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

by Terry C. Johnston

  Those who were hungry enough waited for coffee to boil at greasewood fires. Those who had had enough hardtack for the day collapsed to the ground and were quickly asleep where they fell.

  While the cold stars whirled overhead, Donegan and O’Roarke snored as loud as any.

  * * *

  As darkness sank over their Stronghold, the Modocs had no desire to sleep. In every breast tingled the energy brought of resounding victory. They gloried in not only holding the soldiers at bay—but in driving the white man back from the Lava Beds.

  Not a single Modoc had been seriously injured, much less killed, in the day-long fight, although they had been outnumbered by more than six to one. For all of that, the band was giving thanks … to Curly Headed Doctor.

  But Captain Jack knew the white men would be back. Despite the victory dancing of the mystical shaman and the keening squaws—the soldiers would not give up.

  Of that he was certain.

  Jack realized it now might be up to him alone to keep his fighting men ready when the next assault came. To convince them not to let down their guard because of one day’s victory. But to continue to steadfastly hold out against so many, his people needed food, weapons and bullets.

  When the moon came up splaying silver light over the blackened, bone-sharp landscape, the warriors moved out. Crawling over the positions once held by the enemy, they found haversacks filled with pig meat and hard crackers, a Springfield rifle here and there, along with some much-needed ammunition picked up at every turn. Ironic that they were now better armed than they had been more than twelve hours before, when the battle had started.

  Among the jumble of boulders a few warriors found some of the bodies still warm and unconscious, others attempting to crawl away in a clatter of sharp lava rock as the Modocs came close. They plunged knives into hearts or slashed the throats of those soldiers still living—rather than waste a precious bullet or ruin the scalp by bashing in the white heads with war-clubs. And there were always the dark blue, wool uniforms the warriors stripped from the white bodies—clothing that would protect Modoc man and woman alike until the coming of a fateful spring.

  Besides the pair of army field glasses they picked up on the battlefield, the hotbloods carried back many fresh scalps to the Doctor’s victory celebration held in the freezing darkness of that early morning.

  “My red war rope protected our people with its great power!” exclaimed the shaman. “The powerful magic given me by Ka-moo-cum-chux turned the white man’s bullets to water!”

  “We will drive them all back over the mountains!” vowed a warrior.

  “Those soldiers we don’t kill will run home to his mother’s skirts!” cried another.

  Jack listened as the warriors joined the noisy squaws now in a wild orgy of dancing and feasting at their bonfire reflecting from the choppy surface of the nearby lake. They would go on like this until sunrise caused many to finally crawl off to sleep in their caves and blanket-shelters.

  His heart was heavy, yet—his heart was Modoc. Their chief, Kientpoos, would not make peace until his people wanted peace.

  The cold grew inside him like a cold wave off the lake crashing against the side of his canoe. Worst of all, Jack could not shake the feeling that he would not live to see his beloved Lost River country again.

  With a gnawing of deep, personal pain at that loss, the chief of the Modocs prayed his people would remain strong, resolute and united the next time the white man came. And the next time. And the next …

  Chapter 12

  Late January 1873

  Following a day to recuperate, Major Green assigned Bernard’s Company G to remain on the east side of the Lava Beds while he led the rest of the troops and Fairchild’s California volunteers back to Colonel Wheaton’s headquarters established at Van Bremmer’s ranch on the far side of Tule Lake. From there, Captain Jackson would lead the military escort for the freight wagons loaded with those wounded pulled from the battlefield before the Modocs murdered the rest who had been abandoned. Their painful ordeal on that long and jarring seventy-mile ride north to Fort Klamath would last three full days.

  On that road heading out of Modoc country, the wagon train of wounded was unofficially escorted by most of the Rogue River Oregon volunteers who were quickly scattering now after their resounding defeat, and were most eager to put the Cascade Mountains between them and the Lava Beds.

  There was little enthusiasm for continuing the fight among Wheaton’s regulars as well. With their own eyes, many of those soldiers had personally witnessed what the Modocs had done to the bodies of fallen comrades carried out of the Lava Beds and buried at the base of the bluff the day after the disastrous fight.

