Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  At dawn on November 29 Jackson’s command deployed at the edge of Jack’s camp, containing about seventeen families, on the west bank of Lost River. The Indians met Jackson’s demand for their arms with animated derision. Firing erupted on both sides at about the same time. After half an hour the Indians fled. Jackson reported killing “not less than sixteen” of “the worst men among them.” Actually he killed only one and wounded another. He lost one soldier killed and seven wounded, one of whom later died. At the same time, across the river, a handful of ranchers tried to seize Hooker Jim’s people, about fourteen men and their families, but were thrown back and forced to take refuge in Dennis Crawley’s cabin. Two of the civilians were killed and one wounded. The people from Captain Jack’s village escaped by boat across Tule Lake. Those from Hooker Jim’s village rode around the east side of the lake, slaughtering at least fourteen settlers along the way. South of the lake the two groups united in the natural fortress that would soon become known as “Captain Jack’s Stronghold.”29

  Military officers likened the Stronghold to an ocean surf frozen into black rock. Wave after wave of jagged lava rolled over the plain south of Tule Lake. Nature had erected a gigantic fortress, complete with bastions, towers, breastworks, parapets, and bomb shelters. The Modocs knew every fissure, cavern, and passageway. They skillfully piled up rocks to give further strength to the defenses. Patches of grass afforded pasturage for the herd of cattle the defenders brought in. Sage brush and greasewood yielded fuel. Only water was lacking, and this the Modocs secured from Tule Lake.

  Major Green took the field immediately after the Battle of Lost River. Colonel Wheaton came down from Camp Warner and assumed command on December 21. Reinforcements from Warner, Harney, Bidwell, and Vancouver brought the force to about 225 Regulars of the First Cavalry and Twenty-first Infantry. In addition, two companies of Oregon militia and one from California, slightly more than 100 men, joined the Regulars. Wheaton estimated enemy strength at 150 warriors. Actually, the lava beds never held more than 60 fighting men.30

  On the night of January 16, 1873, concealed by darkness, Wheaton moved his men into the fringes of the lava flow, Major Green on the west, Capt. Reuben F. Bernard on the east. During the night a dense fog settled on the lava beds. At dawn the skirmish lines advanced through the murk as two twelve-pounder mountain howitzers dropped shells in front of them. The fog, shrouding the target area, made the artillery fire more dangerous to friend than foe, and it was silenced. Falling slowly back on both sides, the Modocs kept the troops under a heavy, accurate rifle fire. Both Green and Bernard came to chasms that their men considered suicidal to cross. The advance halted. The plan had been for the two attack groups to reach around the Stronghold on the south, thus preventing the quarry from pulling off in that direction. Thwarted in this intent, Green and Bernard tried to unite their flanks on the north, along the boulder-strewn lake shore. As this movement neared completion, in late afternoon, the fog dissipated and placed the troops under the very muzzles of the Modoc rifles. Pinned down among the rocks, the soldiers remained there until darkness enabled them to withdraw.

  The Battle of the Stronghold cost Wheaton seven Regulars killed and nineteen wounded, two Volunteers killed and nine wounded, two mortally. No Modoc had been hit by military fire; none, indeed, had even been seen by the attackers. Worse than the casualties, the day’s ordeal had demoralized Wheaton’s men. The Volunteers went home. The Regulars settled down in cheerless winter bivouacs, made the more uncomfortable by a late January snowfall, while proponents of gentler methods had their day.

  Former Indian Superintendent Alfred Meacham and other prominent Oregonians had gone to the national capital in January as members of the Electoral College to certify Grant’s election to a second term in the White House. While there they persuaded Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano that peace emissaries might coax Jack out of the Stronghold more easily than the army could blast him out. The President, the credibility of his Peace Policy undermined by the stream of bad news from California and elsewhere, approved, and named Meacham to head a Modoc peace commission. During a month of inconclusive negotiations, the commissioners demonstrated their unfitness for the mission. Late in March, therefore, Secretary Delano gave General Canby full authority over a reconstituted commission. “This actually devolves on you the entire management of the Modoc question,” General Sherman advised his subordinate on March 24.

