By H.L. Delaney · July 29, 2026

After the Modoc War: The Trial, the Hangings, and the Exile

The Surrender

By the late spring of 1873 the Modoc War was over. The band that had held the lava beds south of Tule Lake through the winter had broken apart under the weight of the U.S. Army, and its fighters had scattered in small groups across the high desert. Soldiers ran Kintpuash down and took him on June 1, 1873. Within days the last of the fighters and their families were in Army custody, and the war that had begun on the Lost River moved from the lava country to a guardhouse and a courtroom at Fort Klamath.

What the government did next came in two parts. It tried and hanged a handful of men, and it removed everyone else. For readers new to the conflict, the account of who Kintpuash was covers the years that led to the surrender, and the account of the hanging at Fort Klamath covers the execution itself. This post follows the trial, the exile, and the long aftermath of both.

A Trial Without a Defense

The captured Modoc men were not held as ordinary prisoners of war. A military commission sat at Fort Klamath in July 1873 to try six of them for the killings of General Edward R.S. Canby and Reverend Eleazar Thomas at the peace tent on April 11. The accused were Kintpuash, whom the soldiers called Captain Jack, along with Schonchin John, Black Jim, Boston Charley, and two younger men, Barncho and Slolux.

The proceeding wore the outward form of a trial and withheld its substance. The six men had no defense counsel. They spoke little English and had to follow the testimony through interpreters. Several of the witnesses against them were Modoc men, among them Hooker Jim, who had done killings of their own in the opening days of the war and had since turned informant in exchange for amnesty. The record of the killing at the peace tent shows how hard those same men had pushed Kintpuash to act. At the trial they testified against him.

The law of it ran in one direction. Twenty years before, Ben Wright had killed a Modoc party gathered under a flag of truce near this same country, had been paid a bounty for the scalps, and had never answered for it in any court. When Kintpuash killed a general under a flag of truce, the government built a scaffold. The same killing ran one way for the man the government counted as its own and another way for the people it had already decided to remove.

Guilty From the Start

The trial lasted only a few days. The men were allowed to speak. Kintpuash said little, having no lawyer to shape a case and no reason to expect that anything he offered would change the outcome. The commission found all six guilty and sentenced all six to hang. President Ulysses S. Grant reviewed the case and, days before the date set, commuted the sentences of the two youngest, Barncho and Slolux, to life at the military prison on Alcatraz Island. The four left under sentence were Kintpuash, Schonchin John, Black Jim, and Boston Charley. They were hanged at Fort Klamath on October 3, 1873, before their own families and before the Klamath people on whose reservation the fort stood. That morning is told in full in the companion account of the hanging.

Exile to Indian Territory

The hangings were the war's most visible ending. The exile was the longer sentence, and it fell on people who had killed no one. In November 1873 the surviving Modoc, one hundred fifty-three women, children, and men by the Army's own count, were loaded onto wagons and then rail cars and sent east as prisoners of war. Their destination was the Quapaw Agency in Indian Territory, in what is now the northeastern corner of Oklahoma. They reached it in late 1873, more than a thousand miles from the Lost River country their people had always known.

What the government wanted for the Modoc had been set down before the war was even finished. In March 1873 General William T. Sherman had wired General Canby that if the band kept resisting, the Army should use such force that "no other reservation for them will be necessary except graves among their chosen lava-beds." The scaffold delivered part of that promise. The exile delivered the rest. A people who would not leave their own country were carried a thousand miles from it and held there.

They were prisoners of war for years. The agency put them on a small tract, set them to farming ground they did not know, and sent their children to the agency school. The first winters were hard, and disease and grief cut their numbers steadily through the early years. The exact toll is not recorded with any confidence, though the graves came fast enough that the first Modoc buried in the agency cemetery was Captain Jack's own daughter, dead at seven within months of the arrival. Federal policy kept the exiles apart from the Klamath and from their homeland, and it meant the removal to be permanent. A generation of Modoc children grew up in Oklahoma who had never seen the basin their people came from.

The Long Road Home

The government had a word for Modoc who kept going back to their own country. It called them renegades, and it built the whole machinery of the war and the exile to make sure they could not go back again. The removal was meant to last forever. It lasted thirty-six years. Only in 1909 did the government allow the Modoc in Indian Territory to return to the Klamath Reservation in Oregon. By then many had built lives in Oklahoma, and about half chose to stay.

Those who stayed continue today as the Modoc Nation, a federally recognized tribe in Oklahoma. Those who went back rejoined the Klamath Tribes in Oregon. One people came out of the war with two homes, and both were shaped by what had been done to them. The word the government had meant as an insult, renegade, is the one the people carried home.

Kintpuash himself had no grave his people could tend for more than a century. For years he had asked for one thing, a small reservation on his own river, and he was refused at every turn. That refusal, and the war it finally produced, is the ground the documented history keeps returning to. The full arc, from the Lost River to the guardhouse at Fort Klamath and the long removal to Oklahoma, is the story the novel sets out to tell.