Customer Reviews

Hell With the Fire Out: A History of the Modoc War

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

While not a traditional history text, this book deals very plainly with the people and events of the Modoc War. Graphic depictions of the causes leading to the conflict and the battles themselves lead you to to able to imagine yourself as being there.

Arthur Quinn treats with respect both perspcetives of one the Modoc War. The extreme brutality of both the American Government and the Modoc Warriors is reflected in a suprisingly unbiased manner.

This book is very, very good for anybody interested in 1870 era American Indian conflicts, especially in Northern California. Story easy to follow, no unecessary words, facts etc., unless they're relevant to the story.
Reads as if it were a movie, but is all true, as judged on what I know of California frontier history.
Book is worth getting.

Stayed up until 4am reading this for the third time. Amazed that this hasn't been made into a movie. The nuances, the subjectivity, the history of this region is turned into art by Arthur Quinn. No clue why this book wasn't a Pulitzer Prize winner. Its engaging, witty, ultimately sad. I grew up in Modoc County and there were great grandsons and daughters of many of the people mentioned. To this day, Captain Jack or general Canby can cause an argument in a restaurant or a fight in a bar.This part of California is really NOT the california we've grown up with on tv...this is another world, more rural, bucolic, forbidden, scathing and sublime. There is no place like Modoc County in all of America.

The Modoc Indian War was quite simply a complete waste of life. The Modoc leader, Captain Jack, wanted peace with the whites. The original Indian Agent, A.B. Meacham, worked diligently to avoid the confrontation. The Federal soldiers, whose lives were at risk, initially sided with the Indians. At issue was the fact that neither side fundamentally trusted the other. Roots of the war went back to 1852, when Indians slaughtered sixty-five whites in a wagon train and in retaliation forty-one Modocs were killed during a peace parley. Hostility continued until 1864, when the Modocs signed a peace treaty and agreed to live on a reservation in southern Oregon. Unable to cohabitate with their traditional enemies, the Klamaths, the Modocs fled in 1865, returned to the reservation briefly in 1869, but left again in 1870.

In 1872 the Interior Department initiated negotiations for another return to the reservation. However, mid negotiations the Interior Department changed its Agent from A.B. Meacham, a man the Modocs trusted, to T.B. Odeneal, an agent that would not even meet with them. Sensing treachery a touchy situation became explosive. Rather than talk, Odeneal sent for the Army to forcibly remove the Modocs. When the troops show up at dawn, the Modocs, fearing an unprovoked attack, began to fire wildly. When it was over several were dead on both sides. As the Indians fled, they killed an additional thirteen settlers and retreated to a vast lava bed honeycombed with outcroppings, caves, and caverns, a virtually impregnable fortress.

Initial efforts to dislodge the Modocs cost the army thirty-five dead. There were no casualties for the Indians. Weeks of negotiation followed. The deadlock ended when General Edward Canby and several other unarmed whites were murdered by the Modocs during peace negotiatons and the army subsequently laid siege to the Modoc encampment. The army suffered grievously when an eighty-five man force was ambushed, suffering two-thirds casualties. The situation escalated and became a standoff with roughly fifty Modocs facing more than a thousand army regulars supplemented by Oregon volunteers and Indian allies from the southwest.

Badly outnumbered and short of supplies Captain Jack's followers began to desert the man who initially sought to avoid this war at all costs. Tribal leaders who had urged the more aggressive policy the Modoc leader had followed now guided the army in his pursuit. When Jack surrendered only 33 warriors remained with him.

The Modoc War cost over half a million dollars, the lives of eighty-three whites and seventeen Indians. Captain Jack and three others were hanged for the murder of General Canby and the other peace commissioners. Two Modocs had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Arthur Quinn's unbiased rendition of these events is a very sad story. Interestingly, it is not so much about the Native American - White conflict as it is about Interior Department - Army politics, southern Oregon mistrust of Northern California whites and Indian treachery, first Modoc versus Klamath and then serious splits within the Modoc tribe itself.

It is a good story, well written and well told.

This purported study of the Modoc War is undocumented and lacks a bibliography. It is replete with reconstructed conversation. There are NO maps or illustrations.

Quinn also makes some stunning errors of fact. Here's a whopper: Three of the most important characters in the story are settler Frank Riddle, his Modoc wife Tobie, and their son, Jefferson C. Davis Riddle. Quinn declared that the young Riddle was named Jefferson Davis at birth because of his father's pro-Southern sympathies. Nothing could be further from the truth. The young Riddle was named Charka until 1873, when his parents changed his name to Jefferson C. Davis "Jeff" Riddle in honor of the commanding officer in the Modoc War, Col. Jefferson C. Davis. Quinn's assertion that Frank Riddle was pro-Confederate is pure conjecture, apparently gotten up to explain his incorrect attribution of Jeff Riddle's given name. Is this important? Yes, because Jeff Riddle wrote a key book on the war called The Indian History of the Modoc War.

In his preface, which deals principally with his own medical ailments (a bizarre way to start a work of history), Quinn tells readers who may object to this technique of reconstructed dialogue to consider the book as historical fiction "with his blessing." He also notes that the book owed its publication to the "good taste of the editors at Faber and Faber."

During the height of the Indian conflicts on the plains a smaller,but no less deadly campaign was being waged against the Modocs of the Northwest. Like the Cheyenne after them, the Modocs were a small band whose numbers had already been reduced by warfare and desease. They were willing to live peacefully, only they wanted to live in their own homeland. And as with the Cheyenne, the military wasted much time money, and worst of all lives in order to bring these people to their knees. This is a concise and well-written account of that war.

Quinn is one of those historians who makes broad use of dialogue in his work. While many scholars take a scant view of this method, I think it works well, if done carefully. Certainly we can question how Quinn could possibly know exactly what was said, when there was no one there to record it. However, memoirs and journals often paraphrase, and if the writer has researched the characters and the times well enough, I think it is fair to allow him to make certain assumptions, especially as it brings such dimension to the characters.

Quinn's depiction of events is very exciting without crossing over into sensationalism. And though any story of Americans' treatment of the Indians invites a certain amount of moralizing, he does not go overboard, nor does he portray the Modocs as saints. He also does an excellent job of incorprating the landscape into the story. Quinn's depiction of the lava beds the Modocs called home makes it even more wondrous that the Americans found it so important for them to leave.

This was definitely a story that deserved to be told, and Quinn does a very good job of it.

Mr. Quinn wrote in his Preface: "Anyone who regards this handling of the record as irresponsible for a historian should simply read and judge what follows as historical friction; with my blessing." He is right and I have judged his book. At best it is an attempt to write a "Creative History." I believe this book is FICTION based on a true story. The only good thing about his book is that it can inspire readers to do a little on-line research that the author seemly has failed to do. The issues I have with Mr. Quinn's book are too numerous to list. The events Mr. Quinn has left out of his book are in fact the tip-off that this is not a historical account of the Modoc War.