By H.L. Delaney · September 2, 2026

The First Battle of the Stronghold, January 17, 1873

A Confident Army in Winter

By the middle of January 1873, Kintpuash's band had held the lava beds for close to two months. The fighting at the Lost River late in November 1872 had pushed the Modoc across to the south shore of Tule Lake, into the broken basalt that soldiers would come to call Captain Jack's Stronghold. What put them there ran deeper than the shooting. The Modoc had been marched onto the Klamath reservation under a treaty they were told meant one thing and that read on paper as another, onto land that could not feed them, and they had gone back to their own country on the Lost River and Tule Lake. For coming home, the settlers and the newspapers named them renegades and called for soldiers to make the name stick.

That call fell on ground long prepared for it. Two decades earlier, in his 1851 address to the California legislature, Governor Peter Burnett had told the state that "a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct." The men who marched against the Modoc in 1873 were carrying an old policy into its late form. Settlers in the basin wanted the band gone, the papers wanted the trouble finished, and the Army meant to go into the rock and take Kintpuash's people out of it.

There was reason for the Army's confidence, at least on paper. It had gathered around four hundred men against a band that could put fewer than sixty fighters into the line. It had cavalry and infantry, regulars stiffened by volunteers raised in Oregon and California, and it had artillery to bring against a position the officers assumed they could see and shell. Many of the men were cold, underfed, and untried, but the weight of numbers looked decisive on the map. Winter was thought to work in the Army's favor, pinning the band against the lake with the cold pressing on the families sheltering in the rock.

Behind the plan sat assumptions the Army had carried into many campaigns. Officers expected that numbers and steady, disciplined fire would settle the day, the way they often had against Native people caught in the open. The Stronghold was rough, broken ground, and those habits of thinking carried badly into it.

What the Army did not have was any working knowledge of the ground. The Modoc had lived in that country for generations, and they had spent the winter learning the Stronghold trench by trench and tube by tube. The soldiers were about to advance into a place they had only studied from a distance, and the distance had taught them almost nothing about how the lava was actually laid out.

The Army's Plan

The assault was set for January 17, 1873, under Lieutenant Colonel Frank Wheaton, who held the field command. The plan was a squeeze. Two columns would move on the Stronghold from opposite sides, one pressing in from the west and the other from the east. They were to work their way across the lava, meet somewhere in the middle, and drive the Modoc back against the shore of Tule Lake, where the band would have nowhere left to stand. A battery of howitzers would support the advance with shellfire from behind the infantry.

On a map it read as a sound plan for open country. It rested on two things the lava beds would quietly take away. It rested on the two columns being able to see each other well enough to keep their timing and close the gap between them, and it rested on the gun crews being able to see the Stronghold well enough to shell it without dropping rounds on their own men. Both of those needs belonged to a flatter, clearer battlefield than the one the soldiers were about to enter.

The men went in braced for a hard day's fight. The lava beds gave them a field of black rock they could barely cross and defenders they would almost never see.

The Fog

On the morning of the assault a heavy fog settled over the basin. It rose off the lake and the cold ground and closed sight down to a few yards in any direction. A soldier could lose the man next to him in it. Whole companies felt their way forward without knowing where the next unit had gone or whether it was still moving at all.

The fog took the plan apart from the first hour. The two columns could not keep contact with each other across the rock, and inside each column the companies drifted and lost their alignment. The howitzers were nearly useless, because the crews could not see the Stronghold to aim at it and could not be sure a shell would not fall among their own advancing troops. The one real advantage the Army had counted on, its power to mass fire and movement against a fixed point, was gone before the fighting had properly begun.

For the Modoc in the rock, the fog changed very little. In the days before the assault, Curly Headed Doctor, a medicine leader of the band, had danced and strung the Stronghold with red tule cord, and when the fog came down thick enough to smother the fires, some of the people took it as an answer to that dance. Whatever brought it, the fog cost the band nothing. They were not trying to cross strange ground or hold a line spread over half a mile of basalt. They had only to keep the trenches and low walls they already knew by feel, and wait for shapes to come out of the grey toward them.

