The Modoc Exile: Two Thousand Miles from the Lava Beds

After the war ended, the federal government had a decision to make. One hundred fifty-three Modoc people remained alive, most of them women and children who had spent five months in the lava beds. Captain Jack and three other Modoc leaders had already been hanged on October third, eighteen seventy-three, at Fort Klamath in Oregon.

The government decided the survivors could not stay.

They were loaded onto trains. The destination was Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, the Quapaw Reservation, approximately two thousand miles from the volcanic plateau that the Modoc had inhabited for as long as anyone could document. The distance was not incidental. The decision to send them that far was a deliberate severing: from the lava beds, from the obsidian sources and seasonal gathering grounds, from the cold-desert habitat the Modoc had evolved to live in.

Oklahoma was humid. The Modoc had no resistance to the diseases that thrived in that climate. Tuberculosis. Pneumonia. Within years of arrival, many had died. The exact mortality count is not well established in the public record, which is its own kind of answer.

Federal recognition for the Modoc who had remained in the Klamath Basin of Oregon was terminated in nineteen fifty-four and partly restored in nineteen seventy-eight. Whether the Oklahoma exiles and their descendants were ever formally barred from returning to California is less clear in the sources available.

The Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma, descended from the survivors of that exile, maintains its own tribal government today. They remember what happened here from two thousand miles away.

Sources note: Modoc voices and primary-source accounts from the Oklahoma exile are not well represented in California public archives. The Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma is the appropriate authority on this history.