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

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Always hated funerals meself,” Donegan said eventually as the riflefire faded away across the darkened rocks. “Suppose I’ll even hate my own.”

  “The only one a man’s allowed to hate,” replied the sergeant.

  By the next morning, the army discovered its quarry had flown.

  Only a handful of Modoc sharpshooters remained anywhere near their old fortifications to slow both Green’s and Mason’s troops as they ordered every able-bodied man to push south from the shore of Tule Lake into the Stronghold. As quiet as it was among those rocks, most men feared they were again walking into some sort of trap as they advanced farther, and farther still.

  But the three-day battle was over.

  The fissures and crevices and fractures all converged at the edge of the central ravine of the Stronghold itself.

  “God only knows where that bastard Captain Jack is now,” a soldier grumbled.

  “I thought those Warm Springs Injuns were supposed to tighten a noose around them sonsabitches,” cried another.

  “Injun blood is Injun blood,” complained a third. “Them Tenino mercenaries was just watching out for their own, is what they was doing.”

  While Colonel Gillem had been failed by his officers in their attempts to either capture or kill the renegade Modocs, the arrival of soldiers in the Stronghold did nonetheless mark the turning point of the Modoc War. From 29 November, when Captain James Jackson had unknowingly bungled himself into beginning the conflict, until the predawn darkness of 17 April, this had been a war of siege and assault on impregnable fortifications that had caused union veterans to recall the vivid horrors of action suffered at Atlanta or even Vicksburg itself.

  Unfortunately for the army, the Modocs were now no longer tied down where the soldiers could find them and hammer them at will. Shutting them off from food and water.

  Now the Indians were on the run, free to hit when and where they wanted.

  When the first soldiers advanced into the heart of the Stronghold, they found the Modocs had abandoned the bodies of three men of fighting age, along with the bodies of eight women evidently killed during the incessant artillery bombardment.

  Officers ordered squads to cautiously search every cave and depression, every single structure, to eliminate the chance of ambush by hidden warriors.

  At the resounding rifle shot, Seamus yanked his head into his shoulders and dropped to a knee. His eyes scanned the far rocks.

  “Sounds like it come from up ahead where that other outfit is searching,” said the old infantry sergeant.

  It had been too many hours without sleep and with too little food for Donegan to have too much a sense of humor. He joined the sergeant’s patrol as they continued into the labyrinth of caves and fissures. At the entrance to a small cave, they found a handful of soldiers busy over the corpse of an old man.

  “You boys just kill that ol’ Injun?” asked the sergeant.

  One of the soldiers rolled his head around to smile a gap-toothed grin that reminded Seamus of a coyote loping on the fringes of the slaughter yard at Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory, seven years gone now.*

  “Ol’ Injun—young Injun … what’s it matter to you, Sergeant? We’re just doing what the cap’n ordered.”

  “You was ordered to kill that unarmed old man?”

  “We was ordered to kill Modocs, Sergeant,” he replied. “Besides, he wasn’t helpless. He was holding a knife at us when we come up on him.”

  Seamus stepped forward. “A brave one, ain’t you? Killing an old man with a knife … and the five of you with loaded Springfields.”

  The gap-toothed one waved his knife at the Irishman as he asked the sergeant, “Who’s this big-talking Mick now? Where’s your uniform?”

  “Here you go,” interrupted one of the soldiers working over the old Modoc. “You can have a piece of his scalp, Avery—since’t one of your bullets hit him too.”

  Seamus wagged his head as the gap-toothed Avery held up his little chunk of the old man’s scalp, still dripping with blood. Another private was cutting off the Indian’s eyebrows for souvenirs as well.

  Donegan stepped away, walking on among the black rocks as the knot of soldiers laughed at his back.

  He heard another shot and a third that morning of the seventeenth, in what had been the Modocs’ Stronghold. Later he learned the soldiers had killed two old women, too feeble to escape with the others when Captain Jack led his band south into the maze of lava flow, deep into the heart of darkness.

