June 4, 2025 – On this day in 1873, another “Indian” war most Americans have never heard of – the Modoc War – came to an end in the high desert straddling present-day California and Oregon.
The 18-month war of resistance, in which 52 Modoc warriors and 98 women, children and old men held out against a combined force of 1,000 US Army regulars and local militia, did not end with the Modocs’ official surrender. It ended with the capture of its leader Kintpuash, or “Captain Jack,” as the US Army and federal government – and thus history – came to call him.
The war began after the Modoc – outnumbered, overwhelmed, and half-starved – fled their exile on a distant reservation with their ancient enemies, the Klamath. Led back to their ancient homeland by Kintpuash, the vastly outnumbered Modoc survived as long as they did because of the impenetrability of the terrain they chose to hold off the pursuing Army and militia: the Lava Beds, a vast, wind-sculpted, volcanic rock plateau the size of a small city east of Úytaahkoo (Mount Shasta).
Here is the site of the Modoc War.
When viewed from the overlook at the visitors’ center of today’s “Lava Beds National Monument,” the terrain is a sea of jagged black, brown and red rock. The lava seems to flow still, in standing waves frozen in mid-crest, over a three-dimensional maze of labyrinthine tunnels, caves, alcoves and dead-ends, all formed from rock sharp enough to gash any flesh that brushes against it.
That 150 Modoc could hold out for 18 months – through blistering summer heat and blinding winter snow, against such an overwhelming military force – is another one of those impossible tales of defiance, resilience, and survival that seems more myth than fact, too fantastic to have happened. But happen it did, written across a forbidding landscape, even if almost no one knows about it because it interferes with the classic American telling of “how the west was won.” It was also a lesson the US military might have learned before it thought it could make quick work of the Vietnamese 90 to 100 years later.
But picking your way through the Lava Beds today beneath an unrelenting sun, the wind screaming in your ears, the mind is drawn less to political and military insurgency than to the raw facts of survival: what did they do for food, water, medicine, ammunition? For 18 months? And how were they able to limit their own casualties to 17 warriors killed, while the US Army and militia lost 83 killed and 46 wounded?
Here is one glimpse into the mostly underground lava beds.
From War to Exile and Back to War
For at least 14,000 years prior to the Modoc War – witnessed by their rock art preserved in this most arid of climates – the Modoc had occupied 5,000 square miles of the desert north of the Lava Beds site.
As with every other bio-region in the American West, the population density of its original civilization was a function of the available water supply. Native nations spread out, in size and numbers, where the rivers ran low to dry in summer, and the Modoc in the high desert rainshadow east of what we now call the “Southern Cascade Mountains” were a classic example. Standing sentry over the Modoc homeland from the west: snow-capped and sun-drenched Úytaahkoo, the steaming volcano where their Creator – and thus, to them, The Creator – lived, reminding them with every glance over their shoulder of their origin story.
The harshness of their physical environment might have offered the Modocs protection from the onslaught of westward migration, but for what lay to their west and north. Cutting through the heart of their homeland in the 1840s and 1850s was the brand-new Applegate Trail, a major shortcut for miners and homesteaders on their way to the goldfields and fertile valleys of what would become southern Oregon and northern California.
The Applegate would emerge as the main route west through the entire region, a thoroughfare for tens of thousands of seekers in wagon trains, skittish and hungry after a long, grueling journey, and desperate for water, wood, and game. They killed and tried to eat everything they saw. What was left of their oxen, cattle and horses fouled the fragile desert rivers and trampled all the carefully cultivated camas fields and lily pad lakes that were the Modoc’s traditional food sources. And yet, the Modoc let them pass through.
But inevitably, as across much of the American West in those years, there were random skirmishes between anxious, trigger-happy white explorers and roving bands of Natives. Each side believed it was defending itself and its family against the other, and with few exceptions, each believed that the best defense was a show of preemptive force. As inevitably, what would follow was an armed reprisal, usually not against the initial perpetrators but against the first group of white trespassers or Native travelers encountered by those seeking vengeance. The result was a spiraling of violence and atrocities designed to fuel the worst fears of people at both ends of the trail.
