Battle Mountain takes its name from the last major fight of the Bannock War, on 8 July 1878.^1,2

The Blue Mountains are the homeland of the Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla peoples, today the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.³

In the spring of 1878, Bannock and Northern Paiute people, short of food and pushed off land they had been promised, left their reservations in Idaho and southeastern Oregon. Under Egan, a Paiute chief, they crossed Eastern Oregon in June, heading for the Umatilla Reservation in the hope of finding allies there.⁴

In the first week of July they reached this country. Sheepherders were killed on Camas Prairie near Ukiah. On Butter Creek, a cattleman named E. B. Nelson and his friend Luke Skelly were killed at Nelson's gate, near where Hunt Oregon's lodge stands today. Families from Pilot Rock and the creeks fled to Pendleton, where the townspeople fortified the courthouse.^4,5,6

Army scouts found the camp at the head of Butter and Birch creeks. On the morning of 8 July, General Oliver O. Howard attacked with cavalry, artillery, infantry and volunteers. The soldiers drove Egan's people from three positions on the slopes and captured about 300 horses; five soldiers were wounded. The people scattered into the mountains. Days later Egan was killed near the reservation, and the war was over by the end of the summer.⁴

The ranch's first ground lay on the same two creeks. In 1930 the ranch sold the State of Oregon the timbered ground along the highway over the mountain, which became Battle Mountain Forest State Scenic Corridor: ponderosa pine, larch, Douglas fir and spruce on U.S. 395, nine miles north of Ukiah, with a historical marker at the roadside.⁷

Battle Mountain Lodge takes its name from the mountain, which stands where the open ranch country meets the timber.