Chapter 26

April 16–20, 1873

“So what’s kicking ’round in your craw, Eugene?” Ian O’Roarke asked early that third morning of fighting at the Stronghold as he walked up to the young man who had recently celebrated his nineteenth birthday.

Eugene Hovey ground the back of a dirty hand under his nose. “I asked that officer over there to back off on me.”

“He working you too hard?” Ian asked, knowing full well that Hovey was among several of the braver civilians who had volunteered to take their mule teams into the Lava Beds for the purpose of transporting supplies into and hauling the dead and wounded soldiers away from the battle lines.

“Not that, Mr. O’Roarke,” the young man answered. “I just got me a hunch this morning—a feeling something’s bound to happen to me in that infernal place if I keep pushing it the way I’ve been.”

“You ask the quartermaster if you can back down for ’while?”

Hovey nodded. “He said he knew how I felt, going in there with them Modoc sharpshooters and all—but he had his job to do, and that was getting the wounded and dead soldiers out.”

“Suppose you just sit things out here awhile and let them come find you.”

This time the youngster shook his head violently. “Oh, no, Mr. O’Roarke! I can’t do that—that’d be like being a coward. Not doing what I was called on to do for the soldiers.”

O’Roarke’s heart felt tugged for this young son of a Yreka friend of his. One day Ian’s own sons would be this age. “Ain’t no law says you gotta go back in there, Eugene.”

“I’ll go. My daddy wouldn’t want to know I backed down from doing what I could for the soldiers.”

“Your daddy’s a fair man. He wouldn’t hold it against you if you got a bad feeling about it. Besides, you’ve done a hell of a lot already. No man can call you coward.”

Eugene sighed and shrugged, reaching down deep into his worn britches. He pulled out his old pocket watch. “My pa give me that a few years back—sixteenth birthday. I figure it ought’n go back to him now.”

Ian felt strange, standing there with that watch plopped in his palm, unable to find words for the sudden, cold feeling that spilled down his spine at that very minute.

Hovey stuffed a handful of crumpled scrip into O’Roarke’s hand on top of the watch. “This here money’s for my ma and pa. Got good wages working for the army while I could.”

“I—I can’t—”

“You gotta take it, Mr. O’Roarke. ’Cepting John Fairchild and Press Dorris—I don’t know nobody else here. And I’m gonna find some paper now—write my ma a letter telling her what’s in my heart before I go on out there again. You wait—”

Ian gripped the young man’s shoulder. “Get hold of yourself, Eugene. You aren’t acting like you’re in your right mind.”

The boy tried a thin smile out, so thin that it quickly drained from his freckled face. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life, Mr. O’Roarke. So, I’m asking you again if you’ll wait while I write my ma a letter.”

Ian felt a burn in his throat as he answered, “I’ll wait, Eugene. You go ahead and take your time writing that letter.”

Since the official word had it that the Modocs were surrounded and only a mopping-up action was required, the quartermaster in charge of removing army casualties from the battlefield could not assign Eugene Hovey an escort for his first trip into the Lava Beds that morning. Eugene was only able to talk another young teamster from Yreka into accompanying him as soon as the sun made its appearance for the day at the eastern edge of the Modoc’s Stronghold.

Alone, the two men were crossing the meadow below the bluff where the peace tent had stood less than a week before.

“You hear something?” Hovey asked, stopping.

His companion came up with his pair of mules. “Not a thing, Eugene.”

Hovey’s eyes strained into the surrounding rocks and brush. He glanced at the mules a moment, trying to pick out if they were acting at all strangely. “Sure you didn’t hear nothing?”

“Not a thing. C’mon. This is the place they murdered that general and the preacher. Gives me the willies. C’mon, Eugene.”

The crack of a rifle from the nearby rocks alerted the men that they were under attack. But as the young teamster turned to yell at Hovey, he found Eugene holding a blood-soaked hand over his eye and forehead, collapsing back against his frantic mules.

Another shot whined overhead, close enough that the youngster heard it hiss past with his name on it.

The teamster bolted off, abandoning the mules and his friend, Eugene Hovey.

Hooker Jim and four young warriors who were among those who had escaped the Stronghold under cover of darkness and were circling around to the southwest that early morning to create some diversionary ruckus at the soldier camp had spotted the two white men coming into the meadow leading their mules.

The five fired a few more shots at the fleeing teamster, then turned back to the body of the white man they had wounded.

They found Hovey barely alive, moaning and calling for someone to be sure to give a letter to his mother. To tell her good-bye for him.

With a savage laugh, Hooker Jim himself put his boot on the young man’s neck and began slashing off the white man’s scalp. Hovey cried out in pain and rage, not able to struggle much as he was already nearing death from the head wound. Venting all their own pent-up rage at the white men and soldiers, the other warriors stripped the young man naked and cut off his manhood parts, stuffing them into the teamster’s mouth. Then, while the others slashed at arms and legs, feet and hands, to dismember the white man, Hooker Jim found a rock he could hold in his hand.

