The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America's Gilded Age - Rilegato

McNally, Robert Aquinas

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1496201795 ISBN 13: 9781496201799

Casa editrice: Bison Books, 2017

Riassunto

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native America’s peoples and lands. Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872–73, one of the nation’s costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters.

Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs.

The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war.

The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a “peace policy” toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country’s past. 
 

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Robert Aquinas McNally is a freelance writer and editor based in Concord, California. He is the author or coauthor of nine nonfiction books, including So Remorseless a Havoc: Of Dolphins, Whales, and Men.

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The Modoc War

A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of Americas Gilded Age

By Robert Aquinas McNally

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Robert Aquinas McNally
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4962-0179-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
Prologue: Duel at Lost River, 1, 
Part 1. Holy Lands Here and There, 
1. Bad to Worse, 5, 
2. Stone and Story, 14, 
3. Running the Pagans Out of the Promised Land, 23, 
4. Death Squads, Sex Slaves, and Knights of the Frontier, 29, 
5. The Peace That Wasn't, the Treaty That Was, Kind Of, 49, 
6. The Bacon of Three Hundred Hogs, 60, 
7. Gray-Eyed Rancher to the Rescue, 72, 
Part 2. True Fog, Real War, 
8. Glove and Fist, 83, 
9. Modoc Steak for Breakfast, 90, 
10. A Look Inside, 102, 
11. First Fog of War, 109, 
12. Celebration and Postmortem, 116, 
Part 3. Firing into a Continent, 
13. Give Peace a Chance, 127, 
14. The News That Fits, 134, 
15. Heroic Reporter Dens with Lions, 138, 
16. Talking for Peace, Lying for War, 153, 
17. The Warrior Takes Command, 164, 
18. Squeeze Play, 174, 
19. A Homeland to Be Named Later, 181, 
20. Pride and Prejudice in the Peace Tent, 192, 
21. Martyrs at Midday, 203, 
22. The War Goes Cosmic, 212, 
23. Girding for Battle, 221, 
24. Half-Empty Victory, 229, 
25. Scalps and Skulls, 241, 
26. Into the Volcanic Valley of Death, 248, 
Part 4. Things Fall Apart, 
27. The Center Cannot Hold, 263, 
28. Hounds and Scouts, 275, 
29. Hang 'em High, 283, 
30. Varnishing Vengeance, 292, 
31. Still Small Voices Swell, 311, 
32. Strangled Necks, Severed Heads, 321, 
33. Exile and Showbiz, 335, 
34. Requiem, 350, 
Epilogue, 353, 
Notes, 359, 
Bibliography, 385, 
Index, 397, 

CHAPTER 1

Bad to Worse

The enterprising white man, having seen and appreciated this land of green meadows, silvery lakes and crystal streams, determined to possess it.

— Ivan D. Applegate, "The Initial Shot"

For much of the next year, the Modoc War occupied center stage in the American public mind. Fought on a remote, volcanic steppe against an Indian nation few whites had ever heard of before, this unlikely war rattled the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant to its core, especially when it claimed the life of the only general officer to fall in a western Indian conflict. The Modoc War was also the sole Indian fight in the West that drew an on-the-ground international correspondent. And it was the only Indian war in which a reporter from a leading East Coast newspaper interviewed the leaders of a Native resistance in the middle of the conflict. Because of this unrelenting media attention, the Modoc War prompted a powerful debate over the fate of the fast-disappearing Native nations, the future of the West, and the soul of the United States.

The day before his duel with Frazier Boutelle, however, Scarface Charley had no idea that he was about to become historical. Although he and the Lost River Modocs had been the target of military surveillance, heated negotiations with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and growing hostility from their white neighbors, they had no reason to believe that matters were coming to an armed head. Instead, Charley and other Modoc leaders were sitting down with Henry Miller, the one settler the Indians trusted, a man who lived alongside the Indians and attested to his complete lack of trouble with them. On that Thursday afternoon, about fourteen hours before the cavalry stormed into Lost River, Miller told the Modocs truthfully that he had no knowledge of military plans to roust the Indians. He vowed, too, that, should he learn of such a raid, he would warn the Indians. That promise would soon prove fatal.

The Modocs felt so secure that, as dark fell, they posted no sentries. The men in the village on the east bank of Lost River organized the gambling game they loved for whiling away nights like this one: cold, windy, rainy with sleet. Scarface Charley left his house in the larger village on the west bank and canoed across the stream. He was feeling lucky.

