Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Captain Jack recognized that his band couldn’t hold out against the army forever, even in the lava beds. He was prepared to negotiate. “General, we can make peace quick if you will meet me even half way,” he told Canby, through the interpreters. “If you will only agree to half of what I and my people want, why, we can get along fine.”

  Lava beds. In this geological maze, Captain Jack and the Modocs held out against the U.S. army.

  Canby would brook no compromise. “Captain Jack, I want you to understand that you are not to dictate to me,” he replied. “I am to make peace with you, nothing else.”

  “General, I hardly think you ought to dictate to me,” Jack said. “I think you ought to be aware of the fact that I am not your prisoner or slave, not today, anyway. All I ask of you is to give me a reservation near Hot Creek or Fairchild’s ranch.” Hot Creek and Fairchild’s ranch were close to the lava beds.

  “Jack, you know I cannot do that.”

  “Then give me these lava beds for my home. No white man will ever want to make homes here.”

  Alfred Meacham spoke up. “Jack, the general or any of us can’t promise you any place until we make peace.”

  Canby told Jack what he must do. “Get all your people together and come out under a flag of truce. A white flag means peace. No one will hurt you under the white flag.”

  “Look here, Canby, when I was a boy a man named Ben Wright called forty-five of my people under the flag of truce,” Jack said. “How many do you think got away with their lives?” He held up his hand, showing five fingers. Then he curled his thumb and two of the fingers, and with the two remaining fingers pointed in the direction of the lava beds. “Two of them are there, alive today. You ask me to come out under a flag of truce. I will not do it. I cannot do it.”

  “That was wrong,” Canby said.

  “Your white people at Yreka didn’t say it was wrong. They gave him a big dinner and dance at night, called him the hero.”

  Meacham answered, “Jack, we are different men. We are not like Wright. We want to help you people so you can live in peace.”

  “If you want to help us, give me and my people a home here in our own country. We will harm no one.”

  Eleazar Thomas appealed to a higher authority. “God sent me here to make peace with you, brother,” he told Captain Jack. “We are going to do it. I know it. God says so.”

  “Brother Thomas, I may trust God,” Jack said. “But what good will that do me? I am sorry to say I cannot trust these men that wear blue cloth and brass buttons.”

  Canby reacted as though insulted. “What have these blue cloths and brass buttons done to you?” he queried sharply.

  “They shot our women and little babies,” Jack said, his voice rising.

  “Did not your men kill settlers, and them innocent?”

  “The men killed were not innocent. They were the first to fire on my people on the north banks of Lost River.”

  At this point Tobey, the interpreter, spoke in her own voice. “Mr. Canby, do not get mad,” she told the general. “You cannot make peace this way.” She turned to Captain Jack. “You, too, Jack, be a man. Hold your temper.”

  Tobey’s words calmed things a bit but didn’t produce an agreement. Jack went back to the lava beds; Canby and the others returned to their camp.

  WHEN JACK TOLD CANBY HE COULDN’T MAKE PEACE ON THE white men’s terms, he wasn’t speaking figuratively. Leadership among the Modocs was even more tentative than among the Comanches or the Sioux. A chief wielded authority only as long as the others in the tribe chose to follow him. The irreconcilables among the Modocs were angry at Captain Jack for merely talking to the whites, and they expressed their displeasure plainly at the next council meeting. One asserted that the peace talks were a ruse to allow time for more soldiers to arrive. Another, Black Jim, agreed, and said, “I for one am not going to be decoyed and shot like a dog by the soldiers. I am going to kill my man before he gets me. I make a motion that we kill the peace-makers the next time we meet them in council. We may just as well die a few days from now, as die a few weeks from now.” Black Jim called for a show of support. More than a dozen warriors stepped forward.

  Jack acknowledged the difficulty of the negotiations. “I just do not know how to commence,” he said. “I have a hard fight ahead of me in the coming councils, to save my men that killed the settlers, or to win my point to secure a piece of land in this country for our future home.” Yet he was confident, sort of. “I shall win—at least I think I will.”

