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

by Terry C. Johnston

  A West Point graduate and a veteran of the Mexican War, Davis had served at Fort Sumter prior to its bombardment by the Confederates. In fact, nothing got in the man’s craw more than anyone mentioning that he had the same name as the president of the former Confederate States of America. But he was, most of all, a soldier.

  In 1862 during the war, Davis had killed his commanding general in a heated personal argument, but was nonetheless spared punishment by the testimony of an eyewitness to the deadly confrontation: Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton. Davis was certain the killing prevented his subsequent rise to wearing a general’s stars.

  Later in the war, down in Georgia, as a trusted member of Sherman’s command, Davis’s troops were soon overwhelmed with slaves fleeing their plantation and demanding the Union soldiers protect them from their former masters and confederate Johnnies alike. Their numbers swelled so greatly that Davis was soon unable to move his troops when informed of the approach of Confederate regiments under General Wheeler.

  When the former slaves would not abandon the Union soldiers, Davis gave the order for his troops to march across a bridge at Ebenezer Creek, then ordered the bridge put to the torch. Many of the slaves were killed when Wheeler’s troops arrived, or were drowned, driven into the swollen creek by Wheeler’s cavalry.

  For the longest time there was no end to the criticism suffered by Jefferson C. Davis. Some went so far as to claim that the man bearing such a name had proven his true colors by ordering the deaths of so many coloreds.

  At the end of the war Davis was made colonel of the Twenty-third Infantry and sent to Sitka to receive the nation’s new purchase of Alaska from the Czar’s troops, staying on for a time to act as temporary governor of the country’s newest territory. With that duty at a close, Davis had been sent in obscurity to northwest Washington Territory, where many expected the soldier who had amassed a brilliant war record would run out his days.

  But with Canby’s murder, General Sherman once more notified his trusted friend. With twenty-seven years in the army, Davis was again given a chance at field duty.

  On the third of May, McKay’s Tenino scouts returned from five fruitless days of scouring the Lava Beds for Captain Jack.

  “By damn,” Davis exploded, pounding a fist on the camp table, scattering maps and surprising McKay, Gillem and the gathered officers, “why can’t anybody find this miserable band of Indians?”

  No one answered, nervously shuffling their feet and watching to see who would dare speak up. Davis was rough as a cob against new skin, but he did have one facet of his personality that endeared him to his rank and file soldiers: the colonel could remember what it meant to be an enlisted man. Unlike every other officer who would serve under him until the end of the Modoc War, Jefferson C. Davis had risen from the ranks, the hard way.

  “That chunk of country is like nothing I’ve seen before,” Davis continued, pointing south. “I’ll grant you that. But by all that’s holy—the Lava Beds are not insuperable! We must, and gentlemen—we will—operate on the terrain our enemy has given us to operate on. Do I make myself clear?”

  A few of the braver souls muttered their agreement.

  “If you ask for what I saw when I arrived here, gentlemen—well, I’ll not mince words. As for the soldiers as fighters, a great many … are utterly unfit for Indian fighting of this kind, being only cowardly beef-eaters!”

  He paused and let that sink in while he rolled the cheroot around on his tongue. “When your men are fit enough to fight—I will be expecting them to fight the Modocs on the Modocs’ ground. But, unlike previous tactics, I now plan to bring an end to the Modoc War with one, crushing blow.” He pounded a fist into the palm of his left hand.

  “Tomorrow, in fact, I’m ordering a patrol out to the scene of the Thomas-Wright massacre. I want to find the bodies of the missing enlisted and Lieutenant Cranston. I won’t stand by and abandon the remains of our dead to the enemy. We won’t stand for it!”

  That Sunday, the fourth of May, the patrol found no bodies, but they did manage to surprise a small, miserable camp of Modoc women and children. As the Indians scattered, the soldiers captured two of the older women unable to escape quickly enough into the rocks surrounding Big Sand Butte and Black Ledge.