Like Charley, Boutelle saw no momentous encounter headed his way a day earlier, even when Ivan Applegate galloped into Fort Klamath, Oregon, bearing orders from Thomas B. Odeneal, state superintendent for the Indian Bureau. A little over a year and a half earlier, a large band of Modocs had decided they were done with abusive Indian agents and the scanty food and clothing allotments that left them cold and hungry. Under the headman Kientpoos, whom whites nicknamed Captain Jack, many of the Modocs left the Klamath Reservation. Most settled into traditional village sites on Lost River about a mile from its mouth on Tule Lake and rebuilt their substantial winter houses. The Lost River Modocs hoped to resume something of the nomadic and communal life they had known for unnumbered centuries.

Most of the settlers flooding into the Lost River valley were less than enamored with living alongside Natives. In their eyes, there was nothing noble about these "savages." The settlers blamed the Modocs for every fence that fell and steer that disappeared. Responding to the rising hostility of his fellow Oregonians, Odeneal won approval from F. A. Walker, the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, DO, to move the Modocs back to the reservation: "peaceably if you possibly can, but forcibly, if you must."

Odeneal left his office in Salem and arrived at the Klamath Reservation on November 25, determined to bring this Modoc business to a head. He dispatched Ivan Applegate, an Indian Bureau employee, to Lost River. Applegate was to invite Kientpoos to meet with Odeneal in Linkville — the closest Oregon settlement, which would change its name some twenty years later to Klamath Falls — or lead his people directly to the reservation. Kientpoos refused the invitation. It was, he knew, a ruse to arrest or kill him away from Lost River. Nor was he about to submit himself and his people to the reservation's cold and hunger once again. Applegate rode back to Linkville with Kientpoos's refusal.

Odeneal turned it into a pretext. He drafted a letter to Major John Green, the Fort Klamath commander, ordering him to dispatch a patrol to Lost River, arrest the Modoc leaders, and force the Indians onto the reservation. Applegate gathered up Odeneal's letter, leapt back into the saddle, and galloped through the night to Fort Klamath, nearly forty miles north. He arrived about 5 a.m.

Awakened by the sergeant of the guard, Boutelle told Applegate to make himself comfortable until Major Green was up. Applegate let Boutelle know why he had come and asked the lieutenant whether he thought the major would send a force south. No way, Boutelle said. Green had clear instructions from up the chain of command that he was to confront the Modocs only with an overwhelming force, not Fort Klamath's single cavalry troop. The needed reinforcements could come only from frontier outposts two hundred miles to the east, and they would take a good two weeks to arrive.

So it was one surprised Boutelle who at 8 a.m. received orders from Major Green, an officer who often confounded impetuosity with bravery, to prepare to ride to Lost River immediately. Boutelle reminded Green about the need for overwhelming force and said he was certain the Lost River Modocs would resist rather than surrender. The troop, Boutelle went on, was so small that it was sure to provoke a fight, not prevent one. The major refused the lieutenant's sound advice, concerned more about the army's reputation among the settlers of the Klamath Basin. "If I don't send the troops," he said, "they will think we are all afraid." Troop B was to proceed to Lost River — almost sixty miles away — and arrest Kientpoos and the other Modoc leaders first thing the next morning.

By noon, Captain Jackson, Lieutenant Boutelle, and thirty-six enlisted men, along with Fort Klamath's assistant surgeon, headed out. Ivan Applegate came along as guide and interpreter. A couple of hours behind the troop, a pack train with four enlisted men carried food, ammunition, and medical and surgical supplies. The ride promised to be an ordeal. The weather deteriorated into a sleet and rain storm that soaked men and mounts and mired the roads.

Rain was falling hard and wind whipping cold when Jackson's troop reached the outskirts of Linkville. The settlement, only five years old, was small and primitive: forty permanent residents, hotel, store, saloon, blacksmith's and carpenter's shops, and livery stable. In minutes, the little town was buzzing with the news that soldiers in full fighting fettle were riding hard toward Lost River.

Oliver Applegate, Ivan's brother and a sub-agent on the Klamath Reservation, happened to be in town, as was Odeneal. Both rode out to meet the cavalry. Applegate claimed he wanted to rescue two of his reservation Indians from any fight, enlisted two helpers, and headed out in advance of the cavalry.

