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

by Terry C. Johnston

  On a day marked elsewhere for a celebration of independence, the trial of the Modocs opened on the Fourth of July, 1873. The large assembly hall at Fort Klamath had been prepared with tables for the military commission, chairs for the prisoners and witnesses—including the four “bloodhounds” still free to roam the fort grounds at will—and the American flag. No spectators were allowed during the few days of testimony.

  To a reading of the charges, and a request for a plea, all prisoners answered: “Not guilty.”

  On the second day of the trial, while William Faithful sat in the witness chair, a hush fell over the courtroom as peace commissioner Alfred B. Meacham quietly entered by a side door. This was the first time since the 11 April murders that the prisoners and the “bloodhounds” had seen Meacham, who they had all along believed to be every bit as dead as Canby and Thomas.

  One can imagine the looks on those dark faces as the old man moved among them, their eyes inspecting the wounds where Boston Charley had attempted to remove his ear and scalp.

  It is an interesting sidelight to history to note that Meacham later made a modest living on the lecture circuit, talking of the great Modoc War and the murder at the peace tent, showing his scars and exhibiting his lecture assistant, and former interpreter, Winema Riddle. During that same time period, Meacham made Winema the heroine of his story of the Modoc War, Wi-Ne-Ma. The Riddles’ son, Jefferson Davis Riddle, himself wrote a story of the conflict, The Indian History of the Modoc War.

  But in that hot July of 1873, Meacham was himself called forward as a witness. Following his firsthand testimony that sealed the fate of the murderers, he nonetheless asked the stunned military commission if the prisoners had been assigned counsel. When he was informed they had not, Meacham fumed, angry that counsel had not been appointed for them. No one at the fort would accept the post of defending the prisoners.

  With great credit to the character of the man, a still-weakened Meacham volunteered, but never served, as defense counsel—on the advice of his physicians, who believed so great an emotional strain would most certainly kill their aging patient.

  By the fourth day the prosecution had completed its testimony. With no defense counsel to offer rebuttal or its own witnesses, the prisoners were then granted only the formality of an opportunity to speak for themselves. While it is a common belief that when great chiefs rise to give their death statements, great oratory pours forth, such was not the case with Captain Jack. Instead, his speech was more an enraged indictment than silver-tongued epitaph.

  “You palefaces did not conquer me … my own braves conquered me … You say I killed Canby. Yes, I did kill him, but I see no crime in my heart. My heart is not bad. The ones most guilty are the ones now free. If the white man’s law were not crooked like a snake, they would be here in chains along with these others …

  I am ashamed to die with a rope around my neck. I wanted to die on the battlefield with a gun in my hand. But I am not afraid. I only think of my people and hope you don’t treat them bad on account of what wrongs I did …

  But do we Indians stand a chance to be treated fair by white people? I say no!… [White man] can shoot Indian any time he wants … Can you tell me where one white man has been punished for killing a Modoc?…

  “Now here I am … killed one man, after I had been fooled by him many times and forced to do the act by my own warriors. The law says, hang him. He is nothing but an Indian, anyhow … Let me hang, then! I am not afraid to die. I will show you how a Modoc can die. I am done.”*

  Following the stunned silence that marked Jack’s suddenly resuming his seat on the floor, the other five prisoners made their brief statements, each one similar in their condemnation that the “bloodhounds” who had murdered the innocent white settlers were free while as warriors they would be hanged.

  It should come as no surprise to you that in that short matter of days, after taking testimony from all concerned, all six Modocs were found guilty of two charges:

  Charge 1: murder, in violation of the articles of war (General Canby and Reverend Thomas);

  Charge 2: assault, with intent to kill, in violation of the articles of war (A. B. Meacham and L. S. Dyar).

  The sentence handed down: “To be hanged by the neck until they be dead.”