  The soldiers kept one of the squaws hostage while they sent One-Eyed Dixie out to discover where the rest of Jack’s warriors could be found. The soldiers returned to headquarters to await the outcome of the squaw’s travels.

  Not until Wednesday did Dixie come in to Colonel Davis’s camp to report not only that the Modocs with Captain Jack had abandoned the Lava Beds and were moving into the higher country to the south, but also that she had discovered the bodies of six soldiers. Davis assigned McKay and a patrol of soldiers to recover the remains. Five enlisted men were buried where they were found, and the body of Lieutenant Cranston was returned to camp for full military honors.

  The very same day the burial detail was out recovering the dead, some of McKay’s Teninos came in to report that they believed the Modocs were still operating within the Lava Beds and had not left their old stomping grounds, as One-Eyed Dixie had led the army to believe.

  Davis and the others were beginning to distrust the reports of the Warm Springs scouts when word came in from Mason’s camp near the Stronghold of some trouble suffered days before.

  “They waited this long to tell us about a fight?” Davis demanded of the nervous signalman standing at the tent flaps.

  “Yes,” replied Lieutenant Adams, pressing by his corporal. He saluted Davis. “I figured I’d come tell you this one myself, Colonel.”

  “Tell it.”

  “Three supply wagons on their way under escort to our outpost at Scorpion Point.”

  “They were jumped?”

  Adams nodded.

  “Casualties?”

  The lieutenant swallowed. “Only two wounded. The rest abandoned the wagons and were not pursued by the Modocs.”

  Davis’s eyes narrowed. “What did the warriors capture?”

  “A little bit of everything, it seems,” answered Major Green, looking up from his papers. “Appears from these manifests that they got everything from biscuits to bullets to bacon, General.”

  Davis absorbed it all for the next few minutes as he chewed on the stub of a cheroot. Then his piercing eyes touched everyone in that tent as he rolled the cheroot off his lips with his tongue.

  “An affair no man can be proud of—I’m sure we’ll all agree. Once again I am sorely impressed that the men of this command are in no condition, either mentally or physically, to stand their ground against these thieving raiders.”

  “Thieving is right, Colonel,” muttered Green.

  “What was that, Major?” asked Davis. “I failed to hear you.”

  “Thieving is right, Colonel,” Green repeated, much louder this time, but still grumbling.

  “Explain yourself.”

  He rattled the manifests for that three-wagon shipment of supplies. “Something I just found out the Modocs got their hands on in that shipment.”

  “Some weapons perhaps?” Davis growled, his lips pursed beneath the bushy mustache.

  “No, sir. Not exactly. Captain Jack and his henchmen are now the proud possessors of two kegs of army whiskey.”

  Chapter 31

  Tule Reed Moon

  Another week and they would be in the middle of the Tule Reed Moon. Time for the women to gather the stalks when they were greenest, strongest, and most resilient for weaving, with all the spring moisture.

  But for now there could be no thought of the women going in their canoes to ply the lakeshore, gathering the green stalks. For now Jack had to keep his people moving, constantly moving, always on the lookout for army patrols and those cross-blooded Teninos from up north who searched for the Modocs like the white man’s paid hunting dogs.

  Jack was growing so tired after all these weeks of fighting and running and moving to fight again. He closed his eyes from time to time
, but it was never anything he could call sleep. Above all the others, he alone had to be constantly on the alert. Not only from the white men and their Warm Springs hunters—but also keenly aware of any subtle changes in the mood of the Lost River murderers.

  He was as worried about being stabbed and left to bleed to death by Curly Headed Doctor, Hooker Jim or Schonchin John—his own people—as he was worried about being captured and hung at the end of the white man’s cruel rope.

  Captain Jack did not sleep well these days.

  This running forced his mind to always work, and that was hard on any man. Especially a Modoc. For generations they had been a people of leisure, with much time to consider things of substance, carefully. Now he no longer had time to deliberate—always having to think about where to find food for his people; where they could find their next drink of fresh water.

