Bad to Worse

The enterprising white man, having seen and appreciated this land of green meadows, silvery lakes and crystal streams, determined to possess it.

— Ivan D. Applegate, "The Initial Shot"

For much of the next year, the Modoc War occupied center stage in the American public mind. Fought on a remote, volcanic steppe against an Indian nation few whites had ever heard of before, this unlikely war rattled the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant to its core, especially when it claimed the life of the only general officer to fall in a western Indian conflict. The Modoc War was also the sole Indian fight in the West that drew an on-the-ground international correspondent. And it was the only Indian war in which a reporter from a leading East Coast newspaper interviewed the leaders of a Native resistance in the middle of the conflict. Because of this unrelenting media attention, the Modoc War prompted a powerful debate over the fate of the fast-disappearing Native nations, the future of the West, and the soul of the United States.

The day before his duel with Frazier Boutelle, however, Scarface Charley had no idea that he was about to become historical. Although he and the Lost River Modocs had been the target of military surveillance, heated negotiations with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and growing hostility from their white neighbors, they had no reason to believe that matters were coming to an armed head. Instead, Charley and other Modoc leaders were sitting down with Henry Miller, the one settler the Indians trusted, a man who lived alongside the Indians and attested to his complete lack of trouble with them. On that Thursday afternoon, about fourteen hours before the cavalry stormed into Lost River, Miller told the Modocs truthfully that he had no knowledge of military plans to roust the Indians. He vowed, too, that, should he learn of such a raid, he would warn the Indians. That promise would soon prove fatal.

The Modocs felt so secure that, as dark fell, they posted no sentries. The men in the village on the east bank of Lost River organized the gambling game they loved for whiling away nights like this one: cold, windy, rainy with sleet. Scarface Charley left his house in the larger village on the west bank and canoed across the stream. He was feeling lucky.

Like Charley, Boutelle saw no momentous encounter headed his way a day earlier, even when Ivan Applegate galloped into Fort Klamath, Oregon, bearing orders from Thomas B. Odeneal, state superintendent for the Indian Bureau. A little over a year and a half earlier, a large band of Modocs had decided they were done with abusive Indian agents and the scanty food and clothing allotments that left them cold and hungry. Under the headman Kientpoos, whom whites nicknamed Captain Jack, many of the Modocs left the Klamath Reservation. Most settled into traditional village sites on Lost River about a mile from its mouth on Tule Lake and rebuilt their substantial winter houses. The Lost River Modocs hoped to resume something of the nomadic and communal life they had known for unnumbered centuries.

Most of the settlers flooding into the Lost River valley were less than enamored with living alongside Natives. In their eyes, there was nothing noble about these "savages." The settlers blamed the Modocs for every fence that fell and steer that disappeared. Responding to the rising hostility of his fellow Oregonians, Odeneal won approval from F. A. Walker, the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, DO, to move the Modocs back to the reservation: "peaceably if you possibly can, but forcibly, if you must."

Odeneal left his office in Salem and arrived at the Klamath Reservation on November 25, determined to bring this Modoc business to a head. He dispatched Ivan Applegate, an Indian Bureau employee, to Lost River. Applegate was to invite Kientpoos to meet with Odeneal in Linkville — the closest Oregon settlement, which would change its name some twenty years later to Klamath Falls — or lead his people directly to the reservation. Kientpoos refused the invitation. It was, he knew, a ruse to arrest or kill him away from Lost River. Nor was he about to submit himself and his people to the reservation's cold and hunger once again. Applegate rode back to Linkville with Kientpoos's refusal.

Odeneal turned it into a pretext. He drafted a letter to Major John Green, the Fort Klamath commander, ordering him to dispatch a patrol to Lost River, arrest the Modoc leaders, and force the Indians onto the reservation. Applegate gathered up Odeneal's letter, leapt back into the saddle, and galloped through the night to Fort Klamath, nearly forty miles north. He arrived about 5 a.m.

Awakened by the sergeant of the guard, Boutelle told Applegate to make himself comfortable until Major Green was up. Applegate let Boutelle know why he had come and asked the lieutenant whether he thought the major would send a force south. No way, Boutelle said. Green had clear instructions from up the chain of command that he was to confront the Modocs only with an overwhelming force, not Fort Klamath's single cavalry troop. The needed reinforcements could come only from frontier outposts two hundred miles to the east, and they would take a good two weeks to arrive.

So it was one surprised Boutelle who at 8 a.m. received orders from Major Green, an officer who often confounded impetuosity with bravery, to prepare to ride to Lost River immediately. Boutelle reminded Green about the need for overwhelming force and said he was certain the Lost River Modocs would resist rather than surrender. The troop, Boutelle went on, was so small that it was sure to provoke...