  Throughout the rest of that July and into August, the six were held in the steamy guardhouse, allowed only infrequent visits with their families, while outside at the corner of the parade post carpenter Hiram Fields put his saw and hammer to work, building a scaffold thirty feet long, large enough to accommodate six men at once. Every log cut, every nail pounded, every rope knotted from the huge cross-beam, was witnessed in detail from the windows of that guardhouse. But that was not the only torture.

  Not far from the scaffold soldiers were seen pounding stakes into the ground and looping string around the six rectangles. As sweating soldiers dug those six holes deeper and deeper, no white man had to tell the Modocs that one day soon their lifeless bodies would lie at the bottom of those dark graves.

  As you have read in the Prologue, while there were six graves dug outside the prisoners’ guardhouse window and six ropes hung ready from the gallows’ cross-beam, only four coffins were in that wagon carrying the six to the scaffold. President Grant himself had determined at the end to commute the death sentences for Barncho and Sloluck, who, many back east were convinced, were mentally retarded. (Sloluck had in fact slept on the floor throughout most of the trial, unable to understand not only the white man’s English, but the import of the entire process.) Grant’s orders specified that the two not be informed until moments before the execution of the other four.

  An unnecessary cruelty for men who would spend the rest of their days imprisoned on the little island called Alcatraz.

  When the execution was finally scheduled for ten A.M. on 3 October 1873, a lone newspaperman was allowed to witness the last visit the condemned would have with their families. That night before the hanging, the prisoners were “seated on the floor, each with space enough that his family might gather around him where they engaged in their death chant. The condemned men sat stolidly without uttering a word.”

  As the six were led from the guardhouse on the following, fateful morning to the strains of the army band’s rendition of the “Dead March,” Captain Jack found nearly the whole of the Klamath tribe come to witness the execution. In addition, many of old Chief Schonchin’s Modocs from the Yainax Reservation had journeyed to see this hanging of the renegades.

  Jack mounted the scaffold last, and atop the platform saw that the army had given preferential treatment to the four “bloodhounds.” They had front-row seats to watch the execution.

  Five minutes after the nooses were fitted tight and the black hoods draped over the prisoners’ heads, a captain dropped his handkerchief, signaling a young lieutenant to use his axe to cut the rope holding the heavy drop.

  The platform fell away, and with it the four prisoners.

  A reporter recorded that a quiet gasp of horror went through the crowd. Eerie keening burst from the gaps between the pine logs of the stockade where the women and children were held. “The bodies swing round and round, Jack and Jim apparently dying easily, but Boston and Schonchin suffering terrible convulsions.”

  Eight minutes later the surgeon pronounced all four dead.

  Later that afternoon another reporter found himself passing by a wall tent erected nearby on the Fort Klamath parade, its flaps open enough to show a long table in its center, “similar to those used in the dissecting-room of a medical college.” An Indian gum-rubber sheet was spread over the table, while in a corner the reporter saw a barrel of water, nearby a small table on which were laid surgical instruments.

  The reporter later informed San Francisco Chronicle readers that the heads of all four executed prisoners were cut off and shipped east to the Surgeon General’s Army Medical Museum in Washington for display.

  A ghoulish end to a dirty little war.

  Only
days later the rest of the Modocs were loaded aboard wagons and transported under Captain Hasbrouck’s escort to Yreka, from there to the railhead at Redding, California. Barncho and Sloluck were carried south to Alcatraz.

  Two weeks after the executions, the remnants of Jack’s band were themselves herded onto a Central Pacific train bound for Fort McPherson, Nebraska. By the order of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Wheaton, no one was to know of the final destination of these prisoners until the Modocs had reached their first stop in Wyoming.

  Twelve days later Captain Hasbrouck turned over his 153 prisoners to Colonel John J. Reynolds (who we will meet in future episodes of the war on the plains). Reynolds gave Hasbrouck a receipt for his prisoners, then escorted the Modocs south into Indian Territory, where they were given a grant of land only two and a half miles square at Seneca Springs, near the Quapaw Agency, just south of Baxter Springs, Kansas.