Which is why, in 1850, the newly formed State of California sprang into action. Its first Governor, Peter Burnett, declared a “war of extermination” against all Natives in the region, “until their race becomes extinct.” To fund the genocide, the California legislature appropriated $500,000 for militia campaigns against the Modocs and every other tribe in the region. The State paid vigilantes – mostly failed miners and homesteaders – to kill Natives along every route and river to the gold fields.
The most effective leader of these militias was Ben Wright from Yreka, the gold-rush town west of the Modocs’ homeland. The “military” tactic he used? Ride with his militia into a Modoc camp under a white flag of peace, then kill every man, woman and child they could find. Afterwards, they would return to town as heroes, with scalps and other body parts from their victims, which they paraded through the Yreka streets.
A Modoc Girl Turns Peacemaker
What might have happened next, as across much of the American West during this period, was an escalation into all-out war. The Modoc could have mobilized to wipe out every mounted party coming east from Yreka and every wagon train coming west along the Applegate Trail. But into the breach stepped a mixed-race couple from Yreka: Frank Riddle and his young Modoc bride, Winema, or Toby Riddle, as the newspapers would call her.
Winema was one of countless Native girls and women across the continent paired off with a prominent white man to serve as, among other things, translator and go-between with the local Natives. Such “squ-w girls” usually had little or no say in the matter, may or may never have been officially married in the process, and had little control of their ultimate social status. In the region in the 1850s, the then-current market price for a healthy young “squ-w” was one horse, one mule, or one hundred dollars.
But the 12-year-old Winema, still known by her childhood name “Nanooktowa,” was different. The written accounts – corroborated by her descendants, who live in present-day Oregon – say that she actively sought the arrangement. Since early childhood, apparently, Nanooktowa / Winema had been fascinated by all the new white people in the area: their clothes, the English language, and eventually the manners of the well-dressed Mr. Riddle, a failed miner turned homesteader, landowner, and merchant.
The written accounts also claim that Frank Riddle initially resisted the idea based on her age, but a year later agreed to marry her – and in the process, he would give her family not one but two horses. One year later, at age 13, “Mrs. Frank Riddle,” as she would be known next, bore him his first child.
Winema not only survived early marriage and motherhood, but apparently grew to thrive as a translator, trader, and diplomat. And she would emerge as far more than the usual frontier diplomat, who settled routine disputes over homestead sites or fishing rights or stolen cows. Nanooktowa / Winema / Toby Riddle also managed to talk the Modocs – nearly a decade before the showdown in the Lava Beds – into vacating their suddenly trail-traversed, blood-soaked homeland for a reservation far to the north. No doubt mindful of the annihilation that awaited the Modocs if they went into all-out war against a growing California militia, she convinced her people to stand down.
Here is a photo of Winema (back row center) and Fran Riddle (back row right), with Oliver Applegate and four unidentified Modocs.
Her arguments are lost to history, so we can only speculate about how she managed to talk the Modocs into surrendering their entire homeland. At the time, they were still reeling from losing every other family member to smallpox in the prior generation, and in shock from the first wave of State-funded, genocidal death dealt by Ben Wright and the militia.
The white people will keep coming down the Applegate Trail, she must have told them. Up north on the new reservation, you will be far away from them. You will also be safe from the militia coming back the other way to protect them and avenge whatever happens to them on any Modoc they run across.
Unfortunately, when the Modoc moved en masse to the new reservation across the Oregon border, they were again outnumbered and harassed, this time by the Klamath and Yahooskin. Both were ancient enemies from territories adjacent to the Modoc homeland, where the rivers also ran low to dry in summer. It was the Klamath’s land, and as on nearly all the new reservations in the region, food and clothing were scarce and the government agent sent to administer their distribution was both overwhelmed by the task and crooked.
