Chapter 24

Shining Leaf Moon

Although Captain Jack might still be leader of the Modocs, he was nonetheless doing just as he was told to do.

Curly Headed Doctor and his Lost River murderers had full control of the band now.

Hours ago they had scurried back into their rocky Stronghold to learn that Curly Jack and his bunch had killed one soldier and chased another away on the east side of the Lava Beds. But Curly Jack’s warriors had nothing to show for their efforts.

The peace tent murderers argued and shoved and argued some more over the scanty spoils carried from the bloody meadow: a few items of clothing, a derringer and a horse, along with the soldier chief’s sword and uniform.

As much as some of the murderers tried, they did not succeed in getting Captain Jack to back down from his claim to everything that belonged to Canby.

“I killed him,” Jack told the crowd, pantomiming with his outstretched finger like a pistol he held right in Ellen’s Man’s face.

“I killed him,” Ellen’s Man said, knocking the chief’s hand aside. “He was running away after you shot him. I made him dead.”

Ellen’s Man did not win the contest.

Once Canby’s belongings were securely in Jack’s possession, Ellen’s Man kept the soldier tyee’s pocket watch and chain. The Sunday Doctor’s clothing was divided between Bogus and Boston Charley. Old man Mee-Cham’s possessions were split between Shacknasty Jim, Schonchin John and the ridiculed Hooker Jim.

He sat to the side of things now, this Hooker Jim—ignored even by his father-in-law, the shaman.

Hooker had bungled his job: killing Commissioner Dyar. He had run when faced with the white man’s gun. Captain Jack led the chorus of those who believed Hooker did not deserve anything taken from the murder scene. So rather than celebrate with the others, Jim had instead to suffer the ridicule heaped on him by the band as they prepared to celebrate their victory with the falling of the sun from the cold, snowy sky.

“We must be ready when the soldiers come,” Jack reminded them as the greasewood bonfire was built, flames radiating off the black rocks surrounding their Stronghold.

“Kientpoos is mad with fear! Ha! The soldiers will all run away now,” said the Doctor with scorn.

“We have killed their chief right before their eyes!” added Schonchin John.

“That will make the soldiers angry!” said Scar-Faced Charley.

“He speaks the truth,” Jack said. “And the Teninos from Warm Springs are coming to lead the white men in this fight!”

“Let them come,” boasted the Doctor. “We will be ready for them. The full power of my medicine is not yet tested. Tonight we dance!”

The women and young warriors screeched their approval as the Doctor turned away to complete his preparations at the pole where he hung more feathers and animal skins, along with two more fresh scalps. When the drums began their soul-stirring beat, the young warriors and squaws alike removed some of their clothing despite the dropping temperatures and falling snow. The huge fire coupled with the furious dancing kept them warm until the moon sank far in the west.

As a murky sun rose in the east, shedding gray light over the white land, Jack’s scouts reported no movement of troops from the soldier camp west of the Stronghold. And instead of marching toward the Lava Beds, the soldiers camped by Hospital Rock were seen marching south.

The night-long dancing and medicine making seemed to consolidate the Doctor’s power. No soldiers were coming to avenge the murders the Modocs had hoped would cause the white men to resume the war.

So they danced through that next day and into the night, knowing the white man’s army and the white man’s government were powerless to act against the magic of their shaman.

They danced.

*   *   *

By dawn on Saturday the carpenters had three coffins prepared.

Canby and Thomas were gently laid to rest and the lids nailed shut for their trip north to Yreka for embalming.

Meacham clung tenaciously to life, arousing himself from time to time to curse surgeon Cabaniss for forcing the whiskey past his lips, and to clutch the hand of Captain Ferree as he once more slipped into blessed sleep.

Word spread through camp that twelfth day of April that at dawn some Modocs had fired on a young sentry posted near the signal tower on the bluff.

Later in the day word was flashed from Mason’s camp that a scouting party sent south under Lieutenant E. R. Theller had been shot at by a small war-party stalking them. Although a lot of bullets were fired between the groups, apparently no damage was done to either party.

As the clocks inched toward noon on Easter Sunday, the thirteenth, the soldiers in Gillem’s camp learned that Lieutenant Sherwood had finally succumbed to his wounds, suffered just minutes before the slaughter began at the peace tent.

Solemnly, the two commissioners’ coffins were laid side by side in the back of an army ambulance for the trip to Yreka. From there Thomas was to be transferred to his family in San Francisco, Canby transported on for burial in Indianapolis.

While the general had not been all that popular among the officers and troops during the months of posturing and waiting, Canby’s brutal death now stirred talk of rage and recrimination for the Modocs. The soldiers were ready to storm the Stronghold—but Gillem held his hand from smiting the warriors.

