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Perhaps here is a proper place for a short history of the Modoc Indians; their long series of murders and massacres a series of appalling crimes that have given to their country the name of "the dark and bloody ground of the Pacific." Of all the aboriginal races of the continent the Modocs stand pre-eminent as the most fierce, remorseless, cunning and treacherous.
They were instructed by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs "to ascertain the causes which led to hostilities between the Modocs and the U. S. troops;" to offer them a reservation somewhere on the coast with immunity for past crimes. In vain Gov. Grover of Oregon protested against any compromise with the murderers of Oregon citizens.
Picking our way over the strange ridges and hollows of the beds, we soon came to a circular flat about twenty yards in diameter, on the shore of the lake, where the comparative smoothness of the lava and a few handfuls of soil have caused the grass tufts to grow taller. This is where General Canby was slain while seeking to make peace with the treacherous Modocs.
While I am in no wise a friend to a hostile; I believe in giving even an Indian that which is justly due him, and I must admit that all through this Modoc war I could not help, in a measure, feeling sorry for the Modocs, particularly Captain Jack, for I knew that through the negligence of one agent and the outrageous attack upon Jack by the squad of soldiers on Lost river, while there catching fish to keep his people from starving, he had been driven and dragged into this war, and I do not believe to-day, nor never did believe, that Captain Jack ought to have been hanged.
When I arrived I found that the Rogue River Indians had just been placed upon the reservation, and subsequently the Coquille, Klamath, Modocs, and remnants of the Chinooks were collected there also, the home of the latter being in the Willamette Valley.
I returned to that place in May, 1857, and at a period a little later, in consequence of the close of hostilities in southern Oregon, the Klamaths and Modocs were sent back to their own country, to that section in which occurred, in 1873, the disastrous war with the latter tribe.
Of course they raved and ranted, declaring that we were worse than the Modocs, but when they saw the tents of the regulars and blankets of the volunteers being pulled down and rolled up they came to me and asked what it meant. I told them that we had been ordered to the mouth of Lost River on Tule Lake to protect the Oregon settlers, and that the regulars were going also, but that Gen.
The Indians of the McCloud River that have come under my observation differ considerably in habits and features from the Diggers and other tribes of the foothills and plains, and also from the Pah Utes and Modocs. They live chiefly on salmon.
Saxon clapped her hands, and her eyes sparkled: "He'd been captured on an Indian raid!" "That's the way they figured it," Billy nodded. "They recollected a wagon-train of Oregon settlers that'd been killed by the Modocs four years before. Roberts adopted him, and that's why I don't know his real name. But you can bank on it, he crossed the plains just the same."
Before the Modoc War they lived in dread of the Modocs, a tribe living about the Klamath Lake and the Lava Beds, who were in the habit of crossing the low Sierra divide past the base of Shasta on freebooting excursions, stealing wives, fish, and weapons from the Pitts and McClouds. Mothers would hush their children by telling them that the Modocs would catch them.
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