  The total casualties for the three days of battle were six killed and seventeen wounded from Green’s command. Mason suffered no casualties.

  Gillem took but brief satisfaction in securing the Stronghold. He now had to find the Modocs, and as quickly as was humanly possible. Captain Jack’s people needed water, which would send them scattering across the surrounding countryside. But for the time being the colonel ordered Captain Perry’s cavalry to make a wide circuit of the southern fringe of the Lava Beds. Perry was to ascertain if the hostiles had escaped into more open country, or if they were still hidden somewhere, anywhere in the great expanse of the lava flows.

  “Might not be all that bad, though,” Gillem confided to his officers late that afternoon while they awaited the results of Perry’s reconnaissance. “If we do flush Captain Jack’s henchmen into the open to fight for the first time in this bloody little war—we can damn well finish them in a matter of minutes.”

  * * *

  For three days things were quiet.

  No one heard or saw sign of the Modocs.

  Gillem expected news to arrive at almost any time from either Captain Perry’s reconnaissance or from Donald McKay’s scout with his Warm Springs mercenaries.

  Then Lieutenant Howe rode in with his twenty-man escort for a wagon train of supplies coming in from Scorpion Point to the new soldier camp at the Stronghold. A clearly agitated Howe saluted and reported to Colonel Gillem himself.

  “What happened?” snapped the colonel as he watched a limp body being eased down from one of the wagons, another soldier wounded and helped to the ground by two of his own outfit.

  “A band of Modocs hit us, Colonel,” Howe explained. “We were caught between the lakeshore and a high ridge of rock.”

  “Damn,” Gillem muttered. “They’re not staying in one spot, for fear we’ll find ’em and wipe ’em out.” He turned back to the lieutenant. “Get your man seen to … and your man buried with proper rights.”

  Howe saluted and was leaving when Donald McKay made a grand entrance into camp, causing quite a stir. He had been gone for the better part of two days, sniffing around with his scouts.

  McKay accepted the offer of coffee and drank an entire cup with lots of sugar poured in before he appeared ready to report. Gillem realized the man was, after all, half Indian and would talk when he got damned ready to talk.

  “We counted forty warriors left in there—give or take a couple.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Gillem asked.

  “They weren’t moving around much. Forty is what we counted.”

  Gillem turned to Green and Mason with a smile. “If we add another ten for those who attacked Lieutenant Howe—looks like we’re dealing with something on the order of fifty fighting men, gentlemen.” He looked back at McKay. “Where’d you find them?”

  McKay pointed south. “About four miles from here … in a long ravine formed from the lava rock.”

  “Good,” Gillem allowed. “It looks like they haven’t busted out of the Lava Beds yet and scattered all over hell’s acre, boys. We can still get a crack at them, and soon.”

  “The sooner the better,” Green said. “I don’t trust ’em to stay in one place too much longer, Colonel.”

  Later that afternoon of the twentieth, when Perry rode in with his exhausted and hungry troops mounted on trail-weary horses, the captain confirmed Gillem’s hunch. It had taken his outfit three days fighting the brutal terrain and the unfit mounts, but the news was good. />
  “We did not run across any sign that showed the Modocs have fled the Lava Beds. It’s my considered opinion they’re still holed up somewhere … just to the south of us.”

  Chapter 27

  April 24–26, 1873

  “They’ve got Canby’s replacement coming,” Seamus announced to A. B. Meacham.

  Each day, the Irishman had made it a point to visit the peace commissioner in the hospital. For almost a week now there had been little going on in any other army camps.

  But today word had it that Gillem was sending out his artillery officers on a reconnaissance south of the Stronghold into the Lava Beds, where all reports had the Modocs holed up. The officers could then tell the colonel what his chances were of driving the hostiles out of their position without investing the lives of more infantry over that rugged and unforgiving ground.

  “I’ve heard as well,” Meacham replied. “A dyed-in-the-wool soldier, I’m told. Jefferson C. Davis: colonel of the Twenty-third Infantry up at Fort Townsend, Washington Territory.”

  “Breveted a major general during the rebellion down south.”

