“Help me hold him up,” Cabaniss asked again. “He’s a bloody mess, this one.” The surgeon began to pour a dribble past the commissioner’s lips.
Meacham sputtered at the taste. “B-Brandy! No—”
“It’s whiskey, Meacham,” Cabaniss said.
“I … I can’t,” he replied weakly, trying to turn his bleeding head against the clamp the surgeon had on him. “I’m a t-temperance man, by God!”
“Stop this nonsense, Meacham. Down with it, I say. That’s it—good. By God you just might live—you’ve got that much fight in you still!” the gruff surgeon growled, then pursed his lips into a sour smile aimed at the Irishman.
“I … hit Schonchin—bleeding…” Meacham muttered.
“Shut up, man—and drink,” ordered the surgeon.
When Cabaniss called three soldiers over to help him, Seamus stood and trotted down to the tent. Reporter H. Wallace Atwell was removing his overcoat and draping it over the bloody, naked Canby.
“Get the general a goddamned shroud, sojur,” Seamus hissed at a youngster nearby.
“Sir?” the young man asked, his eyes wide, face drained of color. He repeatedly licked his lips, refusing to look down at the bloodied corpses.
“Cut some canvas from that tent for General Canby.”
“I … I don’t have me a knife—”
“Use mine,” Ian said, slapping the handle of his skinning knife into the young soldier’s hand.
When the wide strip had been hacked from the tent, three soldiers helped wrap the general’s body in the canvas.
“An army tent,” Seamus said quietly. “No more fitting shroud for a fighting man.”
The soldiers laid the two dead and the severely wounded Meacham on stretchers and prepared to carry them back to Gillem’s camp after attending to the possibility they would be attacked by the Modocs they believed still lurking on the fringes of the meadow.
But Jack’s murderers never looked back as they escaped into their Stronghold.
There was no one to fight, and no resistance offered by the Indians, yet the officers ordered their eager soldiers about-face and returned to the tent rather than have a repeat of the debacle of 17 January.
It was there that Seamus and Ian learned how the camp had been alerted to the trouble at the peace tent.
When some unexplained shooting erupted on the far side of the Modocs’ stronghold, Mason’s signalmen sent word to Gillem’s camp that there was an attack made on two of his soldiers under a Modoc flag of truce. Gillem’s signal officer wrote his hasty note and dispatched a soldier with the news for the colonel himself, still taken to his cot.
“Gillem was just completing his own note of warning to General Canby—telling the commissioners to be watchful, suggesting they should return to camp because of the attack on Mason’s men—when another messenger come running down the hill,” explained John Fairchild who had been at the colonel’s tent during the outbreak of excitement. “You should have seen the look on Gillem’s face when that soldier ran up shouting: ‘The commissioners! The Modocs are firing on the commissioners!’”
“You get yourself a crack at any of Jack’s warriors?” Pressley Dorris asked the two Irishmen, his face hopeful as he peered at the gravity etched on every face around him. He had been in camp with Fairchild during it all.
Ian O’Roarke shook his head. “We scoured the nearby rocks hoping to find any that might be skulking about—but all Seamus could find was the three places where four of ’em stayed in hiding until it came time for the bastards to do their terrible deed.”
“The news roared through here like prairie fire,” Dorris said as they all waited quietly outside the surgeon’s tent where Meacham lay horribly wounded. “If it weren’t for a few old sergeants taking control of things—and Captain Biddle pressing things with Gillem—they’d never got that doctor down there for Alfred as fast as they did.”
Seamus turned to Dorris and gripped his arm. “What do you mean, Biddle pressed Gillem?”
Dorris glanced this way then that before he whispered, “The colonel was downright froze in indecision, he was. I don’t known if it was because he was so sick … but the bugle was already blown, and the captains already had their men lined up and ready to march—still Gillem couldn’t decide what to do. So in come Biddle, marching right into the colonel’s tent. Don’t know what he said to Gillem, but when the captain came back out, he ordered Captain Thomas to stay on duty with his battery of artillery to guard the camp. The rest of the troops Biddle was going to lead out to rescue the commissioners and do battle with the murderers if they caught up with any of ’em.”
