From the NYTs:

PRESTON, Idaho (AP) — Tribal members descend in late January each year to the burial ground near the Bear River where soldiers felled hundreds of their ancestors in one of American history’s bloodiest– but little remembered– massacres.

Descendants of the Northwestern Shoshone who were decimated in their winter encampment in a surprise attack 147 years ago, they stamp their feet in the cold and offer songs and prayers to the dead.

Bodies from that distant morning were never officially counted, and the bones were long ago scattered to the surrounding hills.

The commanding Army officer involved counted 220-270 dead. Settlers who went in later found many more bodies in ravines or under deep snow and put the number as high as 500, a figure cited in a National Park Service history. The tribe estimates 400 of their number were killed. No more than 60 survived.

Any of those numbers are larger than the much more well known massacres at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, where some 146 Lakota Sioux were gunned down in 1890, and at Sand Creek, Colo., where an 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed in 1864.

And yet, history books make little mention of Bear River, perhaps because the nation was elsewhere engaged in the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg with its estimated 51,000 casualties was later that same year, one of the bloodiest ever on American soil.