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

by Terry C. Johnston

  When he arose to go relieve himself in the dark, a guard followed behind. Curly Headed Jack tried to run, and when he saw his flight was hopeless, brought the pistol up and shot himself in the head.

  He was buried in another unmarked grave beside that long road to Fort Klamath.

  By the end of the third week of the month, Captain Jack’s people were prisoners in Captain Jackson’s stockade. At sunset on 20 June the soldiers divided the band: prisoners destined for trial kept apart from those who were nothing more than luckless participants in Jack’s bloody war.

  Epilogue

  Mid-June 1873

  “I still can’t talk you into staying here with us?” Ian asked one last time as he came around behind his nephew’s packhorse.

  Donegan snagged O’Roarke by the scruff of the neck and brought his uncle close, into a fierce embrace, then tore himself away after but a moment, afraid of weakening.

  He went back to lashing the gum poncho that enclosed his blankets behind his saddle.

  “At least give it more time before you decide.”

  Seamus turned to look into the man’s moist eyes as they caught the first light of predawn just now creeping over the hills into the yard outside the house. “I’ve had plenty of time to think, Uncle. It’s time I go back.”

  “Still set on home?”

  “Aye, Ian,” he sighed. “It sounds so far … far away right now—doesn’t it?”

  “Why won’t you even head southwest to San Francisco, catch a packet from there, around the horn and back to New York or Boston?”

  He wagged his head, the big smile cutting a wide swath in the chill air. “I must do this my way, Ian. Back over the mountains.”

  “What’s out there for you, Seamus? Out there for any half-civilized white man anymore?”

  Seamus thought on it a moment before answering. “To see it one last time before going home to Eire. To be sure I have gleaned all that I can carry of it home in my heart before I go. That’s why.”

  Ian dragged a battered pipe from his pocket and with a finger retamped the old tobacco in the bowl. “That godforsaken wilderness claimed one of your uncles. And it nearly claimed another—had I not come here when I did.”

  “But look at you,” Seamus said, his big arm sweeping in a wide arc, “this very country nearly swallowed you as much as the plains swallowed Liam. That ground is no more a hell than this has been for some.”

  O’Roarke dragged the lucifer along the sole of his boot, sucking the flame into the bowl and its charge of dark leaf. When he had inspected the red cherry and tossed the lucifer aside, he said, “When it comes down to it, Seamus—I suppose I have chosen my place to stand … as much as Liam chose his on that nameless river you’ve not talked about much.”

  “In the end,” Donegan replied, slapping the big mare on the rump as he finished his preparations for the trail, “that’s all any of us can ask of ourselves, isn’t it? That we find our own place.”

  “So—you’ve decided this isn’t yours.”

  “A fine place it is, Ian. A land so steeped in moisture that the roots don’t have to grow so deep here as they do on the far plains. A rich land where a man can grow his crops and raise his stock without worry of having enough water, or worrying about the next Sioux or Cheyenne war-party to come riding over the hill.”

  Ian looked up at his nephew’s face, studying it closely. “That’s it—at least part of it, ain’t it? You like not knowing—perhaps the uncertainty of that life on those far plains and in those mountains still. Aye?”

  Seamus pursed his lips in concentration. “Perhaps that’s part of it. All I know is that this is a good place to raise children as well as those crops and cattle you tend to so well, Uncle. So here is where Ian O’Roarke should stay,” he said, looking over the older man’s shoulder as Dimity dragged the front door back into shadow and stepped into the light. “To stay here … with a good woman who will stand beside him. With that—no man is ever in the wrong place.”

  Seamus crossed the muddy yard to meet her halfway. She put out both her hands for him. He held them but a moment then pushed them aside, sweeping her up into his big arms.

  “He so wants you to stay, Seamus,” Dimity whispered against his chest, so that only Donegan could hear.

  He squeezed her tight, one last time. “There will be a time when I can return,” he whispered against the fragrant top of her head. “Keep telling him that. Remind him of that for me whenever he grows too wistful—and yearns for my return.”

  The children poured into the muddy yard to stand behind their mother as Seamus pulled back to hold the woman at arm’s length. She reached up and with fingertips swiped some tears from the tall man’s ruddy cheek.

  “As long as Ian had talked and talked about his nephew, I always wondered what you would be like—you and me so close in age.” Then Dimity smiled, bravely, swiping Donegan’s other cheek. “And now it fills my heart with warmth to know you are so much like Ian. Not just reminding him of your mother—but he loves you so just for being what you are. And finding you so much like him.”

  “That must hurt most of all then,” Seamus said quietly as he let her go and took a step back, “to know that even though I am so much like Ian … I can still tear myself away from places and people and move on, like Liam.”

  “But like Ian—I am certain it hurts you more than you would ever let us know.”

  Seamus sensed the salty sting blurring his eyes once more and turned to the children who had clustered at the doorjamb. With both arms he waved them into his embrace. All five at once: tall Patience and young Seamus, his namesake, little Liam and Charity and, last to scurry up atop his short legs, young Thomas.

