“I figure Green canceled Wheaton’s order,” Fairchild replied. “In this damnable fog, I wouldn’t want those gunners not knowing where any of us are.”
“Listen!” yelled someone off to Ian’s right.
“Yeah,” replied another as every man strained to listen to the distant gunfire. “Sounds like Bernard’s outfit has gone and opened up on them at last.”
“Hurraw!” several cheered.
“We’ll send them Injuns straight to hell!”
“Here we go! Straight up their backsides while Bernard’s got ’em penned down!”
There was a wholesale rush by the Oregon volunteers and some of the young soldiers as the morning’s optimism reached its climax.
“Straight to hell!”
Ahead and to the right, rifles of a sudden cracked out of the soggy haze.
A nearby soldier called out as he fell. “Come get me! Pull me outta here! Oh, God—”
Two of those closest to him rushed forward into the whitish mist. More gunfire rattled. One of the rescuers spun around, his jaw gone, the bottom of his face gushing blood as he fell senseless, thrashing to the ground.
The second rescuer grabbed his leg, hollering as loudly as the first soldier hit. “My goddamned leg—don’t make me crawl outta here!”
“Fire!” ordered officers up and down the line.
Yellow and orange spat into the rainy mist of the clouds enveloping the whole battlefield in a surreal glow as the sun continued to rise far behind the fog. More men hollered out in pain and panic. Nearby Modocs answered with their own shrill battle-cries. The air stank of sulfur and blood and burnt powder.
“Charge that position!” yelled some officer, standing and pointing at the dim muzzle-flashes seen through the fog. “Charge!”
By now the white man’s bullets were ricocheting off black boulders and ridges looming out of the thick, icy mist. And soon the Modoc fire diminished as the warriors drew back, disappearing, only to reappear and attack farther down the skirmish line.
“We’re getting eaten alive!” growled Pressley Dorris.
Ian looked on all sides of him as the wounded were dragged back to cover, the dead allowed to lie where they had fallen in silence. “Not even given a chance to get our own licks in, are we, boys?”
The entire advance ground to a halt, men yelling at one another, suggesting orders, giving orders, refusing all orders to continue.
Major Green was among them suddenly, whipping them with his courage. “Up there!” He pointed with his pistol. “We’ve got to take that ridge—that’s where the buggers are! Drive them off—now, charge!”
The first handful obeyed, rising to plunge toward the nearby ridgetop. Two of them fell backward as orange bursts brightly split the fog.
“More—don’t give up now!” Green was hollering. “Charge!”
“You heard the major!” another officer took up the call. “Let’s take the ridge!”
But for every two men who rose to fling themselves against the Modocs atop that foggy ridge, there was a casualty who stumbled and fell. The soldiers left unhurt watched petrified as the wounded and dead piled up, until there was no courage left within them that could make the soldiers continue their suicidal charge.
For the next hour and a half the Modocs continued at will to snipe their way up and down the long skirmish formation, picking off soldiers from place to place while Oregon volunteers bolted and got themselves separated from Mason’s infantry. They had quickly recognized their peril, out on the far flank like ducks in a barrel for the shooting. Now they scurried backward in a rapid withdrawal. Most of them hunkered down behind larger boulders, heaving the cold air into their straining lungs after their narrow escape, listening to Modoc bullets smack the rocks or whine harmlessly overhead.
“You boys aren’t near as brave about eating Modoc steak now as you was the last few days,” Fairchild said to a knot of the Oregon militia.
“Give us a crack at something we can see,” one of them complained.
Ian shook his head. “Funny how them Modocs find targets to shoot at—but you boys can’t see a thing to make war on.”
Far in the distance the cold of the early afternoon air carried on it the sound of sustained volley firing coming from across an inlet of the lake.
“Sounds like Bernard’s got his men into the thick of it now,” O’Roarke commented, dragging a match over the heel of his scarred boot. He lit his pipe and set back with a sigh, trying not to dwell on Dimity and the children.
“Mayhaps Wheaton’s going to let them have a go at Captain Jack for a while now—and give us a break,” Dorris replied.
