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Updated: May 8, 2025
That Gen'ral Canby, who later gets downed by the Modocs, is on the Rio Grande at Fort Craig. While we're pirootin' about in a blind sort o' fashion we ropes up one of Canby's couriers who's p'intin' no'th for Fort Union with despatches. This Gen'ral Canby makes the followin' facetious alloosion: After mentionin' our oninvited presence in the territory, he says: ""But let 'em alone.
Nurse said that some one would have to go to Jacksonville and report at once, for they were not strong enough there to protect themselves against the Modocs, but no one seemed willing to tackle the trip, and I told them that if no one else would go, I would go myself. It was now near sundown, and it was called one hundred miles to Jacksonville from there.
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.
In this order, or rather disorder, we stumbled along blindly, knowing the waters of the lake were on our right. The bottom of the bluff was finally reached and word passed back that the Modocs had captured and held the summit. I stopped as many of the men as possible and asked Col. Bellinger to remain with the litter bearers and I would go forward and if necessary capture it back.
I understood this when, years after in the first battle in the lava beds with the Modocs, I asked General Wheaton to signal to Colonel Bernard to cease firing and I would charge with the volunteers. We had them hemmed between two lines, with an intervening space of not more than 150 yards. He refused, saying we had lost too many men and the country would not justify the sacrifice of human life.
They well knew that the white soldiers would respect a flag of truce, though in their own vernacular they referred to the sacred emblem only as a "fool flag," and sometimes used it, as did the Modocs five years later, to lure officers into ambush and deliberately murder them.
From this on we captured one or two Modocs every day.
He had put up at the adjutant's, after quite a long session at the Mess, an affair attended by Harris only an hour or so, and even then only as an absorbed listener, with other fellow-soldiers, to Willett's brilliant description of the recent campaign in the lava beds, culminating as it had in the brutal massacre by the Modocs of their would-be best friends, the peace commissioners, and General Canby.
A part of the Modocs, who belong by treaty to this agency, and who were at one time located upon the reservation, have, on account of their troubles with the Klamaths, due principally to the overbearing disposition of the latter, left the agency, and refuse to return to it. They desire to locate upon a small reservation by themselves.
There were more or less soldiers killed and wounded every day until the end of the war. One day only a short time after the assassination of Gen. Canby and Col. Thomas, the soldiers were attacked in Dry Lake canyon by the Modocs and were getting badly butchered up. As I rode along Gen. Wheaton dashed up by my side and said: "Where can those Indians be and what kind of guns have they?
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