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

by Terry C. Johnston

“No hurt to me, Uncle.”

  “She was talking out of turn.”

  “Sounds to me like you took more offense than I.”

  “Perhaps I did at that.”

  As Donegan smoothed the blanket then laid the saddle atop it, he asked, “You happy settling down, are you?”

  Ian stopped and sighed. “Sometimes, Seamus. It’s hard sometimes. But the pain of staying planted in one spot like these big trees comes less and less to hurt me with the work of every spring. I’ve done it for so long—for Dimity and the children.” He climbed into the saddle and adjusted the reins, waiting for his nephew. “A man grows older—and so he learns to swallow down a lot of the pain.”

  On the way down the road past Pressley Dorris’s ranch, Ian pointed out Hot Creek to their right. “A small band of Modocs lives downstream under a fella called Shacknasty Jim.”

  “Shacknasty?”

  “Miners named him that ’cause his mother didn’t keep a too tidy place, Seamus.”

  They chuckled, and Ian went on to explain that the band had no connection to Jack’s or Hooker Jim’s troublemakers. Instead, they lived by themselves, causing no man harm.

  Donegan and O’Roarke were rounding a curve in the rutted road when the clatter of many horses and the creaking of wagons greeted them.

  “Ho, Ian! Morning to you, Mr. Donegan!” called out John Fairchild.

  “Morning!” shouted Pressley Dorris, waving.

  “Shacknasty,” Ian said, acknowledging the Modoc warrior on horseback between the two settlers. Then he looked at his white friends. “What’s going?” Ian asked, the jut of his chin indicating the small cavalcade of horsemen and wagons filled with women and children.

  “Shacknasty brought in his bunch to my place late yesterday afternoon,” Fairchild replied. “They don’t want to go join up with Captain Jack—’cause they realize it will mean their deaths. But with all the soldiers roaming the countryside, they came to me for help.”

  “Well, we’re gonna help, ain’t we?” Ian asked.

  Fairchild and Dorris smiled.

  Press Dorris said, “Of course we are. I’ve convinced Jim to take his bunch on up to the Klamath reservation—as long as I can get them there without trouble from the army or Oregon militia.”

  “I hear things are nasty in town,” Fairchild muttered under his breath so that Shacknasty would not catch his pessimism.

  “They’re all here?” Ian asked, his eyes counting off Jim’s brother, Shacknasty Jake, along with Bogus Charley, Steamboat Frank, even Ellen’s Man George.

  Fairchild said, “Last night I sent my hand, Sam Culver, into town to wire agent Dyar up at Klamath that I was gonna bring this bunch in to the reservation. How ’bout you coming along, Ian? You ride with us into town?”

  Ian glanced at Seamus.

  “We were headed to Linkville anyway, Uncle.”

  “We’ll ride along,” Ian replied, “to make sure no one ruffles any feathers there.”

  Yet the town had a bad feel to it as the escort slowly plodded down to the first buildings scattered crudely on the outskirts of Linkville.

  “I got a feeling we better cut short of town and ride down the back street to Whittle’s Ferry,” suggested Dorris.

  “Good idea, Press,” Ian said quietly.

  As they were starting to turn the procession away from the main street, an agitated Sam Culver pushed himself off the boardwalk and signaled Fairchild to heel over.

  “I don’t know how it happened, John,” he began, huffing, his eyes big as penny saucers.

  “What happened, Sam?”

  “Somehow they found out.”

  “Who found out what?”

  “Lot of drinking going on already today—knowing you and Press was bringing them Injuns into town.”

  Ian eased back in the saddle as some heads popped out of doors farther down the street. There was some muffled shouting as the excitement grew along the main street.

  “Whiskey and blood don’t mix well, John,” Ian said. He leaned over to Seamus. “This is turning into something bigger than we thought. You can ease yourself on out of here and get back to the ranch now before—”

  “I told you, Uncle—I was riding into town with you. And now’s not the time to leave you by yourself.”

  Ian smiled with his eyes only as he turned to watch the crowd congealing in the middle of the street. The smile completely disappeared as the mob turned, rumbling up the street toward them.