“Don’t mind this little rest, I don’t,” Ian said, blowing a thick column of blue smoke into the whitish, foggy air. “Shame of it is, this time gives a sane man time to think on just what the devil he’s doing here anyway.”
* * *
Bad as things were for Green’s troops on the west, things couldn’t be any worse for Bernard’s hundred men moving in on the Stronghold from the east.
Although the terrain they had to cross was not near as formidable as was the terrain on the west, Bernard’s men still suffered from the thick fog and the eerie black monoliths that loomed out of the cloudbank before them.
Perhaps halfway through their march, the soldiers and Klamath scouts reached a collapsed lava tube that formed a chasm some twenty feet deep. As their skirmish line came to a confused halt, the Modocs nearby opened a random fire.
No man was hit in those first few, frantic seconds—but the lead whistled overhead or zinged against the black lava formations, splattering with a lot of noise that caused every man to find the biggest place where he could make himself small. As much as the officers yelled at the soldiers, as much as they threatened with orders—the line did not rise from its bulwarks and advance.
“We can’t cross that chasm!” a soldier shouted above the din when the order to charge the Modocs was first relayed.
“That’s no goddamned chasm,” Seamus Donegan muttered, near under his breath.
Beside the Irishman, Captain James Jackson wagged his head. “Right now, that hole may as well be a chasm. We’ll not get these men across it.”
“Your sojurs still afraid of the Modocs after all this time?”
Jackson nodded. “Almost two months since that fight we had with Captain Jack in his village—and yes, they’re still spooky.”
Donegan poked his head up then down the skirmish line. “I don’t know how many warriors are out there in the fog, but they sure have a hundred of us pinned down here.”
“Jackson?”
Both Donegan and the captain turned at the sound of Bernard’s voice. He was crawling on his hands and knees across the rough ground topped by lava pebbles. They nodded to the senior captain as he came to a stop at their boulder.
“I’m deviled on what to do, Jackson,” Bernard hissed.
“We’d better pull back a little. There’s a spot we crossed—about a hundred fifty yards back. It’s there we can set up a defensive perimeter.”
Bernard wagged his head ruefully. “All right We’ll pull back without joining up with Green’s flank as Wheaton ordered.”
“You’re not going to move this bunch of sojurs in this fog,” Donegan said.
Bernard eyed him severely. “I’ll be damned if we aren’t having to fight the whole of Jack’s army out there.”
Jackson shook his head. “No way of telling—but I figure I’m of the same mind as the Irishman here. There’s a handful of snipers out there—picking away at us, holding one hundred soldiers down and turning their nerves to water.”
Bernard chewed at the inside of his cheek a moment. He looked overhead at the dim sun scorching a cold hole in the thick, whitish fog. “Perhaps if we hang on long enough, the sun will burn off this cloud. Pass the order along to pull back to a defensible position.”
In small groups and pairs the soldiers obeyed that order to retreat.
Scrambling back
the way they had come, the men hurried more than a hundred yards and found what they were seeking: a place they could defend against an unseen enemy. Bernard and Jackson moved up and down the new picket line, stretching their defense from the lakeshore for more than a mile and a half by placing a soldier to cover every eighty yards of rocky terrain. Here the men piled up what rocks they could to form more protection against Modoc lead that continued to whine overhead. From time to time throughout that long afternoon, the soldiers would occasionally fire random shots in the general direction of their red-skinned tormentors.
Most of those bullets sailed harmlessly over Captain Jack’s Stronghold, chipping away at the rocky fortifications on the far side of the Stronghold, where Green’s and Mason’s troops huddled, pinned down by the rest of the Modoc leader’s ragtag band of ill-equipped warriors.
Chapter 10
January 17, 1873
Here in the middle of the Ice Moon, Captain Jack was doing his best to lead his men in battle. He had never fought the white man before. None of his band ever had on anything close to this scale.
