On the morning of January 17, 1873, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Wheaton sent more than three hundred soldiers, volunteers, and Indian scouts against a band of Modoc warriors dug into the lava beds south of Tule Lake. Wheaton expected a day’s work against what he called impudent and enterprising savages. He had worn the uniform for eighteen years, fought the Cheyenne on the Kansas frontier, and survived Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. He should have known better.
When the smoke cleared that evening, nine soldiers and militiamen lay dead, another twenty-eight were wounded, and not a single Modoc had been killed. The fight had been a humiliation, and the war it opened would become one of the most expensive, dollar for dollar and life for life, ever fought on American soil, pitting roughly fifty Modoc warriors against nearly a thousand troops and volunteers. The man at the center of it all was born around 1837 near Tule Lake, into a people who had occupied that five-thousand-square-mile region on the Oregon-California border for perhaps a millennium. His given name was Kintpuash, meaning he who strikes the water brashly, but the white miners of Yreka, California, called him Captain Jack, on account of an old soldier’s brass-buttoned jacket he liked to wear.
He was not a large war chief in the usual sense. The Modoc numbered only four to five hundred souls at the time of European contact, and their land, rich in fish, game, roots, acorns, and the tule reeds that built their lodges, had been their home for centuries. Contact with white men came first through fur traders in the 1820s and 1830s, then through government scouts like Kit Carson, who in 1846 attacked a fishing village on Tule Lake after his party was ambushed, killing twenty-one people. The arrival of the Applegate Trail in the late 1840s brought a steady stream of migrants straight through the heart of Modoc country, past Tule Lake and the Lost River, and the result was decades of killing on both sides.
By the 1850s, California operated under a bounty system that paid for severed Indian heads and scalps, and state-funded militias butchered native people with near-total impunity. One of the most notorious of these killers, Ben Wright, invited a band of Modoc to peace talks under a white flag, poisoned their food with strychnine, and when the poison failed, opened fire, killing dozens. One account claims Captain Jack’s father was among the dead. Over roughly twenty-five years, hundreds of Modoc were killed, and they killed nearly as many migrants in return.
In 1864, the United States government signed a treaty forcing the Modoc to give up their ancestral land and move onto the Klamath Reservation in southern Oregon, where they were forced to live with their traditional enemies, the Klamath, who outnumbered them and abused them constantly. The promised payments and food rations arrived slowly, then stopped altogether. The Modoc left the reservation, returned, left again, and in 1870 a band of about fifty men under Captain Jack simply left for good, bringing their women and children back to their homeland around Tule Lake and the Lost River. They were not raiding wagon trains.
They traded in Yreka, worked as ranch hands, cut their hair short, and wore white men’s clothes. Captain Jack even said, I consider myself as a white man. But they demanded food and rent from settlers on land they still considered theirs, and the local citizens grew nervous. In November 1872, the superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon, T.
B. Odeneal, decided to force the issue. Without informing the senior military commanders in the region, he ordered troops from Fort Klamath to return the Modoc to the reservation by whatever force was necessary. On the bitterly cold morning of November 29, Captain James Jackson of the First Cavalry arrived at the Modoc camp on the Lost River with only forty troops and a dozen civilians, not the overwhelming show of force originally planned.
He had intended to come at dawn while the Modoc slept, but sleet and freezing mud slowed his march, and by the time he arrived, it was full daylight and his men had been in the saddle for sixteen hours. Jackson ordered his lieutenant, Frazier Boutelle, to disarm and arrest a warrior named Scarface Charlie. Charlie refused. Both men fired at the same moment, Boutelle’s pistol grazing Charlie’s head and Charlie’s rifle tearing a hole through the lieutenant’s coat sleeve.
The first shots of the Modoc War had been fired. In less than five minutes, the battle was over. One soldier and one Modoc warrior were dead in Captain Jack’s camp. Across the river, two civilians were dead in Hooker Jim’s camp, along with an unarmed Modoc woman and her infant child, both cut down by a single shotgun blast.
The soldiers burned the lodges and withdrew. The Modoc, including the hot-headed younger warriors Captain Jack had struggled to restrain, fled south to the lava beds, a natural fortress of trenches, caves, and pits they knew intimately. Not all of them went quietly. Hooker Jim and about a dozen warriors spent the rest of the day on a killing spree, murdering settlers around Tule Lake, including men who had been friendly to the Modoc.
