The Modoc War

Robert Aquinas McNally’s The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age is an absorbing narrative history of one of the few Indian-White conflicts in nineteenth-century California that merits the label of an “Indian war.” Typically when one encounters the term “Indian war” in California history, it is usually as a euphemism for a one-sided, unprovoked massacre of Native people perpetrated by White men organized as an irregular force of vigilantes or volunteers. Not so the Modoc War (1872–73), as described by McNally, which featured large bodies of regular U.S. Army troops, international diplomacy, massive press attention, and numerous military scenarios, including ambush, siege, and multiple skirmishes. McNally uses thirty-four chapters, organized into four parts explaining the shifting phases of a war best understood as a violent explosion releasing tensions building for decades. Years of betrayal, broken agreements, and unratified treaties preceded the nightmarish war. The war attracted national and international notice, especially beginning as it did with the ambush of General Edward Canby’s peace delegation. Attention continued after cessation of hostilities, to include the trial and execution of Modoc combatants at Fort Klamath. Even when public attention subsided, atrocities continued with the removal of many surviving Modocs to horrendous conditions on an Oklahoma reservation.

Ancient history · Diplomacy · Genocide · Political science · Politics · Siege · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation) · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies