Devil's Backbone: The Modoc War, 1872-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  Kientpoos, chief of the Modocs, slipped into the dream where there was no longer any struggle. No more did he fight against the ropes, gasping for air.

  No longer did Captain Jack fight for the very life of his people …

  * * *

  Until the white man began crossing their land, the home of the Modocs was as limitless as the blue sky domed overhead. As long as he could remember, there had been word of settlers far enough away to the north, in what they called Oregon Territory. And even some much closer, to the south and west where lay the raucous mining camps of northern California.

  To the west stood the massive Cascade Range, a land of once-active volcanos where ancient legend said the thunder and sun had gone to rest. And through the thick forests on the north, bounded antelope, deer, bear and mountain sheep. Overhead flew ducks and geese, even swans in a sweeping winter migration, while pelicans and loons and sea gulls all made this place their home year-round. Fish was to be found in every stream: sucker, perch, and trout as well. Modoc men hunted the hills for the small animals and large while the women dug camas roots from the soil or, from their canoes, dragged water lilies from the surface of many lakes, pounding the seeds into a meal they would use for food. Other seeds and berries could be found at every turn. As a boy, Kientpoos loved most the pine nuts.

  Far away to the east of their land lay the desolate alkali flats. Beyond them, the Paiutes and Snakes and Pit River Indians against whom the Modocs had warred for decades beyond count.

  And to the south of their green country along Lost River lay the undisturbed, pristine lava beds. A long narrow strip of volcanic upheaval that reminded a man of rugged surf breaking upon the shore, black and foamy, frozen for all time. Lying in this land like some monstrous, bony spine stripped of all flesh—black as evil itself.

  This place had not always been Modoc land.

  At one time, beyond the remembering of all but the oldest among them, the Modocs paid tribute to the Lalaca tribe, in later years, with the coming of the white man called the Klamaths. Eventually the Modocs grew weary of living as slaves to the more numerous Lalacas—so weary that chief Moadocus declared that his people would no longer owe allegiance to the Klamaths. In many battles Modoc warriors fell—but sweet freedom was won.

  So the Modocs came to live in a state of wary peace along Lost River—given its name because it rises in Clear Lake and disappears in Tule Lake, without an outlet. Life was good when Kientpoos was but a boy.

  Most of the rivers were too brackish for drinking, so the best water was found in clear, cold springs that dotted Modoc country. Sagebrush and bunch-grass dotted the hillsides, while down in the meadows along the rivers and creeks grew the richer, taller grass that fed the Modoc ponies, descendants of the finest horses long-ago brought to California by the Spanish. The cold, still waters of the lakes nurtured the swamp and tule grasses the Modocs used to weave their clothing before the coming of the white man.

  Kientpoos, son of a chief, grew up in the Lost River land of fog-shrouded lava ridges dappled with juniper and scrub pine, where a man had to strain to hear the sound of geese sweeping overhead each autumn. The very vastness of the land itself swallowed sound as easily as it swallowed a man.

  He could remember when there were no white men in Modoc country. Until 1850 there had been but few—and those only crossed in a hurry to go someplace else. But one or more of them left a disease that decimated half the tribe in 1847—smallpox.

  For a few winters it was a struggle for the Modocs to grow healthy once more—while in their breasts they nursed a hatred of this deadly curse brought by the white man. As the white settlers began slowly pressing down from the north, squatting on some of the best of the meadows for their cattle and plows—it seemed they expected the Modocs to turn their cheek.

  Instead, under the leadership of Kientpoos’s father, the Modocs began to randomly attack small wagon caravans passing through their country, most times attacking at a place on the eastern shore of Tule Lake where the South Road strung itself between a rocky outcrop of lava and the water of the lake itself. In 1852 alone, thirty-six whites were slaughtered at Bloody Point.

  In the midst of all the killing, young Kientpoos could not understand why his people and the whites could not live in some harmony.

  “The white man must be driven out, my son,” the chief told Kientpoos. “He is a treacherous devil who is here to take everything that God gave us. There is no peace living with the white man. He must go—then we will have peace.”