Seamus shook his head and spit into the grass between his boots. “Damn, if that don’t sound like the truth: officers sitting on their thumbs—afraid to do something, anything! And all the while folks are butchered in cold blood.”
“Gillem’s officers and men are hopping mad to get a crack at the Modocs now, but the colonel won’t let ’em,” said Dorris.
“Why won’t he turn ’em loose?”
Dorris shrugged. “Gillem said he’s waiting for the Warm Springs Indians to get here to help before he moves in on Jack’s Stronghold.”
“You should have looked at Dyar’s face when he came running in here,” Fairchild said. “Never have I seen someone in such a state of shock.”
“Still, he got off his telegram to Washington, John,” said Dorris.
“Yes, direct to General Sherman himself,” Fairchild added.
Seamus clucked his tongue inside his cheek. “Uncle Billy? I’ll bet that old war-horse will have a lot to say about this Indian carnival now!”
“Those reporters too,” Fairchild added, with a thumb indicating a handful who stood about, asking questions of soldiers just back from the meadow, scratching on their pads with pencils. “Especially that Bill Dadd.”
Newsman H. Wallace Atwell hunched over his notes, perched on a camp stool, his pad braced atop one knee as he scribbled furiously, hoping to be the first to have this story get out to the world.
“By the saints,” Seamus said quietly, “this is the biggest story of the war yet.”
“Atwell’s hired Bill Ticknor—fella who surveyed the road around the lake,” Fairchild said. “Ticknor will carry the reporter’s story into Yreka to get it telegraphed to his paper in Sacramento.”
Seamus wagged his head. “First time a general’s been killed by Indians…”
As the sobbing wails drew closer, ever louder, the Irishman turned. Stretcher-bearers were bringing the canvas-wrapped body of General Edward R.S. Canby into camp. Half lying across the stretcher himself, stumbling along beside it at a clumsy gait, was Canby’s young orderly, Scott. He screeched in rage and lamented in grief. Captain Biddle ordered three men to comfort Scott at a nearby fire while the body was carried on to the general’s tent.
“Not a man could blame him for crying the way he is,” Ian said quietly.
Seamus saw the mist growing in his uncle’s eyes. “We all have tears inside us for someone.”
Ian gently took his nephew’s wrist in his big, callused, field-worn hand. “Were that I had been there with Liam when my brother took his last breath.”
Donegan peered at the ground a few heartbeats, his chest growing heavier. “I—I wasn’t with Liam when he died.” He gazed into Ian’s moist eyes. “Away down that bloody island when he was murdered.”
Ian put a hand to his mouth in shock. “Murdered? No. I—I thought he died—a head wound—fighting the Cheyenne.”*
“He did,” Seamus started, lips quivering of a sudden. The muscles of his face pinched in their fight to maintain composure. “We all figured he was dying already, Ian. Maybe … Lord help me, I’ve never told anyone this—had I been there, he might’n made it until the surgeon showed up nine days later.”
Ian gripped the back of his nephew’s neck, pulling the big man into a rough embrace. “Don’t go blaming yourself for the acts of other men, Seamus. Only God knows how I’v
e beat myself with that same rod too many years already. It’s not yours to carry any longer, son. Set that load down and go on. Go on.”
At that moment Fairchild and Dorris turned away, perhaps a little embarrassed at Donegan’s sobbing, although it was an age of strong and open sentiment. Seamus stood there among them all, inches taller than even his uncle, hunched over into the older man’s shoulder like a child—shedding himself of that grief carried for too long, a burden much too heavy for any one man to bear alone for all those miles and all those sleepless nights spent alone.
Overhead the heavy, gray clouds had finally filled to their limit with cold. A light but icy snow began to lance out of the heavy sky, covering the countryside with a thin layer of white while the day drained out of the land.
Captain Biddle ordered three wooden rifle cases emptied of their Springfields by two regimental carpenters who would be kept busy beneath lamplight converting the boxes into tin-lined coffins.
“Three?” Ian asked in a whisper as they walked slowly by the canvas awning where the muffled hammering of nails and the screech of bending sheet tin carried through the sleety night.