  “You will never save your people,” Black Jim shouted. “Are you blind, my chief? Can’t you see soldiers arriving every two or three days? Don’t you know the last soldiers that came brought big guns with them that shoot bullets as big as your head?” He glared at Jack. “The commissioners intend to make peace with you by blowing your head off with one of those big guns. You mind what I tell you, Jack. The only way we can get an even start with the peace-makers is to kill them next council. Then all we can do is to fight until we die.”

  The other diehards gave their approval. Black Jim, encouraged, almost spat in Jack’s face: “Promise us you will kill Canby next time you meet him.”

  “I cannot do it, and I will not do it,” Jack said.

  Another irreconcilable pushed forward. “You will kill Canby or be killed yourself,” he told Jack. “You are not safe any place. You will kill or be killed by your own men.”

  The diehards crowded around Jack. One pushed a woman’s hat down on his head. Another draped a woman’s shawl over his shoulders. Several shoved him to the ground. “You coward! You squaw!” they mocked. “You are not a Modoc. We disown you. Lay there, you woman, you fish-hearted woman!”

  Jack struggled to his feet. He threw off the hat and the shawl. He looked from one to the other of the diehards. “I will do it,” he said. “I will kill Canby, although I know it will cost me my life and all the lives of my people.” He paused a moment, then continued, “I know it’s a coward’s work. But I will do it.”

  THE CLASH IN THE COUNCIL, AND CAPTAIN JACK’S SUBMISSION to the irreconcilables, became known to all the Modocs, including Tobey. She felt an obligation to Alfred Meacham, who had done her family a good turn, and so she told her husband, Frank Riddle, who just before the next meeting warned the commissioners that their lives were in danger. “Do not go,” Riddle said. “You will all be killed if you do.”

  Edward Canby dismissed the warning. His scouts had been watching the council tent. Only four Modocs had arrived. Should any more approach, Canby said, his men had orders to attack. He would not be frightened by the words of a woman.

  Eleazar Thomas likewise deemed the warning unreliable. In any case, the minister said, he was willing to put his fate in the hands of God.

  Meacham knew the Modocs better than Canby and Thomas did. And he knew Tobey Riddle. He didn’t think she frightened easily, and he trusted her honesty. He shared his view with Canby and Thomas. Neither changed his mind.

  Meacham thereupon wrote a letter to his wife. “You may be a widow tonight,” he said. “You shall not be a coward’s wife. I go to save my honor.” He added, “The chances are all against us. I have done my best to prevent this meeting. I am in no wise to blame.”

  The commissioners proceeded to the tent. Canby opened the meeting by appealing once more to Captain Jack to come in from the lava beds and take up life on the reservation. Resistance was hopeless, he said. “If you kill all these soldiers, the Great Father will send more soldiers. You cannot kill all of them.” The Modocs had no choice. “The white man’s law is straight and strong.”

  Jack, clearly agitated, stood up and walked around. He seized a sagebrush stick that was lying in the dirt and held it out toward Canby. “Your law is as crooked as this,” he said. He bent down and made a scrawl in the dirt with his finger. “The agreements you make are as crooked as this.”

  “What have I done?” Canby asked calmly. “Tell me.”

  Jack said that Canby had prom
ised not to make war so long as the peace talks continued. But he had been reinforcing his troops and bringing up new weapons, including artillery. “Does that look like peace?” Jack demanded. “We cannot make peace as long as these soldiers are crowding me.” He was getting worked up. “Take away your soldiers. Take away your big guns. And then we can talk peace. Either do that or give me a home at Hot Creek.”

  The other Modocs present, including Hooker Jim, an irreconcilable, began talking angrily over Jack. Alfred Meacham tried to calm them down. Canby seemed unperturbed.

  “Canby, do you agree to what I ask of you or not?” demanded Jack, trying to regain control of the meeting. “Tell me. I am tired of waiting.”

  Meacham nervously implored Canby to answer Jack. “General, for heaven’s sake, promise him,” he said.

  Another of the Modocs tried to get Meacham to make the promise. “Meacham, give us Hot Creek,” he said. “Give us Hot Creek.”

  Meacham said all he could honestly say: “I will ask the Great Father at Washington.”

