The Battle of Sugar Point, or the Battle of Leech Lake, was fought on October 5, 1898 between the 3rd U.S. Infantry and members of the Pillager Band of Chippewa Indians in a failed attempt to apprehend Pillager Ojibwe Bugonaygeshig ("Old Bug" or "Hole-In-The-Day"), as the result of a dispute with Indian Service officials on the Leech Lake Reservation in Cass County, Minnesota.

[1] The main issue between the Pillagers and Indian Service officials was the frequent arrest of tribal members on minor charges and transporting them to federal courts far from the reservation for trial.

However, when he and Sha-Boon-Day-Shkong traveled to the nearby Indian village of Onigum on September 15, they were seized by U.S. Deputy Marshal Robert Morrison and U.S. Indian Agent Arthur M. Tinker as witnesses to a bootlegging operation and were going to be transported to Duluth (Bugonaygeshig had previously testified at another bootlegging trial in the port city on Lake Superior five months earlier).

As the two were being led away, several Pillagers attacked Morrison and Tinker allowing Bugonaygeshig and Sha-Boon-Day-Shkong to escape custody and return to their homes on Sugar Point.

The soldiers made camp and began searching the surrounding woods and neighboring villages to arrest any Pillagers with outstanding warrants.

[3] The initial report of the skirmish sparked a panic and fears of a general uprising and attacks on the nearby settlements of Bemidji, Cass Lake, Deer River, Grand Rapids, and Walker, Minnesota.

Additional federal troops were sent from Fort Snelling and the Minnesota National Guard mobilized, while local settlers organized into impromptu militias.

The day after the battle, the Cass County Pioneer published a letter from the chiefs of the Pillagers: We, the undersigned chiefs and headmen of the Pillager band of Chippewa [Ojibwe] Indians of Minnesota... respectfully represent that our people are carrying a heavy burden, and in order that they may not be crushed by it, we humbly petition you to send a commission, consisting of men who are honest and cannot be controlled by lumbermen, to investigate the existing troubles here... We now have only the pine lands of our reservation for our future subsistence and support, but the manner in which we are being defrauded out of these has alarmed us.

[4]Several days following the incident, US Commissioner of Indian Affairs William A. Jones negotiated with Pillager leaders in a council held at the Leech Lake Reservation from October 10–15.

Jones later said in a report to the Secretary of the Interior Cornelius Newton Bliss, The Indians were prompted to their outbreak by the wrongs committed against them and chafed under unfair treatment.

The battle is the subject of Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor's long poem Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).