  “Ho, Fairchild!” hollered the man leading the bunch. He wore a surly look on his face, chicken-tracked with burst blood vessels.

  “Fritz Dinkins,” the settler replied, pulling the flap of his coat aside to expose the handle on his Colt revolver.

  Dorris and the rest did likewise. Donegan brought up the Henry into plain sight.

  Dinkins wiped a hand across his mouth, that grin still there. “We hear the army’s sending two hundred soldiers down here. Won’t be a Modoc worth a greasy spot on a barn floor by the time they get through with these murdering bastards.”

  “You been working yourself up some, ain’t you?” Ian said, easing his horse up beside Fairchild’s. Now he could clearly see the hard red lines checkering the German’s eyes, the rosy glow tattle-telling his cheeks and nose.

  Dinkins stared back hard. He threw a thumb over his shoulder even before his voice rose a pitch. “You seen the bodies of your friends they’ve got laying in the back of the hotel?”

  “Boddy and the rest? Well, I know what you’re thinking,” Dorris spoke for the first time. “But this bunch didn’t have a thing to do with those murders.”

  “They’re goddamned thieving Modocs, ain’t they?” shouted someone from the crowd.

  The rest surged forward a moment, jostling roughly, muttering their oaths.

  “One of the bodies had the heart ripped out, Dorris!”

  “’Nother had his balls cut off!”

  “They didn’t find all the pieces of the German!”

  “Hold on, dammit!” Fairchild hollered above the commotion.

  “This bunch is giving itself up to avoid trouble,” added Dorris. “Going to the reservation peaceable. So you boys just go on back to town and let us get down to the ferry where we can make the crossing.”

  “I figure we owe it to those dead friends of ours laying back there in the hotel to even the score a bit. Fourteen of these red bastards—for fourteen of our white friends!”

  “Simmer down, Fritz—I don’t wanna have no trouble here!”

  “Shit, Fairchild! You’re leading trouble right there!” shouted Sam Blair. “Just ease on out of the way now and let us string ’em up. We’ll damn well save you the trip to Klamath!” He patted his pocket. “I got a order right here from Governor Grover says I can hang the nine Injuns murdered our citizens!”

  “This ain’t that bunch!” Ian hollered. “I was there when Hooker Jim’s band broke out and ran off to do their bloody work.”

  “I say hang these bastards anyway!” Blair shouted.

  Donegan cocked the Henry as the crowd surged against itself again.

  “Listen—we’re trying to get this bunch to the reservation so they aren’t loose … so they can’t join up with Captain Jack’s renegades,” Fairchild tried reasoning again.

  “It’s a shame, Fairchild,” Fritz snarled with some morbid humor. “The ferry ain’t working.”

  “It ain’t?” Dorris asked, looking down the long slope toward Whittle’s buildings.

  “Whittle says it won’t be till morning he gets it going again,” Fritz said, and many in the group laughed.

  “We got no choice but to keep the bunch under guard till then,” O’Roarke said for the four of them. “Any the rest of you feeling as spry as Fritz here—come on and start your trouble now.”

  “Better than waiting until later,” Fairchild said.

  For a few tense moments the crowd muttered, then first one and a handful inched away, moving back up the street to the hotel beckoning with warm,
yellow light on what was turning into another gloomy afternoon of leaden skies.

  “Let’s get Jim’s bunch camped—and quick. Down there by Whittle’s place,” Ian suggested.

  Late that afternoon before all light drained from the sky, the five civilians sat in Whittle’s warming shed, planning their rotation of guard duty. As best they could, they had explained their situation to Shacknasty Jim and his men. His Modocs were armed to a degree—but the faces of that lynch mob had clearly frightened the women and children of the band.

  Ian stood first watch, then Seamus. Behind him came Fairchild, then Dorris. Last watch of the night was Sam Culver.

  And when the rest came to relieve Culver at dawn, there wasn’t a Modoc left anywhere near Linkville, Oregon.

  Scared of the white citizens, the entire band of forty-five Indians had slipped away in the darkness while Culver snored.

  “Goddamn the luck!” Fairchild cursed.