  With scrap lumber given them by the government and the help of three local white squaw-men, in one day the Modocs erected a “barracks” where they would live only two hundred yards from the agent’s watchful eye and under the leadership of their new chief, Bogus Charley.

  In 1879, Steamboat Frank was ordained as a pastor for the Modoc church on the reservation.

  Yet in the end, for all their attempts to walk down the white man’s road, it was typhus, tuberculosis, despair and starvation that would eventually accomplish what the U.S. Army could not in six bloody months of war.

  By 1909 the fifty-one surviving Modocs were allowed to return to the Klamath’s reservation in Oregon, where they would once again be unwelcome intruders on another tribe’s land. No more would they have anything but dreams of what they once possessed—a land rich and free and belonging only to the Modoc people.

  * * *

  I find it important to note here before closing, two important features of the story I chose not to deal with in the narrative of this novel.

  First of all, I want to emphasize the character of the man, Alvan C. Gillem, who for many weeks was the commander of the Modoc War and would eventually be sent home in disgrace by Colonel Davis. Yet, as I have noted in our story, Gillem recommended many of his enlisted men for special commendation for heroism in the face of enemy fire.

  I want the reader to fully understand just how unheard of was such an act in that era of the Indian Wars—an era when documentation shows us that no other officers recommended their enlisted men, the front-line troops, for meritorious conduct. A star for Gillem’s crown perhaps.

  And secondly, the reader might wonder just who were the two killers of those four Modocs in James Fairchild’s wagon?

  While the Oregon volunteers would to their deaths continue to deny they had anything to do with the killings, peace commissioner Meacham would likewise continue to assert that nothing was ever done to find the killers.

  Although Colonel Jefferson C. Davis refused to launch an investigation of his own into the matter, one can find among the official military documents of the era evidence that the U.S. Army never doubted the fact that the guilty parties belonged to Ross’s militia: “… the Indian captives … were fired into by Volunteers.”

  * * *

  Should you find that you now want to know more about this little-known but very costly and dramatic chapter of the Indian Wars, you can refer to the few reliable books available on the subject. And, I do want to emphasize how little is available on Captain Jack’s war of the Lava Beds. But what you will find for the effort is richly rewarding.

  For a contemporary account, written from interviews of participants and witnesses, you can always trust Cyrus Townsend Brady’s Northwestern Fights and Fighters. In this case, the spectacularly readable reminiscences of Captain Trimble.

  An overview of the entire war and its place in the larger conflict of “winning the west” will be found in Robert M. Utley’s brilliant work, Frontier Regulars.

  Time and again I was drawn from the purely military and dryly historic accounts of the entire conflict to read again the pages of Doris Palmer Payne’s stunning book, Captain Jack, Modoc Renegade. She, more than any other account, has been able to breathe life into the central character of the war: his early years, his coming of age, and his tragic few years of manhood attempting to lead his people.

  What is in my opinion the classic work on the subject should remain so for all time. The Modocs and Their War by Keith A. Murray, who was the first writer to approach the entire history of this little-known conflict between white and Modoc from its earliest days, which dated back to the time of explorer John Charles Fremont.

  Yet Murray himself, in a foreword written for Erwin N. Thompson’s Modoc War—Its Military History & Topography, candidly stated that he wished he had had Thompson’s book available when he was writing his own many years before. Not only does Thompson draw heavily on the formal military record for every shred of the engrossing narrative, but he has combed the press of the day as well, to glean a feel of what the newspapermen assigned to the war had to report to their readers, both in California and back east. Thompson’s book is worth a trip to the library if only to study the stunning and engagingly understandable maps on the history of the whole conflict. With these maps, a student thirsting for knowledge of Jack’s tragic fight with the army would not have to himself visit this beautifully-austere scar of landscape. One can take a most satisfying tour of the entire area by thumbing through those masterfully executed maps.

  But in the end I wish to leave the reader with one of the author’s primary impressions of this little piece of our history, this little piece of what we are as a people.

