By H.L. Delaney · July 19, 2026

Winema (Toby Riddle): The Modoc Woman Who Tried to Stop the Modoc War

Her Names

Her own people knew her as Nannookdoowah. Around the mining town of Yreka the settlers called her Toby. The name that made her famous, Winema, came last, and it came from a white man who put it on the cover of a book. The title of this post carries Winema because that is the name the record kept. The rest of it carries Nannookdoowah, because that is the name that was hers before any of the others were laid on her.

A Modoc Woman, Married Young

She was born Modoc, in the Lost River and Tule Lake country of the Klamath Basin, into the same people and the same villages as Kintpuash, the man settlers called Captain Jack. She was his cousin. She grew up in country the Modoc had held long before any border was drawn across it.

While she was still a girl she was married to Frank Riddle, a Kentucky miner who had come west for gold and stayed. The novel behind this site refuses the romance the legend later attached to that marriage. In the book it is a bargain struck over a child, made in a time when California law and frontier custom treated a Native girl as property. She learned English in Riddle's house and kept her Modoc, and that made her useful to men on both sides of a country sliding toward war.

Interpreter for the Peace Commission

When the Modoc War broke out in the winter of 1872 and Kintpuash's band fell back into the lava beds, the government sent a peace commission to talk them out. Frank and Nannookdoowah Riddle were hired as its interpreters, working alongside the commissioners Alfred Meacham, Reverend Eleazar Thomas, and Leroy Dyar, and the soldier sent to enforce the government's terms, General Edward Canby. That put a Modoc woman in the middle of the war's most dangerous negotiation, carrying words in both directions between her own cousin, dug into the Stronghold, and the officers ordered to remove him.

She had not asked for the position, and it was not a neutral one. She translated words she had not chosen, for men who wanted the Modoc marched to a reservation far from home. Her people wanted a small reservation in their own Lost River country. The distance between those two demands was the whole war, and she stood inside it, trusted completely by no one.

The Warning

In the first days of April 1873 the talks turned. Nannookdoowah learned that the Modoc no longer meant to bargain at the peace tent but to kill the commissioners there, gambling that removing the officers would break the Army's will. She carried the warning to the peace camp and told the commissioners plainly that if they went to the council they would be killed.

They went anyway. The meeting stayed on the calendar for Good Friday, April 11. She went with them, knowing what she had been told, unable to turn either side away from the ground they were walking onto.

Good Friday, 1873

At the tent the warning came true. Kintpuash drew a pistol and shot General Canby, the only United States general killed in any of the country's Indian wars. Reverend Thomas was killed beside him. Leroy Dyar and Frank Riddle broke away and ran. Alfred Meacham was shot several times and fell, and a Modoc bent over his body to take his scalp. Meacham lived. The account of what was said and done at that tent survives in the commission's own papers, gathered among the documents on the Record.

The Legend Meacham Built

Meacham lived, and he spent the rest of his life telling the story of that morning. In his telling, Nannookdoowah was the woman who had saved him, and he is the source of the Winema legend that followed. He built a touring lecture-play around it and carried it east, traveling with Frank, their son Jeff Riddle, and other Modoc and Klamath people, and putting them on stages for audiences who wanted to see figures from a war they had read about in the papers. In 1876 he published a book he titled Wi-ne-ma (The Woman-Chief) and Her People. The name on that cover was his to give, and he gave it.

This is the part the record does not admit on its own. The version of Good Friday that the country received came from the man whose life it flattered, spoken from a stage and printed under a name he had chosen for her. A Modoc woman who had translated for men she did not trust, and been married to one she had not chosen, was remade into a symbol of reconciliation by the same country that had just hanged her cousin and shipped her people to Indian Territory. In the novel she stands through those performances and never gives Meacham the gratitude his hand keeps reaching for. What the symbol left out was almost everything that was true about her.

After the War

She lived a long time. In her later years Congress granted her a small government pension of twenty-five dollars a month for what she had done at the peace tent, an unusual act for a Native woman. Her son Jeff Riddle grew up to publish his own account, The Indian History of the Modoc War, one of the few tellings of that war set down by a Modoc. She died in 1920 on the Klamath Reservation, in the country she had never truly left. A national forest in that basin still carries the name Meacham gave her.

Why I Tell It This Way

I am an enrolled member of the Klamath Confederated Tribes, with Modoc ancestry, and Nannookdoowah belongs to the memory I write from. The easy version of her is the bridge, the good Indian who saved a white man, and it is the version the plaques still tell. She was harder and more whole than that. She was a Modoc woman married off young, made to translate for the men sent to remove her people, standing inside a peace she would never be allowed to live in, and never once stopping being her cousin's kin.

The record that survived was written by the people who won, and they wrote her into a legend that was easier to look at than her life. Her real name was Nannookdoowah. What she did, in the end, was survive. That is the person I have tried to keep true, here and in the novel behind this site, Captain Jack & The Original Renegades.