  The pockets of melted snow and sleet that had collected in the rocks and down at the bottom of the ice caves in the Lava Beds had kept his 165 people alive for many days. But without a source of food his warriors could count on, Jack had watched the faces change. Mostly the faces of the women and children, and the old ones—all growing thinner, more pale and gaunt, their eyes grown sunken like the swallowed eyes of a skull picked clean by thieving ravens.

  For several days he had camped his band near Juniper Butte, where they chopped ice from the cave walls with their metal axes and hauled the chunks back to their fires to melt. It was a small cave, however, and when the ice was depleted, Jack was forced to move his people on to the Frozen River Cave less than a mile away. It was like that every few days. Moving on a little more—the women keeping at the ice while the men were out trying to bring in a little game to feed the many hungry bellies.

  From Frozen River he had pointed them south into the rising country where they were forced to look at the mountains looming over them. At the Caldwell Ice Cave, Jack tried to tell them for the first time that to live in freedom, they might have to live far from Lost River—perhaps even among the summer pines and winter snows of that high country above them now.

  When the ice and seepage at Caldwell ran out, Jack led his people east past three low buttes left behind by the volcanic activity millions of years before. His people called them the Three Sisters. Jack’s band had never been this far east, camping now as they were almost directly south of a thumb of land that jutted into Tule Lake, a place the white man called Scorpion Point. They made their camp on the shores of a long-ago dried lakebed. The women scraped and dug at the sandy soil until a murky, gritty water began to slowly seep into the holes.

  The water was cold though, and some of the men brought in a few small animals to cook over their tiny fires. But if the band was to make it to freedom farther south into the high country, they would need supplies of food, perhaps even ammunition. The warriors wanted to capture some of the army’s supply wagons.

  Jack agreed. Even though it meant letting the soldiers and their Teninos know where they were, he agreed with the young warriors who Scar-Faced Charley would lead in the raid.

  On the road running in from Land’s ranch they spotted a small escort riding along with three freight wagons nearing Scorpion Point. It proved far easier than Jack had expected to run off the soldiers after the warriors wounded two of the white men.

  Like children, two dozen warriors swarmed over their new-gotten booty. Tossing bales of clothing and boxes of hardtack down onto the road, the warriors bypassed barrels of beans but sniffed closely at the barrels of salt-pork the white man was so fond of. To crack open every crate and keg just to be sure what to take and what to leave behind, Scar-Faced Charley ordered some of the warriors to search for some hammers among the soldiers’ toolboxes.

  In the long wooden toolboxes, Boston Charley and the others found two smaller kegs carefully concealed under army blankets.

  “Perhaps it’s better food than this pig meat,” Hooker Jim said, causing the others to laugh as Charley dropped one of the kegs to the ground.

  They gathered around it as Scar-Faced Charley hammered away at the end of the keg and found it to be filled with liquid—a fragrant, potent liquid most of the warriors knew well enough already.

  But Ellen’s Man George shouldered his way into the tight circle and dipped a finger into the keg. He smacked his lips with the taste.

  “Whiskey!”

  Rifling through other bundles, the warriors found a supply of tin cups and proceeded to bust the head off the second keg as they grew uproariously drunk. Weaving and bobbing, some of them clambered into the backs of the wagons and hefted out every case, keg and bale into the middle of the road.

  Then others slapped and whipped the mule teams, firing their pistols overhead as the frightened animals bolted off into the labyrinth of the Lava Beds. Wagon boxes rolled from running gears, running gears splintered from singletrees, as the warriors had themselves their first good laugh in many, many days. As the splintered wood came to a rest among the rain-soaked rocks, and the horses clattered on into the distance, Captain Jack and his men finished their revelry, not in the least fearing an attack by the soldiers.

  When they had their fill, the warriors stumbled and weaved and careened back into the confusing maze of the Lava Beds, carrying what they could after destroying the last of the whiskey kegs.

  “Whiskey’s no good for white men,” Ellen’s Man slurred. “He don’t know how to have him a good time like Modoc.”

  * * *

  Nearly a full month had passed since the murder of Canby and Thomas.