Donegan shook his head. “No one expects Meacham to make it to morning with those bullet wounds.”
“They’re taking the bodies to Yreka,” Ian replied. “Thomas to San Francisco. Canby and Meacham to Portland.”
“Then this army can get back to dealing with the Modocs.”
“No one’s saying a word about talking peace with Jack any longer, Seamus.”
“I figure it’s a blood debt now.”
Ian dragged the back of his hand across his dry lips. “Jack and his bunch don’t have an idea what they’ve started now.”
He sighed anxiously. “I’m tired of this pacing, Ian. Going back to wait by the surgeon’s tent.”
“Maybe they have some news on Alfred,” O’Roarke said as they started back.
As they were coming back up to the quartermaster’s tent lit by firelight and kerosene lamps, crowded with newsmen and the curious, one of the surgeon’s hospital stewards poked his head out the tent flaps.
“Captain? Captain Biddle?”
Biddle came forward, taking his slouch hat from his head. “Is Mr. Meacham dead, private?”
“No—no, sir,” the young soldier replied in wonder. “He … he just asked to have an officer send to Linkville for his brother-in-law.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Biddle replied. “Who’s this brother-in-law?”
“Captain Ferree—Fort Klamath.”
“Ferree—I’ll send someone for him now,” Biddle said, turning back into the crowd that parted for his passing.
“Liam had that when he died, Seamus,” Ian whispered beneath the murky lamplight as the snow scudded icily along the ground. Sparks from nearby fires kicked up fireflies into the black sky.
“Had what, Ian?”
“Family.”
“Family.”
“Always lonely work—this thing of dying,” Ian said. “Made a little easier having family near.”
Chapter 24
Shining Leaf Moon
Although Captain Jack might still be leader of the Modocs, he was nonetheless doing just as he was told to do.
Curly Headed Doctor and his Lost River murderers had full control of the band now.
Hours ago they had scurried back into their rocky Stronghold to learn that Curly Jack and his bunch had killed one soldier and chased another away on the east side of the Lava Beds. But Curly Jack’s warriors had nothing to show for their efforts.
The peace tent murderers argued and shoved and argued some more over the scanty spoils carried from the bloody meadow: a few items of clothing, a derringer and a horse, along with the soldier chief’s sword and uniform.
As much as some of the murderers tried, they did not succeed in getting Captain Jack to back down from his claim to everything that belonged to Canby.
“I killed him,” Jack told the crowd, pantomiming with his outstretched finger like a pistol he held right in Ellen’s Man’s face.
“I killed him,” Ellen’s Man said, knocking the chief’s hand aside. “He was running away after you shot him. I made him dead.”
Ellen’s Man did not win the contest.
Once Canby’s belongings were securely in Jack’s possession, Ellen’s Man kept the soldier tyee’s pocket watch and chain. The Sunday Doctor’s clothing was divided between Bogus and Boston Charley. Old man Mee-Cham’s possessions were split between Shacknasty Jim, Schonchin John and the ridiculed Hooker Jim.
He sat to the side of things now, this Hooker Jim—ignored even by his father-in-law, the shaman.
Hooker had bungled his job: killing Commissioner Dyar. He had run when faced with the white man’s gun. Captain Jack led the chorus of those who believed Hooker did not deserve anything taken from the murder scene. So rather than celebrate with the others, Jim had instead to suffer the ridicule heaped on him by the band as they prepared to celebrate their victory with the falling of the sun from the cold, snowy sky.
“We must be ready when the soldiers come,” Jack reminded them as the greasewood bonfire was built, flames radiating off the black rocks surrounding their Stronghold.
“Kientpoos is mad with fear! Ha! The soldiers will all run away now,” said the Doctor with scorn.
“We have killed their chief right before their eyes!” added Schonchin John.
“That will make the soldiers angry!” said Scar-Faced Charley.
“He speaks the truth,” Jack said. “And the Teninos from Warm Springs are coming to lead the white men in this fight!”
“Let them come,” boasted the Doctor. “We will be ready for them. The full power of my medicine is not yet tested. Tonight we dance!”