Meanwhile, Odeneal took Jackson aside for a pep talk. The superintendent assured the captain there would be no fight; surely the feckless Modocs would cave before the least show of military force. And, he insisted, "If there is any fighting, let the Indians be the aggressors; fire not a gun except in self-defence, after they have first fired upon you or your men." Odeneal planned to wrap feigned innocence around the aggressive act of showing up uninvited on the Modocs' doorstep at dawn.

Odeneal also told Dennis Crawley, the settler whose homestead lay closest to the Modocs' Lost River villages, and James "One-Arm" Brown, an Indian Bureau employee, to alert the settlers along Tule Lake in case the Modocs decided upon revenge. Crawley and Brown left Linkville behind Jackson's cavalry troop, joined by four other civilians eager to help run the Modocs out of the neighborhood.

After riding through the freezing night, soldiers and civilians rendezvoused in the 4 a.m. darkness at the last ford across sluggish, deep, and steep-banked Lost River, some four miles upstream from the sleeping Modocs. Jackson dispatched Oliver Applegate and the civilians down the east bank. He told them to move into the village on that side of the river if they heard firing from the village on the west. Boutelle was happy to see the civilians go. He knew them for what they were: volunteer vigilantes "without order or authority," hot to kill Indians. Even as this pick-up posse splashed across Lost River, Jackson led his cavalrymen and Ivan Applegate down the west bank.

With the leading edge of dawn lightening the gloom, the cavalry halted a mile from the large Modoc village. The mounts, breathing hard, milled in the cold mud and filled the air with steam, fatigued muscles twitching beneath soaked hides. Lieutenant Boutelle, the seasoned fighter, announced that he wanted to strip the decks in case of action. He took off his overcoat and strapped it to his saddle, leaving him more exposed to the weather but freer to move fast. Something about Boutelle's combative eagerness enlivened the yellowlegs. The soaked, sleep-deprived, saddle-sore soldiers all stripped off their overcoats and cinched them to their saddles. Jackson took his troop at a trot to the edge of the sleeping village.

On the east side of Lost River, civilians numbering nine or ten men, some with their families, gathered at Crawley's homestead. They left the few women and children in the cabin and headed across sagebrush and bunchgrass to a gully some four hundred yards from the smaller Modoc village; all were armed. In the rising tide of adrenaline, Crawley and Brown forgot Odeneal's instructions to alert the unknowing settlers along the eastern shore of Tule Lake. That omission would prove disastrous.

At the western village's edge, Captain Jackson called halt and dismount, then designated a handful of troopers to hold the horses. The remaining soldiers formed into a skirmish line, loaded carbines at the ready, and moved forward.

* * *

Snug in their winter houses, the unsuspecting Modocs slept. On the east side of the river, men who had spent the night gambling were just breaking up their game. As the sleety sky lightened and Scarface Charley canoed back across Lost River, he spotted blue-shirted soldiers advancing in a line toward the winter houses of the western village. Startled, he tied his canoe and climbed the steep bank, tripping on the way up. His rifle's blast cracked the stillness. The advancing cavalrymen tensed and double-timed while the Modocs on the west stirred from sleep and peered out into the gloom, rain, and sleet.

Already the soldiers had made it inside the village. Captain Jackson shouted commands in English, and Ivan Applegate echoed the orders in Chinook Jargon, the trade tongue of the Pacific Northwest. Jackson demanded to talk with Kientpoos. The chief, sleeping naked, rummaged about for something to pull on. He sent Bogus Charley out to talk in his unclothed stead.

Women and children knew to lie flat on the floor in their houses, which, partly dug down into the soil and subsoil, afforded protection against rifle fire. Some of the Modoc men emerged and milled about in the rainy open, waiting to see what the unexpected soldiers would do next. Scarface Charley, Bogus Charley, and several other men disappeared into their houses, then emerged stripped to the waist, each brandishing several loaded single-shot rifles. Sporting a red bandana tied into a headband, Scarface Charley handed a weapon to Black Jim, laid two at his feet, held another ready at his waist.