And with it he smashed the young teamster’s head until it was no more than the thickness of two fingers.

The Modoc warriors then followed Hooker Jim, whose idea it was to go through with their original plan of attacking the soldier camp to cause confusion among the white men. They were joined by a dozen more men at the base of the bluff. The warriors hurled themselves against the outlying pickets.

“Sergeant!” hollered Grier, the lieutenant left behind by Gillem to guard his headquarters. “We’ve got Indians in camp!”

Fairchild, Dorris and O’Roarke came running with their weapons, joining other civilians and the soldiers hurrying to meet the attack. Grier quickly scribbled a note for the signal sergeant to send a message to Major Green somewhere near the shoreline of Tule Lake.

Modocs out of stronghold and attacking camp.

A brisk, hot fight held the white men down as the eighteen Modocs spread out, giving the impression of far more warriors firing into camp. O’Roarke and the others had no way of knowing how many Modocs they were facing.

Ian was one certain that Captain Jack would come out of the Stronghold fighting to avenge the damage done him by the soldiers—and what smarter way was there than to totally abandon their Stronghold and immediately attack the soldier camp with his entire force?

Minutes dragged by as bullets whistled overhead and the crack of enemy rifles drew nearer and nearer to Grier’s small band of defenders—until the Modocs crossed into the camp itself.

But just as everything appeared darkest for that small band of defenders, they watched as the Modocs turned, their fire being drawn behind them.

A cheer went up among the civilians and the few soldiers in camp.

Another cheer erupted from a band of reinforcements sent by Major Green from the Lava Beds to rescue Gillem’s headquarters.

“They won’t be back any time soon,” the young lieutenant said confidently.

Ian turned to him. “Wouldn’t be so sure. Captain Jack is out and on the loose now. And there’s no telling what a wounded animal will do.”

*   *   *

The best thing that could be said about the fighting on the sixteenth was that the soldiers had forced the Modocs out of the Stronghold.

Trouble was, they paid a terrible price for that black rubble and honeycomb of caves.

On through that long night of the sixteenth, the mortars and howitzers hammered away at the center of the Lava Beds. In the pauses between bombardments, Donegan listened to volleys of rifle shots coming from the soldier camp.

“The Modocs attacking camp again?” Seamus wondered out loud, digging into his haversack for something to eat. It was as empty as every other haversack in the Lava Beds.

He sighed, laying his head back against the sharp rocks, scratching at his many open lacerations from those rocks, angry at the mosquitoes that came in vapors each night to torment every man.

“No,” replied the old sergeant. “Sounds to me like they’re burying some boys.”

Donegan nodded, eyes squinting in the darkness, knowing no man would see those gray eyes moisten. Too many times Seamus had dug midnight graves for brothers-in-arms, fellow soldiers who would be left behind in unmarked holes. Nameless dead all too often unknown by their own officers.

“Always hated funerals meself,” Donegan said eventually as the riflefire faded away across the darkened rocks. “Suppose I’ll even hate my own.”

“The only one a man’s allowed to hate,” replied the sergeant.

By the next morning, the army discovered its quarry had flown.

Only a handful of Modoc sharpshooters remained anywhere near their old fortifications to slow both Green’s and Mason’s troops as they ordered every able-bodied man to push south from the shore of Tule Lake into the Stronghold. As quiet as it was among those rocks, most men feared they were again walking into some sort of trap as they advanced farther, and farther still.

But the three-day battle was over.

The fissures and crevices and fractures all converged at the edge of the central ravine of the Stronghold itself.

“God only knows where that bastard Captain Jack is now,” a soldier grumbled.

“I thought those Warm Springs Injuns were supposed to tighten a noose around them sonsabitches,” cried another.

“Injun blood is Injun blood,” complained a third. “Them Tenino mercenaries was just watching out for their own, is what they was doing.”

While Colonel Gillem had been failed by his officers in their attempts to either capture or kill the renegade Modocs, the arrival of soldiers in the Stronghold did nonetheless mark the turning point of the Modoc War. From 29 November, when Captain James Jackson had unknowingly bungled himself into beginning the conflict, until the predawn darkness of 17 April, this had been a war of siege and assault on impregnable fortifications that had caused union veterans to recall the vivid horrors of action suffered at Atlanta or even Vicksburg itself.

Unfortunately for the army, the Modocs were now no longer tied down where the soldiers could find them and hammer them at will. Shutting them off from food and water.

Now the Indians were on the run, free to hit when and where they wanted.

When the first soldiers advanced into the heart of the Stronghold, they found the Modocs had abandoned the bodies of three men of fighting age, along with the bodies of eight women evidently killed during the incessant artillery bombardment.

Officers ordered squads to cautiously search every cave and depression, every single structure, to eliminate the chance of ambush by hidden warriors.

At the resounding rifle shot, Seamus yanked his head into his shoulders and dropped to a knee. His eyes scanned the far rocks.

“Sounds like it come from up ahead where that other outfit is searching,” said the old infantry sergeant.

