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

by Terry C. Johnston

  They chuckled a bit, blowing steam from their coffee as night came down hard on the Lava Beds.

  “I just don’t like the way some of them others been reporting on Meacham,” Fairchild continued. “Another one said that ‘words roll from his silvery tongue like green peas from a hot platter.’”

  “Don’t let them worry you none, John,” Ian said. “Those reporters are only angry because Meacham won’t let them attend any of his conferences—or his meetings of the commission. They bloody well print anything these days.”

  “But Uncle,” Seamus said, “the truth is that if Meacham is every bit as good as the reporters are saying he is at charming the pants off those Modocs—then he’s the perfect man for what task lies ahead of them.”

  Ian and Fairchild both nodded. Donegan’s uncle stared into the flames. “Then I suggest we all pray Meacham’s up to the task of making peace out of this dirty war, nephew.”

  If the administration of Ulysses S. Grant back in Washington had anything to say about it, they were bound and determined to make peace with the Modocs. Twice in those past four months, the U.S. Army had tried, and failed miserably, to muscle Captain Jack’s people onto the reservation.

  A majority of politicians and power brokers alike back east were dismayed that Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap, and his Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, would not join forces to annihilate the Modocs. Instead, the administration had closed ranks to negotiate with that ragtag band of renegades holding out against the might of the frontier army.

  Yet as the headlines bannered across the front pages of eastern newspapers, daily reporting the bumbling attempts of the army and the staggering, wavering efforts of the peace commission, more and more of the east came to debate the fact that it appeared the Modocs were doing only what could be expected of them—given a reservation on the homeland of their ancient enemies when their own Lost River land was stripped from them by white settlers.

  Even more impressive, it was becoming more and more abundantly clear to a growing number of politicians who had their own agendas that this little war with the Modocs was turning into an affair lasting much too long, and by every means of accounting, much too expensive.

  But try as A. B. Meacham and General Canby could, the Modocs were not cooperating in making peace.

  Twice the Modocs sent word that they were ready to surrender provided they would not be hanged and the band would be given a reservation far from the Klamaths. Twice Canby sent wagons to the agreed-upon meeting place. Both times the wagons rumbled back to Gillem’s headquarters empty.

  Forces against surrender were at work in the Stronghold. Each time it appeared Captain Jack was making headway convincing his people that surrender was the best path to take—Curly Headed Doctor and his zealots intimidated and threatened. As murderers of the white settlers four moons before, these warriors knew that surrender for them meant the end of a white man’s rope. Besides, everytime the mood of the Modocs huddled in the Stronghold seemed to inch toward giving up—the shaman would leap to the top of a boulder and harangue his believers.

  Pointing each time across the lake to Bloody Point.

  Where twenty winters before, a white peacemaker named Ben Wright had come among the Modocs—and savagely slaughtered most of their village.

  As the frustrations had simmered week after week with complete lack of progress in the negotiations, the face of the commission changed. General Canby found himself dealing more with Meacham and the hope for peace talks every day. In addition, fifty-eight-year-old Methodist minister Eleazar Thomas was appointed to replace a departing commissioner. Also, the subagent on the Klamath reservation, L. S. Dyar, was appointed to take the place of the departing Jesse Applegate.

  If it were to be a staying action meant to contain the Modocs in their Stronghold while the commissioners talked, then Canby would guarantee his superiors that the local settlers were protected and that he would know what the hostiles were up to. Accomplishing this had meant the construction of signal towers the soldiers would use in transmitting heliograph and semaphore signals between Gillem’s headquarters and Bernard’s camp, located at Applegate’s ranch on Clear Lake.

  It was there that Captain James Biddle received orders to lead his K Troop, brought in from Camp Halleck in Nevada, on a reconnaissance of the Ticknor Road that strung its way through the roughest of country skirting the south side of the Lava Beds.

  Seamus led his horse up beside Sergeant Maurice Fitzgerald and mounted when the older cavalry veteran gave the order to his horse soldiers. Around last night’s fire the two had shared memories and tales of battles, fighting units of J.E.B. Stuart’s Confederate horse at Gettysburg and in the Shenandoah for Phil Sheridan.