Seconds later Scarface and Boutelle fired at each other at a distance of but a few yards. Boutelle's pistol shot clipped Charley's bandana, skimming the side of the Modoc's head without breaking the skin. Charley's rifle slug traveled up the sleeve of Boutelle's left arm, his gun side, slicing blouse and cardigan yet missing flesh. Both men remained standing for the next instant, staring at one another, aware that death had passed them by.

In the next fraction of a second every armed Indian and every armed white man was shooting and reloading and shooting again. The Modoc called Watchman went down dead in the first volley, as did a Sergeant Harris. Indians took cover behind the houses to shoot. Soldiers stood in the open and returned fire. Two or three Modocs were hit, none fatally, and seven more troopers fell, one wounded mortally. With all the racket, the soldiers holding the cavalry mounts dropped the reins, and the panicked horses stampeded. One of the frightened mounts took a slug and went down, whinnying pitifully as it bled out.

Boutelle did what came naturally to his temperament: he ordered a charge. The Modocs fell back before the soldiers, less to retreat than to lure them into the open. Boutelle refused the bait. He had his troopers collect the women, old people, and children in the village and send them off toward their men. The lieutenant figured that the Modoc men would cease fighting if they got their families back. Indeed, the gunfight fizzled out after only a few minutes.

The soldiers raged through the empty Modoc village, shattered every abandoned weapon and threw the pieces into Lost River, then torched the houses. With Lieutenant Boutelle covering the rear, Captain Jackson and his troopers fell back toward Crawley's homestead, bearing dead and wounded. Half the fight was over.

* * *

Scarface Charley's accidental warning shot had roused the Modocs on Lost River's east side as well. Men grabbed their weapons, came outside to see what the ruckus was about. Oliver Applegate ordered the white settlers to mount up and ride into the village, where he jumped off his horse and shook hands, no doubt awkwardly, with a surprised Curley Headed Doctor, the shaman. Applegate announced his bona fides in the stilted English whites affected with Natives: "I have come to save you, & befriend you. You know I am chief at Yainax [on the Klamath Reservation], and that I use your relatives well that are there. Come to me and lay down your arms, and I will see that the troops do not trouble you."

The Modocs were unconvinced. Hooker Jim, who was Curley Headed Doctor's son-in-law and leader of the eastern village, broke, ran, and pushed a canoe into the river. A civilian pursued, drew a derringer, and demanded that Hooker return to the circle of whites and give up his rifle. Then a wrestling match broke out between a Modoc and one of Applegate's men over Hooker Jim's weapon.

At the very moment when Scarface Charley and Frazier Boutelle blasted at each other in Kientpoos's village, the gunfight on the east side of the river erupted as well. A white man fell dead in the first exchange, and one Modoc was wounded. George Small, one of the vigilantes, shot down a six-year-old child, then turned his shotgun on a mother with an infant. Most of the blast missed the mother yet cut her child in half. Outnumbered and exposed, the civilians fell back toward Crawley's cabin. The Modocs gave chase, then stopped to launch distant potshots into the little structure, more for .50-caliber terror than lethal effect.

Two neighboring settlers, who wondered what all the shooting was about, rode over for a look and stumbled into Modocs who were in no mood for white visitors. Wendolin Nus, the first full-time settler in the Klamath Basin, died in the volley. His companion, Joe Pennig, was maimed for life.

* * *

The Modocs chased out of the now-burning western village gathered at the mouth of Lost River, where the stream fanned out into Tule Lake. Hooker Jim sent his old, women, and young to join them. All the assembled Indians — Kientpoos and his men, including an unscathed Scarface Charley, plus the women, old people, and children from both sides of Lost River — piled into small canoes and pole-driven rafts. They faced a miserable all-day and all-night passage: wind-whipped and cold, soaked by rain and sleet. The fleeing Indians paddled and poled around the lake, holding to the shallows along shore, navigating toward the southwestern corner of Tule Lake and the Lava Beds, their traditional refuge in times of peril.

Hooker Jim intended to go there, too, but first he had business to take care of: retribution for the shooting of women and children in his village. He and eight other men — Long Jim, Schonchin John and his son Peter Schonchin, Weium, Dave, Slolux, Billy, and Curley-Headed Doctor — made their way toward the Lava Beds the long way around, riding down the eastern shoreline. They were hunting settlers.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Modoc War by Robert Aquinas McNally. Copyright © 2017 Robert Aquinas McNally. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Bison Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1496201795
• ISBN 13: 9781496201799
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 409
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile