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

by Terry C. Johnston

  The captain straightened, took a deep breath of the cold air that seemed to momentarily settle his discomfort. “You’ll ride with me into the main camp, Mr. Donegan.”

  “I’d like him to stay with me,” Ian protested, “if you’re sending me off with Applegate from here.”

  Seamus grinned at O’Roarke. “It’s all right, Uncle. Riding with soldiers into an Injin camp is nothing new to this Irishman.”

  O’Roarke felt a swell of pride for his nephew—something akin to how he felt for the accomplishments of his own children in years gone the way of winter snow. “This ain’t your fight, Seamus. It might be safer you come with us.”

  Donegan patted his uncle’s arm with a crackle of breaking ice. “It’s all right.” He turned to Jackson. “I’m yours, Cap’n.”

  The soldier flashed a grin before his face drained serious once more. “All right, Applegate. Take your men across to the cabin Fairchild told me isn’t far from Hooker Jim’s camp.”

  “That’ll be the Crawley cabin,” Fairchild added. “Sitting up on the hillside the way it is, we can watch both camps from the windows.”

  “If trouble breaks out,” Jackson said somberly, “hold on to the cabin at all costs. And, Applegate—do not allow any of your civilians to initiate any action against the Modocs. We’re not here to start any war, mind you.”

  “Captain, this is entirely Odeneal’s show,” Applegate replied sourly. “I was all for waiting for Colonel Wheaton to send you some reinforcements.”

  Jackson chewed the inside of his cheek as another wave of nausea swept over him. “I suppose the fat’s in the fire now. You have your orders, Mr. Applegate.”

  “Keep your head down, Seamus,” Ian said as he rode past his nephew on the way down the bank to the ford.

  * * *

  For the better part of two hours, Jackson led his soldiers, surgeon, and Donegan through the lush countryside rather than using the trail. The Irishman had been quick to advise the move—to lessen the odds of running across Modoc sentries. A tough trip that took them straight on to first light, and still they found themselves a mile from the village.

  Here the captain formed his men into two platoons: one to follow himself, the other under the command of Lieutenant Boutelle. The troopers were told to dismount quietly and were given five minutes for tightening cinches and readying for the final ride into the village.

  “You men take off your coats,” Boutelle ordered.

  There was a bit of grumbling from some of the darkened faces.

  “I know it’ll be cold,” the lieutenant replied. “But I’m giving the order for your own good. The coats restrict your movement.”

  “Lieutenant’s right,” Donegan said quietly to a couple young soldiers who glanced over their shoulder at him as he started to pull the icy horn buttons from the frozen holes in his canvas mackinaw.

  Here, with the graying of light along the tops of the hills climbing up from the banks of Lost River, Seamus got the first good look at Jackson’s entire outfit. Clearly exhausted without a night of sleep riding down from Fort Klamath, and numbed to the bone by the bitter, icy cold, both men and animals plodded off once more through the icy mud, caked with ice. Horses and soldiers alike hung their heads wearily against each renewed blast of sleet hurling against them like tiny lances of pain.

  Jackson and Boutelle led them the last mile until the officers finally made out the first dim outlines of the brush arbors and earthen wickiups of the Lost River Modocs. The captain halted his troops and ordered Boutelle’s seventeen men forward on foot.

  The lieutenant and his troops dismounted and began inching into the village as a dull sun rose like a pewter button illuminated behind the thick, icy clouds.

  A gunshot cracked the still air as the soldiers reached the center of the quiet village.

  Boutelle’s squad dropped to their knees. The Modoc tongue hurled at them from all directions. Up from the bank came a Modoc man, carrying a rifle. He suddenly stopped, totally surprised—raising his arms, his face filled with shock to find the soldiers in the middle of the village.

  “Who is that, Applegate?” Captain Jackson asked Ivan Applegate, who was expected to interpret.

  “Scar-Faced Charley. At one time he was Captain Jack’s best friend.”

  “Tell him to drop his gun,” Jackson ordered as the village came alive.

  Many heads poked out from the earth shelters, then disappeared as quickly into the darkness as the Modoc warrior began gesturing, talking excitedly.

  “Get those men out here now!” Jackson hollered.