By nightfall, between fourteen and eighteen civilians were dead. The violence convinced the band’s shaman, Curly-Headed Doctor, that his Ghost Dance medicine could protect the warriors, and it convinced the warriors themselves that the war would be won. The army’s first assault, the First Battle of the Stronghold, ended in the humiliation of January 17. Wheaton was relieved of command, and General Edward Canby arrived to take over.
Canby had fought in the Civil War and the Mexican-American War, but he preferred negotiation to combat. A peace commission was formed, which included Alfred Meacham, a former superintendent of Indian Affairs who had once had a respectful relationship with the Modoc, and Jesse Applegate, whose trail had brought settlers through Modoc land in the first place. Captain Jack wanted to surrender, but his warriors, whipped up by Curly-Headed Doctor and threatened by hotheads like Hooker Jim, refused. When Jack pressed for peace, some of his own men threw women’s clothing at him in contempt.
Humiliated and desperate to reassert his authority, he agreed to a treacherous plan: kill the peace commissioners. On April 11, 1873, Good Friday, General Canby, Meacham, the interpreter Toby Riddle and her husband Frank, and two other commissioners met with Captain Jack and his warriors at a peace tent. The talks broke down. At a signal, two young warriors named Slow Lux and Barncho emerged from hiding with rifles.
Captain Jack drew his revolver, leveled it at Canby, and fired. The first shot misfired. He cocked and fired again, hitting the general in the head. Another warrior, Boston Charlie, killed the Reverend Eleazar Thomas.
Four rounds were pumped into Meacham, who was badly wounded and about to be scalped. Toby Riddle saved his life by shouting that the soldiers were coming, a lie that sent the Modoc fleeing back to the stronghold. Canby became the only general ever killed during the Indian Wars. The murder of Canby ended any hope of peace.
President Grant called for the extermination of the Modoc. The army prepared for a slow, grinding assault, and on April 15 the Second Battle of the Stronghold began. The Modoc held out for two days, but the soldiers cut off their water supply. On the night of April 17, Captain Jack evacuated the stronghold, slipping away through a lava flow with his people.
The war was not over. On April 26, Captain Evan Thomas and sixty-seven men stopped for lunch at the foot of a bluff called Sand Butte, in a natural cul-de-sac surrounded by ridges. The Modoc, who had been shadowing them for miles, opened fire from above. Forty-two men survived.
Scarface Charlie called down to the survivors: all you fellas that ain’t dead better go on home. We don’t want to kill all of you in one day. Colonel Alvin Gillum, who had replaced Wheaton, was relieved of command for failing to send a relief party. His successor was General Jefferson Davis, a controversial officer who had once shot and killed a fellow Union general in a quarrel and who, during Sherman’s March to the Sea, had destroyed a bridge and stranded hundreds of freed slaves on the wrong side to be slaughtered by Confederates.
He now chased the Modoc across the lava beds. At the Battle of Dry Lake, on May 10, the army finally beat the Modoc in a stand-up fight, killing Ellen’s Man George, one of the tribe’s best strategists. The loss fractured the Modoc. Hooker Jim, Steamboat Frank, Bogus Charlie, and Shacknasty Jim, the very men who had pushed hardest for war, deserted Captain Jack, and when they were captured, they agreed to help the army capture him in exchange for amnesty.
With his band reduced to about twenty-four warriors and his people starving and exhausted, Captain Jack was cornered on June 4, 1873, on Willow Creek. He asked for John Fairchild, the rancher who had been his friend. Fairchild was not present. Jack handed over his rifle, saying his legs had given out.
The war was over. Captain Jack and five others were tried by a military court. The trial was a formality. The six men were found guilty and sentenced to hang.
Slow Lux and Barncho, described in court as not anything, had their sentences commuted to life in prison at Alcatraz. On October 3, 1873, Captain Jack, Boston Charlie, Schonchin John, and Black Jim were hanged. Jack was thirty-five years old. Hooker Jim, the man who had led the settler killings, opposed surrender, and helped pressure Jack into murdering Canby, went free.
He died a few years later in Oklahoma. The surviving Modoc were exiled to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. Some were allowed to return to the Klamath Reservation years later, but others remained, and their descendants still live in Oklahoma today. The war cost the United States government $420,000, the equivalent of ten million dollars today, to subdue a band of fewer than sixty warriors.
The once-prized land of the lava beds is now a national monument, remarkable mostly for its silence and desolation, where deer and antelope graze among the rocks and hawks glide silently overhead.