With less than sixty armed warriors, Kientpoos spread his fighting force across three miles of terrain, forced to cover two fronts, both east and west. Most of Jack’s men kept moving, using the fogbank to their advantage: firing randomly at a portion of the soldier line, then disappearing, to reappear somewhere else where they would wreak havoc for a few minutes before disappearing there as well.
While the fog tied the white men down, it could only help the Modocs, who knew every foot of these terrifying Lava Beds.
Jack was sure this hit and run approach to fighting the soldiers had to give the army the unmistakable illusion they were fighting a much larger Modoc force.
Within their bastion the Modocs had been using a few large pits one could not really call caves for shelters. Over them they had suspended their blankets or a few old animal hides against the freezing rain. Splitting their Stronghold was a series of three or four long, lateral cracks in the lava rock, making a space wide enough for a man to squeeze through—and now used to move small groups of warriors back and forth across the Stronghold itself, from front to front.
The increasing noise coming from the lakeshore alerted Jack that the soldiers were moving once more, this time from the west to the north—toward the lake itself. Inching closer to the edge of his Stronghold.
He quickly ordered Scar-Faced Charley and Steamboat Frank to take a handful of others to that section of the rocks that would overlook the shoreline. There his warriors would be hidden among the rocks some twenty feet above the approaching soldiers—able to fire down on the unsuspecting attackers.
If they were going to instill cold fear in the bowels of the white men, his Modocs had until sundown to do it. He gazed overhead, watching the sun fall off mid-sky and slip into the western side of the world, as the Modocs knew it.
By sundown that relentless winter sun could in all likelihood burn off the fog.
His fifty warriors would then be up against four hundred soldiers and Klamath scouts.
Jack willed the sun to stand still in the sky.
* * *
The whole area Green had been trying to force his way across since dawn was a rumpled landscape scored by ridges and gullies of lava flow frozen long ago in time. Each deep gully, some a hundred feet wide, had to be crossed by the soldiers while exposing themselves to Modoc fire. When they would reach the far side, the white men still had to climb a steep twenty- to thirty-foot wall of black rock, cross the top of that ridge, then drop down into the next deep gully. It was hard going, and the young soldiers resisted every step of the way.
No one could blame them. They were called on to bare themselves to Modoc riflefire for every foot of ground they gained.
Because of the hard going and the effective use of the terrain by the warriors, by one o’clock in the afternoon the entire advance had slowed to a halt, pinned down by the random, yet uncannily accurate fire of the ghostly Modocs hidden somewhere in the white fog.
During the painstaking crawl forward, Mason’s infantry had somehow lost track of the slower Oregon volunteers. Major Green soon realized that there was more than three hundred yards of open field between those two outfits. He dispatched his scout Donald McKay with an order for the volunteers to close up the ranks. Instead, the civilians turned around and sent that order on to Captain Perry’s cavalry unit, then the Oregon volunteers retreated, carrying along the body of one of their own casualties.
Not long after this mysterious move, Green had to send word back to Wheaton that his right flank had become mired down, unable to move and taking heavy fire from the unseen Modocs. Even more distressing, the major reported, his positions were not only hearing fire from Bernard’s troops dug in on the far side of the Stronghold, but some of Bernard’s bullets were falling among his skirmish lines—although it seemed Bernard’s forces were not moving forward at all.
“Wheaton wants us to get your cavalry and Mason’s infantry shuttled down to the lakeshore, where he wants us to make a junction with Bernard’s men,” said Major Green as he raised his eyes from Wheaton’s orders, just brought in by half-breed scout McKay.
“What good will that do us?” Captain Perry asked, rows of thick flesh furrowed between his eyebrows.
“Yes, I agree,” said Mason. “Our plan was to join on the south, not on the lakeshore. If we join on the lake, we’ll be driving them toward open ground where they can flee.”
Green shook the orders angrily, frustrated. “I don’t understand, gentlemen.” Suddenly he turned to the Californians standing nearby, observing the officers’ conference. “Fairchild—you and O’Roarke—come on over here. Can you tell me what happens if we form a solid line of troops at the lakeshore then attack inland toward the Modocs’ Stronghold?”
