By H.L. Delaney · June 20, 2026

The Modoc War of 1872-1873: A Short History

A Small People and Their Own Country

The Modoc War was fought by a small Modoc band, never more than about sixty fighters with their families, against a far larger force of U.S. Army soldiers and volunteers. It ran from late 1872 into the summer of 1873, across a stretch of lava beds south of Tule Lake in what is now the border country of Oregon and California. The Modoc were defending the country they had always lived on, and they would not be driven off it.

The government called them renegades. The word was used for Native people who left the reservation and went back to their old country, and that is exactly what the Modoc had done. Almost everything set down about the war afterward came from the side that won it, from the officers and agents to the newspapers and the courts. That is the record this story has to be read against.

The Policy Behind the War

The war did not begin in 1872. It began with a policy. In January 1851 the first governor of California, Peter Burnett, told the state legislature that "a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct." The policy was carried out. In 1852 a party led by Ben Wright killed dozens of Modoc near Tule Lake under a flag of truce and took their scalps for bounty. The Modoc did not forget it. The war that came twenty years later grew out of that killing and the policy behind it.

The Treaty and the Removal

The Modoc had lived for thousands of years in the basin around the Lost River, Tule Lake, and Lower Klamath Lake. In 1864, at Council Grove, the United States drew up a treaty that placed the Modoc, the Klamath, and the Yahooskin band of Northern Paiute together on the Klamath Reservation in Oregon. The treaty was written in English and explained to the Modoc through interpreters, and what they were told it meant and what the paper said were two different things. It sent them off their own country and onto land held by the Klamath, with whom they had old friction. The food and support that had been promised came slowly or not at all. People went hungry.

In 1870 the leader the settlers called Captain Jack, whose Modoc name was Kintpuash, led his people off the reservation and back to the Lost River. Over the next two years he asked again and again for a small reservation in the Modoc's own country. The Indian Office refused every time. By 1872 the government had decided to march the Modoc back to the Klamath Reservation, by force if they would not go. This was the return that got them named renegades.

Lost River, 1872

On November 29, 1872, cavalry rode into the Modoc camp on the Lost River before dawn to force the band onto the reservation at gunpoint. The Modoc fought back. People were killed on both sides. In the violence that spread afterward, a group of Modoc men killed a number of settlers around Tule Lake. Kintpuash and his band took their families south into the lava beds. The government had chosen to take the Modoc by force, and that raid at dawn opened the war.

Captain Jack's Stronghold

The Modoc fell back into a natural fortress in the lava beds, a maze of collapsed lava tubes, trenches, and ridges the soldiers came to call Captain Jack's Stronghold. The Modoc knew every foot of that ground. The Army did not. In broken volcanic country a few well-placed defenders could hold off a much larger force, and the Modoc did exactly that.

In January 1873 the Army threw a major assault at the Stronghold under heavy fog. It failed. The soldiers took serious losses and could not force the Modoc out, and the Modoc held the ground without losing a single fighter in that first battle. Sixty or so Modoc fighters kept a far larger army pinned in the rocks for months.

The Peace Tent and the Killing of General Canby

With the assault stalled, Washington sent a peace commission, led by General E.R.S. Canby, commander of the Department of the Columbia. The commission was never allowed to offer the one thing the Modoc wanted, a small reservation in their own country. Its orders were removal. In March 1873 General Sherman wrote to Canby that if the talking failed, he should use such force that no other reservation for the Modoc would be necessary, none "except graves among their chosen lava-beds." Inside the Stronghold the Modoc argued over what to do. Some wanted a settlement. Others were certain that surrender meant removal or the rope, and they pushed for a harder course.

On April 11, 1873, at a meeting in the peace tent, Kintpuash and several other Modoc killed General Canby and the commissioner Eleazar Thomas and wounded Alfred Meacham. It was the only time in the country's Indian wars that a general was killed. It ended any chance of a negotiated peace and brought the full weight of the Army down on the lava beds.

The End of the War

After Canby's death the Army came back in force. A second assault drove the Modoc out of the Stronghold. Short of water and supplies, the band broke apart into the surrounding country, where the fighters were hunted, split, and worn down through the late spring. Some surrendered. Others were run to ground. Kintpuash was taken on June 1, 1873, and with his capture the fighting was over.

A military commission tried Kintpuash and five others. Kintpuash, Schonchin John, Black Jim, and Boston Charley were sentenced to death and hanged at Fort Klamath on October 3, 1873. Two others, Barncho and Slolux, had their sentences commuted to imprisonment. After the hanging the four dead men's heads were removed and shipped to the Army Medical Museum in Washington.

After the War

The punishment did not stop at the gallows. The government removed the surviving members of Kintpuash's band, more than one hundred and fifty people, far from their homeland to the Quapaw Agency in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. They were held there as prisoners of war, strangers in a hard and unfamiliar climate, and many of them died in the years that followed.

In 1909 some of the Oklahoma Modoc were finally allowed to return to the Klamath Reservation. Others stayed in Oklahoma, where their descendants live today as the Modoc Nation. The people endured in two places, and they carried the memory of the homeland and of the war with them.

The Modoc War has long been told as a frontier drama with Kintpuash cast as its villain. That version was written by the men who won it, and it skips the only question that matters, which is why the Modoc were in the lava beds in the first place. They were there because the country was theirs, because they were ordered off it, and because they went back. A small band held a whole army in the stone until the cost came due. The record that came down to us was written by the side that beat them. This book gives the Modoc back the center of their own war.