  While Tobey was translating Meacham’s reply, Jack took a step toward Canby. In Modoc he declared to the other Indians, “Let’s do it.” He drew a pistol from under his shirt and took aim at Canby, a few feet away. He squeezed the trigger, and the hammer fell. But the charge didn’t ignite. He pulled the hammer back again, and squeezed the trigger once more. This time the bullet fired, and it hit Canby in the face, just under his right eye. Yet the bullet missed Canby’s brain, and the general tried to run. A Modoc named Bogus Charley tripped him, then fell upon him and fatally slit his throat.

  Another Indian shot Eleazar Thomas in the chest. The minister fell to the ground, asked God to have mercy on his soul, and died.

  Alfred Meacham, believing Tobey’s warning, had brought a small pistol to the meeting. He now aimed the pistol at one of the Modocs, named Schonchin. He squeezed the trigger, but the gun failed to fire. Schonchin fired at Meacham, hitting him in the left shoulder. Meacham retreated and Schonchin kept firing, but to little further effect. When Schonchin ran out of bullets, he produced another pistol. By the time he took aim, Tobey had stepped between him and Meacham. “Don’t kill him!” she said. “Don’t kill Meacham. He is the friend of the Indians.”

  Schonchin ignored her. He fired and hit Meacham in the forehead. Miraculously Meacham wasn’t killed outright. Another bullet slammed into Meacham’s right arm. Yet another nicked his right ear. And still another grazed the right side of his head. He fell to the ground, all but dead.

  One of the Indians began to scalp him. Tobey rushed at the Indian and tried to pull him off the prostrate, dying Meacham. The Modoc threw her aside.

  Thinking quickly, she shouted, “The soldiers are coming! The soldiers are coming!”

  The Modocs froze, then started running to the lava beds. In seconds they were gone.

  The soldiers were not coming, but Tobey’s words saved Meacham, who kept his scalp and somehow survived his wounds.

  THE KILLING OF EDWARD CANBY AND ELEAZAR THOMAS MADE a prophet out of Captain Jack. Canby was the highest-ranking officer—the only general—to be killed by Indians in all the wars of the West. And Thomas was a man of the cloth. The murder of the two, under a peace flag, abruptly erased the sentimental support that had existed in parts of white America for Captain Jack and the outnumbered Modocs. “All the Modocs are involved,” William Sherman declared. “Do not pretend that the murder of General Canby was the individual act of Captain Jack. Therefore the order for attack is against the whole, and if all be swept from the face of the earth, they themselves have invited it.” Not everyone in America would have put the matter as harshly as Sherman did, but almost no one contradicted the sentiment.

  The Modocs were not—quite—swept from the face of the earth. The soldiers’ ranks were reinforced until they outnumbered the Modoc warriors twenty to one. With their artillery they pounded Captain Jack’s lava-bed stronghold. The Modocs slipped the cordon one moonless night, but they didn’t elude their pursuers for long. After a few more skirmishes, short but sometimes bloody, they surrendered.

  Most of the survivors of Jack’s band were sent into exile in Oklahoma. Jack and three others, convicted of the murder of Canby and Thomas, were sentenced to death. They were hanged at Fort Klamath, near the reservation they had refused.

  41

  THE PRIDE OF YOUNG JOSEPH

  THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM HAD LONG BEEN OF two minds about the Indians. Americans who lived closest to the Indians, who stood to benefit from the seizure of Indian lands and felt at risk of Indian attack, tended to support repressive, dispossessive policies. Americans who lived at a greater distance, with less to gain or lose, often displayed greater sympathy toward Indians and supported more accommodating policies. Put simply, the East liked Indians a lot more than the West did.

  The East liked no Indian more than Joseph, chief of the Nez Perce. “The Nez Percé comes into history as the white man’s friend,” the New York Times editorialized in 1877. The paper quoted Lewis and Clark: “The Pierced-Nose nation are among the most amiable men we have seen—stout, well-formed, well-looking, active, their character placid and gentle, rarely moved into passion, yet not often enlivened by gayety.” The editorialist noted that until the very recent past, there was no record of a full-blooded Nez Perce having killed a white man. “With the Nez Percés we have always been at peace; and when we have had wars with other neighboring tribes, the Nez Percés have invariably been the allies of our army.”