Fairchild looked at O’Roarke, some confusion in his eyes. He stared back at Green, unblinking. “You’re opening the corral gate, Major.”
O’Roarke snorted, wagging his head in exasperation. “Don’t you soldiers see it’s like flushing your breeding pens? You’ll never catch the Modocs then.”
Green turned to Perry after some moments of deep thought while staring at his boots. “Perhaps it would be better for the soldiers among us not to second-guess Colonel Wheaton.”
“With all due respect, Major—”
Green held a hand up and silenced Perry. “Captain, we will proceed with our orders as received.”
“Sir—I’ll take heavy casualties if I send my men across that terrain. They’ll be exposed every time they climb—”
“Captain, take your men and commit to making a junction with Bernard’s stalled offensive.”
Perry straightened and sighed. He saluted. “Yes, sir.”
“We’re going too, aren’t we, John?” Ian O’Roarke asked Fairchild, still tasting in his mouth the stale coffee and greasy salt-pork the army had fed the civilians that morning in the predawn darkness.
The settler looked at the handful of others who stood watching Perry march off, flinging his arms at his men, ordering them from behind their boulders, demanding they form up for the advance. He turned back to O’Roarke.
“We’re going, Ian. But, by God, some poor soul is gonna pay for this fool’s errand.”
O’Roarke spoke a silent prayer he would soon be walking back up that muddy, rutted path from the Ticknor Road, seeing Dimity in the distance, waving her bonnet at him, raising herself up on her toes the way she always did when she first spotted him coming up the path, gone long to Linkville or beyond, watching for him out the front window and rushing into their tree-shaded yard in her still-youthful excitement. Ian prayed.
Foot by foot Perry led his troops and the Californians along the dangerous shoreline. When they were less than 150 yards from the rocks ringing the Stronghold, the Modocs opened a sudden, devastating fire. Two of the volunteers dropped, dead where they lay on the black sand. Then, as suddenly as the gunfire had erupted, it slowed, trickled off and
stopped.
“Hello, white mens!” sang out a Modoc voice.
Ian turned to Fairchild. “That sound like Steamboat Frank?”
The rancher nodded as the disembodied voice continued.
“Charley—don’t you see some Yreka boys with those white mens?”
“Yes—I see them good down there,” came a second voice.
Pressley Dorris crabbed up on hands and knees to collapse between Fairchild and O’Roarke. “Scar-Faced Charley—know his voice anywhere.”
“Look—that was old Dorris talking! What you Yreka boys want with us, say? Dorris, what you want doing here?” The Modoc brazenly raised his rifle and fired a shot at the soldier lines.
“Fairchild with you?” Charley asked, and fired a shot.
“How about O’Roarke?”
Another shot fired.
“How long you boys going to fight us?”
Again and again Scar-Faced Charley emphasized each question by firing a round from his captured rifle. Keeping soldier and civilian heads down as he had his fun.
“What’s matter with you, Dorris?” Steamboat Frank asked this time, and fired his own rifle.
“Can’t you hear us, boys?” Charley chimed in again.
Frank laughed loud enough for the soldiers to hear. “Ain’t you got no ears, white men?” He fired another shot. “Can’t you talk?”
Scar-Faced Charley laughed with Frank. “These white boys ain’t got mouths!”
As the afternoon dragged on, the Modocs slowed their funning with the white men and began to have real sport with the attackers. By that time most of the canteens had been drained while the lake lapped invitingly close. Trouble was, each time a soldier attempted to belly-crawl to the shore, he had to cover the last ten yards without the protection of any boulders, exposing himself to fire from the warriors stationed high in the rocks above the soldier position.
Lieutenant John Kyle was himself hit, yet not seriously, as he emerged from the boulders, four canteens slung over his shoulder. Down he went with a clatter. Grunting with the pain of dragging his bleeding leg back across the sharp lava-laced sand, Kyle made it to the shelter of the rocks.
Devil's Backbone: The Modoc War, 1872-3 Page 11
