Legends of the Old West - MODOC WAR Ep. 1 | “Lost River”

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

The Modoc live in the area known as the Lava Beds in northern California for centuries before the arrival of European explorers. Then, in 1848, discovery of gold brings a flood of people from around the world to California. The Modoc suffer at the hands of American militias in the 1850s and on a reservation in the 1860s. In 1870, a Modoc man known locally as Captain Jack, leads a group of Modoc away from the reservation and back to their homes along Lost River. In 1872, the U.S. Army tries to force the Modoc back to the reservation, which sets the stage for the Modoc War. Thanks to our sponsor Trees.com! Get 20% off of your order with the code OLDWEST! For a full account of the story, check out “The Modoc War” by Robert Aquinas McNally from Bison Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. Merchandise: https://black-barrel-media.creator-spring.com/ On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On a rainy afternoon in January 1848, John Sutter was surprised to see one of his project managers burst into his office. Sutter, a Swiss immigrant, had arrived in the Mexican province of Alta, California in 1839. He moved inland from the tiny coastal village of Yerba Buena, which would later become the sprawling city of San Francisco. He received a land grant of 48,000 acres from the local Mexican governor, and he built a compound along the Sacramento River. He wanted to turn his small compound, commonly called a fort, into a full-fledged settlement. To do so, he needed lumber. 45 miles to the northwest, along the south fork of the American River, he hired a crew to build a lumber mill. James Marshall was in charge of the machinery at the mill, and on a soggy

afternoon in late January 1848, Marshall showed up at Sutter's fort with an unexpected surprise. He was dripping from the rain, and he requested an urgent and secret conference with Sutter. They went into Sutter's private office and locked the door. Marshall pulled a rag out of his pocket, unfolded it, and showed Sutter several pieces of what Sutter later called Yellow Metal. They conducted some basic tests, read a long article in the Encyclopedia Americana, and then, Sutter said 10 years later, declared this to be gold of the finest quality of at least 23 carrots. Sutter tried to keep the gold a secret, but within two weeks of the discovery, his workers had quit to pan for gold in the American River. Within a year,

news of the discovery had circled the globe, and nothing could hold back the flood of people rushing into California. In September 1850, two and a half years after the discovery of gold, California joined the United States as the 31st state in the Union. Four months after joining the U.S., California's first governor, Peter Burnett, delivered his final speech to the California legislature. He was likely right when he said that the new legislature of California faced more challenges than any other state upon entering the Union. Texas has certainly faced some similar issues, but the one thing Texas had never experienced was a gold rush.

In 1849, the year before statehood, between 80,000 and 100,000 people raced to California, most defined gold. The population of people from all over the world exploded almost overnight. The new government of California had to figure out, how to handle lingering issues from the Empire of Spain, which had claimed California for 300 years, the Empire of Mexico, which had governed the province of Alta, California for 25 years, the question of slavery, which would dominate every governmental conversation of the 1850s,

the onslaught of new arrivals who brought total chaos in their desperate search for gold, and then, of course, the people who had lived in California since the end of the last Ice Age. The issue that dominated the first half of Governor Burnett's speech was the increasingly deadly and widespread conflict with Native Americans. Unlike many Americans, Burnett actually seemed to have some understanding of the plight of local tribes when he said. They have not only seen their country taken from them, but they see their ranks rapidly thinning from the effects of our diseases.

They instinctively consider themselves a doomed race, and this idea leads to despair. and despair prevents them from providing the usual and necessary supply of provisions. This produces starvation, which knows but one law, that of gratification, and the natural result is that these people kill the first stray animal they find. This leads to war between them and the whites, and war creates a hatred against the white man that never ceases to exist in the Indian bosom. Burnett went on to deliver a fatalistic view of the future of California, and the American West.

Our American experience has demonstrated the fact that the two races cannot live in the same vicinity in peace. The white man, to whom time is money, and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property. And after being robbed a few times, he becomes desperate and resolves upon a war of extermination. This is the common feeling of our people

who have lived upon the Indian Frontier. that a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result, but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert. Situated as California is, we must expect a long, continued, and harassing irregular warfare with the Indians. Governor Burnett's vision of the future was dark but accurate. Due to the vastness of the land, the new state government of California resolved to allow settlers to form their own militias for their defense. But the strategy became an offensive tactic almost immediately.

The Modoc people, a relatively small group who lived 200 miles north of the heart of the gold rush, suffered badly over the next 20 years, until they decided enough was enough, and they made one of most dramatic last stands in the West. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and this is a six-part series about the Modoc War, the extraordinary and devastating conflict in which a small band of Modoc held off the U.S. Army in the lava beds of Northern California. This is episode one, Lost River.