  Meacham coughed a bit of a chuckle, wincing with the pain of his head wounds. “How you put on, Irishman. Don’t you think I know that was more than a damned rebellion? For the likes of you it was nothing less than the pure hell of war, was it not?”

  Donegan peered at the ground between his cracked boots and for a moment brooded of how he could talk the quartermaster out of a new pair. But like a troublesome prairie buffalo gnat, Meacham’s question still invaded his thoughts as much as he might try to evade the brutal memories.

  “Davis ought to show up here any day now.” It had been ten days since the War Department appointed the hard-bitten colonel to fill Canby’s shoes.

  Meacham lay back against the pillow made of a rolled army blanket. “This war’s hell by itself, Seamus. Can you believe those young soldiers cut off the head of an old man they killed in the Modocs’ Stronghold and presented it to Dr. Cabaniss?”

  “What for?”

  “I suppose for a souvenir—an oddity of sorts. Cabaniss says he will keep it preserved in a glass morning jar. Perhaps for display someday as the head of Schonchin John.”

  “Was it his head?”

  Meacham’s eyes told it with a glint of fire. “I ought to know, shouldn’t I? He was one who tried to kill me.” He sighed. “No. Whoever that poor old man was—it wasn’t Schonchin John, brother of the Yainax chief, Riddle agrees with me … but it’s no use telling any of these soldiers—even that butcher of a surgeon Cabaniss.”

  “Now, the man’s good on bones and bleeding, Alfred.”

  “Lot you know, Seamus. It’s not been your wounds he’s been jabbing with his probe three times daily. And a lot he lacks in civility as well—I’ve had to take another vow of temperance because of that man!”

  “That whiskey was just what you needed right then.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, lad. I needed to get my hands on Schonchin John at that moment.”

  Seamus wiped his palms across the tops of his thighs. It was warm in the tent today, the sun beating down on the canvas, making things much warmer in here than they were outside in the gentle spring breezes.

  “I hear Gillem’s sent those Tenino Indians down to hold the Stronghold,” Meacham said.

  He nodded. “They’ve got themselves a nice camp there now, so the Modocs can’t come running back in to reoccupy the area. But there’s not much going on over there except that Muybridge fella from San Francisco.”

  “The photographer I’ve heard about?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Been taking stereoscopic views of the Stronghold caves and fortifications, officers and the Warm Springs scouts—even this camp.”

  “Perhaps I should pretty myself up and let him take a photograph of me—warts, scars and all.”

  Donegan smiled. “Don’t you joke now—Muybridge would jump at the chance to immortalize one of the survivors of the peace tent massacre.”

  “Him and every other hack newsman west of the Missouri River.”

  “They’ve been hounding you again.”

  “Every day it seems someone new arrives here from Linkville or Yreka—representing one newspaper back east or the other. And all wanting my story of the murders. I bloody well keep those young guards at the tent flaps busy turning reporters away.”

  “Don’t be so hard on them, Meacham. Their kind will bite at any little morsel any one of us feed them—blowing it up into a story of their heroic exploits for their readers back home.”

  He sighed deeply. “I’m growing weary again, Irishman. I apologize.”

  “No need. I’ll find me something else to do, and leave you sleep in peace. At least in here you don’t have to worry about looking yourself over at least once a day to check for wood ticks.” Seamus scratched at his collar absently. “Just came down to see you after Gillem sent his artillery officers off to study the terrain where he figures the Modocs are hiding. When they get back, the colonel will know better how to drive Captain Jack’s warriors out into the open—”

  The not too distant crack of rifles interrupted Donegan and aroused the dozing Meacham.

  “That sounded damned close, Irishman.”

  “Too close,” Donegan replied, already on his feet and halfway to the tent flaps. “I’ll see what’s doing.”

  Outside, the camp was a mass of confusion, soldiers going this way, teamsters in another, most dragging teams of horses or mules to the far side of the tent village. Seamus grabbed the arm of a young soldier as he was trotting by.

  “What’s the commotion?”