  Ian only wagged his head. “Shame. It’s a shame. Fourteen more warriors on their way right now.”

  “Way where?” Donegan asked.

  He looked up at his nephew. “On their way to join Captain Jack’s holdouts and Hooker Jim’s cutthroats.”

  Chapter 7

  Freezing Rain Moon

  It could only be the sort of place a man might come to die.

  Captain Jack brooded as he peered out on the drizzling sleet that pounded the section of the Lava Beds where his people had fled after the soldiers attacked their Lost River village. Smoky fires sputtered and hissed whenever the cruel wind sent a gust of wind into the caves, accompanied by a spray of the icy sleet.

  The children cried for water or from empty bellies or because they could not go out to play—escaping the captivity of the dank, smelly caves where the Modocs hid from the rain and ice and cold. Always the children were crying.

  And now there were even more mouths to worry over. Late yesterday the Modocs from the Hot Creek area had come in with stories to frighten the women and children—stories of the white men in Linkville preparing to murder them all, even though they were desiring only to hurry to the reservation.

  If the white man would kill women and children who were willing to surrender themselves to the reservation life—then there was no hope to make talk that would see his people out of this tragedy.

  He hated the way the cold of that realization had settled in his belly and wouldn’t leave—like an unwelcome relative come to live off his family. One who would not admit his welcome was worn-out. He first noticed the cold in his belly when Hooker Jim, Curly Headed Doctor and the others had come roaring into the caves in this central part of the Lava Beds located at the south shore of Tule Lake.

  It was to this place the various bands had agreed they would flee if ever attacked.

  But when Curly Headed Doctor’s fourteen warriors showed up with their women and children, they were also carrying the scalps of fourteen white men. Fresh scalps, dripping not only with freezing rain, but dripping still with gore. So there was great celebration among Jack’s people when the others arrived—singing and rejoicing over the scalps. The killings were justified because other white settlers had attacked their camp across Lost River from Jack’s village. They had simply avenged a blood debt.

  Still, the cold knot of doubt troubled Jack. He did not like all white men. But those he had come to know, like Elisha Steele in Yreka, had taught him enough about white men for Jack to realize the white men and their own avenging armies were going to consider the killing of the settlers by Hooker Jim’s warriors as simple murder. Not as war.

  Racing some thirteen miles across the choppy surface of Tule Lake in their dugout canoes, the Modoc women and children had joined their men who hurried overland, all fleeing to the middle of the Lava Beds—this narrow, forbidding landscape covering something on the order of fifty long miles of uninhabitable terrain.

  Except for some dried bunch-grass and an abundance of sagebrush, the maze of caverns was notable only for its austere lack of vegetation and absence of animal life. If it weren’t for the freezing rain captured in tiny pockets on the shredded rock, his people would be without a source of water. The place was nothing more than blackened, volcanic rock scattered in a long and narrow bed, angling south from Tule Lake into the sage-dotted foothills like a slightly deformed spine of some monstrous demon long ago fallen to the earth in a fiery time gone—leaving nothing but its blackened bones to tell of its evil passing.

  So rough was this three-mile-wide strip that it appeared the ground had suffered eruption after violent eruption of volcanic activity. And during the lull between each successive eruption, more of the lava flow cooled, until in the end there were no more massive, cinder boulders to hurl into the air. The landform solidified into a cruel, sadistic smear of hulking black jutting across the countryside, from afar looking much like a stream of old blood gone cold on the sand.

  In between each violently uplifted ridge of cruel rock the size of a San Francisco city block were a maze of chasms and crevices forming winding pathways where smaller, even the tiniest of pebbles, waited to quickly slash through a thick, cowhide boot. Over some of the Modocs’ caves the walls of the canyons towered as much as twenty, forty, sixty feet above a man—man thereby made to feel especially small and unimportant in the midst of the bleak ugliness assaulting this dead place.

  Just less than a mile from the south shore of the lake, the winding, tortuous trail through the ugly chasms led to a large crater in the lava flow. Here in this small, natural amphitheater, Jack stationed his people. Here would be his Stronghold where they could hold out against the white man. To reach this hollowed pit, the soldiers would have to run the gauntlet of that rugged trail, on either side of which stood walls of jagged lava-cooled spires jutting up like the fangs of some prehistoric creature. Here the Modoc warriors could rain their riflefire down on all who trespassed on this, their last bastion of hope for their people.