  Each grabbing and clutching for a piece of this giant of a cousin who had ridden into their lives more than half a year ago, and now was heartbeats away from riding back out again.

  He touched each cheek, kissed each forehead, gave the three boys a tousle of their hair and both the girls a gentlemanly bow as he called out their names one last time, as if to let his own heart vow to return to this home and warmth when needed most.

  Then all six of them met again in that embrace no man is ever ashamed to share with loved ones … before Seamus tore himself away and strode through the softening mud to his uncle’s side.

  “You’ll send us word—something—each place you stop on your way?”

  Seamus nodded, swallowing down the hot ball that threatened to choke him still. “I plan on riding to St. Louis, from there catching a boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Surely there I can find something heading home—perhaps some captain who could use my muscle in payment for my steerage.”

  “Aye,” Ian said, his voice growing low and raspy as he swallowed down his own pain. “Amerikay will not easily claim Mother Donegan’s firstborn son, will she?”

  “Home,” he said wistfully. “Where that woman has too long waited for me to return. If that homecoming cannot be with her brothers, then best it be that I return before she breathes her last prayer.”

  “Tell her of my love, Seamus. And how I love this family of mine—and this new land … in so many ways like Eire.”

  “Yes, the land. You really do feel that in your heart—don’t you?”

  Ian watched his nephew climb into the saddle. Then reached up and grabbed Donegan’s hand as it adjusted the rein. “My prayers go with you, nephew. Knowing now how for the rest of your life you will have that struggle waging within your heart. At last I know you carry within you the best and the worst of your uncles. And for the rest of your days, you will suffer that struggle between what Liam loved most, and what Ian held most dear.”

  Seamus bent far over, with one arm dragging his uncle to his toes in one last embrace. Then he suddenly jabbed the heels of his muddy, new army boots into the mare’s flanks, demanding she take him from this place. And quickly.

  It was not until he was far down the rutted lane, when he thought he would not be discovered, that Seamus turned to
look at what he was leaving behind. Wondering if such happiness of hearth and home and family would ever be his to have … fearing that it would not.

  The O’Roarkes still stood, long after he had passed from sight through the trees—the seven of them. The children huddled close, arms entwined with their parents: two people so fiercely in love that nothing—not this brutal land, not enemies pale-skinned nor red, and certainly not time and distance—could keep apart.

  Seamus prayed he would one day find a home for his heart.

  Author’s Afterword

  This time around, I’d like to do things differently and give you something to read after you’re done with Devil’s Backbone.

  Students of the era of the Indian Wars have largely neglected the long and bloody conflict in the Lava Beds of northern California. Fewer would even be able to locate on a map where the many battles and ambushes took place. But there are yet a few reminders here in the Lava Beds that more than 127 years ago a great and exhausting struggle took place not far from where I sit.

  One can gaze across the remnant of what was once the pristine Tule Lake, and find along what was once its southern shoreline the crude cairn, that tower of rocks the soldiers of 1873 themselves erected to commemorate the murder of their revered leader. Atop the rocks stands a wooden cross, dutifully inscribed by a soldier these words on the cross-arm:

  Major General E.R.S. Canby,

  U.S.A., was killed here by Modoc Indians

  April 11, 1873

  You can still walk below the bluff the soldiers first descended at dawn on 17 January 1873, to attack the Modocs in their Stronghold, at the bottom of which Colonel Alvan C. Gillem would later erect his great encampment, and to this day find the places where the real actors in this great drama stood and breathed. At the base of that same bluff is Toby’s Cave, where interpreters Winema and Frank Riddle lived during their tenure with Meacham’s peace commission and where (incidentally) many of the Modocs visiting from the Stronghold would stay the night.

  About fifty feet above the flat ground at the base of the bluff, you can still recognize Signal Rock, used to communicate with the eastern camps, either by semaphore flags or by heliograph on sunnier days. It was from this rock that the soldiers witnessed the murders of Canby and Reverend Thomas.

  Now that you have finished the story, keep in mind that Captain Jack fought the U.S. Army, and eventually surrendered to soldiers of that frontier army only three short years to the month before troops under the command of General George Armstrong Custer were massacred in faraway Montana Territory.

  There were factors that made the struggles on the plains and the continuing conflicts in Apache country different from this final eruption of war on the Pacific Coast. But for every difference—there were as many, and greater, similarities. It cannot be emphasized enough that the Indian of America, no matter his geographic location, was fighting against extermination. If not extermination of his species, then most certainly extermination of his culture, his way of life, his spirit.

  And for a brief, glorious moment experienced by these Modoc red men some three years before another brief and glorious moment for the plains Indian, a few ragtag, ill-equipped Modocs fought off the pride of the U.S. Army. Captain Jack’s warriors totally befuddled the soldiers ordered into battle against them. In the end, Jack’s young lieutenants also confounded proven, able army officers who had served and fought with distinction in the Army of the Potomac or the Army of the Shenandoah or in Sherman’s army that left Georgia in ruins.

  Jack was grinding the army down—if not by bullets and blood, then most surely grinding down his enemy through despair and confusion.