  Realizing his immediate need was to relocate to a new base camp, the colonel left Van Bremmer’s ranch and the outrageous prices the civilian was charging the army for its stay. He moved the entire command north to the Stukel Ford of Lost River once more.

  There among an abundance of tall, sheltering trees a spare handful of miles above Crawley’s cabin where the butchery had begun the end of last November, Wheaton’s men established their camp on 21 January alongside the river, just below a steep bluff that would protect the site from most but the harshest of winter gales.

  The great cogs inherent in the army command were already grinding into motion: reinforcements were on their way. General Canby alerted Troop K at Camp Halleck in Nevada to march to the scene. Artillery Batteries A and M were dispatched from the Presidio in San Francisco. In addition, Battery E of the Fourth Artillery from the Department of the Columbia, Companies C and E of the Twelfth Infantry, along with Company I of the Twenty-first Infantry, both from the Department of California, were given their marching orders.

  That same day, Wheaton had Captain Bernard abandon his camp at Land’s ranch and instead establish his G Company farther east at Applegate’s ranch, on the north shore of Clear Lake. Upon receiving those orders, the troops moved out that very afternoon, taking all their supplies except for three tons of grain for the horses.

  The following morning, the twenty-second, Bernard dispatched Lieutenant John Kyle and twenty men to escort two wagons back to Land’s ranch for the grain. A lone, gray-eyed civilian rode along with the troopers, helped load the forage, then remounted for the return trip to Applegate’s.

  “Stretching your legs again, are you, Mr. Donegan?” Kyle asked the tall Irishman on the big-headed, ugly horse beside him.

  Seamus smiled. They had put some two miles on the return trip behind them and were nearing Scorpion Point on the road hugging the east side of Tule Lake. “Aye, Lieutenant. Horse sojur like me can’t take all that sitting around in camp like those foot-sloggers of Green’s or Mason’s.”

  Kyle laughed. “Horse soldiers we are—”

  A flurry of shots whined through the escort, knocking two men into the road. The rest struggled to control their frightened animals, bucking and rearing, twenty different voices raised, every one screaming in fright, surprise or outright shock.

  With a shrill yelp of pain, a civilian teamster pitched backward off his seat like a sack of oats into the frozen shards of grass at the side of the trail. He thrashed, crying out as bright blood spurted from his belly between his gloved fingers.

  “Take cover!” Kyle ordered.

  Seamus could see there was no need in giving the order—the soldiers were already doing just that.

  Barely four days had come and gone since the brutal lessons learned in the Lava Beds. Like quicksilver, the soldiers reacted to the frightening Modoc war-whoops. A few dropped from their horses, coolly aiming at the puffs of smoke dotting both sides of the road, which betrayed a Modoc rifle. Most, however, either abandoned their mounts or savagely kicked their horses in a wild retreat that left the two heavily-loaded wagons standing in the middle of the road.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Donegan realized in a matter of seconds there would in all likelihood be only four of them left to hold off the Modocs.

  �
��Best you get someone riding to tell Bernard!”

  Kyle nodded. “And then we’re pulling back ourselves!”

  Seamus nodded. “Best idea I’ve heard all day.”

  As the lieutenant slapped his sergeant on the arm and gestured toward their rear, Donegan slammed home more cartridges into the Henry. He wasn’t sure he was doing any damage through the thick growth lining the road that hid the enemy. But he had them at bay for the moment.

  And the moment only.

  First one, then a second shot whistled by. This time from his right.

  “They’re flanking us, Irishman!”

  “Ruddy well I know that!” he shouted above the clamor. “Let’s retreat while we still bloody can!”

  After getting less than a hundred yards down the road, the Modoc fire lessened. Kyle and Donegan found the rest of the escort and the wounded teamster spread out along both sides of the muddy, ice-slicked path.

  “You thinking what I think you’re thinking, Donegan?”

  He nodded to the lieutenant. “Two or three of ’em followed us to make sure we’d stay pinned down here—while they finished plundering the wagons.”

