By H.L. Delaney · September 15, 2026

After the War: The Modoc Exile to Indian Territory

The Modoc War ended in the early summer of 1873, and the killing did not end with it. On October 3 the government hanged Kintpuash and three other men at Fort Klamath, and that morning is often where the story is allowed to stop. What the United States did to the rest of the Modoc came after the scaffold, and it lasted far longer than the war had. The survivors, more than one hundred fifty people, were taken from their own country and carried a thousand miles east to Indian Territory. They had killed no one. They were removed anyway, as a whole people, for what a handful of their men had done and for the plain fact that they had refused to leave the land they came from. The word for that is collective punishment, and it is the right word here.

Held as prisoners of war

The Modoc who came out of the lava beds alive were held as prisoners of war. In the middle of October 1873, less than two weeks after the hanging, the Army loaded them onto wagons at Fort Klamath, men and women and children together, and started them east. The Modoc Nation's own account records twenty-seven wagons and, once the group reached the railhead, cattle cars with armed guards posted at the doors of every car, day and night. This was the government moving a whole community under rifle, the way it would move a shipment it did not trust to arrive on its own.

The removal was a second one. Years before the war, the Modoc had already been pushed onto the Klamath Reservation in southern Oregon, onto land shared with other peoples and short of everything, and it was the hunger and the crowding there that had driven Kintpuash's band back to the Lost River in the first place. The exile to Indian Territory took that same logic and stretched it across the width of the country. The homeland at Tule Lake and the Lost River was the one place the Modoc had asked to keep, and the exile was built to put it permanently out of their reach.

A thousand miles from the Lost River

Their destination was the Quapaw Agency, in the far northeastern corner of what is now Oklahoma. It was low, humid country, nothing like the high desert basin the Modoc knew, and they were set down on a small tract and told to farm ground they had never worked. The men hired out to their white neighbors and hauled freight into the surrounding towns to keep the group fed. The agency put the children in its school. Everything about the place was arranged to make the people over into something the government found easier to manage, and to make certain they stayed where they had been put. The trial that condemned Kintpuash, and the amnesty that spared the informers who had turned on him, are set out in the companion account of the trial and the exile.

The dying

The exile killed them steadily. The land was strange, the diseases were new to them, and the grief of the removal sat on top of both. The National Park Service records that the Modoc population fell by a third after the exile and that many died of tuberculosis. The Modoc Nation counts fifty-four dead within the first six years, so that by 1879 the group at the Quapaw Agency had dropped to ninety-nine people. Among the first buried in the agency ground were the children. A people that had held off the United States Army through a winter in the lava beds was being worn down in Oklahoma by illness and homesickness, quietly, year after year, with no battle left to explain the losses.

The long road home

The removal was meant to be permanent. The government had a word, renegade, for Modoc who kept trying to go back to their own country, and the whole machinery of the exile was built to make going back impossible. It held for a generation. Only in 1909, under an act of Congress, were the Oklahoma Modoc allowed to return to Oregon at all, and by then most had spent thirty-six years building lives where they had been sent. Some went back to the Klamath country in Oregon; the Modoc Nation records that twenty-nine made the journey west, while the majority stayed in Oklahoma. One people now had two homes, a thousand miles apart, and both of them were the direct result of a removal that had set out to erase the Modoc entirely.

Termination and restoration

The story did not settle in 1909. The Modoc who stayed in Oklahoma reorganized and continued as the Modoc Nation, a federally recognized tribe. The Modoc who returned to Oregon rejoined the Klamath Tribes, the confederation of the Klamath, the Modoc, and the Yahooskin Paiute peoples. Then the federal government came for the recognition itself. Under the Klamath Termination Act of 1954, Congress ended its relationship with the Klamath Tribes, and the act swept in the Oklahoma Modoc as well, since the law still counted them among the Klamath. For the second time in a century the Modoc were told, on paper, that they had ceased to exist.

Both peoples fought their way back. The Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma regained federal recognition in 1978. The Klamath Tribes regained theirs in 1986. The recognition returned, though the land taken during termination did not come back with it. The arc that runs from the Lost River to the Quapaw Agency to the termination rolls is one long record of a government working to end a people, and of that people outlasting every attempt to do it.

This site keeps the documented ground beneath that history. The telegrams, the peace commission papers, and the Fort Klamath trial record are gathered on The Record. The full story, from the reeds of Tule Lake through the war and the long exile that followed it, is the one the novel Captain Jack & The Original Renegades sets out to tell.