As Civil War–era volunteer regiments were redeployed to the West, Colonel Patrick E. Connor and the 3rd California Volunteer Infantry established a presence in Utah Territory (notably at Camp Douglas). Their arrival heightened U.S. military capacity to conduct campaigns against Indigenous communities across the Intermountain West.
U.S. Army troops under Colonel Patrick E. Connor attacked a Northern Shoshone winter encampment at Boa Ogoi (near present-day Preston, Idaho). The assault killed large numbers of Shoshone people (including women and children) and became a defining trauma shaping subsequent Shoshone–U.S. relations in the region.
An 1867 executive order established the Fort Hall Reservation for Shoshone and Bannock peoples in southeastern Idaho, forming a key administrative and territorial framework for the subsequent reservation era.
U.S. commissioners and Eastern Shoshone and Bannock leaders signed the Fort Bridger Treaty. The treaty provided for peace and reserved lands (including provisions anticipating a Bannock reservation), establishing federal obligations that became central to later disputes over land, resources, and enforcement.
The federal government formally proclaimed the Fort Bridger Treaty, an act that marked full federal acceptance and implementation of its provisions in Indian affairs and reservation governance.
The U.S. Senate ratified the Fort Bridger Treaty, converting it from a negotiated agreement into binding federal law and strengthening the legal basis for reservation administration affecting Shoshone and Bannock communities.
A presidential executive order set aside the Malheur Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon. The reservation was intended to concentrate Northern Paiute bands and also became intertwined with Bannock–Paiute movements and later prisoner removals after the 1878 conflict.
Federal commissioners and Shoshone and Bannock leaders concluded an agreement at the Fort Hall agency that affirmed the continuing validity of the 1868 treaty provisions not altered by the new terms, reflecting ongoing federal negotiation over reservation conditions and governance.
President Rutherford B. Hayes issued an executive order withdrawing land from the public domain to establish the Duck Valley Reservation for Western Shoshone (later also home to Paiute), shaping a major reservation center in the Plateau/Great Basin borderlands.
In late spring and early summer, Bannock and Paiute fighters left Fort Hall amid mounting conflict over hunger, resource access (including camas grounds), and reservation administration. Fighting escalated into the Bannock War (June–August 1878) across Idaho and into Oregon.
Bannock leader Buffalo Horn was killed during a clash near South Mountain as the conflict expanded. Leadership of key Bannock forces shifted after his death, influencing the war’s next phase.
Egan (often identified as a Paiute leader allied with Bannock fighters) was killed later in the war, an event widely described as accelerating the unraveling of the Bannock–Paiute armed coalition.
After major fighting, federal orders directed General Oliver O. Howard to move hundreds of Paiute and Bannock prisoners from the Malheur area to the Yakama Reservation, deepening displacement and consolidating federal control in the conflict’s aftermath.
U.S. troops pursued Tukudeka ("Sheepeater") Shoshone bands in central Idaho in a late episode of the region’s Indian wars. The campaign contributed to further coercive pressure for Indigenous settlement under reservation and agency control.
Federal officials ended the Malheur Reservation era in the years following the Bannock War, amid settler demands and administrative recommendations, reinforcing the pattern of reservation contraction and forced removals in the Great Basin and Plateau region.
Shoshone-Bannock Wars, the Bear River Massacre, and Reservation Era (1850–1890)