  The Modocs had proved as elusive and frustrating in negotiations as in battle. One day they seemed willing to surrender; the next they could not even be brought to talk. This reflected a confidence born of military victory, but also a rising dissension within their ranks. Some wanted to surrender, others to fight on, still others to seek favorable peace terms. Jack emerged as a moderate. But an aggressive war faction led by Curley Headed Doctor, a shaman, severely limited Jack’s freedom to pursue negotiations without imperiling his own authority. Factionalism verging on violence split the Modoc leadership.

  In hopes of fortifying the peace party and hastening meaningful negotiations, Canby stepped up the pace of military activity. Col. Alvin C. Gillem, First Cavalry, had succeeded Wheaton and had been heavily reinforced.31 Bivouacs were pushed closer to the enemy and forward observation posts established. Patrols probed the edges of the lava beds. Colonel Gillem moved his headquarters and base camp to the southwestern shore of Tule Lake, scarcely three miles from the Stronghold. This pressure appeared to bring results, for early in April 1873 Jack and his lieutenants began direct discussions with the peace commission. The meetings took place at a point midway between the Stronghold and Gillem’s camp. A lone tent was erected to provide shelter from sudden spring storms. Jack demanded a reservation on Lost River and amnesty for his people. Canby could only insist on unconditional surrender to the army as prisoners of war.

  Canby’s “compression” policy had still another effect. It agitated the factionalism among the Indians and made their temper and behavior all the more erractic and unpredictable. The militants began to discuss the possibility of killing the peace commissioners. Jack resisted this talk as far as he dared. But in a dramatic confrontation with the militants he was held up to a ridicule so humiliating that he agreed to take the lead in carrying out the plan.

  Toby Riddle, Modoc wife of Canby’s interpreter, learned of the plot and warned the commissioners of impending treachery. Canby could not believe the Modocs would attempt such a foolhardy act. Meacham and Commissioner L. S. Dyar thought otherwise. The remaining commissioner, Rev. Eleasar Thomas, a fundamentalist Methodist cleric, left the matter up to God, although Meacham wryly pointed out that God had not been in the Modoc camp all winter. On Good Friday, April 11, Canby donned his dress uniform and led the commission and its two interpreters to the council site. In the midst of the talks, Jack suddenly drew a pistol from beneath his coat and shot Canby full in the face. Other Indians attacked Meacham, Thomas, and Dyar. The Riddles and Dyar made good their escape. Shot, stabbed, and stripped, Canby, Meacham, and Thomas were left on the ground near the peace tent. Miraculously, Meacham still lived. Ultimately he recovered.

  The death of the respected and well-liked Canby stunned the nation and enraged the army. “Any measure of severity to the savages will be sustained,” Sherman wired General Schofield.32 War Department orders of April 14 named as Canby’s successor hard-bitten Jefferson C. Davis, colonel of the Twenty-third Infantry and brevet major general. While he traveled from his Indiana home, Colonel Gillem took the offensive.

  Gillem’s assault plan almost duplicated Wheaton’s. This time, however, the force was larger and no fog obscured vision. For three days, April 15 through 17, the two attacking formations worked their way slowly and undramatically into the heart of the lava beds. Indian and soldier exchanged sniping fire as the one fell back before the other’s advance. At night the howitzers and four mortars bombarded the enemy positions. The third day’s advance disclosed that the Modocs had abandoned the Stronghold, leaving behind the bodies of
three men and eight women.

  The Modocs had merely retreated into the lava beds farther south. On April 26 Gillem threw out a reconnaissance in force-five officers and fifty-nine enlisted men under Capt. Evan Thomas—to scout the new Modoc positions. Resting in the shadow of a sandy butte four miles to the south, they were ambushed by stealthy warriors. Half the command panicked. The rest stood with their officers in a valiant, disorganized defense. All five officers and twenty enlisted men perished; sixteen were wounded.33

  Again disaster had struck. Again morale plummeted. Reaching Gillem’s camp on May 2, General Davis discovered “a very perceptible feeling of despondency pervading the entire command.” The Thomas disaster, he advised General Schofield, showed that “a great many of the enlisted men here are utterly unfit for Indian fighting of this kind, being only cowardly beef eaters.”34 By mid-May, however, Davis had been further strengthened and, according to the Army and Navy Journal, had “infused new life into a command demoralized by mismanagement.”35 On May 14 his battalions closed around the new Modoc defenses. They were empty. The war had suddenly become fluid; needed now were mobile cavalry columns to give pursuit.36