  Indeed, for every ambush, the white man came to retaliate. That fall the white miners at the nearby California town of Yreka, founded only the year before when gold was discovered along Greenhorn Creek, formed into a posse under an Oregon frontiersman named Ben Wright to revenge the killings.

  The white men came to the Modoc camp, promising peace and preparing a feast for the Modoc men, women and children to prove their good intentions. Yet the Indians grew suspicious when the white men would not eat the food they had prepared for the Modocs. His elaborate plot to poison the tribe foiled, Ben Wright’s men opened fire on the village. Less than a third escaped into the forests—never to forget the evil that lay behind the smiles of some.

  That day would long remain in the heart of Kientpoos—a day when the white man’s promise of peace was nothing more than a shabby cloak for his treachery.

  With his father murdered, the embittered young man struggled to become chief against a weak leader, Old Schonchin. Kientpoos was at last convinced there were indeed some white men who wanted to kill Indians as much as there were Modocs who wanted to kill the white-skinned. Still, he reasoned, there surely must be some white men who wanted peace as badly as he.

  “I have always told white men when they came to my country, that if they wanted a home, to live there they could have it,” Kientpoos said, “and I never asked them for any pay for living there as my people lived. I liked to have them come there and live. I liked to be with white people.”

  In years past he often visited the mining settlement at Yreka, California, some seventy miles west of Modoc land, where Kientpoos grew fond of the white man’s things: clothes, wagons, houses, tools and weapons. In turn, the miners gave the friendly Modocs white names: Hooker Jim, Scar-Faced Charley, Curly Headed Doctor and Ellen’s Man George, among others. Attorney Elisha Steele gave Kientpoos his white name—“Captain Jack”—after a miner he resembled. Steele and the Yreka miners did not recognize Old Schonchin as chief of the Modocs. To them, Captain Jack was the head man.

  Too, the Modocs soon found that the lonely miners had grown fond of the Modoc women, and would pay a price for their services. As they became more familiar with the miners and shopowners, the Modocs more and more frequently bartered away the favors of their women for the precious articles of white civilization they could take back when they returned to Modoc country. They began to dress like white men, became drunk on the white man’s whiskey and learned to crudely speak the white man’s tongue.

  The relations the Modocs shared with the miners was much better than the strained, uneasy peace the tribe maintained with the white settlers who kept moving into the Lost River country. All too soon the farmers and ranchers found themselves every bit as split as were the whites back in the east fighting their great war. While most settlers in Modoc land grumbled and complained to white officials and the army about the Indians, a few settlers who often hired the Modocs to work as hired hands on their claims said the tribe had every right to take a cow or horse here or there. Captain Jack’s people were due that small “tax” for the white use of their tribal lands.

  With each passing season, the Modocs learned better who to trust. And who they must be wary of.

  Tensions grew and ebbed over the years, so much that Jack finally went to Yreka on St. Valentine’s Day in 1864, to approach his friend Elisha Steele with the idea that a treaty with the white man would settle much that threatened to flare into full-scale war. Although Steele had no authority to ne
gotiate a treaty, the attorney hoped that he could nonetheless forge a lasting peace.

  By terms of Steele’s agreement, the Modocs would no longer steal stock and would cease selling their women to the miners. They conceded the right of the army to punish them if they broke the terms of the agreement. What they received in return was permission to trade with the white man, to serve as guides to army and civilian alike, and to operate ferries for a profit.

  Bound only by the strength of his word, Steele promised Jack he would try to win the Modocs a permanent home along the Lost River.

  At the same time, the cries of the settlers grew so loud the army and the white man’s government could no longer ignore them. Peace commissioners finally came among the Modocs and the Klamaths, a tribe more than twice as large as Jack’s people, living just to the north of Modoc land. A new treaty was proposed that would move the Modocs from the Lost River to resettle on a part of what had long been traditional Klamath hunting ground. In their ignorance the white men believed the two tribes were alike and could live in harmony together. They promised the Indians that every man’s family would be provided with stock and a wagon, tools to work the land, clothing and food.

