Bannocks War - 1878
A last scare of Indian hostilities swept through the John Day Valley in 1878 with the outbreak of the Bannock War. The troubles erupted in Idaho because of trespass by sheepherders onto Indian lands. The Bannock swept into eastern Oregon to rally the discontented Northern Paiute. The efforts to forge common cause against the Euro-Americans largely failed.
Between September, 1865, and August, 1867, numerous incidents occurred which involved Northern Paiutes and residents of the upper John Day watershed. These ranged from armed encounters and killings to petty thieving, raids of isolated ranches and mining camps, and periodic sweeps by volunteer companies seeking the "enemy." Indian Superintendent Huntington summarized eight packed pages of these encounters in his report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1867. Indians suffered numerous deaths; stock drivers lost their animals and cursed the Indians. Indians raided settlements and escaped. Troops rounded up Indians and killed them. The situation was nearly guerilla warfare.
Resolution of conflicts with the Northern Paiute, of a sort, had come with the executive order of President Ulysses S. Grant on September 12, 1872, to create the Malheur Reservation. A vast tract sprawling across the meadows of the Harney Basin and encompassing Malheur Lake, Oregon's largest lake, the reservation was designated as a permanent homeland for the Northern Paiute. It was enlarged on May 15, 1875, to 1.7 million acres, but pressures mounted rapidly for its termination. On January 28, 1876, the president virtually abolished the reservation. Cattle drovers such as Peter French and David Shirk had discerned the potentials for wealth if they controlled key water resources and grazing. The press was on to dismember the Malheur Reservation. For the Northern Paiute the decision was a disaster.
Trouble had long been brewing among the Bannocks at Fort Hall, and friction with the Shoshoni added to the difficulty. Buffalo Horn, a Bannock leader, had gained considerable military experience, and his men were ready to fight. Following an incident on the Camas Prairie on May 30, the Bannocks left to join Egan's Northern Paiutes in Oregon, sinking Glenn's ferry on the way, and fighting a battle at South Mountain in which Buffalo Horn survived by only four days. After further hostilities in Oregon, the scattered Bannock warriors eventually made their way back; most of them returning to Fort Hall.
Following a brisk battle at Silver Creek on 23 June 1878 the Bannock turned north toward the Columbia River to escape soldiers of the U.S. Army. They engaged in an abbreviated exchange near Canyon City, killing one man and wounding two others. The Bannocks moved from the South Fork of the John Day to the Long Creek Valley, stealing, burning cabins, and fleeing.
The final conflicts occurred at Willow Springs and Birch Creek. The Umatilla Indians did not rally and, in fact, joined in opposing the Bannocks and killed Egan, a Northern Paiute leader who was with the hostile forces. The continued pursuit compelled some Bannocks to try to cross the Columbia. Their war was crushed with many deaths; the Bureau of Indian Affairs removed the survivors to the small reservation at Fort Hall, Idaho.
The Sheepeater Indians lived relatively unmolested in the wilderness country of the Salmon River Mountains until 1878. They produced fine skin products, praised both by other Indians and by white fur traders. Other Indians referred to them as "hunters of big game", from which they received the English appellation of "Sheepeater".
The Sheepeater campaign of 1879 grew out of the Bannock War, and after a summer-long search for a Shoshoni band that inhabited the Salmon River mountain wilderness, a Sheepeater group at last was found and moved to Fort Hall. At the end of the Bannock War of 1878, a number of Bannock refugees are thought to have joined the Sheepeaters. From this, the Sheepeaters later gained an undeserved reputation as a band of outcasts from other tribes. The 1879 massacre of Chinese placer miners at Loon Creek was unjustly blamed on the tribe also. Using the Chinese massacre as a justification, the U.S. Army decided to round up the Sheepeaters in the summer of 1879. After a difficult military campaign, about fifty members of the tribe, mostly women and children, agreed to move to a reservation. Other Sheepeaters eluded the army, and a few families continued to live their mountain lives unmolested in the ancient pattern for another few decades.
Considering the fact that the Indian people of Idaho were forced to give up their lands and were crowded onto reservations on which many of them found it impossible to work out a satisfactory way of life, a resort to force was not surprising. These campaigns terrorized the whites and ruined the Indian peoples who were involved, but "solved" the Indian problem for most whites. For the Indians, the wars meant simply that they had no alternative but to exist on reservations permitted them by the white intruders.
The Bannock War of 1878 contributed to considerable local lore about Indian hostilities in the John Day watershed. Because of settlement, many Euro Americans had personal stories to tell. Families fled isolated homesteads and residences, forted up at defensible positions, and waited for the troubles to subside. The Dedman homestead near Twickenham was one of these locations. Built of hewn logs with heavily shuttered windows, the building had holes in its walls for rifle ports. A.S.MacAllister and Peasley owned the ranch in the 1870s. It subsequently passed to Zachary Keys in 1906. An account by Dickse Williams summarized the fate of most of the "forts" of the era of Indian hostilities: "As far as can be determined, the [Dedman] house was never under attack by Indians . . " (Oregon Society Daughters of the American Revolution 1959: 28-29).
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