Chapter 31

Tule Reed Moon

Another week and they would be in the middle of the Tule Reed Moon. Time for the women to gather the stalks when they were greenest, strongest, and most resilient for weaving, with all the spring moisture.

But for now there could be no thought of the women going in their canoes to ply the lakeshore, gathering the green stalks. For now Jack had to keep his people moving, constantly moving, always on the lookout for army patrols and those cross-blooded Teninos from up north who searched for the Modocs like the white man’s paid hunting dogs.

Jack was growing so tired after all these weeks of fighting and running and moving to fight again. He closed his eyes from time to time, but it was never anything he could call sleep. Above all the others, he alone had to be constantly on the alert. Not only from the white men and their Warm Springs hunters—but also keenly aware of any subtle changes in the mood of the Lost River murderers.

He was as worried about being stabbed and left to bleed to death by Curly Headed Doctor, Hooker Jim or Schonchin John—his own people—as he was worried about being captured and hung at the end of the white man’s cruel rope.

Captain Jack did not sleep well these days.

This running forced his mind to always work, and that was hard on any man. Especially a Modoc. For generations they had been a people of leisure, with much time to consider things of substance, carefully. Now he no longer had time to deliberate—always having to think about where to find food for his people; where they could find their next drink of fresh water.

The pockets of melted snow and sleet that had collected in the rocks and down at the bottom of the ice caves in the Lava Beds had kept his 165 people alive for many days. But without a source of food his warriors could count on, Jack had watched the faces change. Mostly the faces of the women and children, and the old ones—all growing thinner, more pale and gaunt, their eyes grown sunken like the swallowed eyes of a skull picked clean by thieving ravens.

For several days he had camped his band near Juniper Butte, where they chopped ice from the cave walls with their metal axes and hauled the chunks back to their fires to melt. It was a small cave, however, and when the ice was depleted, Jack was forced to move his people on to the Frozen River Cave less than a mile away. It was like that every few days. Moving on a little more—the women keeping at the ice while the men were out trying to bring in a little game to feed the many hungry bellies.

From Frozen River he had pointed them south into the rising country where they were forced to look at the mountains looming over them. At the Caldwell Ice Cave, Jack tried to tell them for the first time that to live in freedom, they might have to live far from Lost River—perhaps even among the summer pines and winter snows of that high country above them now.

When the ice and seepage at Caldwell ran out, Jack led his people east past three low buttes left behind by the volcanic activity millions of years before. His people called them the Three Sisters. Jack’s band had never been this far east, camping now as they were almost directly south of a thumb of land that jutted into Tule Lake, a place the white man called Scorpion Point. They made their camp on the shores of a long-ago dried lakebed. The women scraped and dug at the sandy soil until a murky, gritty water began to slowly seep into the holes.

The water was cold though, and some of the men brought in a few small animals to cook over their tiny fires. But if the band was to make it to freedom farther south into the high country, they would need supplies of food, perhaps even ammunition. The warriors wanted to capture some of the army’s supply wagons.

Jack agreed. Even though it meant letting the soldiers and their Teninos know where they were, he agreed with the young warriors who Scar-Faced Charley would lead in the raid.

On the road running in from Land’s ranch they spotted a small escort riding along with three freight wagons nearing Scorpion Point. It proved far easier than Jack had expected to run off the soldiers after the warriors wounded two of the white men.

Like children, two dozen warriors swarmed over their new-gotten booty. Tossing bales of clothing and boxes of hardtack down onto the road, the warriors bypassed barrels of beans but sniffed closely at the barrels of salt-pork the white man was so fond of. To crack open every crate and keg just to be sure what to take and what to leave behind, Scar-Faced Charley ordered some of the warriors to search for some hammers among the soldiers’ toolboxes.

In the long wooden toolboxes, Boston Charley and the others found two smaller kegs carefully concealed under army blankets.

“Perhaps it’s better food than this pig meat,” Hooker Jim said, causing the others to laugh as Charley dropped one of the kegs to the ground.

They gathered around it as Scar-Faced Charley hammered away at the end of the keg and found it to be filled with liquid—a fragrant, potent liquid most of the warriors knew well enough already.