Fighting Blind in the Rock

The soldiers advanced into terrain that fought them before the Modoc did. The lava rose into ridges and dropped away into cracks and trenches. Men climbed over rock that cut their hands and boots, slid down into hollows, and lost their footing and their line as they went. Every yard forward carried them deeper into a maze the defenders had memorized over a winter and the attackers had never once walked.

The Modoc fired from cover and showed almost nothing of themselves. A fighter could lay a rifle across a foot of basalt, fire into the fog, and drop back out of sight before a soldier could fix where the shot had come from. Men went down to gunfire that seemed to come out of empty rock. Fighters like Scarface Charley and Hooker Jim moved through the old lava tubes to fire again from a new place a moment later, so that the shooting never stayed where the soldiers thought it was. The band did not shoot to hold a line so much as to scatter the columns and break the orders passing between them.

The fight went on through the short winter day. Soldiers pinned in the rock could do little more than return fire toward muzzle flashes and the sound of shots, and the officers found that orders passed along the line arrived late or not at all in the fog. Ground gained in one hour could not be held into the next, because no one could see enough of the field to know what was theirs and what was still the band's.

The columns that were meant to join in the middle never joined. The advance slowed, then stalled, then began to come apart as officers understood that they could not find the enemy or one another in the fog. By the end of the day Wheaton had seen enough to know the position could not be carried this way, and he ordered his force pulled back. The Army had thrown several hundred men at the Stronghold and had not taken a foot of it that it could keep. The assault had failed, and it had failed outright.

What It Cost

The Army's losses that day were heavy. The casualties ran to dozens of men killed and wounded, and the exact toll is still argued in the records. It was enough to end the operation and force the column to carry its wounded back out over the same brutal ground it had just failed to cross.

On the Modoc side the cost was almost nothing. Firing from rock they controlled, against soldiers who could rarely see them, the band came through the day with no one killed and few if any wounded. The plain shape of it is not in dispute. A force many times their size came into the lava to break Kintpuash's people, and it left without having killed one of them. Fewer than sixty Modoc, defending their families in ground they understood completely, held the Stronghold and threw the Army off it.

What the First Battle Meant

The failure carried far past the lava beds. This was the same army that had fought the Civil War at enormous scale a decade earlier, and it had now sent hundreds of men against a few dozen Modoc in their own rock and been turned away without gaining the ground. Word of it reached the newspapers and reached Washington, and it forced a change of course. Wheaton was relieved of the field command and replaced by Colonel Alvan Gillem, and the government moved to try talking where the direct assault had just failed. Out of that decision came the peace commission that would bring General Edward Canby and the others to the edge of the Stronghold in the weeks ahead.

The battle also set the shape of the war that followed. The Army had learned that it could not rush the Stronghold, so it settled in for a siege, and the standoff in the lava dragged on into the spring. The peace talks and their collapse, the killing of Canby in April, the second and heavier assault, and the thirst that finally forced the band out of the rock all grew from the plain lesson of January 17. The Stronghold would not fall to a direct charge. The government's answer to the repulse was to harden. As the peace effort broke down, General William T. Sherman wired that if it failed, no other reservation for the Modoc would be necessary except graves among their chosen lava-beds. The old extermination policy was still there under the diplomacy, waiting.

The written account of that day came mostly from the men who lost it, in the reports and telegrams they sent back east, and it has framed the fight ever since as a matter of fog and bad ground. The harder truth is plainer. Around fifty Modoc, defending their homes against an army sent to end them, read the country they were born to and used it, and the army that meant to crush them could not. They were still badly outnumbered, still cut off from any help, still bound for a defeat that would scatter the band and carry the survivors into exile far from the lake and the rock. What they did on January 17 is documented, and it belongs to the people who stood in the rock and did it.

Sources & further reading

• Keith A. Murray, The Modocs and Their War (University of Oklahoma Press, 1959).
• Boyd Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
• Jeff C. Riddle, The Indian History of the Modoc War (1914).
• Cheewa James, Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn't Die (2008).
• The Oregon Encyclopedia, entries on the Modoc War and the Lava Beds (oregonencyclopedia.org).