Long before the miners and the militias and the soldiers, the Modoc lived in one of the most striking landscapes in North America. Their homeland straddled what is now the border between northern California and southern Oregon. It was a country of high desert, volcanic rock, and wide lakes fed by snowmilt and underground springs. At its center ran Lost River, a peculiar waterway which started at Clear Lake in the northernmost edge of California, then looped 60 miles up into southern Oregon, and then back down to California to end at Tule Lake. The river got its name from American settlers

who marveled at how the flow vanished into a web of tiny channels during its journey, only to gather itself farther along at a narrow passage and continue its long curve between the two lakes. It was a river that disappeared and came back. It was a lost river. The Modoc people had lived and thrived on its banks for 10,000 years. The name Modoc comes from their own word for Tule Lake, Mootoc, meaning Lake of the extreme south.

The Modoc were the southernmost branch of a people who also included the Klamath, their cousins to the north. The two groups spoke dialects of the same language and shared the same creation stories. The Klamath settled around Upper Klamath Lake and its tributaries. The Modoc claimed the country to the south, from Mount Shasta in the west to Goose Lake in the east and Medicine Lake in the south. It was a vast territory for a people who probably not. never numbered more than 2,000. They lived according to the rhythms of the country. In the winter,

Modoc families crowded into substantial pit houses, dug four feet into the ground, framed with heavy timbers and long poles, then roofed with bark, grass, and the excavated earth itself. A fire pit in the center kept the cold at bay. When the snow retreated in the spring, the modoc dismantled the houses, but left the pit open to wind and sun. Only the four main, the main framing posts remain standing, ready for rebuilding in the fall. In the spring, the modoc moved to camps along Lost River and caught sucker fish. Huge runs of the fish surged up through the streams that fed Clear Lake and Tule Lake. In the summer, women gathered tubers, bulbs, and roots. They roasted seeds and fires, dried

them in the sun, and stored them in sacks. They wove the giant grass-like plants that grew in the shallows of every lake into shoes, mats, hats, baskets, and rope. In the autumn, the modoc harvested wocus plants from the waterways, the bulbs of which contained highly nutritious seeds. Then the cycle returned to winter, and the modoc moved back into their pit houses. Nowhere were the modoc villages more tightly packed than along the last few miles of Lost River above Tule Lake. That was the beating heart of Modoc country.

But south of Tule Lake lay a different kind of country, a vast field of volcanic rock known as the lava beds. It was a maze of stone, ridges of black rock, jagged crevasses, caves and natural trenches, which were both foreboding and forbidding. The Modoc and the other native people of the region lived there unbothered for thousands of years. Until the 1770s, when the Spanish moved north through California, and the English and French moved south from Canada through the future states of Washington and Oregon. And then, in growing numbers throughout the early 1800s, Americans moved west across the entire continent. When the first wagon trains rolled westward in 1836, settlers were drawn by land in California

in Oregon. Then on August 19, 1848, the New York Herald became the first Eastern newspaper to break the news of the discovery at John Sutter's Mill. After that, everyone in the world was drawn to California by gold. Over the next 14 months, close to 100,000 people hurried to the land that was trying to build a state government, but was not officially a state of the U.S. A population nearly as large as that of Texas at the time moved to California in just one year, and fighting between the new arrivals and the original residents started immediately. By the time California's first governor, Peter Burnett, delivered his final address to the state's legislature in January 1851.

The government had told its citizens to form their own militias, and Burnett detailed several clashes between white settlers and Native Americans, from San Diego and Southern California to the Sacramento area in Northern California. The following year, the killing in Northern California turned truly sinister. Fast-growing trees, a company you've heard me talk about, America's largest and most trusted online nursery, is now Trees.com. Go to their website and browse for virtually any tree or plant you can think of. When our mom moved into her new house, she planted several new trees, two of which were juniper-tailor pines next to the back deck as a privacy fence. Trees.com delivers plants and trees right to your door, whether you want privacy trees or shade trees or fruit trees or anything else. and they all come with the alive and thrive guarantee. Plant experts are available to help with your choice,

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using the code Old West at checkout. Trees.com code Old West. Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use Old West to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. In Modoc territory, volunteer militias began operating out of the mining town of Wyrika in the shadow of Mount Shasta.