But Ellen’s Man George shouldered his way into the tight circle and dipped a finger into the keg. He smacked his lips with the taste.

“Whiskey!”

Rifling through other bundles, the warriors found a supply of tin cups and proceeded to bust the head off the second keg as they grew uproariously drunk. Weaving and bobbing, some of them clambered into the backs of the wagons and hefted out every case, keg and bale into the middle of the road.

Then others slapped and whipped the mule teams, firing their pistols overhead as the frightened animals bolted off into the labyrinth of the Lava Beds. Wagon boxes rolled from running gears, running gears splintered from singletrees, as the warriors had themselves their first good laugh in many, many days. As the splintered wood came to a rest among the rain-soaked rocks, and the horses clattered on into the distance, Captain Jack and his men finished their revelry, not in the least fearing an attack by the soldiers.

When they had their fill, the warriors stumbled and weaved and careened back into the confusing maze of the Lava Beds, carrying what they could after destroying the last of the whiskey kegs.

“Whiskey’s no good for white men,” Ellen’s Man slurred. “He don’t know how to have him a good time like Modoc.”

*   *   *

Nearly a full month had passed since the murder of Canby and Thomas.

Seamus lay beneath the first streaks of gray cracking the sky this morning of 10 May, in a temporary camp comprised of two troops of cavalry and one company of artillerymen Colonel Davis had ordered out yesterday with five days rations behind a select group of McKay’s Tenino scouts. Davis had instructed the patrol commander, Captain H. C. Hasbrouck, to determine why in two weeks no one had been able to find a trace of the Modocs—while the warriors seemed to come and go through the Lava Beds with impunity.

The patrol had covered a little better than twenty-five miles almost southwest of the main headquarters camp before stopping for the night at the shore of Sorass Lake, a small, dry depression of cracked alkali mud lying in the midst of rugged buttes and scarred foothills. What water stood in parched pockets was laden with salts, unfit for man or animal to drink.

For better than two hours that afternoon, Hasbrouck had details of his men digging at wells in the hope they could find water. When this plan failed to produce any seepage, the captain stated he had no other choice but to send some men back to Scorpion Point after breakfast the following morning to bring out water for the patrol. That evening Hasbrouck fondly named the place Dry Lake in his daily report.

While the cavalry had hobbled their mounts and put them out to graze on what skimpy grass could be found, the artillery company moved on, something less than a mile to the south, encamping among the stands of mahogany and juniper. McKay’s scouts spread their bedrolls near the horse soldiers, certain of safety there. Just two hundred yards north of them extended three humps of low rock outcroppings, while another two hundred yards beyond these humps stood a rocky, volcanic ridge rising a minimum of thirty feet above the lakeshore.

Not a single Modoc had been seen along the skyline throughout the long march of the ninth, but Hasbrouck had nonetheless warily placed his pickets atop this higher bluff for the night.

Rolling over within the warm cocoon of his two wool blankets, surrounded by the darkness of the early morning, Seamus set too much pressure on the healing wounds suffered only two weeks before. Wincing in pain, he cursed himself for his sleepy stupidity and ground his hip into the sandy, grassy soil, taking respite that no one was stirring that early—forcing the command to move out before sunrise.

The fingers of his right hand tingled with pinpricks. Gently he urged his left hand under the thick bandage Dr. McElderry had looped tightly over the injured shoulder, across the broken collarbone, firmly imprisoning the upper arm against the right side of his chest.

It felt good to move the arm, even though the collarbone nagged at him when he adjusted the wrap.

“Shut-up!” said Charley Larengel in a harsh whisper to his blue tick hound stretched out beside its master’s bedroll. The dog growled back in its throat, his muzzle snarling, teeth bared.

“He smells something,” said Larengel, rustling at last and turning to Donegan as if in apology for waking him.

“Injins,” Seamus said. “By the saints—I’ll put my money on your dog’s nose before I’ll bet on those worthless Teninos any day! Go find one of the guards and get him to alert the camp.”

Larengel took his growling dog at the end of a chunk of rope and set off into the predawn darkness to find a guard. The first picket he happened across laughed at the civilian’s claim that there were Indians near by. But he took Larengel to awaken the sergeant of the guard.