  Surely, Jack kept brooding as the first cold, gray days ran into freezing black nights, the white man and his soldiers will leave us alone now that we have come here. They cannot want these abandoned beds of frozen fire where no crops can grow and no cattle can graze. Only the Modoc can survive here—if the spirits allow. Only the Modoc can survive here.

  But as fervently as he hoped his people would be left alone to eke out a living here among these lonely chasms, Jack was certain the white man would follow. Curly Headed Doctor and his bunch had seen to that by murdering many of the white settlers Captain Jack had called friends. This was a cloak he could not take from his shoulders—he was leader of the Modocs. Jack realized that in the end he would suffer for the crimes of his people.

  His heart had grown heavy earlier that morning when he and a few others had gone scouting to the edge of the fractured terrain, scaling some of the higher lava rocks to see what they could of any attempt to follow or dislodge them. To his surprise, Jack discovered some of his white friends approaching from the west side of the lake, come for a parley. They left their horses to graze where they could on the soggy bunch-grass.

  Though the wind was cruel and the sleet slashed at the openings of a man’s clothing, Fairchild, Dorris and O’Roarke talked long with the chief. Jack told the settlers they were free to use the Ticknor Road south of the Lava Beds without danger.

  “But the Emigrant Road going around the north end of the lake is closed,” Jack told them sullenly. “Any man found on that road will be killed.”

  Standing with the chief were Shacknasty Jim, Steamboat Frank and Ellen’s Man George. No longer was there any doubt of it—the lynch mob at Linkville had driven the Hot Creek Modocs into the arms of Curly Headed Doctor’s stirred-up warriors.

  By the end of their council, the settlers found that their horses had wandered off. Jack called to his warriors to bring up three more of their own to exchange for the lost animals.

  “I bring your saddles here—this place—if my men find your horses,” said the Modoc leader as the white
men clambered bareback aboard the ponies.

  “We do not want to fight you, Jack,” Ian O’Roarke sighed.

  He nodded. “I know you—know all my friends. We want not to fight friends. Send soldiers away. We live happy on Lost River again.”

  Fairchild and the others shook their heads sadly. “The army is coming, Jack. Come out and surrender now before any of your people are killed.”

  This time Jack backed up several steps, straightening his stocky frame in the midst of the driving, icy rain, his hair dripping in rivulets down his dark face. “I cannot come out and give my body to the soldiers. Jack is a dead man already.”

  * * *

  Already the might of the U.S. Army was converging on the Lava Beds.

  Lieutenant Colonel Frank Wheaton, commander of the Twenty-first Infantry, would become the first director of the campaign. He ordered Captain Reuben F. Bernard of the First Cavalry to immediately take all available mounted troops west from Camp Bidwell and march for Tule Lake, there establishing one of two army camps at the ranch owned by Louis Land. On that site directly across from the Peninsula jutting out from the east shore of the lake, Bernard went into camp some five miles from the Modoc hideout.

  At the same time, Wheaton ordered Captain David Perry to take his F Company, First Cavalry, from Camp Warner and join up with Bernard. Wheaton himself would establish his own, and the second, camp at the Van Bremmer ranch fifteen miles west of the Lava Beds.

  Fort Klamath was now all but stripped of its manpower and armaments for the coming campaign.

  Until the heliographs were set up on the surrounding hillsides, and until the weather cooperated by providing enough sunlight to operate the signal mirrors, the two camps were forced to communicate by using either the rough Ticknor Road to the south or taking the easier, longer route looping completely around the north end of Tule Lake.

  While Major Green and Captain Jackson were left to man their camp at Crawley’s cabin as a supply link north of the lake, Wheaton ordered Major Edwin C. Mason to lead B and C companies of the Twenty-first Infantry, who had only recently returned from chasing after the Apaches with Crook in Arizona, out of Fort Vancouver. Their confidence in their abilities to rout a motley band of coastal Indians was high.