  Terms the Modoc did not like, nor want.

  Yet Old Schonchin made a grand show of his acceptance of the treaty. After making his mark on the talking paper, the old chief turned to face the south, placing a hand over his heart, then moved the other from left to right, showing in sign that as steadfastly as the sun moved from east to west, he would keep his word.

  Although something in his gut told Captain Jack not to affix his mark to the white man’s talking paper, he reluctantly signed with the other chiefs that October in 1864 and moved his people to their new homes on Klamath land.

  Trouble began immediately. The Klamaths considered the smaller bands of Modocs as intruders. They harassed Captain Jack’s people: shamed them, took the fence rails they had split and lumber they cut to build their homes. It ate at the soul of the Modoc men to live as tenants and beggars on land controlled by their former enemies. During those same dark seasons, the white man’s promises went the way of goose down before a wind. The promised clothing and food never arrived on the Modoc reservation, although the Klamaths were always well-fed and had plenty of clothes to fight the chill of winter.

  That humiliation was ultimately more than Captain Jack could take. He found his tribe split in two factions. Those who believed in making the peace work allied themselves behind Old Schonchin, who had always been most agreeable to everything the white man offered. On the other hand, the more militant, freedom-loving Modocs arrayed themselves behind Jack. Even Old Schonchin’s brother, John, vowed he would leave the reservation with Captain Jack.

  Daring the white man to make good his promises, Chief Jack led his people back to Lost River, his very birthplace, by the end of 1865.

  Along the streams and in the rich meadows that dotted the country of the Lower Klamath, Tule and Clear lakes, the Modocs discovered more cabins and fences and cattle than there had been when they left for Klamath country. For the next four years, Jack did his best to keep his people away from the whites as best he could, while the Modocs went back to hunting the hills for game, netting the streams for fish and gathering seeds and nuts for meal.

  During the next four years, Jack continued to visit his white friends in Yreka, coming to respect Elisha Steele all the more. At the same time, Jack’s Modocs watched Old Schonchin’s band on the reservation with growing interest.

  It was enough to convince them they should go on living free, as their ancestors had.

  In that Lost River country, the white settlers were quick to complain that the army must do something about the nearly six hundred Modocs who had jumped their reservation behind Captain Jack—surly Indians returning to old tribal haunts to harass the God-fearing white folks who had come in peace to subdue and till this rich land so like a Garden of Eden.

  With the inauguration of war hero Ulysses S. Grant in 1869, a new Indian superintendent for Oregon stepped to the fore—A. B. Meacham. In his lap landed the Modoc problem.

  Meacham came south with a pair of interpreters, white man Frank Riddle and his full-blood Modoc wife, Winema. Also along were some civilian teamsters and a small escort of soldiers to guard Meacham in his talk with Captain Jack on the Modoc’s Lost River stomping ground. Wisely, the Indian superintendent listened to the advice of Riddle and his wife, and left the soldiers in hiding some distance from the Modoc camp—not wishing to alarm Jack’s people.

  After the Modoc chief refused to hear of moving from Lost River, Meacham showed Jack the Modoc’s own signature on the 1864 treaty. After a long, brooding silence, Jack reluctantly agreed he would go if he could live near a friend, Link River Jack.

  Suddenly the fiery shaman, Curly Headed Doctor, leaped to his feet and shouted, “We will not go!”

  At that moment Jack knew the fat had been thrown in the fire: if his band indeed did return to a reservation, any reservation, the tribal shaman would not enjoy his current prestige and authority among Jack’s people while they lived in unfettered freedom.

  Guns were drawn as more of the Modocs circled Meacham and his interpreters.

  “Don’t shoot—wait until we talk!” Winema Riddle shouted.

  “Hear us!” Frank Riddle pleaded.

  Jack himself strode into the center of the council arena, stepping between Meacham and the shaman to ask his question of the white man.

  “If we do not go to this new reservation, what will become of us—you and me?”