The sergeant grumbled something fitting about civilians knowing their place in the army’s war and told Larengel to go back to his blankets until reveille was blown.

“You get out of your blankets and take me to see Captain Hasbrouck right now, laddie—or you’re going to find my boot heel under your goddamned chin!”

Evidently the sergeant clearly read the look in Larengel’s eye, because he pushed himself out of his own blankets, squared his clothing and set off with the civilian in tow to find Hasbrouck.

Seamus was chuckling to himself, cradling the right arm as he eased back against his blankets, knowing Larengel would convince Hasbrouck to believe him as well and send out some of the scouts to make a circuit of the camp.

He closed his eyes. Perhaps a few more minutes of sleep before dawn came calling … would be a blessing—

He bolted upright, blankets falling away and the wounds crying out in sudden, sharp anguish. Hair stood on the back of his neck, as he vividly remembered those war-cries that echoed through the cavalry camp.

Horses tied at the picket-lines reared and kicked and whinnied in fear and pain as bullets rattled among them. Those rope picket-lines strung between trees were but momentary obstacles. Half of the horses bolted through the camp, leaping over the crouching mounds of soldiers fleeing the hammering hooves.

Through the night, the Modocs had slipped past the pickets and crept into position on the high ridge. Some of the warriors had quietly made their way down to the lower humps before dawn, that much closer to the sleeping soldier camp.

Here and there on this northern fringe of camp, a soldier cried out to his fellows, saying he was hit. There were the screams of others as bullets found their marks among the cavalry and Teninos alike as they rolled behind saddles and blankets, pulling on boots or simply running for cover barefooted. Others fell without a sound at all. They were trapped between the lakeshore and the rocks where the Modocs hid, firing with impunity.

His searching left hand found the Henry, but for a moment.

Seamus threw the blankets back over the rifle and swept up the two pistol belts. The enemy was already pressing past the outer pickets they had killed, pushing into the camp itself. No need for the long-range Henry—even if he could have forced the butt against the healing shoulder. Pistols would have to do in the dirty little fighting when you got close enough to see the eyes of your enemy.

With gritty pleasure, Seamus knew he had a personal score to settle after the horror of the Black Ledge. He wanted to get close enough to see the look on the face of every warrior he cut down with a .44.

Captain Hasbrouck came out of the gloom, hollering his orders, scrambling to regain control of the panicked soldiers diving for cover, others scrambling to retrieve their Springfields. He sent veteran lieutenant Boutelle with a squad of proven men to attempt circling behind the enemy so they could get word to the artillerymen camped nearby.

Captain Jackson, second in command, cried out his orders as well among his own B Troop. His men huddled on the lakeshore in terror—believing they were now to be massacred like Thomas’s men before them.

Lieutenant Kyle attempted to reassume control of his Troop G and went after the horses before the Modocs could escape with the company’s mounts.

Skirmish lines were established as bullets whizzed past the soldiers fighting first of all to see their enemy in the gray light. This time the white men did not flee and run like some headless creatures. Instead, Jackson and Kyle held a firm grip on their soldiers, pushing them ahead almost two hundred yards as McKay brought up his Teninos on the left flank.

“Remember Thomas and Wright!” shouted some soldier down the line.

“Avenge Canby!” cried another.

The hail of Modoc lead was coming from a series of three low ridges directly to the north of camp.

“The bastards followed us yesterday,” Kyle growled at Donegan as they forged ahead, foot by foot. “I’d lay money on it.”

“Then laid in wait for first light,” Donegan replied. The pistol bucked reassuringly in his left hand.

“You any good with that hand?”

Donegan smiled. “Good enough as a man needs to be at this range.”

“Lookit that!” cried a soldier nearby as some of the firing quieted.

“Glory—who’s that?”

“Who can it be?”

For the space of a half-dozen heartbeats, the riflefire coming from the cavalry and scouts tapered off and withered to nothing as they all noticed the form standing alone on the ridgetop, outlined by the new light in the east.

“He’s wearing a army uniform!”

“Lookit that hat—the medals—a officer to boot!”

“Did those devils capture a officer?”