  The Indians had abandoned the lava beds following another quarrel. Hooker Jim, Curley Headed Doctor, Bogus Charley, and others of the militants who had prodded Jack into assassinating the peace commissioners now began to lose heart. Water was scare, and an attack on a military camp at Dry Lake on May 10 had gone badly. Hooker Jim and thirteen men, with their families, deserted Jack and headed west. On May 18, in the mountains south of Lower Klamath Lake, they ran into a mounted squadron under Capt. Henry C. Hasbrouck and sustained several casualties before scattering. Four days later they surrendered to General Davis.

  Hooker Jim, characterized by Davis as “an unmitigated cutthroat” with “well-earned claims to the halter,”37 volunteered to help catch Captain Jack. Such an opportunity was not to be scorned, and Davis authorized Hooker Jim, Bogus Charley, Steamboat Frank, and Shacknasty Jim to draw arms and rations and search out Jack. The defectors guessed correctly that the quarry would be found on Willow Creek, an affluent of Lost River east of Clear Lake. On May 28 Hooker Jim’s party confronted Jack and urged him to surrender. Tired, hungry, and destitute, Jack’s followers, thirty-seven men and their families, seemed willing. But Jack himself knew that surrender meant death. Angrily he ordered the traitors to go back and live with the white people. Meanwhile, Major Green pushed the cavalry forward in two squadrons under Hasbrouck and Jackson. On May 29 they surprised Jack’s camp. The occupants scattered. For the next four days, Davis later wrote, “the pursuit … partook more of a chase after wild beasts than war.”38 Singly, in pairs, and in family groups, Jack’s Modocs surrendered to the cavalry units scouring Willow Creek and the vicinity. On June 3 Capt. David Perry found Jack and his family hiding in a cave and persuaded him to give up. His “legs had given out,” Jack explained.39

  This outcome of the long and dismal Modoc War displeased General Sherman. “Davis should have killed every Modoc before taking him if possible,” he wrote Sheridan on June 6; “then there would have been no complications.”40 Now he believed the proper course was to try Jack and the others involved in Canby’s murder by military court, to turn over Hooker Jim and the men who killed the settlers after the Lost River fight to the state courts, and to send the rest east and distribute them among other reservations, “so that the name of Modoc should cease.” He implored the Secretary of War for a swift decision, “before some Indian agent makes a fatal promise,” and he directed Schofield to insure that the prisoners were held closely pending further orders.41

  Ironically, these instructions reached Davis just in time to avert summary execution of Captain Jack and others. A scaffold had already been erected. Finally, a week later, Davis received authority to bring the slayers of Canby and Thomas before a military commission. The panel of officers sat from July 1 to 9 taking evidence against the six who were charged.42 There was never much doubt of the verdict or the sentence. President Grant commuted the sentence of two to life imprisonment. The other four were hanged at Fort Klamath on October 3, 1873, and their heads shipped to the Army Medical Museum in Washington. Because of their services to the army, Hooker Jim and his cohorts escaped punishment for the Tule Lake killings. During October the prisoners, 155 in number, were escorted to Indian Territory and settled on a small patch of ground near the Quapaws. The name Modoc did not at once cease to exist, but it no longer offered any obstacle to the settlement of the Modoc homeland.

  The Modoc War bathed none of its participants in glory, or even credit. The settlers who demanded Jack’s removal could claim little genuine provocation. The Indian Bureau, especially Superintendent Odeneal, displayed little insight into the problem and no imagination in seeking alternatives to a confrontation over removal. General Canby and his subordinates allowed Odeneal to lead them into a war they might have prevented. The army made a mess of almost everything it attempted. Commanders quarreled or simply did not cooperate; underestimated, then overestimated the enemy; hesitated when they should have acted, acted when they should have hesitated. Enlisted men proved too easily panicked, repulsed, and demoralized. In the end, Modoc defectors provided the key to military “victory.” Even the Modocs, although they battled with admirable courage, tenacity, and skill against great odds, seemed driven to a treachery that doomed them. Against the peace commission it was a blunder that destroyed all hope of compromise; among themselves it was suicidal.