  A big grin creased the older man’s face. “What do you say to it being our turn at making a charge?”

  “That’s the medicine, Lieutenant!”

  Kyle turned, hurling his voice all about him. “Two of you, stay with the teamster—make him comfortable as you can. The rest of you—form in two squads: one on each side of the road. Mr. Donegan will take the left flank. I’ll lead the right. Reload now while you can, boys. We’ll let those Modocs know we’re not going to take this licking laying down.”

  “We might be too late,” Donegan grumbled, pointing up the road.

  Above the frost-shrouded trees emerged the first oily smudges of black smoke.

  “They’re torching the wagons, men. Let’s march!” Kyle ordered.

  Donegan splashed through the jelling mud and over the ice-slicked ruts, eight soldiers tromping behind him. They double-timed it across the frost-rimed grass, ducking beneath the icy, dripping branches of the trees lining the wagon trail.

  As soon as the Modocs heard the soldiers huffing up the trail, they whirled and fired a ragged volley. Then backed behind the roiling smoke all but obscuring the two wagons they had set ablaze.

  With a wave of his arm, Seamus brought his squad up in a solid front. On the far side of the road Kyle did the same.

  “That smoke’s no better for us than the fog was,” growled an old soldier.

  “We’re going through the smoke after ’em,” Donegan replied. “Get around and flank ’em.”

  Into the trees he led his squad, eyes scanning the thick timber for an ambush—feeling himself sucked in just as Major William Judd Fetterman must have felt, lured on and on by Crazy Horse himself … until it was too late.*

  “They’re gone!” the old soldier whispered, pushing the kepi back on his receding brow.

  “What you make of that?” another asked.

  They all came to a halt at the edge of the road on the far side of the burning wagons. The fire was licking along the high-walled boxes—with little hope of slapping the flames out now.

  “Damn!” Kyle cursed as he came upwind of the smoke with his ten men.

  “At least they didn’t get the wagons to use, Lieutenant!” yelled a soldier.

  Some others muttered their grudging agreement before Kyle silenced them. “What the hell would the Modocs want with our wagons in that goddamned devil’s den of a place anyway?”

  “Lieutenant’s right, fellas,” Donegan said. “The Injins didn’t want the wagons or the grain.”

  “What they ambush us for?”

  Donegan turned on the soldier who asked the question. “Because they didn’t want us to have it either.”

  * * *

  In the midst of planning to snatch victory from the jaws of his defeat in the Lava Beds, Colonel Wheaton received notice that he was being replaced by Colonel Alvan C. Gillem from the Benicia Barracks, north of San Francisco.

  “So much for Wheaton’s grand scheme to float four flatboats laden with artillery across the lake and bombard that goddamned Stronghold,” Lieutenant Thomas F. Wright commented that night of the twenty-third to some of the Californians at the fire where most men huddled as soon as the sun began to sink in the west. Wright had taken a liking to the volunteers and spent as much time among them as he could spare.

  “Just might work at that,” Donegan replied.

  O’Roarke eyed his nephew a moment. “You know about artillery do you, nephew?”

  Seamus snorted, then dragged his sleeve under a raw, runny nose that for days had refused to stop dripping. “Aye, Uncle. I’ve had so much grapeshot and mother-rounds both flung me way—I ought to qualify as expert!”

  “Your nephew’s right, Mr. O’Roarke,” Wright said, then turned to Donegan. “Wheaton will do his damndest to make every last regular an expert in drilling by the time Gillem comes in.”

  Seamus nodded. “No sojur can be happy with the account they gave of themselves that day in the Lava Beds,” he grumped, staring at the flames licking at the inky darkness.

  “I just don’t understand it, Donegan,” Wright brooded. “As long as the army’s been fighting the Indians, a detail of soldiers—no matter if they are numerically inferior to the hostiles in numbers—has always taken the day in an open fight of it. Yet on this ground, when we had them by a superiority of numbers and arms—we got whipped.”

  “It was their ground, lad,” O’Roarke commented. “They knew every foot of it.”

