Legends of the Old West - Modoc War - Episode 1: Lost River
In 1852, a militia captain named Ben Wright rode into Modoc country, raised a white flag, and invited the Modoc to talk peace. For five days they ate his beef and flour. On the morning of the sixth, he walked into their sleeping camp with two revolvers under his cloak and opened fire. Between 30 and 90 people died. Wright rode back to Yreka with their scalps, the town cheered, and the State of California paid him $744 for his trouble.
The Modoc never forgot what a white man's white flag meant. Twenty years later, they’d prove it.
This week Chris Wimmer kicks off a six-part series I wrote on the Modoc War. It's the story of how a people who never numbered more than two thousand were cut down to four hundred, signed away six million acres, starved on someone else’s reservation, and finally walked home to Lost River. And how, on a freezing November dawn in 1872, 36 soldiers rode into Captain Jack’s village to drag them back.
The first shots were fired by two men standing face to face, each missing the other by the width of a bandana and a shirt sleeve. Then everything erupted.
By the end of the episode, roughly 150 Modoc men, women, and children, only fifty or sixty of them fighters, are sheltered in a labyrinth of black lava south of Tule Lake, a place the U.S. Army and most of America had never seen, but which they would soon come to know as Captain Jack’s Stronghold.
If you want the whole story, this series leans heavily on Robert Aquinas McNally’s The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Bison Books / University of Nebraska Press). It’s the best account of the conflict ever written, and it deserves a place on your shelf.
This episode is available on Spotify:
Apple Podcasts:
YouTube:
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