  The Modoc War—more accurately, the slaying of Canby and Thomas in the midst of a peace conference—did more to discredit Grant’s Peace Policy than any other influence before the Custer disaster three years later. Newspapers across the land saw in it spectacular evidence that Indians could not be trusted or reasoned with. Whether editors called for extermination or moderation, all judged Canby’s death a grievous blow to the Peace Policy.43 And the saying made it so, even though the Modoc War actually taught very few lessons about the efficacy of the Peace Policy. More relevant to the debate, more sharply defining the real issues, were events occurring simultaneously in Indian Territory. Here the “Fort Sill Sanctuary” had come to symbolize all that the army condemned in the Peace Policy. Here the army finally won a fundamental modification in its application.

  As part of President Grant’s program of purifying the Indian Service by enlisting the churches to nominate Indian agents, the Central Superintendency—Kansas and Indian Territory—fell to the Society of Friends. In the summer of 1869 Quaker agents, pacifists by religious conviction, took charge of some of the most warlike Indians on the continent. Lawrie Tatum, a balding, big-framed Iowa farmer of great courage and tenacity, was appointed to the Kiowas and Comanches. Elderly Brinton Darlington received the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, to be succeeded after his death in 1872 by John D. Miles, an energetic and able executive. Overseeing these agents from offices in Lawrence, Kansas, were Superintendent Enoch Hoag, a pious visionary, and his chief clerk, Cyrus Beede, whom General Sheridan characterized as “a little too simple for this earth.”44 Honesty, trust, generosity, fore-bearance, and persuasion were Quaker tools in the task of transforming the plains nomads into self-supporting Christian farmers.45

  Except for the Kwahadi Comanches out on the Staked Plains, most of the Kiowa and Comanche bands regularly drew rations and other annuity goods at the Fort Sill agency. With almost equal regularity they scourged Texas frontier settlements all the way to the Rio Grande and even probed deep into Mexico. The Cheyennes and Arapahoes also preferred to roam unmolested. They too drew food and presents at their agency, relocated in 1870 from Camp Supply to a new site 100 miles down the North Canadian, but generally ranged to the west. A few Cheyennes joined in the Texas raids, but for the most part the tribe resisted the repeated invitations to make common cause with the Kiowas and Comanches against the whites. Instead, the Cheyennes fell tragic prey to impoverishment and debauchery, visited by whiskey sellers swarming across the Kansas border.


  Under the Peace Policy, troops in Texas could attack raiders in Texas but could not cross Red River into the reservation. Likewise, the big garrison at Fort Sill could act only on application of the agent—one whose religious scruples enjoined nonviolence. Truly, as Texans charged, Fort Sill became a “city of refuge,” where warriors received government supplies and protection while resting between raids. The pattern was clear, even to Tatum, but its dimensions were open to debate: Were Texans exaggerating the menace? Were the Staked Plains Kwahadis the principal culprits? Could the reservation Indians who were guilty be more effectively influenced by nonviolent techniques than by armed force?

  Fort Sill’s commander shared Tatum’s optimism and gave him hearty support. Benjamin H. Grierson, the tall, heavily bearded colonel of the Tenth Cavalry, treated the Indians as kindly and as tolerantly as he did the black troopers of his regiment. He espoused the Peace Policy, and he worked closely with Tatum to make it succeed with the Kiowas and Comanches. Not surprisingly, many officers regarded Grierson as a traitor to the army; some even gave credence to the charges of Texas editors that he and Tatum were providing arms to the raiders and winking at their bloody forays into Texas.46

  The year 1871 produced important changes in the Texas military system. The Fourth Cavalry replaced the lethargic Sixth, and its hard-hitting young colonel took station at Fort Richardson. Although only thirty-one in 1871, Ranald S. Mackenzie boasted a brilliant war record and qualities that led Grant to pronounce him “the most promising young officer in the army.”47 Tireless, high-strung, irascible from wounds and exposure, a harsh disciplinarian, Mackenzie whipped the Fourth into the best cavalry regiment in the army.48 Sherman took further steps to bolster the defenses by assigning General Augur to command the Department of Texas and by making it part of Sheridan’s Division of the Missouri and extending its authority over Fort Sill.49