Copied from Richard Clemmer’s (University of Denver) review of The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre, by Brigham Madsen, 1985. Published in American Indian Culture and Research Journal 10:1 (1986), 53-94.

O’Connor, on a less grand scale than [General James] Carleton, saw his mission as making the West safe by eliminating the Indians as a significant factor in any way he could. Carleton was obviously unsuccessful; today there are 180,000 Navajos, only 120 years after their confinement at Bosque Redondo. In contrast, O’Connor’s effect was more devastating. For example, we find no reference — not even in the index — to Northwestern Shoshonis in the recently issued Great Basin volume of the Handbook of North American Indians. Despite the existence of a separate treaty with the ”Northwestern Shoshoni,” treatment of the Cache Valley, Bear River, and ”Weber Ute” Shoshonis as a separate adaptation during the historic period was editorially deleted from the Handbook‘s chapter on ”Treaties, Reservations and Claims,’’ and was subsumed under the ethnographic designation “Northern Shoshoni.’’ Despite their importance in history, the Northwestern Shoshoni virtually disappeared from the record, despite the fact that the Mormon Church did eventually attract about 300 individuals back from the Fort Hall Reservation to a Church-run reserve in the Cache Valley, which Madsen documents in another excellent work, The Northern Shoshone (Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho, 1980).