By H.L. Delaney · June 29, 2026

The Thomas-Wright Patrol: Ambush at Sand Butte, April 1873

After the Stronghold

By the middle of April 1873 the Modoc had left the Stronghold. The Army had worked its way in between the band and Tule Lake and cut them off from water, and thirst did what no assault had managed. No charge ever carried the position by force. When the band slipped away they kept their arms and kept together, moving south into the same broken lava, down into the ridges and old flows below the lake. The soldiers walked into the empty rock and called it the end of the hard fighting. What they had actually done was push a people who knew this country by heart onto ground as difficult as the Stronghold, and the worst day the Army would spend in this war was still in front of them.

This is the stretch of the war that vanishes when the story is boiled down to the Stronghold and the killing of General Canby. Kintpuash (Captain Jack) and his people were still in the field, still armed, still able to fight, and the Army had not yet learned how little its numbers counted for in the lava. What happened near Sand Butte at the end of that month taught that lesson in full, at the very moment the officers were surest the worst was behind them.

Why the Patrol Went Out

The Army's purpose that spring was stated plainly at the top of the chain. In March 1873, weeks before the patrol marched, General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote that "no other reservation for them will be necessary except graves among their chosen lava-beds." The men sent out to find a gun position for the next bombardment were carrying out that intent. This was country the government meant to clear, and the Modoc were the people it had decided to be rid of.

On the morning of April 26, 1873, the patrol left Gillem's Camp to scout the ground toward Sand Butte, a cinder cone the soldiers also knew as Hardin Butte, a few miles to the south. The errand was reconnaissance. The command wanted to know whether it could haul a mortar battery up onto the high ground and drop shells on the Modoc from above, the way it had tried to shell the band out of the Stronghold, and the patrol went to look over the route and the ground.

Captain Evan Thomas led the column, with First Lieutenant Thomas Wright among the officers, and the two names have stayed fixed to the day ever since. By the records that survive, the patrol numbered somewhere around sixty-five men: five officers, an assistant surgeon, a body of enlisted soldiers, and a civilian guide and packer. A party of Warm Springs scouts under Donald McKay was working the same country and expected to join them during the day. The men carried a day's rations and crossed the rock on foot.

The camp behind them was sure the hardest part of the war was over. The band had been driven from its fortress and was thought to be scattered, hungry, and all but finished, and a day's march to look over a butte did not read as the kind of errand that got men killed. That belief went out into the lava with the column. It is why the officers let the men settle in to rest and eat in the open at the base of the butte, and why the first volley caught so many of them off their feet. The Modoc had counted on exactly that confidence and used it to draw the soldiers in.

The Ground and the Ambush

Sand Butte rises off the flatter lava as a loose cinder slope, more open than the trench country of the Stronghold, and that openness is part of the story. The Modoc had moved in the night and let the soldiers keep believing the band was broken and still in flight, then turned that belief into a trap. A small force shadowed the column through the morning over ground they knew by heart, staying out of sight, and worked up into the rocks and the slope above the route the patrol would take. By the accounts that survive they numbered only about two dozen fighters, led by Scarface Charley, one of the ablest fighting men the band had.

Around midday the patrol reached the base of the butte and the men stopped to rest, eat, and wait for McKay's scouts to come up. They took their break in low ground, with broken rock and higher slopes standing over them on more than one side. The Modoc opened fire from above and from the flanks, down into men who were in the open and off their feet. Good cover on the high ground, a command strung out below, and the resting place became a killing box inside a few minutes. Soldiers who tried to form up and fire back were shooting uphill at an enemy the rock hid as completely as it had hidden the band all winter.

Discipline came apart fast. Some of the men broke and ran, others were pinned where they lay, and the officers who tried to hold a line were shot down doing it. A part of the command made a stand among the rocks and was surrounded there. The fight was short by the clock. By the time it thinned out the patrol had been destroyed as a fighting unit, and the survivors were scattered across the lava, many of them wounded, working their way back toward the camp they had marched out of that morning.

Scarface Charley is remembered for calling out to the men still alive once the shooting had mostly stopped, telling them in effect that enough had died and that those who could still walk should go home. The words come down in more than one version, so I will not put a quotation in his mouth that I cannot stand behind. What the accounts agree on is the sense of it. He let the living leave. A band that owed the Army nothing chose, at that moment, to let cornered men go home to their own.

What It Cost

The losses were among the worst the Army took in the whole war. The patrol lost nearly all its officers, Captain Thomas and Lieutenant Wright among the dead, and most of the enlisted men were killed or wounded. The exact toll is counted differently from source to source, and the honest thing is to say so rather than hand over a precise number I cannot vouch for. The scale is not in question. A command of around sixty-five men was shattered in an afternoon, and the Modoc force that did it lost no one.

The wounded had a long, bad night ahead of them in the rock. Relief did not reach the field until after dark, and parties spent the following day carrying men and bodies back over the lava to Gillem's Camp. For an army already turned back at the Stronghold in January, losing a whole patrol and its officers to a couple of dozen fighters was a blow of a different order.

What It Meant

The fight near Sand Butte forced home a thing the Army had been trying not to believe since January. A small Modoc band, worn down and short of nearly everything, could still meet a United States force in the open and destroy it. The Stronghold had been explained away as a fortress of natural rock that any defenders would have been hard to dig out of. Sand Butte gave the Army no such comfort. Here the Modoc came out of their strong position, took the offensive against a moving column, and beat it to pieces with a fraction of its numbers.

The news carried the way the first Stronghold fight had carried, into the newspapers and back to Washington, and it hardened the will to finish the war at whatever cost. More troops came. The command was reorganized and the pursuit was pushed harder through May, and the pressure told. Hunger, exhaustion, and the band's own divisions wore it down, and the captures that closed the war followed through the early summer. Kintpuash and the men held responsible for Canby's death were tried and hanged at Fort Klamath, and the surviving Modoc were loaded onto trains and carried to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, far from the lake and the lava.

What Sand Butte shows does not turn on how the war ended. A few dozen Modoc, defending their families and their own country on ground they understood better than anyone alive, met a trained army sent to be rid of them and beat it badly on a spring afternoon in 1873. The government had called these people renegades for coming home to the country that was theirs and refusing to be driven off it again. Sand Butte is what that refusal looked like when the Army came to break it. The victory belongs to the Modoc, and it stands on its own.

Sources & further reading

• “Modoc War,” The Oregon Encyclopedia.
• Keith A. Murray, The Modocs and Their War (University of Oklahoma Press, 1959).
• Jeff C. Riddle, The Indian History of the Modoc War (1914).
• Cheewa James, Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn't Die (Naturegraph Publishers, 2008).
• Lava Beds National Monument, National Park Service.