“Sure—that’s it! The red bastards got one of our men up there, holding him hostage.”

“Going to kill their prisoner—cease fire, men! Cease fire!” became the yell up and down the skirmish lines.

As the soldiers halted their fire, the figure paced to the left grandly, then back to the right. With a smart about-face, he marched to the left once more as the soldiers grumbled and the Teninos chaffed at this suspension of the fight.

“The scouts say that ain’t a white man!” hollered a soldier down on the left flank near the Teninos.

“By God—that’s Cap’n Jack hisself!” screamed another.

“Wearing Canby’s bloody uniform!”

“Shoot him—pray do it! Shoot the murderer!”

The soldiers opened up once more with a wild barrage of fire. Those bullets were as quickly answered with a hideous war cry as the Modoc chief beat his chest provocatively.

“Bastard thinks he can’t be killed, eh?” Kyle hissed, slamming a cartridge into his Springfield carbine.

As the soldiers plunged to the base of the ridge, a Modoc dropped. Then a second. And suddenly the warriors were falling back, sagebrush tied to their bodies, providing the perfect concealment in the gray light of this new day. Soldiers shrieked out their own throat-searing war-cry now, following their quarry at a sprint, stopping only to fire at each new puff of smoke spotted among the retreating Modocs.

But a sudden, wild shriek ignited the warriors, causing them to wheel and stand their ground, more accurately returning the soldier bullets.

Within seconds the soldiers halted in the face of the renewed and devastating fire. Then the retreat began as the camouflaged Modocs surged back toward the white men. Yard by yard the white men gave up, a soldier falling here. Another there. Then a second of the Tenino scouts cried out, dead before he crumpled to the ground.

Before they knew it, six soldiers were dead, another seven lay bleeding in the grass.

Then behind the cavalry arose a rattle of riflefire, and another volley. Shouts climbed above the clamor as Captain Hasbrouck’s artillerymen arrived to reinforce the battered, confused and angry cavalry under Jackson and Kyle.

Slowly at first, the Modocs gave ground again, this time carrying the body of a mortally wounded warrior. Then of a sudden they found bullets falling among them from a new direction. McKay’s scouts were flanking the surprised warriors on two sides, preparing to surround them in minutes.

Now the warriors buckled in—foot by foot then yard by yard, until they were fully sprinting, leaping over the rocks, having abandoned their ponies in a mad flight due west into the heart of the lava flows just north of Big Sand Butte. But in that escape, with the Modocs having to break through the encircling flanks, the fighting became something more ferocious and primal.

Then the warriors broke through the tightening noose.

For three tortuous miles the soldiers followed the escaping warriors, harassing them, firing into the Modocs disappearing among the boulders and fissures. Hasbrouck ordered McKay’s scouts to mount what horses Kyle had succeeded in rounding up. Still the Teninos were unsuccessful in capturing their prey in that rugged, cruel terrain. Not another warrior was killed.

“We’ve gone far enough!” yelled Captain Jackson.

The Teninos howled in disappointment. McKay tried to explain to the soldier that his scouts wanted more scalps. The soldier told his guide to clamp it for good and follow orders.

“We’re not stringing this patrol out across the whole extent of these goddamned Lava Beds—and us on foot to boot!” Jackson shouted down the complainers.

“By gor—look at you fellas!” Lieutenant Kyle hollered at his dismounted company as they milled. “This is the first victory we’ve had—driving the bastards off the way we did—and still you whimper and cry for more!”

“Damn right, Lieutenant! If this is what turning the tables on the Modocs feels like—we want more!”

“Give us more Modoc blood!”

“And scalps!”

As they turned about and made their way back to their Sorass Lake camp, the soldiers found for all their own casualties, they had killed but one warrior. Two dozen captured Modoc ponies would in no way salve the wounds caused in losing so many good soldiers. Those animals, along with some powder and blankets discovered on the field following the battle, were awarded the Teninos for their part in the victory.

Still, the complexion of the Modoc War was changing at last. No more would the army turn its back on Jack’s ragtag band of renegades living hand-to-mouth, striking from the hills and running to fight another day.

Victory was at hand. One more fight, the soldiers cheered one another lustily—and they would have this dirty little war won.