The Modoc War

Robert Aquinas McNally is a freelance writer and editor based in Concord, California. He is the author or coauthor of nine nonfiction books, including So Remorseless a Havoc: Of Dolphins, Whales, and Men.

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native America’s peoples and lands. Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872–73, one of the nation’s costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war.The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a “peace policy” toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country’s past.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Prologue: Duel at Lost River Part 1. Holy Lands Here and There 1. Bad to Worse 2. Stone and Story 3. Running the Pagans Out of the Promised Land 4. Death Squads, Sex Slaves, and Knights of the Frontier 5. The Peace That Wasn’t, the Treaty That Was, Kind Of 6. The Bacon of Three Hundred Hogs 7. Gray-Eyed Rancher to the Rescue Part 2. True Fog, Real War 8. Glove and Fist 9. Modoc Steak for Breakfast 10. A Look Inside 11. First Fog of War 12. Celebration and Postmortem Part 3. Firing into a Continent 13. Give Peace a Chance 14. The News That Fits 15. Heroic Reporter Dens with Lions 16. Talking for Peace, Lying for War 17. The Warrior Takes Command 18. Squeeze Play 19. A Homeland to Be Named Later 20. Pride and Prejudice in the Peace Tent 21. Martyrs at Midday 22. The War Goes Cosmic 23. Girding for Battle 24. Half-Empty Victory 25. Scalps and Skulls 26. Into the Volcanic Valley of Death Part 4. Things Fall Apart 27. The Center Cannot Hold 28. Hounds and Scouts 29. Hang ’em High 30. Varnishing Vengeance 31. Still Small Voices Swell 32. Strangled Necks, Severed Heads 33. Exile and Showbiz 34. Requiem Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index