For a year, the surviving remnant of the Modoc lived in squalid captivity on what would become known as the “Kla-Mo-Ya” reservation, getting short-shrift from the new “Indian Agent” on supplies, and suffering the humiliations of life as unwelcome guests on land that had once belonged to their oldest enemy.
Kintpuash Leads Them to the Promised Land
Within a year, Kintpuash – a charismatic, mixed-race Modoc who promised the tribe a Moses-like escape from captivity to freedom – had convinced them to flee. They would “go off the reservation,” as the American idiom still popular today describes those who challenge authority.
Under the cover of darkness, Kintpuash led the Modocs south to their original homeland east of Úytaahkoo. When they got there, however, history – this time in the form of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Homestead Act – found them once again.
Like a tsunami that begins far away with an earthquake under the ocean, the American West by the late 1860s was overwhelmed with a swell of war veterans, refugees, criminals, civilian survivors, and orphans, all displaced by a war that had claimed six percent of the US population. Most of them had to have been more desperate – and most certainly more traumatized and therefore prone to pre-emptive violence – than the land-seekers and gold-hunters who had come west a decade earlier to start over.
This mass of westward survivors was everywhere now; most had nowhere to go back to; and this time the returning Modoc were the “trespassers” in their old homeland.
The returning Modoc thought a harassment campaign of petty thefts and vandalism would drive the settlers away, which generated only public outrage and inspired the next round of miliary invasion against them. But this time, it was not a California-funded militia. The orders came from Washington to the US Army: round up the Modoc and drive them back to the reservation, “peacefully if you can, forcibly if you must.”
In the winter of 1873, the US Army moved in with an initial force of 500 soldiers, howitzers, the works. The 150 Modocs with Kintpuash fought back, shocking the Army by routing them all.
That fateful first military skirmish – so often won by Natives across the continent and earning them only a massive reprisal with a bigger force in the months to come – usually spelled the immediate doom of many tribes.
But not so the Modoc. They won that first skirmish and then they just – vanished.
They melted into the most extreme and remote part of their old homeland, the lava beds, on a high desert plateau in the shadow of Úytaahkoo.
Winema Tries to Negotiate a Surrender
Winema tried to negotiate a peace. But the Army undermined her when it broke a cease-fire and seized 36 Modoc horses set out to pasture outside the lava beds. The Modoc resistance raged on, and reporters started showing up.
For six months, from blinding cold winter to blistering hot summer, some 150 Modoc men, women and children held out in those lava tunnels and caves against 500 Army regulars and militia. How? By sneaking in and out at night and smuggling in enough food. By hiking every day through knife-walled tunnels, back and forth to the ice caves, to haul pieces back to turn into drinking water.
As they hunkered down in that impossible landscape, the Modoc resistance ground on, splitting, inevitably, into the usual factions: surrender versus fight. Trying to mediate those factions, Kintpuash made the exact wrong call. He thought he could end the whole confrontation the way tribes always had: by cutting off the head of the snake.
As Ben Wright had done a decade earlier, Kintpuash rode into a peace parley under a white flag – and shot whom he recognized as his opposing war chief: General Edward Canby, the US Army’s commanding officer. Canby’s killing was an outrage that would doom them all.
The Army brought in another 500 soldiers, and used the howitzers to blast through all that black stone to get at the flesh and blood hiding inside it. But the Modoc – unlike the Yakama, Spokane, Bannock and Nez Perce to the north and east with their fast and agile herds, who fought their own wars of resistance in those same years – did not stand a chance without those 36 lost horses. They were trapped. It was only a matter of time and diplomacy. And thanks to Kintpuash’s gambit, there would be no sympathy for them in the press.
When they did finally surrender, regardless of whatever Winema had actually managed to negotiate – there is no record of the terms – Kintpuash and three other leaders of the Modoc were hanged, like criminals, even though the Army, government, and press were by then calling it “The Modoc War.”
But we have to wonder: how many more might have been hanged, and how much worse the fate of some of the Modocs, but for the deft maneuvering with the military brass by Winema?