The women and young warriors screeched their approval as the Doctor turned away to complete his preparations at the pole where he hung more feathers and animal skins, along with two more fresh scalps. When the drums began their soul-stirring beat, the young warriors and squaws alike removed some of their clothing despite the dropping temperatures and falling snow. The huge fire coupled with the furious dancing kept them warm until the moon sank far in the west.
As a murky sun rose in the east, shedding gray light over the white land, Jack’s scouts reported no movement of troops from the soldier camp west of the Stronghold. And instead of marching toward the Lava Beds, the soldiers camped by Hospital Rock were seen marching south.
The night-long dancing and medicine making seemed to consolidate the Doctor’s power. No soldiers were coming to avenge the murders the Modocs had hoped would cause the white men to resume the war.
So they danced through that next day and into the night, knowing the white man’s army and the white man’s government were powerless to act against the magic of their shaman.
They danced.
* * *
By dawn on Saturday the carpenters had three coffins prepared.
Canby and Thomas were gently laid to rest and the lids nailed shut for their trip north to Yreka for embalming.
Meacham clung tenaciously to life, arousing himself from time to time to curse surgeon Cabaniss for forcing the whiskey past his lips, and to clutch the hand of Captain Ferree as he once more slipped into blessed sleep.
Word spread through camp that twelfth day of April that at dawn some Modocs had fired on a young sentry posted near the signal tower on the bluff.
Later in the day word was flashed from Mason’s camp that a scouting party sent south under Lieutenant E. R. Theller had been shot at by a small war-party stalking them. Although a lot of bullets were fired between the groups, apparently no damage was done to either party.
As the clocks inched toward noon on Easter Sunday, the thirteenth, the soldiers in Gillem’s camp learned that Lieutenant Sherwood had finally succumbed to his wounds, suffered just minutes before the slaughter began at the peace tent.
Solemnly, the two commissioners’ coffins were laid side by side in the back of an ar
my ambulance for the trip to Yreka. From there Thomas was to be transferred to his family in San Francisco, Canby transported on for burial in Indianapolis.
While the general had not been all that popular among the officers and troops during the months of posturing and waiting, Canby’s brutal death now stirred talk of rage and recrimination for the Modocs. The soldiers were ready to storm the Stronghold—but Gillem held his hand from smiting the warriors.
The colonel’s signal sergeant brought word down from the signal tower not long after the bodies were on their way west to Yreka: chief of scouts Donald McKay had arrived at Mason’s camp with his Tenino mercenaries from the Warm Springs reservation in northern Oregon.
As far back as 22 March the War Department had authorized signing on the Warm Springs Indians to fight the Modocs in the Lava Beds. Canby had believed he had a powerful negotiating tool in telling Captain Jack that his enemies were on their way to fight the renegades.
But while Canby and the army might have faith in Donald McKay, the Tenino mercenaries did not.
McKay himself represented both bloods involved in this fight. While his father had been a famous fur trader with the Northwest Fur Company working out of Astoria on the Columbia River, his mother was a Cayuse Chinook woman. McKay’s whole life had been spent traversing the wilds of the northwest, either as a trapper himself, a guide for the army, or as an interpreter for hire. It was while serving as scout for the army during the Snake War that McKay first crossed swords with the Warm Springs fighters, who claimed the underhanded half-breed swindled them of much of their army pay.
But with the army that spring of 1873, it was a matter of moving out under the command of Donald McKay or not going at all. And if they did not go, the Warm Springs scouts would not be paid anything.
Seventy-two of them headed south for Tule Lake on 4 April.
Their arrival on Easter Sunday caused a stir in both camps as the troops realized they would be marching into the Stronghold at last. Only one small problem: these converted Christian soldiers refused to fight on Sunday.
Monday would be soon enough for the Teninos.
Quartermasters prepared weapons and rations as officers laid out a plan of attack. While most of the troops were buoyant in expectation of a quick and decisive fight of it, the few soldiers who had been in on the debacle of 17 January were decidedly more solemn.
Devil's Backbone: The Modoc War, 1872-3 Page 24