The Modoc War and the Lava Beds

Near this spot stood Fort Klamath, and the ground here holds one of the hardest stories in the American West, the Modoc War of eighteen seventy two and eighteen seventy three. It began with a broken promise. In eighteen sixty four the Klamath, the Modoc, and the Yahooskin band signed a treaty ceding more than twenty three million acres, agreeing to share a single reservation here in the Klamath Basin.

But the Modoc and the Klamath did not live easily together, and a Modoc leader named Kintpuash, whom settlers called Captain Jack, led his people back to their homeland along the Lost River in northern California. When soldiers came to force them back, the Modoc fled south into a maze of black volcanic rock, the lava beds, where roughly fifty to sixty fighters and their families held a natural fortress now called Captain Jack's Stronghold. For months a band of roughly two hundred Modoc, most of them women and children defended by about fifty warriors, held off an army many times their size.

In April of eighteen seventy three, during a peace parley under a flag of truce, Kintpuash shot and killed Brigadier General Edward Canby. Canby remains the only full rank United States Army general ever killed in an Indian war. The killing turned the nation against the Modoc.

By the following June the resisters were captured. After a military trial here at Fort Klamath, Kintpuash and three other Modoc men were hanged on October third, eighteen seventy three. Two others sentenced to die had their sentences changed to life imprisonment on Alcatraz Island.

The surviving Modoc were shipped as prisoners far away to Oklahoma, exiled from the basin they had defended. Historians often call the Modoc War one of the costliest Indian wars the country ever fought, measured against the tiny number of people who resisted. By common estimate the army spent around half a million dollars and hundreds of lives to break a community of a few hundred.

Today the Modoc are part of the restored Klamath Tribes, and their descendants still live in this basin. When you drive these high, quiet roads, remember that this country was once the stage for a war the whole nation watched.