  It is clear now, if not then, that the white man, both soldier on the scene and the civilians back at the War Department in Washington, had completely underestimated their enemy in the Modocs. Not only that, but prior to the outbreak of hostilities on 29 November 1872, the Indian Bureau had totally underestimated Captain Jack’s resolve not to be moved from his traditional homeland.

  Yet in the end the Modocs brought about their own destruction with the mindless murders of General Edward R.S. Canby and Reverend Eleazar Thomas. Deaths that stunned the nation and enraged the army to finish the task at hand.

  This was the only war in which a general of the U.S. Army was killed by Indians.

  And it was most certainly a perfect study of the cultural conflicts already raging in the Apache southwest and on the great plains, for in this study of the Indian Wars, one is continually struck with the fact that both sides failed to grasp an essential ingredient to the conflict:

  … While the Indian could not understand just how great a value the white man placed on the material ownership of the land, the white man in kind failed to understand to what extremes the Indian would go to maintain the universal freedom of the land.

  In addition, the differences between the two opposing cultures were already racing toward inevitable conflict in 1872 when Jack executed a Klamath shaman who had failed to cure a Modoc girl after accepting payment for his services prior to conducting his mystical rites. Under Indian law, Jack was by all rights allowed to kill the medicine man.

  Yet, Jack and the other prisoners months later would find the intricate machinations of military and American jurisprudence more baffling still than the straightforward meting out of Indian justice.

  What occurred through more than six long months of fighting, negotiating, sniping, ambushes and full-scale battles was in fact the most costly Indian war in U.S. history. When a few angry warriors broke away from their Lost River camp and swept around the shore of Tule Lake, killing white settlers, they set in motion a military machine that would eventually require more than a thousand soldiers, scouts and civilian teamsters to surround, subdue, chase, and do battle with no more than seventy poorly-armed red warriors.

  Beyond the human terms, the long, protracted months meant that the total cost of the war in dollars multiplied every day. An army in the field requires fodder. Civilians were hired to haul in those supplies—which opened the door to what became the general practice throughout the era of the Indian Wars: civilian profiteering.

  Read here how author Keith Murray lists the prices charged the army during its stay near the Lava Beds:

  soap

  50 cents a cake

  iodine

  50 cents per ounce

  rubbing alcohol

  $1.25 per quart

  calomel

  $4.00 per pound

  horseshoeing

  $1.25 per shoe.

  In a time when, as Murray shows, a man might be extremely happy to earn two dollars per day, most teamsters working out of Yreka, California, and Linkville, Oregon, were charging the army a minimum of twenty dollars per day for their services—if they were hauling supplies or not.

  And that’s where the grand total for Captain Jack’s war swelled every day—with this matter of transportation from the rail depot at Redding, California, to the various camps in the Lava Beds. One teamster alone received $118,132.86 for hauling men and matériel to the scene of the fighting!

  The final tally of direct costs to the federal government exceeded $420,000. They paid Oregon and California more than $76,000 for the use of their militias. Other costs such as pensions and medical expenses billed to the government by veterans of the conflict are, in Murray’s opinion, sure to total more than an additional $100,000.

  A half-million dollars—and, mind you, nineteenth century dollars at that!

  In the end, whether the Modoc warriors were killed with army bullets or at the end of an army rope, for each of those seventeen warriors, the government sacrificed the lives of a dozen soldiers, volunteer militia or civilian employees of the army. Eight officers, thirty-nine enlisted men, sixteen citizens and two Tenino scouts, in addition to another sixty-seven wounded. Almost as many white men killed by Captain Jack’s people as we had servicemen killed twenty-five years later in the whole of the Spanish-American War.

  To allo
w you firm footing once more, let me bring you up to date on what transpired in this story once the Modocs arrived at Fort Klamath, Oregon—when the wheels of military justice began to grind.

  It must surely have caused Captain Jack great pain those last few weeks of his life to feel each waking minute the weight of those iron shackles binding him to Schonchin John, while outside the guardhouse on the parade stood four separate tents, one each for the four men who had murdered innocent white settlers, then surrendered to the army and volunteered to hunt down their former chief.

  On 9 June 1873, the U. S. Attorney General made a determination that all the actions of the Modocs following the skirmish in their village on 29 November 1872, did most certainly “constitute war in a technical sense that crimes afterwards committed against the laws of war are triable and punishable by military courts preferably Military Commissions.”

  This put to rest all but one last-minute attempt by Oregon officials to put the Tule Lake murderers on trial in their own state courts. General Schofield ordered Colonel Davis to immediately form a military commission to try six prisoners. In addition, Schofield left it up to Davis as to whether or not to punish those Modoc “bloodhounds” who had helped hunt down and capture the notorious Captain Jack.

  In the next few days the War Department itself would direct its military commission to try only those warriors who had killed General Canby, Reverend Thomas or Lieutenant Sherwood. The rest were to be treated as prisoners of war.

  And ultimately, only those who had taken part in the killings at the peace tent would face that military tribunal seated at Fort Klamath.

  Six only: Captain Jack, Schonchin John, Black Jim, Boston Charley, Barncho and Sloluck.