  “Charley doesn’t know what you want with him,” Applegate explained excitedly, turning to the officer. “Says he’s just visiting from Yainax—here to gamble with Jack’s people.”

  “I’m letting none of these men go,” Jackson hissed, eyeing the Modocs who inched away from their shelters now, stripped to the waist and armed, slowly moving toward Scar-Faced Charley and the riverbank. “Is Captain Jack here among these warriors?”

  Applegate searched. Then shook his head. “No. I don’t see him.”

  “Tell all of these men to lay down their weapons, Applegate. Carefully and quietly.”

  The twenty-two-year-old Scar-Faced Charley took this opportunity to wheel and lope to the nearest lodge. In a moment he reemerged carrying several rifles. With one at ready in his arms, he dropped two at his feet, handing the others to Black Jim. In the gray light his horrible scar stood out like satin against his dark face, running nearly from forehead to jaw, the result of a childhood fall from a white man’s wagon. He waved his rifle menacingly.

  “Get these Modocs to settle down, Applegate!” Jackson snarled, clutching a hand over his gut. “Explain that we’re here to escort them to Yainax. Convince them, goddammit—we don’t want to fight. But they’ve got to turn over their weapons—tell them!”

  In his stuttering Chinook jargon, Ivan Applegate began a painful, time-consuming dialogue with the armed warriors who jockeyed with one another for cover behind the earthen houses. Behind the interpreter, the young soldiers likewise made themselves as small as possible throughout the negotiations.

  After more than forty-five minutes of hollering between the two groups, immense pain crossed Jackson’s face. He straightened somewhat, still grimacing, signaling Boutelle closer.

  “What the devil’s going to come of this?”

  The lieutenant shook his head anxiously. “There’s going to be a fight, Captain—I have no doubt of it now.”

  “Our surprise was ruined.”

  “The sooner we start the fight, the better, Captain. Longer you wait—the better armed these boys get. That scarred one there seems to be one of the leaders of this bunch—despite what the agent says about him just visiting from Yainax.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Boutelle,” Jackson agreed, gritting his words in pain. “Applegate! Help the lieutenant here disarm that Scar-Faced Charley there.”

  As Boutelle passed the agent, pulling his service revolver up and heading for the armed warriors, Applegate started to protest to Jackson. It was too late for words already.

  Boutelle was trying on his own to spook the warriors, talking loudly, profanely, in hopes of cowering the enemy, distracting them—anything so that he could get close enough to grab Scar-Faced Charley’s weapons. “You sonsabitches better drop those guns now—or your carcasses will bleed in hell before the sun’s half-high!”

  Charley muttered his own oath, “You no call me dog names!”

  Applegate had no time to translate as the Modoc suddenly brought his rifle to his hip and Boutelle lunged aside. The pistol and rifle exploded together, a bullet raking along the lieutenant’s left arm. Another cut through the bright red bandanna tied at the young Modoc’s neck.

  Donegan pitched forward into a crouch while the whole village sprang to life.

  Warriors poured from every lodge, firing guns or bows at the skirmish line of startled soldiers. Horses reared and bucked, yanking free of their holders
as bullets whistled and whined among them. Troopers dove for cover, returning the Modocs’ fire. Every few moments another soldier grunted, falling dead or wounded, crying out to his companions to pull him to safety.

  All too quickly the soldiers were retreating, giving way, being driven from the village.

  As he reached the wounded lieutenant, Seamus realized that in moments Jackson’s outfit would likely be overrun.

  Donegan crouched over Boutelle, his eyes wary on the approaching warriors. “You hit bad, Lieutenant?”

  He shook his head. “Just a scratch.”

  “C’mon, we’ll get you out of the line of fire.” Donegan grabbed the back of the lieutenant’s tunic, pulling Boutelle behind an earthen lodge.

  “Thanks, Irishman.” He twisted painfully, getting to his knees and glancing around the side of the lodge. “We’ve got to move against them, and now. Or we’ll be swallowed up.”

  Donegan peered over the village quickly, appraising what he could through the gun smoke and sleety haze. “I’m in for this hand. If you’re in shape to lead—let’s go.”