In the autumn of 1852, Ben Wright led a company of 20 volunteers into Modoc country. Wright was a Quaker from Indiana who had abandoned his face. and drifted west as a young man. The story went that a girl he fancied was killed in an Indian attack along the immigrant trail, and the loss turned him into a lifelong enemy of all native people. Whether or not the story was true, Wright's hatred was real. He settled in the mining camps near Wyrika. He grew his hair long, wore buckskins, and shaved his face clean

except for a patch of hair beneath his lower lip. He reportedly looked so much like an Indian that one of his own men, tackled him in the dark, mistaking him for a warrior. For three months, Wright escorted wagon trains through the northernmost reaches of California, and when the opportunity arose, he killed Indians. At one point, Wright and his men ran down two Modoc women fleeing toward the nearby lava beds. The men shot the older woman dead. The younger woman survived with a wound to her arm. Wright walked up to her, drew his knife, and finished the job. But it was his most notorious attack, which taught the modoc a tragic lesson they never forgot,

and one which they used to deadly effect 20 years later. To draw the modoc into the open, Ben Wright used a white flag of truce and announced that he wanted to talk peace. A group of cautiously hopeful modoc agreed to meet. They camped near Wright's men at a place called Natural Bridge on Lost River. For five days, they ate the militia's beef and flour, and they talked. On the morning of the sixth day, Wright sent his men to surround the sleeping camp.

He concealed two revolvers beneath a heavy cloak, walked into the group of Modoc, and opened fire on their leader at point-blank range. Then he moved through the camp, shooting as he went, while his men poured rifle fire from every direction. The modoc, armed only with bows and arrows, had no chance. Women were killed alongside men. Those who tried to escape into the river were dragged back and shot. shot. Estimates of the dead range from 30 to 90. None of the attackers receive so much as a

scratch. Wright and his volunteers rode back to Wyrka carrying Modoc's scalps. The townspeople cheered. The California legislature paid Wright $744 for his three months of service as a militia captain. That's roughly $23,000 in today's money. His men collected $4 a day, more than eight times what a regular army private earned. And the modoc learned a lesson they would never forget. A white flag of truce was not an invitation to peace. It was a trap. Among the survivors of the Wright massacre were two men whose names would echo through the next 20 years, a shaman called curly-headed doctor and a young warrior called Skonshin-John. Both carried the memory of the betrayal for the rest of their lives. As for Ben Wright, his reputation as an Indian killer one-hundred

him an appointment as a government Indian agent on the southern Oregon coast. There, drunk and vicious, he publicly whipped and humiliated a native woman called Chetko Jenny. Jenny conspired with a Shoshonee scout called Enos, and together they ambushed Ben Wright near the mouth of the rogue river. Enos killed Wright with an axe, cut open his chest, and according to the story, ate his heart. And the Ben Wright massacre was not the only mass killing in the 1850s. In 1856, militia captain J. D. Cosby and 65 men chased a group of Pitt River Indians who had ambushed a wagon train. When the Pitt River warriors proved impossible to find, the militiamen took their frustrations out on the modoc. The militiamen came across a group

of 14 modoc cooking breakfast in a summer village along Lost River. Cosby ordered them shot, men, women, and children. The posse then crossed the river and attacked another village. The militiamen scalped the dead and hung the trophies on their saddles. Back in Wyrka, Cosby claimed he had fought two pitched battles against hostile Indians. It was a lie, but nobody cared enough to check. By the close of the 1850s, the modoc had been shattered. A people who had once numbered roughly 2,000 were reduced to about 400.

Armed resistance became impossible, and the modoc along with other native peoples of the Northwest became some of the first to experience life on reservations. On Valentine's Day, 1864, a lawyer named Elijah Steele came home to Wyrka and found several hundred Indians filling his yard. Steele was a New York transplant who had gone west chasing gold rush money. Like many, he failed at mining, so he returned to the law. He was gaunt and bony-faced with a fringe of beard, and he reminded some of the locals of President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had appointed Steele, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, for the northernmost collection of California counties in 1863.

Steele was a political progressive by the standards of the time. He opposed slavery. He named one of his sons after Charles Darwin, and he believed native people deserved fair treatment. When he took the job, conditions across the region were dire. Indians were starving. Bands were fighting each other and killing settlers. Settlers responded with militias which were closer to death squads. Steele addressed the crisis by negotiating an end to the fighting

and working to increase food supplies. That effort was what brought the Indians to his door. There were Klamath and Modoc and Shasta, along with other communities from the Sacramento and Scott River valleys. The headmen came because they recognized that the present situation could not continue. Starvation was so widespread that one military commander had approved five tons of government beef and five and a half tons of flour on his own authority to keep people alive. Families were selling children as slaves and women as prostitutes to bring in money,

