The Struggle to Control the Past: Commemoration, Memory, and the Bear River Massacre of 1863.

On January 29, 1863, the United States Army attacked a band of Northwestern Shoshones at Bear River in southern Idaho, killing nearly 300 men, women, and children. This massacre is absent from much of the historiography. At the site of the massacre, however, a handled of monument stand commemorating the same event yet telling the story in different--almost contradictory--ways. These momments are anomalous in America's commemorated history, and reveal shifts in popular and scholarly memory over the last 140 years: a visible struggle to control the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]