  “Second platoon!” Boutelle hollered. “Spread out, on the skirmish! Forward.”

  It was a shaky charge at best, but the soldiers began to eat up some ground, forcing their way back into the heart of the village as the Modocs now gave ground.

  In a spare handful of minutes more, the shooting tapered off as the Modocs backed into the sagebrush and trees, fleeing into the low, scrub-lined hills south of the village. They were fleeing along the west shore of Tule Lake, quickly disappearing into a forbidding, fog-shrouded wilderness.

  Boutelle doggedly kept after them for another ten minutes, then turned back to the village.

  By the time Donegan and the soldiers reached the Modoc camp, Jackson had ordered his squad to clear the lodges. Old men and women were herded out of the village, dragging two bodies with them to the icy riverbank. There, the Modocs pulled aside brush and tule reeds where they had hidden their canoes. The old and the very young, bringing along one dead warrior and another seriously wounded, quickly pushed off and paddled off downstream toward the nearby lake.

  “What are our casualties, Mr. Boutelle?” asked a weary, ill Jackson.

  “One dead, sir. Seven wounded.”

  “Seriously?”

  “One won’t make that trip back to Linkville, Captain.”

  “Are you in any condition to fire the village, Mr. Boutelle?”

  The lieutenant glanced at his left arm. “You want to destroy the village? Yes, sir.”

  “Better search the lodges for any old ones left behind in the escape, Cap’n Jackson,” Seamus Donegan suggested.

  “The old ones have left—you saw them yourself, dammit,” Jackson growled. He wheeled on Boutelle. “What are you waiting for, Lieutenant? Put this camp to the torch!”

  * * *

  To a gully some seventy-five yards from the Crawley cabin, Ian O’Roarke led Oliver Applegate and the rest of the civilians. Here they squatted and watched, less than a mile from Hooker Jim’s village.

  In the spreading of a murky, gray light, One-Arm Brown and Dennis Crawley bolted from the cabin door and joined the seven.

  “You spread the word to the rest?” asked Pressley Dorris.

  Crawley nodded, huffing air. “Warned everybody from the edge of town, clear down to my place here.”

  O’Roarke squinted at him, grabbing Crawley’s shirt angrily. “You didn’t warn nobody on down the lakeshore?”

  “Superintendent doesn’t think there’s gonna be a fight,” Crawley said.

  “Anyone else in your place?” asked O’Roarke.

  “Bybee and his family come down here for safety. Four other fellas and Dan Colwell, my partner.”

  A few tense moments passed as a murky sun rose behind the sleety clouds. Across the misty river they could begin to make out the movement of soldiers approaching the outskirts of the village. A single gunshot rang from the far shore.

  Breathless, the civilians waited for more gunfire. Minutes passed and the only thing heard from across the river were the loud voices from Captain Jack’s camp.

  “What you suppose is going on?” Crawley asked the bunch.

  “I don’t know,” One-Arm Brown answered, “but I’m fixing to find out.”

  “Where you going?” O’Roarke demanded.

  “Ride down to the bank—see if I can find out what’s going on over there.”

  A moment later Brown slipped from the trees and pointed his horse down the soft bank to the edge of the water. He moved upstream several yards, stopped for some time, then reined back to the gully.

  He rode up shouting, “It’s all right! Captain Jack’s boys are throwing down their weapons.”

  The civilians set up a whoop. But somehow, something just didn’t sit right in O’Roarke’s gut.

  “Jackson’s got ’em!” Crawley led the cheer.

  Brown was back among them then. “Let’s go on down to Hooker Jim’s camp and drive those fellows in.”

  Chapter 5

  November 29, 1872

  From the sound of those first loud voices carried across the waters of Lost River, the Modocs in the camp of Curly Headed Doctor had awakened and gathered along the shoreline to watch the drama unfold in Captain Jack’s village.

  They turned suddenly as better than a dozen white men clattered into camp on horseback.

  Oliver Applegate was off his animal even before it had come to a stop, trotting the last few yards, his hand outstretched to the startled Modoc shaman. Confused, Curly Headed Doctor eventually shook the offered hand.

  “The soldiers have come,” exploded Applegate enthusiastically in Chinook jargon.

