The Lava Beds: The Modoc War of 1872-1873

At Tule Lake, a Modoc boy learned the boundaries of his people's country by walking them: which marsh gave the wocus seed, which ridge the antelope crossed in fall, how the Lost River ran out of the lake and back into it again. His name was Kintpuash. The Americans would call him Captain Jack, and in the end they would hang him.

In November 1872, soldiers came to the Lost River to force his band back onto the Klamath Reservation, a place the Modoc had already walked away from. The band answered by retreating into the lava beds south of the lake, a broken black country where a few dozen fighters could hide from an army. For six months they held it against a force that grew to around a thousand soldiers and volunteers.

The book follows the whole war: the first trappers' maps of the Modoc country, the broken promises of the Klamath Agency, the siege of the Stronghold, and the peace talks that ended on Good Friday, 1873, with the killing of General Edward Canby, the only U.S. general killed in the Indian Wars. Then come the long pursuit, the capture and trial, and the hangings at Fort Klamath that October.

The Modoc were never a large people, perhaps six or eight hundred at their strongest. They never stopped insisting the land was theirs.