  Seamus lay beneath the first streaks of gray cracking the sky this morning of 10 May, in a temporary camp comprised of two troops of cavalry and one company of artillerymen Colonel Davis had ordered out yesterday with five days rations behind a select group of McKay’s Tenino scouts. Davis had instructed the patrol commander, Captain H. C. Hasbrouck, to determine why in two weeks no one had been able to find a trace of the Modocs—while the warriors seemed to come and go through the Lava Beds with impunity.

  The patrol had covered a little better than twenty-five miles almost southwest of the main headquarters camp before stopping for the night at the shore of Sorass Lake, a small, dry depression of cracked alkali mud lying in the midst of rugged buttes and scarred foothills. What water stood in parched pockets was laden with salts, unfit for man or animal to drink.

  For better than two hours that afternoon, Hasbrouck had details of his men digging at wells in the hope they could find water. When this plan failed to produce any seepage, the captain stated he had no other choice but to send some men back to Scorpion Point after breakfast the following morning to bring out water for the patrol. That evening Hasbrouck fondly named the place Dry Lake in his daily report.

  While the cavalry had hobbled their mounts and put them out to graze on what skimpy grass could be found, the artillery company moved on, something less than a mile to the south, encamping among the stands of mahogany and juniper. McKay’s scouts spread their bedrolls near the horse soldiers, certain of safety there. Just two hundred yards north of them extended three humps of low rock outcroppings, while another two hundred yards beyond these humps stood a rocky, volcanic ridge rising a minimum of thirty feet above the lakeshore.

  Not a single Modoc had been seen along the skyline throughout the long march of the ninth, but Hasbrouck had nonetheless warily placed his pickets atop this higher bluff for the night.

  Rolling over within the warm cocoon of his two wool blankets, surrounded by the darkness of the early morning, Seamus set too much pressure on the healing wounds suffered only two weeks before. Wincing in pain, he cursed himself for his sleepy stupidity and ground his hip into the sandy, grassy soil, taking respite that no one was stirring that early—forcing the command to move out before sunrise.

  The fingers of his right hand tingled with pinpricks. Gently he urged his left hand under the thick bandage Dr. McElderry had looped tightly over the injured shoulder, across the broken collarbone, firmly imprisoning the upper arm a
gainst the right side of his chest.

  It felt good to move the arm, even though the collarbone nagged at him when he adjusted the wrap.

  “Shut-up!” said Charley Larengel in a harsh whisper to his blue tick hound stretched out beside its master’s bedroll. The dog growled back in its throat, his muzzle snarling, teeth bared.

  “He smells something,” said Larengel, rustling at last and turning to Donegan as if in apology for waking him.

  “Injins,” Seamus said. “By the saints—I’ll put my money on your dog’s nose before I’ll bet on those worthless Teninos any day! Go find one of the guards and get him to alert the camp.”

  Larengel took his growling dog at the end of a chunk of rope and set off into the predawn darkness to find a guard. The first picket he happened across laughed at the civilian’s claim that there were Indians near by. But he took Larengel to awaken the sergeant of the guard.

  The sergeant grumbled something fitting about civilians knowing their place in the army’s war and told Larengel to go back to his blankets until reveille was blown.

  “You get out of your blankets and take me to see Captain Hasbrouck right now, laddie—or you’re going to find my boot heel under your goddamned chin!”

  Evidently the sergeant clearly read the look in Larengel’s eye, because he pushed himself out of his own blankets, squared his clothing and set off with the civilian in tow to find Hasbrouck.

  Seamus was chuckling to himself, cradling the right arm as he eased back against his blankets, knowing Larengel would convince Hasbrouck to believe him as well and send out some of the scouts to make a circuit of the camp.

  He closed his eyes. Perhaps a few more minutes of sleep before dawn came calling … would be a blessing—

  He bolted upright, blankets falling away and the wounds crying out in sudden, sharp anguish. Hair stood on the back of his neck, as he vividly remembered those war-cries that echoed through the cavalry camp.