By H.L. Delaney · September 2, 2026

The Hanging at Fort Klamath, 1873: The Execution of Captain Jack

The Sentence

The Modoc War ended in the early summer of 1873 with the surrender of Kintpuash and the last of his band, run down in the lava country after the Army had pursued them through a winter and a spring. What Washington wanted for the Modoc had been set down in plain language months before the fighting was over. In March 1873, General William T. Sherman wired General Edward Canby that if the Modoc 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 order named the end from the start. Everything that came after the surrender was the machinery for delivering it.

That machinery was a military commission. It sat at Fort Klamath in July 1873 and tried six Modoc men for the killings of Canby and Reverend Eleazar Thomas at the peace tent on the eleventh of April. The six were Kintpuash, whom the soldiers called Captain Jack, along with Schonchin John, Black Jim, Boston Charley, and two younger men named Barncho and Slolux. The men had no defense counsel and followed the proceeding through interpreters. The commission found all six guilty and sentenced all six to hang. There was a double standard buried in the law of it. Twenty years earlier a man named Ben Wright had killed a Modoc party gathered under a flag of truce and had never answered for it in any court; that earlier killing is set down on its own.

The case went to Washington for review. President Ulysses S. Grant confirmed the sentences, and then, only days before the date set for the executions, he commuted the sentences of the two youngest men. Barncho and Slolux were spared the scaffold and sent instead to the military prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Barncho died there within about two years. Slolux survived his imprisonment and was later released. The reprieve came so late that, by several accounts, the two men were not told of it until the day of the execution, brought out with the others before they learned they would live.

That left four men under sentence of death: Kintpuash, Schonchin John, Black Jim, and Boston Charley. The date of the execution was set for October 3, 1873. The trial and the questions of law it raised are taken up on their own in the account of the trial and the exile. What follows here is the record of the day itself.

The Fort and the Scaffold

Fort Klamath stood on the Klamath Reservation in southern Oregon, north of Upper Klamath Lake and well away from the lava country where the war had been fought. The choice of ground carried a bitter weight. It was removal onto this same reservation, and the hard years the Modoc had spent on it sharing land with the Klamath, that had helped drive Kintpuash's band back to the Lost River in the first place and set the war in motion. Kintpuash was to be hanged on the reservation he had refused to be confined to.

The Army had brought the condemned men to the fort after their capture, and it was there the commission had sat through the summer. It was there the scaffold went up. The gallows was built in the open, within sight of the fort's parade ground, large enough to take four men at once. In the days before the execution the prisoners could watch the work of it being done. The Army made no attempt to carry the hanging out quietly or behind a closed wall. It was arranged as a public act, on a reservation full of Native people, and the arrangement was deliberate.

October 3, 1873

On the morning of October 3, 1873, the four men were brought out together. They were seated on the scaffold, their arms bound behind them, and the ropes were fitted one by one. An officer read the order of execution aloud. A chaplain prayed. Then the trap gave way and the four men dropped at once, before the assembled soldiers and the gathered Native people. By the middle of the morning it was done.

Accounts written afterward differ on what was spoken on the scaffold and by whom, and this account will not put words in the men's mouths that they may never have said. What is documented is the shape of the morning. Four men who had led and fought for their people were hanged by the neck until dead, in front of those people, and then cut down.

Made to Watch

The hanging was staged as a lesson, and its audience was chosen with that purpose in mind. Modoc prisoners were brought out to watch, among them the wives and children of the men on the scaffold. The Klamath people, on whose reservation the fort stood, were present as well, some of them brought in for the occasion. Several hundred people are said to have been on hand.

A public execution of that kind was meant to be seen and long remembered. The government had fought a small band to a standstill through a winter and a spring and had lost a general in the doing, the only general killed in the whole of the Indian wars. The hanging at Fort Klamath was the answer it wanted witnessed, and it was the answer Sherman had already named. His telegram had told Canby the Modoc would need no reservation but graves in their own lava country. The graves at Fort Klamath were that promise carried out, dug on schedule and witnessed on order. The lesson was meant for the Modoc who had lived through the war, and for the other peoples of the basin who might be watching to learn the terms on which the United States meant to deal with them.

The killings were also news. The war had been followed in eastern papers for months, in part because it had gone so badly for the Army and because a general lay dead. The execution gave that long story its ending, and the ending was printed and read across the country. For the government the public hanging closed an account it had found humiliating to keep open.

What Was Done to the Bodies

The four men were buried at the fort. Their remains did not stay whole, and they did not stay in the ground. Accounts from the day describe soldiers and onlookers cutting the hanging rope into lengths and taking locks of the men's hair and pieces of their clothing to keep or to sell, a traffic in the dead that began before the scaffold was even down.

After the burial the heads of the four men were removed and shipped east by rail to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, where the crania of Native people were gathered and catalogued as specimens through those decades. Accounts from the time also report that Kintpuash's body was embalmed and carried east to be shown as a traveling exhibit, put on display for paid admission in eastern towns. That report was never confirmed, and it is best held at the distance the record allows. What the record documents plainly is the removal of the heads.

The taking of the heads followed a wider practice of the period, in which the skulls and remains of Native people were gathered by the hundreds for government and scientific collections. What was done to the four Modoc at Fort Klamath was done to many others across the West in those years. That is where this belongs in the record, as one instance among many of a policy carried out in the open.

The crania were later transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, where they were held for the better part of a century. In 1984 the remains were at last returned to the Modoc and reburied. It took more than a hundred years to give back what should never have been taken, and by then every person who had ordered or carried out the hanging was long dead.

How It Has Been Remembered

Fort Klamath is a small county museum and historic site today, and the ground where the scaffold stood is marked. The graves of the four men are there. Visitors come, and some of them are Modoc, descendants of the people who were made to watch on that October morning.

The memory of the hanging did not stay where the Army left it. Among the Modoc it has been carried down as a founding grief of the modern tribe, held in the same account as the exile to Indian Territory that followed within weeks of the execution. The Modoc who were sent to Oklahoma became the Modoc Nation, federally recognized there today. Those who were later allowed to return rejoined the Klamath Tribes in Oregon. Both peoples keep the names of the men who died at Fort Klamath. In October 2023, on the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the execution, Modoc and Klamath people gathered at the fort to mark the day and to remember the four.

The documented pieces of this history, the orders and the trial papers and the record of what became of the men afterward, are gathered on The Record. Keeping the day accurate is part of the same work the novel sets out to do.

For Kintpuash there was no grave his own people could tend for more than a hundred years, and no marker at the place he had asked to be left in peace. He had wanted a small reservation on the Lost River, in the country his people had always held. What he was given was a trial he had no means to answer, a scaffold on another people's reservation, and a long century in a museum drawer. The men hanged at Fort Klamath died for a war that a stated policy of extermination had made. California's first governor had put that policy into words in 1851, declaring that a war of extermination would be waged until the Indian race went extinct, and the Army carried its own version of it into the Klamath Basin. Sherman had already named the only reservation the government meant the Modoc to have. On October 3, 1873, at Fort Klamath, it gave them the graves.

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 and the Causes That Led to It (1914).
• Cheewa James, Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn't Die (Naturegraph Publishers, 2008).
• “Kintpuash (Captain Jack),” The Oregon Encyclopedia, oregonencyclopedia.org.