  This is a story all too representative of other battles during the Indian Wars, a story of an Indian chief representative as well of other chiefs gone before, and after. But while there might be others who died tragically and at most dramatic times—(Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull, among others)—there is no other chief more symbolic of his own people’s struggle to find a way to deal with the coming of the white man.

  In the beginning the small but hearty band of Modocs attempted to keep the white man away from their Lost River country. Then, over time, these people came to see the white man was there to stay. The Modocs attempted some adaptation, some accommodation with the new intruders. In fact, it is plain to see that the young Kientpoos himself attempted to amalgamate both cultures within his own band. That was not an easy task, and (some might argue) a task ultimately doomed to failure.

  In the end, when Captain Jack decided that he was going to live outside the bounds of white society and wanted that culture to leave his people alone—his personal death warrant was sealed.

  From that point on, in the press of the day, this tragic figure was known as “the red Judas.”

  Let me close by saying that Jack’s one-time hope to amalgamate both cultures is what should live on in our history, not only a recitation of the bullets fired and the blood shed in the Lava Beds.

  This sharing of the best we all have to offer one another’s spirits is to be remembered and cherished. I would argue that this sharing was, and still is, possible—and most assuredly something that would enrich both societies.

  The wind blows here still, across this dark and rumpled ground rarely visited. Fire came here first to cleanse, millions of years ago. Now the wind blows with a ghostly whisper across these ravines and ridges and bluffs and caves. And you can hear the whispers on that wind.

  It’s always here, this wind that comes at last to cleanse the terror, the horror, the sheer tragedy of man’s passing from this place. The wind always blows.

  —Terry C. Johnston

  Lava Beds National Monument

  June 1, 1990

  HERE IS AN EXCERPT FROM SHADOW RIDERS, THE NEXT VOLUME IN THE TOWERING PLAINSMEN SERIES BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON

  Prologue

  July 1873

  With a nerve-rattling screech of iron upon iron, the great hissing weight of the eastbound freight was eased into the station at Hays City, Kansas beside the Smok
y Hill River.

  It was almost as if the great black monster sighed as it settled itself there this early evening beside the battered platform that had seen countless thousands of boots and moccasin soles over all those years it had stood here beside the Kansas-Pacific. To most who found themselves meeting this train at twilight, this appeared to be just another eastbound chain of freight cars and passenger wagons shuddering to a stop behind the wheezing engine as it hissed its first of many spouts of steam among the legs of those gathered in the fading summer sunlight on that scuffed platform of cottonwood planks.

  Seamus Donegan rose slowly from his horsehair, leather-covered seat beside the window on the far side of the train, away from the station platform. He was in no real hurry, he figured; time enough to let the other passengers scurry down the aisle in their rush, down the iron steps and into another life than the smoky, dusty, confined life they had all shared for what time they gave themselves over to this black snorting monster that had pulled the Irishman here all the way from Redding, California and the land his uncle Ian O’Roarke had come to call his own.

  Seamus was moving east, heading back to the only place he could ever admit to feeling was home. Ireland.

  With a sense of some completeness now fully a part of him, the tall Irishman set the battered brown slouch hat atop his shoulder-length curls, then tugged the heavy canvas mackinaw onto his arms. The sun had just settled at the edge of the far prairie, giving a pink tint to the underbellies of the summer flecks of clouds overhead. The air would be growing cool soon enough.

  Seamus had been a long time returning to these plains, gone to the edge of the western world, tracking down uncle Ian and fighting Modocs in the devil’s playground called the Lava Beds. And he had spent more nights than he cared to now remember wrapped in his bedroll at the edge of this endless prairie wilderness.

  The plaintive howls of wolf and coyote, the whisper of wind and the hammering hoofbeats of summer thunderstorm on his gum poncho, the minute cry of insects at work in the dark, a sound almost lost against the aching immensity of the whirring of the faraway stars a man could almost make out coming from that great black velvet canopy overhead. A great, arching skyscape just out of reach above the bed he made in that lonely land of the high plains that only a true, wandering soul could learn to love.