  “That, and the fog working on their side,” John Fairchild put in. He turned to see his friend Dorris walking up. “Halloo, Press! What’s news from our Hot Creek country?”

  Dorris nodded to the friends gathered at the fire, then accepted a cup of coffee from Donegan and squatted, blowing steam from the tin’s hot surface. “Modocs paid our side of things a visit few days back.”

  Fairchild didn’t appear ruffled on the surface. “Oh?”

  “Just a scouting party, I figure from the sounds of it.”

  “Who told you?” Wright asked.

  Dorris glanced at the lieutenant. “Some of the Hot Creeks who didn’t go to join up with Captain Jack … or head north to the reservation. I didn’t tell nobody, but they’ve been holing up at my barn. Hooker Jim and his cutthroats found them there and shot the hell out of my barn to scare the Hot Creek bunch.”

  “Damn,” O’Roarke muttered. It was as if a big hole had opened up inside him and much of his belief in the fight had gushed out. “Everyone safe up and down the road—you talk with Dimity?”

  “She and the young’uns just fine, Ian. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about, is it? We’ve done this to these innocent Indians, Press. You and me and John. How long can we go on blaming the Modocs for what’s happened?”

  “It ain’t just them—it’s those goddamned Klamaths that started it long before a white man ever stomped his boot track into this part of the country,” Dorris replied, blowing at his steaming coffee, making his face disappear behind the wispy gauze film.

  “Shit, Press,” O’Roarke said. “It’s our moving in on their land—”

  “We damn well pay for the use of it, Ian,” Fairchild broke in.

  “That’s right—but we’re only three. All the rest have just gone in and taken what they wanted of that Lost River country.”

  “What’s that got to do with Klamaths?” Donegan asked his uncle.

  Ian glanced at Fairchild, then at Dorris, before he poked a stick in the fire. “We took the land away from the Modocs, nephew. Not from the Klamath tribe. And somewhere along the line then the government ordered Captain Jack’s people to go live with old chief Schonchin on Klamath land. You can’t do that to a man who has any pride.”

  “Goddammit, I hate it when you’re right, Ian,” Fairchild grumbled. “You can’t take a man’s home away from him—then expect h
im to live as a boarder in the house owned by his old enemy.”

  “That what this is all about?” asked Seamus.

  Ian nodded. “I suppose.”

  “Perhaps we are all a little to blame for the way things turned out,” Dorris said.

  “And now the Modocs are split down the middle,” O’Roarke said. “Hot Creeks and Schonchin’s band on one side—Captain Jack and Curly Headed Doctor on the other.”

  “It ain’t so simple as that,” Fairchild said with a shake of his head as he tossed the last of his coffee into the fire. “I still can’t understand that match, Ian. Jack joining up with Hooker Jim and the Doctor. Something smells awful wrong there—Jack being in cahoots with those butchers. I just can’t believe it’s so.”

  They turned at the sudden disturbance at a nearby fire—a struggle between two of the volunteers and a blanket-wrapped woman.

  “Bring her over here, Schearer,” Fairchild ordered, standing. When the squaw was stopped before the rancher, he turned to Dorris. “Press, ask her what she’s doing here.”

  Dorris spoke his slow and plodding Modoc, then she replied in her pidgin English learned from the miners at Yreka.

  “She’s come with a message from Captain Jack himself.”

  “You don’t say?” remarked another of the volunteers as more of the civilians pressed forward.

  “Someone—go find Wheaton. Tell him to get on over here and fast,” Fairchild commanded.

  Minutes later the colonel stomped up through the light snow that was beginning to fall. He parted the civilians to find the Modoc woman sitting at O’Roarke’s fire.

  “What’s going on here? Just what is it she’s doing here?”

  “This squaw comes with a message for you from Captain Jack himself,” Dorris announced.

  Wheaton made a perfunctory grunting noise as he stepped closer, inspecting the squaw who sat dipping a hard cracker in some coffee laced with a lot of sugar. “So—let’s hear what she has to tell me.”

  “Jack wants a meeting.”

  “With me?”

  “With someone who will talk—to discuss a settlement.”