Darren Parry and his book "The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History" Season 2, Ep. 6 - Part 1 & 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome. This is Brad Westwood, and you're listening to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is the sixth episode in our second season. Remember, each episode of Speak Your Piece is two 30-minute segments. We hope you'll come back and listen to other shows in our catalog. The past is never truly in the past. It's all around us. It informs us, it speaks to both to our shared and our separate identities. Speak Your Piece is a podcast where contributors to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries. The podcast is produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. My job as senior public historian is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah, accessible to the widest audience.
If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place.
My guest today is Darren Parry, former chairman of the Northwest Band of Shoshone Nation, who has also served on boards of the American West Heritage Center in Logan, the Utah State Museum Board, and the advisory board of the Huntsman Cancer Center.
An educator by training in secondary education with an emphasis in history, Darren attended both Utah State University and Weber State University. Over the last year, he has ran for election unsuccessfully to the US House of Representatives, Utah First Congressional District. Darren also received the Esto Perpetua Award from the state of Idaho, for one who has preserved and promoted history in the state of Idaho. Hello and welcome, Darren.

**Darren Parry** (1:50)
Thank you.

**Brad Westwood** (1:52)
So glad to have you here.
In today's podcast, we'll be discussing Darren's book entitled, The Bear River Massacre, Shoshone History, published in 2019 by Common Consent, an imprint of the Desert Book Company. If you want to learn more about this book, pick up a copy, we certainly hope you will. The details are in our Speak Your Piece show notes for the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. We will be speaking to Darren about the story of the Bear River Massacre, which occurred not far from Preston Day, Idaho. We will also be talking about what happened on a snowy day, January 29th, 1863 And we will be discussing the Northwest Band of Shoshone's plans to build an Interpretive Center on the site in Idaho.
Hello again, Darren. Thank you so much for being here.

**Darren Parry** (2:43)
Oh, this is really a pleasure to be here because I get to talk about something that is so important to me.

**Brad Westwood** (2:50)
Well, you and I got acquainted with the Transcontinental Railroad story in 2019 And that was an amazing event and was on the ancestral lands of the Shoshone Nation.

**Darren Parry** (3:02)
Yeah, it was.
Yeah, that was such a wonderful event. And there were so many people that contributed that made it really nice.

**Brad Westwood** (3:10)
Darren, first, will you speak about Mae Timbimboo Parry and her influence on you and the Timbimboo family and the Parry family and the vibrant band of Shoshones today?

**Darren Parry** (3:24)
So you ask me a question that I'll probably get teary-eyed over because every time I talk about my grandmother Mae, I tend to do that. And so she was the most wonderful woman you'd ever meet.
She was beautiful. She had black hair, deep creases in her skin, and just told of a life that was probably hard. And she was our tribal matriarch. She was the keeper of our sacred records, the history.
And I got to learn at her feet, probably similar to the way that she learned from her grandfather, Yeager, who had survived the Bear River Massacre. So the Timbimboo family, who was, she was born and raised at Washakie, Utah, a farming community that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints established for the Shoshones after their conversion in 1873 And so the Timbimboo family was there. The Parry family, ironically, is from Malad, Idaho, not very far from Washakie. And the Parry side were school teachers. And my great grandfather, Parry, was called to be a school teacher at the Washakie school. He took his little boy to school and their grand parry met Mae Timbimboo as young children. And so I think they've known each other since they were five or six years old. So from that union came my dad and me and the rest of the family. So the Parries are Welch.
They immigrated to America after joining the church and were assigned to go to Malad. So really a beautiful story about a union of settlers that had joined the church and now Shoshone Indians that had joined the church as well. My grandmother used to tell me, you should have seen the crowd that came to the hospital the day your dad was born in Malad because he was a mixed race baby. And I don't think a lot of the people that lived in that area had seen that before.