  “Modocs attacking the camp.” He pointed, pulled his arm free and trotted on toward the sound of the firing.

  The first shot to actually reach camp whistled through the leafy branches of a tree overhead.

  “Donegan!”

  He was back in the tent before Meacham could holler out again.

  “Are we in danger?”

  He shrugged. “Can’t tell—but I wouldn’t put it past those red bastards to boldly stomp on in here to try to finish the job they started on you two weeks ago.”

  Seamus watched Meacham shift uneasily on his bed, eyes squinted as he adjusted the bandages wrapped about his skull.

  “I’ll stay with you, friend.” Donegan took a pistol from his belt and laid it on the side of the cot in easy reach of Meacham’s hand. Then took his revolver from its holster at his hip. Meacham laid his hand on the pistol and closed his eyes a minute.

  “No man is ever going to try for my scalp again—I’ve sworn to that, Donegan.”

  Seamus winked as a flurry of shots landed close by, snapping canvas and banging pots and pans in a nearby mess-kitchen.

  “Why would anyone want your poor scalp? There’s too damned much fallow ground there between the fertile grasslands for one of Captain Jack’s boys to make much of a fuss over.”

  Meacham reached up to rub a few fingers over the very top of his bald head not covered with bandages. “I suppose you’re right. But just the same—I’ll keep your pistol here till the ruckus is over. With that fine head of curly hair, you might need my help saving your scalp, Irishman.”

  The sudden roar of one of the mountain howitzers shook the sides of the tent. A second cannon erupted. In the distance they could hear the impact of the shells. Ian O’Roarke poked his head through the flaps, then strode on in with a look of relief on his face.

  “By glory—I feared I’d lost you to the Modocs, Seamus. Pardon me, Alfred.”

  “Come in and pull your pistol free, Ian. We’re preparing for the bastirds to breech the walls.”

  Ian dragged up an empty hardtack case and settled atop it. “Everytime the cannon fires, the Modocs scuttle for the rocks. After the shell explodes, they come prancing back out to show us their brown bottoms and call the soldiers by every name the miners in Yreka taught them!”

  “A lively show of it, eh?” Meacham asked, stroking the blued met
al on the pistol.

  “They come out laughing at the soldiers, line up and point their rifles at an angle—just like Gillem’s mortars—then one of ’em gives the command to fire and the bullets rattle into camp.”

  “You’re sure they’re not storming the camp?”

  Ian shook his head. “Not a chance of it, my friend. Rest easy now until it’s over. Captain Biddle is mustering a force of infantry to go chase the warriors back to wherever they came from.”

  “Hell, most likely,” Meacham muttered, his head sinking into the blanket pillow.

  “Aye, hell is where they ought to return as well.”

  * * *

  Late the next afternoon, 25 April, word came from the signal station located high on the bluff that they had spotted a thin column of smoke rising some five or more miles south of the army’s camp, away in the heart of the Lava Beds. The tallest landmark in that inhospitable area was what the soldiers had come to nickname Sugar Loaf, called Big Sand Butte by the local settlers.

  And to the west of that ugly, bald cinder cone was hell on earth—a place called Black Ledge.

  Despite the austere conditions to be found in that country, John Fairchild along with other civilians advised Colonel Gillem that the Modocs could survive in there for some time.

  “There’s enough water back in some of those lava caves cut through the Black Ledge,” Pressley Dorris explained.

  “And enough seeps in the ledge that’s been catching water one rainy season after another,” added Ian O’Roarke. “Likely that smoke your men spotted was the Modocs burning their dead.”

  The colonel looked up in amused wonder. “They cremate their dead?”

  O’Roarke nodded. “No other reason I can think of for Indians on the run to be making such a big fire.”

  Gillem drummed the fingers of one hand on the map he had spread beneath his elbows, his eyes focused on something more than the rugged terrain of the Black Ledge country.

  “All right,” he sighed. “Thank you very much, fellas. Now I need you to excuse the rest of us so we can discuss our plans for a reconnaissance in force down to that Big Sand Butte.”