  “By God, Irishman,” Fitzgerald bawled now within his black beard, already flecked with white, “what you and me could do to clean this little matter up and quick, eh?”

  Seamus eased down onto the saddle as the sun warmed a cheek. “This ain’t the kind of horse war I grew used to fighting, Sergeant.”

  Fitzgerald appraised him, then finally nodded. “If only those bastards back in Washington would turn the cavalry loose—we’d show ’em which way the Modocs run!” He urged his mount near Donegan’s, flinging his fist at the big Irishman’s arm. “If only we could get you back in uniform, you bloody renegate!”

  “Things working out fine just the way they are, Sergeant,” he said as Fitzgerald signaled his patrol to move out. “I get me fill of fighting when I want it. But I don’t do no kitchen patrol and don’t dig no latrines.”

  “Ah—you do have the best in life, don’t you, Donegan!”

  “If you love bad food and wet blankets and a drippy nose.”

  “What? You’d give up white beans and corn dodgers for the cooking of some soft-fleshed person of the female persuasion?” prodded Fitzgerald with a great smile creasing his dark beard.

  “Before you could say deserter!”

  They laughed together, joined by a few of the troopers within hearing distance, as they moved into the freezing fog of mid-morning, a milk-pale sun climbing overhead behind the thick clouds blanketing the land.

  By early afternoon Troop K had plodded past Dry Lake and were heading west, nearing a low, yet prominent, outcropping known among the locals as Sand Butte. Like nighthawks flitting across the horizon at twilight, Seamus caught the barest hint of movement—ahead and to the right.

  When he glanced over at Fitzgerald, he found the sergeant squinting into the haze of foggy sunlight and smudgy clouds.

  “I saw it, Irishman.”

  “Two of ’em?”

  “Two, most like.”

  “You see any weapons?”

  Fitzgerald wagged his head. “But you can be damned sure if there’s a Modoc raiding party out here—they’ve got weapons.” He turned in his saddle and threw up a hand, halting the column.

  Captain Biddle pushed his horse ahead and reined up beside Fitzgerald. “You spot something ahead?”

  “Both of us.”

  Seamus watched Biddle’s eyes flick his way, then go back to rest on his sergeant.

  “You’re figuring an ambush.”

  “They like working that way, Captain,” Donegan replied.

  “Let’s prepare this troop for action,” Biddle said after a moment of thought. “I don’t like the lay of this country.” He flung an arm ahead, indicating the winding trail through the rocky landscape strewn with bluffs and ridges, boulders and a few stunted junipers and a profusion of sagebrush.

  “They’ll draw us in, Captain—and jump when they figure the place is right.”

  “Unless we make ’em jump first,” Seamus said, a small grin beginning to carve his face.

  Biddle regarded him sternly. “What’s on your mind, civilian?”

  “Me and Fitzgerald—best riders you’ve got, Captain. What say the sergeant and this civilian ride ahead to flush out what’s up there?”

  Biddle looked at Fitzgerald, asking with his
eyes. The sergeant nodded. Then smiled.

  “Sounds like something I can do. With your permission, Captain.”

  Once more Biddle regarded the torn, horrid country that lay just ahead as they approached the foot of Sand Butte. He sighed. “All right. But don’t take any chances.”

  Fitzgerald chuckled. “Me, Captain? Not with this rummy to cover my backside I won’t! C’mon, Irishman.”

  As they moved out, Seamus pulled free the mule-ear on the army holster and dragged out the .44 caliber pistol. He stuffed the long barrel beneath the belt he had tightened around his thick, blanket mackinaw. As they eased toward the foot of the butte, there were places where the horsemen had to ride single file through the boulders. They kept their eyes moving above them, on either side, expecting at any moment to see figures blot out some of the sky, firing down upon them.

  Instead, as they rode free of a tangle of boulders, the two horsemen caught sight of the same two Modocs seen minutes before, but now hurrying away to the north around the base of the bluff, riding bareback on ponies.

