The Modoc War

A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America's Gilded Age

Robert Aquinas McNally

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496204226
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered awar that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States' conquest of Native America's peoples and lands. Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872–73, one of the nation's costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war. The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a "peace policy" toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country's past.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part 1. Holy Lands Here and There
• 1. Bad to Worse
• 2. Stone and Story
• 3. Running the Pagans Out of the Promised Land
• 4. Death Squads, Sex Slaves, and Knights of the Frontier
• 5. The Peace That Wasn’t, the Treaty That Was, Kind Of
• 6. The Bacon of Three Hundred Hogs
• 7. Gray-Eyed Rancher to the Rescue
• Part 2. True Fog, Real War
• 8. Glove and Fist
• 9. Modoc Steak for Breakfast
• 10. A Look Inside
• 11. First Fog of War
• 12. Celebration and Postmortem
• Part 3. Firing into a Continent
• 13. Give Peace a Chance
• 14. The News That Fits
• 15. Heroic Reporter Dens with Lions
• 16. Talking for Peace, Lying for War
• 17. The Warrior Takes Command
• 18. Squeeze Play
• 19. A Homeland to Be Named Later
• 20. Pride and Prejudice in the Peace Tent
• 21. Martyrs at Midday
• 22. The War Goes Cosmic
• 23. Girding for Battle
• 24. Half-Empty Victory
• 25. Scalps and Skulls
• 26. Into the Volcanic Valley of Death
• Part 4. Things Fall Apart
• 27. The Center Cannot Hold
• 28. Hounds and Scouts
• 29. Hang ’em High
• 30. Varnishing Vengeance
• 31. Still Small Voices Swell
• 32. Strangled Necks, Severed Heads
• 33. Exile and Showbiz
• 34. Requiem
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Robert Aquinas McNally
• Ilustrations