  Meacham considered his answer a moment. “My little group will have to fight you until we are all dead. Then more soldiers will come to kill your people—on and on, until there is not one left alive among you.”

  Jack adjourned the council and retired to his lodge to debate the matter with his head men. For two days they debated, and talked with Meacham. Then debated some more.

  While Meacham ground through those two tense days of wrangling with the Modoc leaders, the escort company of soldiers grew restive and finally, charged up with enough of the whiskey they had brought along, they rushed the Modoc camp—scattering the warriors but capturing many women and children.

  Infuriated, Meacham had little choice but to play the cards dealt him. As it turned out, the Modoc warriors had little choice as well: with their families held hostage, they eventually came in to surrender and hand over their old muzzle-loaders, agreeing to give the reservation a second try.

  Although the Modocs were moved to a new area on the eastern side of the Klamath reservation known as the Yainax Agency, matters proved even worse than ever. Now the Klamaths prevented Modoc children from gathering nuts and seeds in the hills, preventing Modoc women from hunting with snares to supplement what moldy flour the Indian Bureau gave out. As well, the women were kept from fishing, bullied and even beaten by the Klamaths. Not only did the Klamaths continue to steal the fruits of Modoc labor, but the white officers at Fort Klamath itself appropriated a few of the younger Modoc women for their own recreational use.

  Three times Captain Jack went to the Indian agent for the District of the Lakes, Captain O. C. Knapp, to register his complaints. And each time Knapp waved the Modoc delegation away with his assurances he would talk to the Klamaths.

  Nothing was done.

  By the spring of 1870 the gall had finally risen in Jack’s throat.

  “The agent has no heart for us,” Jack told his people. “He does not keep Meacham’s promises. I no longer have a heart for Knapp—no heart for this place. The Modoc and Klamath cannot live together. We will go where we belong—to our homes on Lost River.”

  Chapter 1

  Early Spring 1871

  “Bloody right we’ll share a drink one day soon, old man,” Seamus Donegan whispered quietly to himself as he folded Sam Marr’s letter and stuffed it in one of the big pockets on his canvas mackinaw, his heart awash with memories of the man who had started north up the bloody Bozeman Road
with him five years before.

  With a sigh, he stepped down from the shadows into a stream of sunshine that poured through the breaks in the pewter clouds like liquid butterscotch.

  The tall Irishman, who stood inches over six feet, had to admit there was something about this high country that could capture a man’s heart. Both that country down around Cripple Creek in Colorado Territory, and this up here in the Montana diggings. He left the first behind a year before to follow the ghostly trail of his uncle, which led here to the gold boomtowns sprung up along Alder Gulch. Seamus had passed his thirtieth birthday getting this far up the backside of the snow-washed Rockies.

  He smiled as the sunshine warmed a freshly shaved cheek. Seamus still favored the sweeping mustaches and the long, bantam tuft sported just beneath his lower lip first grown when he spent nearly a year fighting off Red Cloud’s Sioux. The smile was as warm as the sunshine—warmer in remembrance. Was a time he and Sam Marr had tried their luck getting up the Bozeman Road into this part of Montana—and both had been lucky to come through those days with their hair.*

  Unconsciously Seamus’s fingers sought to caress the old mountain man’s medicine pouch he carried, tied around his neck on a buckskin thong there beneath his woolen shirt. He swung into the saddle atop the ugly roan he had traded from Teats at the Elephant Corral in Denver City back in the fall of ’69. Coming there from Fort McPherson and his brush with death at the hand of a renegade mulatto.†

  Seamus nodded to the owner of the shanty mercantile, a bookish sort of elf who also served as Nevada City’s postmaster, before he reined up the street, headed out of town. Bound now for northern California.

  He had been some time getting this far, learning this much. But at this moment beneath the Montana sun he sensed he was at long last heading down on the final leg of what seemed to have been a life’s journey. Spring was breaking winter’s hold on the high passes, and Seamus figured he could be in the California diggings by early fall.

  What would happen when he arrived there was no way to tell. If only he could run across another wisp of a clue to the whereabouts of Ian O’Roarke out there in northern California.