  “Wasn’t no war-party, Sergeant.”

  “Just what I was thinking,” Fitzgerald answered. “But what would two of them be doing out here alone—”

  Seamus tapped the sergeant’s arm. “There.”

  “I’ll be go to hell right here, Irishman,” he exclaimed, pushing his slouch hat back on his head, then turning in the saddle, looking downtrail.

  “We’ve hit the jackpot. Let’s go back and tell the captain he’s captured some Modoc ponies.”

  “We don’t have to, Donegan.” He pointed behind them.

  “Biddle got a little curious, eh, Sergeant?”

  “His ass gets itchy if he don’t know what’s going on up ahead.”

  They waited for the captain and his troopers to come up, then showed off the thirty-five ponies grazing on dry, brittle grasses in a long, narrow meadow totally hidden from the Ticknor Road.

  “If we hadn’t come this far up the butte chasing those two herders, we’d never found those ponies,” Donegan commented.

  Biddle smiled, which was signal to many of the young, green troopers to shout their approval. “Good work, boys. I suppose it is about time we took something from the Modocs. Lord knows we’ve too damned little to be proud of in this campaign.”

  “Just take each day as it comes, Captain. You’ll keep your hair that way,” Seamus replied. “Might even win a scrap or two with these ruddy Modocs too.”

  Chapter 16

  Early April 1873

  Captain Biddle drove the captured ponies on west to Gillem’s headquarters at Van Bremmer’s ranch.

  It was there, two days later, that a half-dozen Modoc women showed up to protest the capture of the herd.

  Alfred Meacham advised General Canby against returning the animals. Agreeing, Canby allowed the women only to briefly visit their ponies before the squaws were escorted from the army camp, empty-handed.

  As a staunch Republican and a God-fearing Methodist, Meacham was a former hotel and toll-road operator from the Grande Ronde Valley of the Blue Mountains in north-eastern Oregon when President Grant appointed him to serve as the state’s Indian Superintendent in 1869. Meacham had long been a supporter of the Grand Old Party and “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.

  But his appointment had not come as his first experience dealing with Indians. Back in 1863 when he had arrived in Oregon, Meacham already possessed twenty-six years of fair-handed business dealings with Indians in his native Iowa. He himself had been instrumental in the government’s 1844 removal of the Iowa bands to lands farther west on the plains.

  This quiet, stocky and balding superintendent got the shock of his life when he made his first visits to the agencies newly in his charge. Not only did he find most of the agents corrupt and venal under an effectively-oiled spoils system, but he discovered most of the Indian Bureau itself to be morally bankrupt. Meacham himself was enraged to run across several attempts of local agents to “wash out the color”—an expression of the time referring to the interbreeding between white and red to solve “the Indian problem.”

  Instantly indignant at the abuses, Meacham was quick to rid his department of those agents doing everything they could to personally hurry along the “mixing of the races.” At the same time, he declared it mandatory that any man living on the reservations with an Indian woman had either to marry the woman in legal ceremony or abandon her immediately.

  Yet his greatest despair, it seemed, was that he was unable to elicit the army’s help in his reform. In fact, Meacham was unable to enact any substantial change in the moral climate at Fort Klamath itself, where the officers openly “borrowed” squaws from their husbands. Try as he might, Meacham was powerless as well to end the practice of the fort commissary officers and contract sutlers using the local squaws, who were unable to pay for their purchases, as prostitutes for the enlisted men.

  So by this spring of 1873, Alfred Meacham found himself feeling older every day now. For more than two months he had been traveling this road of negotiation and hope, attempting to find some accord between the government and the Modocs. He took little joy in knowing the process was making an old man of him.

  Immediately following the 17 January debacle in the Lava Beds, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano had asked Secretary of War William Belknap to suspend hostilities against the Modocs while Washington selected a commission to determine how best to bring about a lasting peace with Captain Jack’s renegades. On 30 January military action was duly suspended, except for any action required by the army for the protection of settlers in the area.

