Egan (Paiute)

Egan (? - 1878) is the American name given to Pony Blanket. Pony Blanket was a Paiute leader in the Oregon Country in the 19th century.

Pony Blanket, known to American settlers as Egan, was born to a Cayuse family and did not know his birth mother. He married Evening Star, the sister of Chochoco (Has No Horse)'s first wife Dawn Mist, and was thus the brother-in-law of Has No Horse. With Evening Star he had at least two sons and a daughter.

In 1868, his lodge was at Fort Harney. In 1869 he collaborated with Chochoco (Has No Horse) to set the Snake people of Weahwewa (Wolf Dog)'s band free from the Klamath Reservation, where they were starving under the mismanagement of Indian Agent William V. Rinehart. Following the Snake War many of the Paiute had moved onto the Malheur Reservation in 1872, but white settlers began to take back land when they found gold and good grazing land there. Egan led his tribe and some Bannock people in fighting the white settlers for two years.

On June 10, 1878, what became known as the Bannock War was declared, in response to the Great Shoshoni Uprising. On June 22, 1878, the first major U.S. military strike of the war began about two miles east of the present Crook County line.Major James Herron, on orders from General M. V. Brown, led fifty Oregon Volunteers into the Ochoco, where they joined with Colonel Orlando Robbins and his Idaho Militia troops, and with Civil War veteran Captain Reuben F. Bernard and his 250 U.S. cavalrymen. They planned to wait for General Oliver O. Howard's infantry to join them from a day's march to the south.

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