Malheur Indian Reservation

On September 12, 1872, a presidential order by Ulysses S. Grant set aside the Malheur Indian Reservation in Eastern Oregon for the Northern Paiute.

In January of that year, President Grant, under pressure from settlers, ordered the northern shores of Malheur Lake open for settlement.

With the completion of major portions of the transcontinental railroad in 1868, cattle ranchers in the former Nez Perce lands had begun to drive herds along those trails to Central Pacific railheads such as Winnemucca, Nevada, for shipment to the East.

The outbreak of the Bannock War in May 1878 in Idaho led the Paiute to abandon the Malheur Indian Reservation and take refuge on Steens Mountain to the south of the Harney Basin.

The mountain is a large block-fault formation, and its eastern escarpment rises almost straight up from the Alvord Desert, making it relatively easy to defend.

[7] Other Paiute and Bannock were scattered about Eastern Oregon, northeastern California and northern Nevada, working for settlers or engaged in subsistence hunting and gathering.

Ranchers and settlers had started to graze their herds on the best meadowlands of the Malheur Indian Reservation, and the U.S. Army had been reluctant to remove the trespassers.

In his annual report in August 1879, Agent W. V. Rinehart, who had fought in the West under General Crook and held negative views of the Natives, opined that the reservation should be discontinued, in part because the support for all agencies in Oregon was spread too thin to be effective.