The Battle of Four Lakes and the End of the Plateau Wars
Near Spokane, Washington
On September first, eighteen fifty-eight, Colonel George Wright led seven hundred U.S. Army soldiers into the rolling grasslands west of present-day Spokane and met a coalition of Schitsu'umsh, Palus, Spokan, and Yakama warriors in the battle that would effectively end Native military resistance across the Columbia Plateau.
The confrontation grew out of a longer crisis. For years, miners and settlers had been crossing into tribal lands protected by treaty, and the Army was building the Mullan Road through the region without consent. In May of eighteen fifty-eight, the tribes had dealt a sharp defeat to Lieutenant Colonel Edward Steptoe's column, killing several soldiers and forcing a night retreat. Wright's expedition was the punitive response.
What changed everything at Four Lakes was technology. Wright's troops were equipped with long-range Springfield rifles that could kill at distances far beyond the bows and older trade muskets of the coalition warriors. When the tribes attacked in their traditional close-quarters style, they were cut down before they could reach the Army line. American casualties: none. Tribal casualties: significant.
Four days later Wright defeated another force at the Battle of Spokane Plains. Then came what historians remember as the more devastating act. A few days later, Wright's soldiers drove eight hundred horses belonging to a Palouse chief to a site near present-day Liberty Lake and shot every one of them. It took an entire day and most of the next. The horses represented the wealth, the mobility, and the military power of the plateau tribes. Soldiers also destroyed tribal lodges and winter food stores. Within days, tribal leaders were asking for negotiated peace.
Wright hanged seventeen Palouse men along a creek that settlers named Hangman Creek, since reclaimed on Washington maps as Latah Creek, its original name. The peace that followed erased the tribes' freedom of movement across their ancestral homeland. It was a decisive and brutal conclusion.