  All of which, the Times declared, made the U.S. army’s war against the Nez Perce, beginning in the summer of 1877, so incomprehensible. The paper blamed the U.S. government. “These harmless and peaceful neighbors, these faithful allies in every war, were the nation that we drove to desperation and deeds of blood.” Acknowledging that the immediate responsibility was obscure, given the convoluted chain of events triggering the war, the paper nonetheless condemned the conflict as “a gigantic blunder and a crime.”

  The Nez Perce war, like many other Indian wars, had roots in the distributed nature of governance in the tribe. Starting in the 1850s various bands of the tribe had agreed to relinquish land claims to the U.S. government in exchange for annuity payments of food and blankets. But other bands refused to sign. Among these were the followers of Joseph, the son of a chief who had been given the Christian name Joseph by Henry Spalding, Marcus Whitman’s missionary partner. The younger Joseph took pride in his father’s peaceful reputation. “There was no stain on his hands of the blood of a white man,” he said. “He left a good name on the earth.”

  He also left young Joseph some advice. The elder Joseph and other Nez Perce of his generation had watched as whites came to their land. “At first our people made no complaint,” the younger Joseph said. “They thought there was room enough for all to live in peace, and they were learning many things from the white men that seemed to be good. But we soon found that the white men were growing rich very fast, and were greedy to possess everything the Indian had. My father was the first to see through the schemes of the white men, and he warned his tribe to be careful about trading with them. He had a suspicion of men who seemed so anxious to make money. I was a boy then, but I remember well my father’s caution. He had sharper eyes than the rest of our people.”

  Some Nez Perce yielded to white pressure to sell the tribe’s lands. Old Joseph did not. “I have no other home than this,” he said. “I will not give it up to any man. My people would have no home.” He never changed his view. As he grew older, his son became chief of the band. Another council was called by the whites, and the younger Joseph made ready to represent the band. “When you go into council with the white man, always remember your country,” the father told the son. “Do not give it away. The white man will cheat you out of your home.”

  Joseph. The Nez Perce chief became eastern America’s model of the noble warrior.

  Young Joseph heeded his father’s advice. At the council he told the government officials, “
I did not want to come to this council, but I came hoping that we could save blood. The white man has no right to come here and take our country. We have never accepted any presents from the government.” Other chiefs had agreed to sell the lands of Joseph’s band, but they had no right to do so. “It has always belonged to my people. It came unclouded to them from our fathers, and we will defend this land as long as a drop of Indian blood warms the hearts of our men.”

  The Indian agent at the council said Joseph and his people must move. They had been assigned land on a reservation. They must go there.

  “I will not,” Joseph answered. “We have plenty, and we are contented and happy if the white man will leave us alone. The reservation is too small for so many people with all their stock.” The agent offered presents; Joseph rejected them. “You can keep your presents. We can go to your towns and pay for all we need. We have plenty of horses and cattle to sell, and we won’t have any help from you. We are free now; we can go where we please. Our fathers were born here. Here they lived; here they died; here are their graves. We will never leave them.”

  Shortly thereafter, Joseph’s father lay dying. He called for his son. “Always remember that your father never sold his country,” he said. “You must stop your ears whenever you are asked to sign a treaty selling your home. A few years more, and white men will be all around you. They have their eyes on this land. My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and your mother.”

  Joseph nodded. “I pressed my father’s hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit-land.”

  JOSEPH REMAINED TRUE TO HIS FATHER’S ADMONITION, THOUGH the task became increasingly difficult. “White men had found gold in the mountains around the land of winding water”—the Wallowa Valley, the home of Joseph’s band. “They stole a great many horses from us, and we could not get them back because we were Indians. The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great many of our cattle. Some white men branded our young cattle so they could claim them. We had no friend who would plead our cause before the law councils. It seemed to me that some of the white men in Wallowa were doing these things on purpose to get up a war. They knew that we were not strong enough to fight them.”