The colonel’s signal sergeant brought word down from the signal tower not long after the bodies were on their way west to Yreka: chief of scouts Donald McKay had arrived at Mason’s camp with his Tenino mercenaries from the Warm Springs reservation in northern Oregon.

As far back as 22 March the War Department had authorized signing on the Warm Springs Indians to fight the Modocs in the Lava Beds. Canby had believed he had a powerful negotiating tool in telling Captain Jack that his enemies were on their way to fight the renegades.

But while Canby and the army might have faith in Donald McKay, the Tenino mercenaries did not.

McKay himself represented both bloods involved in this fight. While his father had been a famous fur trader with the Northwest Fur Company working out of Astoria on the Columbia River, his mother was a Cayuse Chinook woman. McKay’s whole life had been spent traversing the wilds of the northwest, either as a trapper himself, a guide for the army, or as an interpreter for hire. It was while serving as scout for the army during the Snake War that McKay first crossed swords with the Warm Springs fighters, who claimed the underhanded half-breed swindled them of much of their army pay.

But with the army that spring of 1873, it was a matter of moving out under the command of Donald McKay or not going at all. And if they did not go, the Warm Springs scouts would not be paid anything.

Seventy-two of them headed south for Tule Lake on 4 April.

Their arrival on Easter Sunday caused a stir in both camps as the troops realized they would be marching into the Stronghold at last. Only one small problem: these converted Christian soldiers refused to fight on Sunday.

Monday would be soon enough for the Teninos.

Quartermasters prepared weapons and rations as officers laid out a plan of attack. While most of the troops were buoyant in expectation of a quick and decisive fight of it, the few soldiers who had been in on the debacle of 17 January were decidedly more solemn.

Amid the revelry that night before the planned assault, some of the men in both camps sat talking with comrades of other wars and faraway battles, of places called Antietam and Cold Harbor, Manassas and the Wilderness, Kennesaw Mountain and the James River. Toasting one another’s health come dawn and the orders to advance on that impregnable fortress of black rock where the Modocs danced and sang and celebrated over the scalps of good soldiers.

A few made oral wills or scribbled down their final requests and stuffed them into the hands of friends. To see that a wedding ring made it back home to a wife; a cabinet photo back to children waiting in the east; a little extra pay forwarded to some aging parents somewhere in southern Ohio.

A few of the many faceless enlisted who could not write asked friends who could to put down their name on a piece of paper they would pin to their uniform come morning. So that when they died, the men burying them would know them, at least by name.

And there were always the songs to be sung: “The Girl I Left Behind Me” given voice repeatedly over those campfires where gathered the men in blue, young and old alike; along with the “Doxology” and “Annie Laurie,” sung as a bittersweet lament for love’s anguish.

Likewise the many raised their tin cups to toast to success with the coming light of day. Seamus Donegan stood among them, soldiers all at that moment, adding his roughened, off-key brogue of a voice to theirs.

“Then stand by your glasses steady,

This world’s a round of lies;

Three cheers for the dead already,

And hurrah for the next who dies!”

Not only in Yreka that day, but elsewhere across the land, a terrible grief was sweeping through every heart. As ink was smeared across long sheets of newsprint, the shocking headlines reached a stunned nation that Easter Sunday. On every street corner from big city to small hamlet, newsboys hawked their wares to angry customers, eager for any scrap of news from the bloody Lava Beds.

Slowly, but steadily, the cries for a war of extermination were heard echoing across the land.

In the far west, two long lines of silent, bare-headed mourners lined the streets of that California mining town beneath flags dropped to half-mast. The army’s black-draped ambulance pulled up before the only mortician in Yreka, and the two rifle-case coffins unloaded while the loud cries of vengeance against Captain Jack rose to the leaden skies once more.

Outside in the streets they hung a life-size effigy of Interior Secretary Columbus Delano, who had urged his peace policy on the Grant administration’s War Department.

“Give them bullets and grapeshot!” was the shout raised that day.

“No talk of peace with murderers—let ’em choke on their own blood!”

Canby lay in state for most of the day and into that black evening while thousands for many miles around, even schoolchildren dismissed from classes, came in to pay their respects and glimpse the mortal remains of the man who had given his life, sacrificed on the altar of the hope of making peace with Jack’s Modoc renegades.

Late that Sunday night a recovering A. B. Meacham’s own brief telegram outlining the murders at the peace tent in horrid details was speeding to officials in Washington. His painful conclusion: “We believe that complete subjugation by the military is the only method by which to deal with these Indians.”

Receiving word of Canby’s murder at a late supper, General William Tecumseh Sherman immediately hurried to a midnight counsel with President Grant before wiring General Schofield, Commanding Officer of the Military Division of the Pacific, recently returned from Hawaii.

