Captain Jack's Stronghold: Fifty-Three Against Six Hundred

The lava is still here. Walk through it and you will understand why the United States Army could not.

In the winter of eighteen seventy-two, a Modoc leader named Kientpoos, called Captain Jack by the settlers who had already claimed his homeland, made a decision. He and his people had been living on the Klamath Reservation in Oregon, where the Klamath Tribe treated the Modoc as subordinates on land that was not their own. When the Army came to force them back, he withdrew instead, south and east, into a landscape of volcanic ridges and lava tube caves south of Tule Lake that the Modoc had known for generations. The Army had never seen anything like it.

What followed was five months of siege in one of the most lopsided military campaigns in American history. The United States Army brought, eventually, more than six hundred forty soldiers, along with artillery, howitzers, and supply lines. Captain Jack had about fifty-three warriors, defending a larger band of roughly one hundred fifty Modoc men, women, and children. The Army attacked in January of eighteen seventy-three and could not take the Stronghold. They attacked again and could not take it. The Modoc knew every tunnel, every blind ridge, every passage through the rock that made frontal assault suicidal. The federal government spent approximately five hundred thousand dollars trying to dislodge them. Historians have called it the most expensive Indian war per soldier engaged in United States history.

It ended in April, not through military defeat but through fracture within the Modoc community. At a peace negotiation on April eleventh, Captain Jack killed General Edward Canby and peace commissioner Eleazar Thomas, an act that his own community had pressured him toward and that he appeared to know would seal their fate. Canby was the only active-duty United States Army general killed in the Indian Wars. The killing ended any possibility of negotiated settlement.

On October third, eighteen seventy-three, Captain Jack and three other Modoc leaders were hanged at Fort Klamath, in Oregon. One hundred fifty-three surviving Modoc were put on trains and sent to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Two thousand miles from the lava beds. From everything they had defended.

You can walk through the Stronghold today. The volcanic rock has not changed. The terrain that made fifty-three people nearly unmovable is the same terrain. Stand in it long enough and the military math starts to make sense.