To “Indian Country” with the Other “Bad Western Indians”
The rest of the Modocs who were captured were deemed “prisoners of war” and punished accordingly. They were loaded into railroad cattle cars, their men in chains, to a place they would come to loath even more than the reservation up on the Klamath homeland: “Indian Country.”
The flat, nearly treeless, nearly waterless barrens of what would become present-day Oklahoma was already crowded with dozens of tribes who had been driven there from all over the eastern half of the continent. The place was so grim no white people wanted it – yet, as no one knew there oil underneath it – its western panhandle so grim that the new state of Texas had willingly given it up so it would remain below the 36 degree latitude line, and could remain a slave state.
On top of the tribes displaced from the east under Andrew Jackson, “Indian Country” would also serve as an open-air prison for all those Natives who fought wars of resistance against the theft of their land, for “the bad Indians from the west” like the Modocs.
Mrs. Toby Riddle on the Speaking Circuit
If Americans had room in their heads for more than two native women, Winema would have been number three, right behind Pocahontas and Sacajawea, for the exact same reason. She was held out to the public as a “model Indian” and “friend to the white man,” a begrudging honorific bestowed on whomever – most famously like Sealth (Chief Seattle) – negotiated a peaceful surrender to the newcomers.
As the Modoc War raged in the national press, Mrs. Toby Riddle would rise to national prominence as the woman who single-handedly ended it. She and Frank went on a speaking tour, believing that the publicity would help the Modocs now in that open-air prison and other Native peoples struggling to hold on to whatever homelands they had left. And they had a ready audience: after the defeat of Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Greasy Grass (The Little Bighorn), the American public clamored to hear the story of the protracted bloody mess in the lava beds from someone who not only survived it, but managed to do what 1,000 Army regulars could not: end it.
An articulate polyglot, floating through the American intelligentsia in her Victorian finery, Mrs. Toby Riddle was a miracle of a human being: a girl married off at 12 and a mother at 13, who grew into a skilled cross-cultural emissary. She was living proof that not all Indians are sub-humans who needed to be like domestic animals. Or was she proof of how well that could be done?
All thanks to what we have to imagine was At the other end of her life, Mrs. Toby Riddle was held out as proof that not all Indians are “savages.”
Winema’s Legacy & the Modoc Today
In 1909, after the discovery of oil underfoot in “Indian Country” and establishment of Oklahoma as a US state, the Modoc were given the opportunity to return, if not to their actual homeland, then at least to the Kla-Mo-Ya. Only 29 Modoc took up the offer, and went north, where many of their ancestors live today. The majority stayed put in Oklahoma.
Both segments of the tribe were terminated in 1954 as part of the federal Termination Act, which sought to dissolve the tribes’ legal standing and thus their ability to hold the government accountable to obligations made under their historic treaties with them. The Act also allowed timber and oil companies to raid what was left of the tribes’ reservation lands.
On the Kla-Mo-Ya, in exchange for accepting termination, the tribe sold their rights to a timber company for a one-time cash payment that would be held in trust for the descendants of the Modoc, Klamath and Yahooskin. They were told they would have jobs logging their old land, and more jobs in the mill the timber company promised to build. But all the logging jobs went to local whites, and the mill was never built.
Because it was the 1950s, their daughters could no longer be sold off for horses, mules, or cash. Instead, the money went the other way. They became “trust babies” – Native children adopted by white families off the reservation and raised to be Christians, because they were worth almost $20,000 at the time – their own share of the payout from the timber buyout trust, and a considerable sum in the 1950s.
Winema’s direct descendants were among those trust fund babies.
Both segments of the Modoc have since been re-recognized by the federal government: in present-day Oklahoma, as the independent Modoc Nation; and in present-day Oregon as part of the Klamath Tribes. Both tribes own and operate multiple businesses, and both are active in ecological, cultural, and language restoration programs.
Of particular interest, the two segments have come together to work on land and water restoration projects on their shared original homeland on the border of present-day Oregon and Washington.
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