By H.L. Delaney · July 29, 2026

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

The Surrender

By the end of the spring campaign of 1873, the Modoc War was lost. The band that had held the Lava Beds through the winter had fractured under the weight of the U.S. Army, and the fighters had scattered into small groups across the high desert. Kintpuash was run down and captured on June 1, 1873. Within days the last of the remaining fighters and their families were in Army custody, and the war that had begun on the Lost River moved from the lava beds to a courtroom.

What followed fell into three parts: a trial, four executions, and an exile that lasted more than a generation. For readers new to the conflict, the account of who Kintpuash was gives the years that led up to the surrender.

The Military Commission

The government did not handle the captured Modoc men as ordinary prisoners of war. A military commission convened at Fort Klamath on July 5, 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, Schonchin John, Black Jim, Boston Charley, and two younger men, Barncho and Slolux.

The charge was murder. Twenty years earlier, Ben Wright had killed a Modoc camp under a flag of truce near this same country and been paid by the piece for the scalps, and no court ever convened for him. When Kintpuash killed a general under a flag of truce, the government built a scaffold. The same act under the same white flag ran one way for the men the state armed and another for the people it had already marked for removal.

The proceeding followed the outward form of a trial while denying the men its most basic protections. The six had no defense counsel. They spoke little English and followed the testimony through interpreters. Among the witnesses against them were Hooker Jim and other Modoc men who had committed killings of settlers in the opening days of the war and had since turned informant in exchange for their own amnesty. The record of the killing at the peace tent shows how much pressure those same men had put on Kintpuash to act. At the trial, they testified against him.

The Verdict and the Sentence

The trial ran only a few days. The men were allowed to speak, and Kintpuash said little in his own defense, having no lawyer to shape a case and no reason by then to expect the outcome would turn on anything he offered. The commission found all six guilty and sentenced all six to death. President Ulysses S. Grant reviewed the case and, only days before the execution, commuted the sentences of the two youngest, Barncho and Slolux, to life imprisonment. They were sent to the military prison on Alcatraz Island. The four remaining men were left to hang.

The wider war and its causes are laid out in the overview of what happened and why it matters. What the trial settled was narrower. The government had decided who would answer for Canby's death, and by what means.

October 3, 1873

On the morning of October 3, 1873, Kintpuash, Schonchin John, Black Jim, and Boston Charley were hanged together on a scaffold built at Fort Klamath. Modoc prisoners, including the condemned men's own families, were brought to watch. The Klamath people, on whose reservation the fort stood, were present as well.

The bodies were buried at the fort, though they were not left undisturbed. The heads of the four men were removed and shipped east to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, where they were held for decades as anatomical specimens. It was a practice of that era, and it is a hard thing to read now. The remains were eventually accounted for in the twentieth century, long after the men who ordered the hangings were themselves gone.

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. Within weeks the surviving Modoc band, roughly 150 women, children, and men, were loaded onto wagons and then rail cars and sent as prisoners of war to the Quapaw Agency in Indian Territory, in what is now northeastern Oklahoma. They arrived in late 1873, more than a thousand miles from the Lost River country their people had always known.

They were held as prisoners for years. The agency settled them on a small tract, set them to farming ground they did not know, and sent their children to the agency school. The land was strange to them, the first winters were hard, and disease and grief thinned their numbers steadily through the early years of the exile. Federal policy kept them apart from the Klamath and from their own country, and it meant the removal to be permanent. A generation of Modoc children was born and raised in Oklahoma who had never seen the basin their people came from.

The Long Road Back

The exile held for 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 roughly half chose to remain there. Their descendants continue today as the Modoc Nation, a federally recognized tribe in Oklahoma, while the others rejoined the Klamath Tribes in Oregon. One people came out of the war with two homes, both of them shaped by it.

Kintpuash himself never had a grave his people could tend. He had asked for years for a small reservation on his own river and had been 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 scaffold at Fort Klamath and the long road to Oklahoma, is the story the novel sets out to tell in full.