Andrew Jackson Bolon (c. 1826 – September 25, 1855) was a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent whose 1855 death at the hands of renegade Yakama is considered one of several contributing factors in the outbreak of the Yakima War.
Bolon had been assigned responsibility for the Yakima Reservation and spent the summer of 1855 meeting tribal leaders and learning the geography of the area.
The tribes, in return for this recognition, were to receive half of the fish in the territory in perpetuity, awards of money and provisions, and reserved lands where white settlement would be prohibited.
While governor Isaac Stevens had guaranteed the inviolability of Native American territory following tribal accession to the treaties, he lacked the legal authority to enforce it pending ratification of the agreements by the United States Senate.
Meanwhile, the widely publicized discovery of gold in Yakama territory prompted an influx of unruly prospectors who traveled, unchecked, across the newly defined tribal lands, to the growing consternation of Indian leaders.
According to the most popular version of events, Bolon, receiving word of the prospector deaths, departed for the scene on horseback to investigate but was intercepted by Shumaway who warned him Qualchin was too dangerous to confront.
[8] These details of Bolon's death were told to rancher Lucullus McWhorter sometime between 1911 and 1915 by the elderly Suleil, who claimed to have been witness to the event as a young man.
[3] When Shumaway heard of Bolon's death he immediately sent an ambassador to inform the U.S. Army garrison at Fort Dalles, before calling for the arrest of his son, Mosheel, who he said should be turned over to the territorial government to forestall the American retaliation he felt would likely occur.
After receiving Shumaway's ambassador, U.S. Army district commander Gabriel Rains ordered Major Granville O. Haller to set out with an expeditionary column from Fort Dalles.
After the end of hostilities, two of Mosheel's confederates in the murder of Bolon were arrested at Priest Rapids by a detachment of United States Army Indian Scouts who returned them to Fort Simcoe where they were hanged.