The Battle of Sand Butte between the Modoc Indians and the United States Army was a part of the Modoc War in California. On April 26, 1873, a force of ~70 Army soldiers and ~12 Warm Springs Indians scouts went looking for a group of Modoc who had escaped a previous assault attempt by the Army. Mid-day, the Army and Warm Springs Indians were ambushed at the base of Sand Butte, and nearly wiped out by 20 Modoc warriors. The Modoc victory lead to further public calls for their extermination.
In the spring of 1873, during the Modoc War, the U.S.' War Department authorized Donald McKay, a mixed-race mercenary who was leader of the Warm Springs Indians, to recruit 100 of his tribe to fight the Modoc people in California. In the 1860s, McKay had fought against the Northern Paiutes with a band of Warm Springs Indians. In April 1873, General Edward Canby and a reverend named Thomas were killed by the Modocs, and in response, the U.S. Army and Warm Springs Indians attempted to capture a Modoc base, the Stronghold, near Medicine Lake Volcano. They planned an assault on the Stronghold on April 18. On the 17th, hours before the assault, most of the Modoc abandoned the Stronghold. The next day, when the Army and Warm Springs Indians arrived, the Modoc that were present were women, the elderly, and the wounded. The women were given to the Warm Springs Indians, and the elderly and wounded were burned.
On the morning of April 26, about 70 Army soldiers left their camp next to the Stronghold, Gillem's Camp, and went south, hoping to find the Modoc. They assumed the Modoc were hiding east of the hill Sand Butte, which was four miles south of the Stronghold. They wanted to bring a mortar battery to the butte's summit so they could easily fire at the Modoc. This early morning party was led by Captain Evan Thomas and Lieutenant Thomas Wright. During the walk, they were spread out in a line left-to-right.
The Modoc in the area were led by Kientpoos (who killed Edward Canby) and Scarface Charley, and numbered at 20 to 30. They carried rifles. They could easily tell where the patrols were, as they were fully visible and making noise. They formed a parallel line to the patrols, and stayed out of sight as they walked up from behind. Around noon, the patrols stopped at the base of Sand Butte (to the east) to eat, rest, and watch the arrival of Donald McKay and his troops. The area was flat grassland surrounded by ridges on all four sides, and was 200 feet below the top of Sand Butte. McKay and a dozen scouts met with the patrols at noon.
Soon after the patrols were resting, the Modoc got into position. Kientpoos and Charley's group went to an area of trees at the northern face of Sand Butte. They were flanked by two other squads to their north and south, and a few others were to their west at an overlook ridge. No matter which way the patrols would run, they would be under gunfire from the Modoc at high ground.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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