It had been too many hours without sleep and with too little food for Donegan to have too much a sense of humor. He joined the sergeant’s patrol as they continued into the labyrinth of caves and fissures. At the entrance to a small cave, they found a handful of soldiers busy over the corpse of an old man.

“You boys just kill that ol’ Injun?” asked the sergeant.

One of the soldiers rolled his head around to smile a gap-toothed grin that reminded Seamus of a coyote loping on the fringes of the slaughter yard at Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory, seven years gone now.*

“Ol’ Injun—young Injun … what’s it matter to you, Sergeant? We’re just doing what the cap’n ordered.”

“You was ordered to kill that unarmed old man?”

“We was ordered to kill Modocs, Sergeant,” he replied. “Besides, he wasn’t helpless. He was holding a knife at us when we come up on him.”

Seamus stepped forward. “A brave one, ain’t you? Killing an old man with a knife … and the five of you with loaded Springfields.”

The gap-toothed one waved his knife at the Irishman as he asked the sergeant, “Who’s this big-talking Mick now? Where’s your uniform?”

“Here you go,” interrupted one of the soldiers working over the old Modoc. “You can have a piece of his scalp, Avery—since’t one of your bullets hit him too.”

Seamus wagged his head as the gap-toothed Avery held up his little chunk of the old man’s scalp, still dripping with blood. Another private was cutting off the Indian’s eyebrows for souvenirs as well.

Donegan stepped away, walking on among the black rocks as the knot of soldiers laughed at his back.

He heard another shot and a third that morning of the seventeenth, in what had been the Modocs’ Stronghold. Later he learned the soldiers had killed two old women, too feeble to escape with the others when Captain Jack led his band south into the maze of lava flow, deep into the heart of darkness.

The total casualties for the three days of battle were six killed and seventeen wounded from Green’s command. Mason suffered no casualties.

Gillem took but brief satisfaction in securing the Stronghold. He now had to find the Modocs, and as quickly as was humanly possible. Captain Jack’s people needed water, which would send them scattering across the surrounding countryside. But for the time being the colonel ordered Captain Perry’s cavalry to make a wide circuit of the southern fringe of the Lava Beds. Perry was to ascertain if the hostiles had escaped into more open country, or if they were still hidden somewhere, anywhere in the great expanse of the lava flows.

“Might not be all that bad, though,” Gillem confided to his officers late that afternoon while they awaited the results of Perry’s reconnaissance. “If we do flush Captain Jack’s henchmen into the open to fight for the first time in this bloody little war—we can damn well finish them in a matter of minutes.”

*   *   *

For three days things were quiet.

No one heard or saw sign of the Modocs.

Gillem expected news to arrive at almost any time from either Captain Perry’s reconnaissance or from Donald McKay’s scout with his Warm Springs mercenaries.

Then Lieutenant Howe rode in with his twenty-man escort for a wagon train of supplies coming in from Scorpion Point to the new soldier camp at the Stronghold. A clearly agitated Howe saluted and reported to Colonel Gillem himself.

“What happened?” snapped the colonel as he watched a limp body being eased down from one of the wagons, another soldier wounded and helped to the ground by two of his own outfit.

“A band of Modocs hit us, Colonel,” Howe explained. “We were caught between the lakeshore and a high ridge of rock.”

“Damn,” Gillem muttered. “They’re not staying in one spot, for fear we’ll find ’em and wipe ’em out.” He turned back to the lieutenant. “Get your man seen to … and your man buried with proper rights.”

Howe saluted and was leaving when Donald McKay made a grand entrance into camp, causing quite a stir. He had been gone for the better part of two days, sniffing around with his scouts.

McKay accepted the offer of coffee and drank an entire cup with lots of sugar poured in before he appeared ready to report. Gillem realized the man was, after all, half Indian and would talk when he got damned ready to talk.

“We counted forty warriors left in there—give or take a couple.”

“You’re sure about that?” Gillem asked.

“They weren’t moving around much. Forty is what we counted.”

Gillem turned to Green and Mason with a smile. “If we add another ten for those who attacked Lieutenant Howe—looks like we’re dealing with something on the order of fifty fighting men, gentlemen.” He looked back at McKay. “Where’d you find them?”

McKay pointed south. “About four miles from here … in a long ravine formed from the lava rock.”

“Good,” Gillem allowed. “It looks like they haven’t busted out of the Lava Beds yet and scattered all over hell’s acre, boys. We can still get a crack at them, and soon.”

“The sooner the better,” Green said. “I don’t trust ’em to stay in one place too much longer, Colonel.”

Later that afternoon of the twentieth, when Perry rode in with his exhausted and hungry troops mounted on trail-weary horses, the captain confirmed Gillem’s hunch. It had taken his outfit three days fighting the brutal terrain and the unfit mounts, but the news was good.

“We did not run across any sign that showed the Modocs have fled the Lava Beds. It’s my considered opinion they’re still holed up somewhere … just to the south of us.”