a human commerce that destroyed communities. Among the MODOC leaders who went to Steele's yard that day were Skonjinjohn, the senior headman. He was accompanied by a young man called Kampus. He was solidly built, composed, and clearly a rising figure. It was Steele who gave the young man the nickname Captain Jack, after a local miner who resembled the young man. The gathering at Steele's home led eight months later to the Treaty of Council Grove. signed on October 14, 1864, it was a sweeping agreement in which the Modoc, Klamath, and Yehuskin Paiute

ceded more than 6 million acres to the U.S. government. In return, they were promised a reservation, annual payments, and provisions. The reservation would be in Oregon, centered on the upper Klamath Lake in the heart of Klamath territory. The Modoc had to leave their homeland along Lost River and Tule Lake and go north to someone else. else's land. But they upheld their side of the agreement, and they moved to the reservation. The Klamath were more numerous, and they made sure the modoc knew who was in charge. From the beginning, life on the reservation was miserable. The modoc were crowded, harassed, and shortchanged. The promised food and clothing arrived sporadically and in insufficient quantities.

Winters were brutal. The modoc went cold and hungry, while reservation agents, mostly political appointees who had gotten their jobs through patronage skimmed the supplies. Captain Jack and the Modoc endured the reservation for six years, but conditions didn't improve, and the Klamath hostility never led up. In April of 1870, Jack made a decision. He led roughly 370 Modoc off the reservation and back to their homeland on Lost River. They rebuilt their winter houses along the banks where their ancestors had lived for centuries, and they settled in. It was not meant as an act of war. For the Modoc, it was a homecoming. Jack hoped to live in peace alongside the settlers who now occupied the valley. He visited Wyrika. He traded with local ranchers.

He made himself available to government officials and told anyone who would listen that the modoc wanted their own reservation on Lost River, a small piece of the six million acres they had given up. But the settlers didn't see it that way. To them the modoc were squatters on land that now belonged to white men. Every missing calf and downed fence was blamed on the modoc. Petitions went to the government, demanding that the modoc be sent back to the reservation. For two years, Captain Jack's band lived in an uneasy limbo along Lost River. They were not at war, but they were not at peace either.

They occupied a legal and political no-man's land. was a situation that could not hold, and by the fall of 1872, the machinery that would end it was in motion. One of the petitions to the government to request or demand the removal of the modoc was likely drafted by members of the powerful Applegate family. The petition read, In part, shall a petty Indian chief with 20 desperadoes and a squalid band of 300 miserable savages any longer said it defiance the strong arm of the government, driving out citizens from their homes, threatening their lives and destroying their property. Behind the rhetoric lay something more calculated than frontier anxiety.

Jesse Applegate was one of Oregon's founding pioneers, and he had his eye on the land the modoc occupied. He and an absentee land baron named Jesse Carr were quietly assembling a real estate empire in the Lost River country. The Modoc were in the way of that ambition, and the Applegates used every lever possible, petitions, political connections, influence over the Indian Bureau, to ensure the modoc were removed. Thomas O'Don Neal, the new Oregon superintendent for the Indian Bureau, was a man more aligned with settler interest than his predecessor Elijah Steele. O'Donle won authorization from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington to force the Modoc back to the reservation. The commissioner's instructions were blunt, remove them, quote,

peaceably if you possibly can, but forcibly if you must. In late November of 1872, O'Don Neal traveled to Klamath country to bring the matter to a head. He dispatched Ivan Applegate, Jesse's nephew, to Lost River with a message for Captain Jack. The message instructed Jack to go to the town of Linkville to talk, or just to lead his people directly back to the reservation. Jack refused both options. He believed the invitation was a trap. He was not going to walk into Linkville to be arrested, and he was not going to go back to a reservation where his people had starved.

Ivan Applegate rode back with Jack's refusal, and O'Don Neal turned it into a pretext. He wrote to Major John Green at Fort Klamath and ordered him to dispatch soldiers to Lost River, arrest the modoc leaders, and forced the rest of the group back to the reservation. At Fort Klamath, Lieutenant Fraser Boutel heard the plan and told Green it was reckless. the fort's single cavalry troop was far too small to round up 300 people. General Edward Camby, the commander of the Department of the Columbia in the Pacific Northwest, had a standing order which required overwhelming force before any confrontation with the modoc. Sending 36 men to arrest a chief who refused to surrender and was backed by 300 was not a show

of strength. It was an invitation to a fight. Major Green overruled Lieutenant Butel, and his His reasoning had to do with reputation. If I don't send the troops, the Major said, they will think we were all afraid. By noon on November 28, 1872, Superintendent O'Don Neal, Captain James Jackson, Lieutenant Frasier Boutelle, and 36 enlisted men were riding south toward Lost River with Ivan Applegate as their guide. A pack train carrying ammunition, food, and surgical supplies followed two hours behind the soldiers. The weather turned foul as sleet and rain soaked the men and the horses and turned the roads

