By H.L. Delaney · June 20, 2026

Scarface Charley: Chikchikam Lupalkuelatko and the Modoc War

The Name and the Scar

The Modoc fighter the soldiers called Scarface Charley carried a Modoc name that the record preserves in several spellings, most often written Chikchikam Lupalkuelatko. It marks the scar he wore on his face and how he came by it. As a boy he was run over by a wagon, a mail stage in most tellings, and the injury left a deep mark down his cheek that stayed with him for the rest of his life. The English nickname the settlers gave him was a plain translation of the wound. The family rolls kept during the years of exile record him as Chik-chack-am. This page uses both his names, the Modoc one where it can.

The early record of his life is thin. He was born in the Lost River and Tule Lake country, the Modoc homeland in the high basin along what is now the California and Oregon line, in the years before removal closed in on his people. The sources do not agree on the year of his birth, and this account will not invent one for them. What the record carries plainly, and from many hands, is what he did once the war began.

The First Shot at Lost River

The Modoc War opened at dawn on November 29, 1872, when the Army rode into the Modoc camp on Lost River to force Kintpuash's band back onto the Klamath Reservation. This was homeland the Modoc had already been made to leave, sent to live on Klamath ground where they could not feed themselves, under a treaty they had been told meant one thing while the English paper said another. Behind that removal stood a policy the state had put into open words. In 1851 California's first governor, Peter Burnett, told the legislature that "a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct." The men in the Lost River camp that morning were defending their right to live in their own country.

The soldiers moved to disarm the Modoc men. Scarface Charley was among them, and he and an Army officer ended up facing each other with weapons drawn. Both fired. Some accounts name that exchange as the first shot of the war, and some place the opening shot elsewhere in the confusion of the morning. The record does not settle it, and the fight was underway before either side had decided it had begun.

Whoever fired first, the raid failed in its purpose. Modocs and soldiers were killed, the camp scattered, and Kintpuash's people fled south across Tule Lake into the lava beds. Scarface Charley went with them, and from that morning he was one of the fighters the whole war would turn on.

Captain Jack's Field Commander

Inside the lava beds, in the broken volcanic ground the Army came to call Captain Jack's Stronghold, fewer than sixty Modoc fighters held off the United States Army through the winter of 1872 and into the spring of 1873. Scarface Charley was among the ablest of them. He served Kintpuash as a field commander and a tactician, and he knew that country the way a man knows ground he has hunted and traveled his whole life. In a maze of trenches, lava tubes, and sharp black rock that swallowed the advantage of numbers, that knowledge was itself a weapon.

He fought in the major engagements of the war, and he was trusted to carry word across the line, one of the men who moved between the Modocs and the soldiers while there was still talking to be done. Among the Modocs and among the officers who wrote about the war afterward, he held a steady reputation as the best fighter the Modocs had. He also held to something harder to name. He meant to keep his people in their own country without letting the fight turn them into the thing that had come to destroy them.

The first great test of the Stronghold came in January 1873, when the Army moved on the lava beds in force and through heavy fog. The assault broke against the ground. The soldiers took casualties and fell back, and the Modocs held their position without losing a fighter. Wins like that came from men who could read the rock, hold their fire, and pick their moment, since the Modoc never had the numbers to win any other way. Scarface Charley was among the surest of those men.

The Thomas-Wright Fight

By the middle of April 1873 the war had turned. A renewed Army assault had at last forced the Modoc out of the ground they had held all winter, and the fighters slipped away into the surrounding lava country. The Army sent patrols across the broken ground to find them again. One of those patrols found Scarface Charley.

On April 26, 1873, at the foot of a butte in the lava country, in the action the Army recorded as the Thomas-Wright fight and also called Sand Butte, Captain Evan Thomas and Lieutenant Thomas Wright led a patrol of more than sixty soldiers and scouts out to reconnoiter the ground south of the Stronghold. The patrol stopped to rest in a hollow. Modoc fighters, roughly two dozen of them, held the high ground above and opened fire. Scarface Charley led them.

The patrol was shattered. About two-thirds of the command were killed or wounded, and every officer on the patrol died, Thomas and Wright among them. For the number of men engaged, it was among the worst defeats the Army took in the whole war, and the news reached the East as a shock. A patrol sent to hunt a handful of Modoc had been all but destroyed by them, and the officers who led it were dead.

The day is remembered for more than the killing. Accounts hold that as the fight wound down, with the survivors broken and pinned in the rocks, Scarface Charley called out to the soldiers still alive and told them to go home, that enough men had died. His words come down in more than one version, and this account will paraphrase rather than put in his mouth a quotation that cannot be verified. Their sense holds steady across the tellings. He had done what the fight required, and once it was decided he called for the rest of the killing to stop.

The Man Who Would Not Be Made Chief

By the late spring of 1873 the Modoc resistance was breaking apart. The bands split. Hooker Jim and part of his following surrendered to the Army and then guided the soldiers through the lava country after Kintpuash, and the ground the fighters had held so long could no longer be held. In that unraveling, accounts hold that some of the Modoc looked to Scarface Charley to take up the leadership of the fight. He was the ablest fighter left, and the reasoning was plain. He refused. The record on the refusal is thin, and this account leaves it where the sources do. Even so, it is part of how he has come down to us, the best warrior in the war and a man who would not command it.

Kintpuash was captured in June 1873. He and three others were tried at Fort Klamath and hanged that October, and the surviving Modoc, roughly 150 people, were shipped as prisoners of war to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Scarface Charley went into that exile with them. For a time the Army named him a leader of the exiled band. It did not last. Within about a year he was removed and replaced, in part over his limited English and in part, by some accounts, because he would not press his people to give up their own ways at the agency's asking.

How He Has Been Remembered

He lived out the rest of his life in Indian Territory. In the years after the war he spent some time speaking about it to audiences in the East and the Midwest, telling the story of the fighting to people who had followed it in the newspapers. Later in life he was converted to Christianity by missionaries at the agency. He died on December 3, 1896, in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, of tuberculosis, one of the diseases that took many of the exiled Modoc in the years after the war. He did not see the Klamath Basin again.

He has been remembered above all as the finest fighter the Modoc put in the field, the man who broke the Thomas-Wright patrol and then, in the same fight, told the surviving soldiers to go home. Both belong to the same man. He fought to keep his people in the country that was theirs, against soldiers sent by a government that had already said in plain words that it meant to see that people gone. He set a limit on the killing while the killing was still his to continue. The government called men like him renegades for coming home to the land they had been ordered to forget, and the record that survived was written mostly by the side that gave them the name. It has taken a long time to read past that record to the man.

For me this is family history as much as it is record. I am an enrolled member of the Klamath Confederated Tribes, with Modoc ancestry, and I have tried to set down what the sources will carry and to say plainly where they run thin. Scarface Charley was a Modoc man who lived and fought and chose, and meeting him as that is what this site, and the novel behind it, are for.

Sources & further reading

• “Modoc War,” The Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon Historical Society. oregonencyclopedia.org
• 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 and the Causes That Led to It (1914), a firsthand Modoc account by the son of Winema and Frank Riddle.
• Cheewa James, Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn't Die (Naturegraph Publishers, 2008), by a descendant of Modoc War survivors.