Colonel Wright and the Price of the Plains
Near Spokane, Washington
In the summer of eighteen fifty-eight, the United States Army and the tribes of the Columbia Plateau collided in the hills and plains west of present-day Spokane, and the consequences shaped the entire region for the next century and beyond.
The conflict began in May when Lieutenant Colonel Edward Steptoe led a column of one hundred sixty-four soldiers northeast from Fort Walla Walla toward Colville. His force was ambushed near present-day Rosalia, Washington, by a coalition of Coeur d'Alene, Spokane, and Palouse warriors numbering around one thousand. Running short of ammunition after ten hours of fighting, Steptoe's men slipped away in the night. Whether the warriors allowed them to withdraw to avoid greater violence, as the Coeur d'Alene tell it, or whether the soldiers outmaneuvered their pursuers, as the Army claimed, is still debated.
The Army's response came in September. Colonel George Wright led six hundred men back across the same ground. At the Battle of Spokane Plains on September fifth, eighteen fifty-eight, Wright's forces used long-range rifle fire to disperse the coalition warriors with heavy losses but few Army casualties.
What followed was not a peace. Between September ninth and tenth, Wright's soldiers captured a herd of nearly one thousand Indian horses being guarded by tribal elders and children and killed between six hundred and nine hundred of them, shooting them in volleys. Destroying the horses was deliberate: without them, the tribes could not hunt, travel, or resist over the coming winter. Wright then held summary proceedings and hanged a number of tribal leaders he designated as having committed violence against white settlers.
The Coeur d'Alene War, as historians call it, ended on terms Wright dictated. The tribes ceded the lands that would become Spokane and were confined to reservations that were a fraction of their former territory. The city that rose on those lands now sits in the shadow of Fort George Wright, named for the colonel who cleared the ground for it.