  The shaman’s eyes shot a glance across the river. The eyes grew lidded with sinister suspicion.

  The agent continued, buoyed by Jackson’s success. “I have come to save you from the trouble happening to Captain Jack’s band. I come to befriend you all. You know I am the chief at Yainax—and I treat your relatives well who are there with me.”

  O’Roarke slid from his saddle, wary and watchful as more of Hooker Jim’s warriors formed a rough crescent around Applegate.

  “That’s right,” the agent was saying effusively. “Come here to me and lay down your weapons. Now. It’s good you lay them down and I will see that the soldiers do not trouble you anymore.”

  It grew so quiet that Ian could hear the cold river lapping icily at the nearby bank. That, and the pounding of his own apprehensive heart. He thought quickly of home and Dimity—the children … as a handful of the Modocs stepped forward and laid down their collection of old rifles and pistols. A few bows found their way atop the scattered pile.

  Like a jackrabbit scurrying through the maze of sagebrush, Hooker Jim suddenly bolted for the riverbank, a rifle in his hand.

  Spurred by his action, some of the rest of the warriors started to retrieve their weapons. They stopped when the white men’s rifles were quickly lowered at their chests. Out of the tense confusion sprang the interpreter, O. C. “One-Arm” Brown, skidding down the slick, icy bank after Hooker Jim.

  He caught Hooker Jim as the Modoc was pushing a canoe into the icy river still being pelted by the diminishing sleet, with a sound like dried beans plopping on a taut drumhead.

  “Give it up, Hooker,” Brown snarled, holding a derringer on the Modoc.

  “Do what he says,” O’Roarke said, coming up behind Brown, his own rifle pointed and ready.

  The Modoc took a step up the slick bank and slipped, falling to his knees in the icy mud. Hooker Jim tried again, clawing up the bank.

  “Your gun—drop it,” Brown demanded as the Modoc reached the top.

  “Who’s that coming across the river?” Crawley called out, drawing everyone’s attention.

  A canoe with two Modocs paddling furiously neared the bank. This momentary diversion was all the warriors needed.

  A warrior called Miller’s Charley lunged at Brown, snagging Hooker Jim’s gun from
the white man.

  In the next breath Dave Hill was on the Modoc, struggling to free the rifle.

  “Better keep talking to them, Oliver,” O’Roarke said from the side of his mouth. “The fat’s gonna drop in the fire, you don’t.”

  Applegate started chattering in Chinook once more, trying to calm the Modocs who milled and muttered among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the frightened women and children huddled close to the earth lodges.

  “What’s taking things so long?” Brown grumbled, nodding his head across the river.

  O’Roarke shrugged his shoulders. No matter what happened now—this hadn’t turned out to be the clean, tidy removal everyone had said it would be. Dimity and the children were on his mind—

  —when the two shots echoed across Lost River, the roar heavy on the cold, dawn air.

  As the white men whirled, confused and frightened, the warriors acted. Sweeping up their weapons, Hooker Jim’s men knelt and fired into the civilians.

  George Fiocke fired his double-barrel shotgun into the milling, terrified Modocs.

  A young mother cried out as an infant sagged in her arms, bloodied. An old woman pulled the wailing, wounded mother behind a drying rack, screaming that the young squaw should run—that the child was already dead.

  As puffs of ugly, gray gun smoke billowed between the two groups, the white men fell back toward their horses while the warriors disappeared among their lodges. Women, children and old ones tore into the trees, shrieking hideously in pain and fear, anger and rage.

  In his confusion and fright, one of the civilians bolted from the clouds of gun smoke in the wrong direction. At the very moment he found himself among the deserted lodges, a bullet smashed into the side of his face. Jack Thurber’s heart pumped the last of its shiny blood onto the ice-slicked ground, steaming into the air of that gray dawn.

  “C’mon, dammit!” screamed O’Roarke. “Pull back! Pull back—everyone back to Crawley’s place!”

  They really didn’t need that much prodding to retreat from the hail of fire coming out of Hooker Jim’s village. Wild Modoc yells of vengeance and rage followed the civilians as they struggled to catch up their horses. Most of the white men hurried up the slope, straggling toward the top of the hill on foot.