The President now sanctions the most severe punishment of the Modocs and I hope to hear that they have met the doom they so richly have earned by their insolence and perfidy.

More to the gritty business of waging war on the Modocs, Sherman selected Colonel Jefferson C. Davis to fill Canby’s role as Commander of the Department of the Columbia. But Davis would be some time in arriving on the scene. For the present, it would fall to Colonel Alvan C. Gillem to prosecute Sherman’s war of annihilation on sixty Modoc warriors.

At his command, Gillem had fully five troops of cavalry and five companies of infantry, in addition to four artillery batteries and the newly-arrived mercenaries under Donald McKay. His firepower had recently been augmented by the addition of four Coehorn mortars capable of effective bombardment of the Stronghold. For every soldier to carry into battle was a supply of five hundred hand grenades from the armory at Benicia Barracks near San Francisco.

Yet Gillem’s officers continued to shrink from the idea of a direct frontal assault on an impregnable position backed by a determined enemy. Their idea was to soften up the Modoc positions by judicious use of the mountain howitzers and mortars before the foot soldiers moved in: Major Mason from the east with some three hundred men, Major Green marching from the west with 375 soldiers.

Gillem’s final orders, “Tell your men to remember General Canby, Lieutenant Sherwood and the flag.”

They didn’t get moving until Monday. By that night of the fourteenth, Mason moved his troops and the Warm Springs Indians into position on the east. There was a slight delay while the seventy-two Indians held a Christian service of song, thanksgiving and prayer before going into battle.

So different from the attack of last January—no blinding, confusing fog awaited them now. Only a balmy, moonless sky, undisturbed by a single breeze.

After bugles blew reveille at midnight, Green ordered his soldiers forward at two A.M. across the sharp rocks in the dim starshine to the nearby peninsula to await the coming of dawn less than a mile from the hostiles. Mortars and mountain howitzers had been broken down and packed on foot-sure mules for the trip into the Lava Beds. Each man carried sixty rounds for his Springfield. On his back was a haversack containing fifteen hardtack and a skimpy supply of salt-pork.

Unlike the disaster of January, this time the troops were no longer dependent upon doing the job in one day. This time they were prepared to stay until the job was done.

A handful of the infantrymen left behind to guard Gillem’s camp decided they had the best idea for starting the war to annihilate the Modocs. As pickets who hid among the rocks a few yards east of the soldier tents, they watched with surprise as a lone warrior strode up out of the darkness.

Slow-witted Long Jim had decided he would like to visit the soldier camp again, as he had done so many times in the past weeks of negotiation and wrangling. Yet he walked right into a far different reception than the one he had enjoyed before the murder of the peace commissioners.

Seizing Long Jim, the soldiers argued as to the best way to kill the Modoc, something no soldier could boast of having yet done in the war of the Lava Beds. They decided to convince Jim to escape—then shoot him as an escaping prisoner of war. While they were arguing over their options, Jim took it upon himself to flee toward the Stronghold.

The hapless infantrymen fired, and fired again at their escaping prisoner, until the starlit darkness swallowed Long Jim from pursuit.

“Now I know why we were left here and the rest of ’em got orders to do the fighting,” grumbled one of the infantrymen. “Ain’t none of us can shoot to hit a Modoc, even a old slow-witted one like that’un.”

As the minutes crawled into hours and the stars whirled overhead, Green’s troops inched closer and closer to the peninsula where they would await first light. Off to Donegan’s right a soldier stumbled and fell clambering over the black rocks. His Springfield clattered to the ground, discharging.

Every man dropped to his belly, most believing they had been spotted by Modoc snipers—a repeat of the horror encountered in last January’s defeat.

But as that solitary shot echoed away over the silent stronghold, only harsh whispers from confused and harried soldiers were heard beneath the black of night.

No Modoc warriors were waiting to swallow the soldiers this time.

*   *   *

Jack issued orders to William Faithful and Scar-Faced Charley to roust everyone from their sleep. After that single gunshot had echoed over their Stronghold, wasn’t many of the Modocs still sleeping anyway.

Everyone knew the attack was coming.

Old women and men took charge of the children and moved them farther back into the deepest of the caves, fortified with their skimpy supplies of water and what food they had.

The young women went out with the warriors to help reload the captured Springfield rifles, keep powder and ball supplies near at hand for the older muzzle-loaders, along with carrying water skins and canteens to their men who would stand the brunt of the coming assault.

In the dim light of coal-bright fires, the women wrapped rawhide around the hands, elbows, knees and feet of the warriors for protection from the sharp rocks they would be called upon to scale during the battle.

All Captain Jack could do now was to wait for dawn, anxious to see if the shaman’s magic still possessed enough power to hold the white soldiers at bay.