  At that same time, Secretary Delano did not have to cast far to find the head of what would be his peace delegation. Former Oregon superintendent Meacham was visiting in Washington. In a matter of hours his presidential appointment was made official and Meacham was on a westbound train, headed for Oregon country once more.

  As mile after mile, and day after day, were put behind him, Meacham wrestled with the dilemma of where to begin and what to do once he arrived at the Lava Beds. Truth was, he had accepted the position with misgiving.

  And ever since he had arrived on the scene, nothing had changed his most private of feelings. Down in his heart of hearts, A. B. Meacham sensed that he had accepted a task that may very well cost him his life.

  By the last days of March, Meacham found himself dealing with a new group of commissioners. Joining him now in the peace efforts were the fifty-eight-year-old Methodist minister Eleazar Thomas from California, and the subagent from the Klamath reservation, L. S. Dyar. In addition, General Canby had in recent weeks become so active in the affairs of the commissioners that he was regarded as one of their delegation.

  But back on the twenty-third of March, Meacham actually feared Canby had put his foot in it.

  Colonel Gillem had suggested that the colonel and Canby journey over for their own firsthand look at the Lava Beds. Escorted by a full company of heavily armed troops, the officers marched east from Van Bremmer’s to the bluff from which the disastrous 17 January attack had begun.

  “At that point, I ordered the troops to dismount and rest,” Canby had explained upon his return to Meacham. “I could look out over the placid expanse of Tule Lake stretching away many miles northward and eastward, while to the east and south lay the seemingly level expanse of the Lava Beds.”

  “That’s when you saw the Modocs?”

  Canby had bristled, nettled at Meacham’s attempt to hurry along his own well-paced rendering of the story.

  The general cleared his throat. “While leisurely gazing over the imposing landscape, we suddenly heard a shout from the rocks near the foot of the bluff where we were standing. I then observed an Indian waving his cap at us.”

  “Is that when Dr. Cabaniss approached the warrior?” Meacham asked, referring to one of the several contract surgeons assigned the regiments for the campaign.

  Canby nodded. “He knows some of Jack’s men and a few of the w
omen.”

  “Yes. He’s a good man,” Meacham observed.

  “That’s when he and that English journalist, uh…”

  “Fox?”

  The general agreed, “Yes. When they went down and found out from the warrior that Captain Jack wanted to talk to me—personally.”

  “Cut through the brush, General,” Meacham chided. “Did you make any ground in your talk with Jack?”

  This time the pleasure drained from Canby’s face. “No. Jack kept Cabaniss and Fox as hostage until we had finished talking.”

  “Wasn’t it more of an argument?”

  The general eventually agreed. “I suppose it was. Jack hasn’t relented at all. Still wanting the army to disperse and his people allowed a reservation on Lost River. It was clearly not a pleasant encounter.”

  Meacham grinned darkly, his eyes moving over to a nearby fire where New York Herald correspondent Fox was having an army barber trim his long hair. “I suppose that unpleasant encounter is reason enough for Fox to want his hair sheared?”

  “Yes,” Canby agreed, attempting to smother a chuckle. “Immediately after the Modocs left us and we were heading back, Fox vowed he would crop his mane so short that should he have another encounter with Jack’s renegades, no Modoc would want his scalp!”

  And through it all, day in and day out, Captain Jack’s band played the army and civilians alike for time. Almost any day expecting another terse, impatient telegram from Secretary Delano, Meacham feared the calendar would end up falling on Captain Jack’s side of this war of nerves.

  On the first day of April, Canby agreed with Meacham that they should stoke the fire beneath the Modocs. The general moved his headquarters from Van Bremmer’s ranch to a site at the base of the bluff—three miles from and almost within hailing distance of the Stronghold.

  After Gillem’s camp had been impressively spread below the bluff, the following day saw the entire peace commission meet with a delegation of Modocs for the first time. The wary on both sides met in that no-man’s land between the army’s tents and the bastion of the Stronghold. Meacham was alone among the commissioners in realizing the Modocs had come with some women as a universal sign of peaceful intentions.