to mud. The column rode through a freezing night and covered nearly 60 miles. As the soldiers passed through the tiny settlement of Linkville, Superintendent O'Neill pulled Captain Jackson aside for one final instruction. Let the Indians fire first. If there was to be blood, the superintendent wanted to be able to say the Modoc started it. Linkville, an informal posse of local citizens, led by Ivan Applegate's brother Oliver, joined the army column, or at least stayed near it. They were not part of the army's mission,

but they were eager to help run out the modoc. In the 4 a.m. darkness, at the last Ford on Lost River, Captain Jackson split his force. He sent Oliver Applegate and the civilian posse down the east bank toward a small Modoc village. Jackson led the cavalry down the West Bank toward Captain Jack's larger village. Dawn was coming, and the Modoc were asleep. The faintest hint of light was creeping into the eastern sky on Friday, November 29, 1872, when Scarface Charlie, a Modoc man, paddled his canoe across Lost River from an all-night gambling game.

On the western bank, he spotted blue-coat soldiers advancing in a skirmish line toward the Modoc winter houses. As Charlie climbed the steep slope, he saw, stumbled and inadvertently fired his rifle. The loud crack woke up the villagers and sent the soldiers running. The soldiers double-timed it into Captain Jack's village. Women and children dropped flat to the floors of the pit houses. Dug four feet into the ground, the earthen walls offered some protection against rifle fire. Several MODOC men emerged stripped to the waist, each carrying multiple loaded rifles. Scarface Charlie, wearing a red bandana around

his head, handed a weapon to Black Jim, then laid two more at his feet and held another at his hip. Army Captain James Jackson shouted commands to the Modoc in English, while Ivan Applegate repeated them in Chinook jargon. Jackson demanded to speak to Captain Jack. Jack was scrambling to find something to put on, so he sent a man known as Bogus Charlie out in his place. During the confusion, Lieutenant Boutel drew his revolver and locked eyes with Scarface Charlie. Both men fired at the same time. Boutel's pistol shot clipped Charlie's bandana and skimmed the side of his skull without breaking the skin. Charlie's rifle slug traveled up the sleeve of Boutel's left arm and sliced through his sweater without touching his skin.

The two men stood staring at each other. They were still alive and they had experienced a fluke of physics so outrageous they could not have done it again if they tried. And then everything erupted. Every armed man on both sides began shooting. A modoc man called watchmen dropped dead in the first volley. A sergeant fell injured next to him. Two or three modoc were hit, none fatally, but seven more troopers went down, one of them mortally wounded.

The soldiers holding the cavalry horses lost control of the reins, and the panicked animals stampeded into the brush. The firefight was short and savage. Boutel ordered a charge, and the modoc fell. back, not in retreat but to lure the soldiers into the open. Boutel didn't take the bait. He told his men to collect the women, the elderly, and the children, and send them toward their men. Once the Modoc families were reunited, the shootings sputtered out. The soldiers torched the empty modoc houses. While Lieutenant Boutel supervised the burning, Captain Jackson sent the wounded across Lost River in canoes. When the work was done, the captain led the remaining soldiers.

away from the village. They started riding eight miles upriver to the nearest usable Ford. They intended to cross the river and move downstream to the cabin of a settler named Dennis Crawley. While the soldiers rode, they could hear the echoes of gunfire from the smaller Modoc village on the east bank of the river, but they wouldn't learn the details until later that day. On the east bank, Oliver Applegate and his civilian posse rode into the smaller village. Applegate shook hands with the shaman, curly-headed doctor, and announced in the stilted English settlers used with Indians that he had come to save them. The modoc were not convinced.

A man called Hooker Jim bolted for a canoe. A civilian demanded Jim returned to the village, and the two men wrestled over a rifle. And then, at the same instant, Boutelle and Scarface Charlie fired at each other on the other side of the river, the East Bank fight exploded. A civilian in the posse fell dead in the first exchange. A settler named George Small turned his shotgun on a six-year-old modoc child and killed him. Then he fired at a mother holding an infant. The blast missed the woman but killed her baby.

The men of the posse outnumbered and exposed realized they had ignited a firestorm. They retreated to Dennis Crawley's cabin and took shelter inside. The modoc followed and fired from long distance, but did it be a firestorm. not rush the cabin. On both sides of the river, Modoc leaders were more concerned with moving the villagers to defensible positions than fighting the attackers. On the west bank, Captain Jack led his people south toward the lava beds. They traveled light and fast, abandoning everything they couldn't carry. Hooker Jim's east bank villagers went the other direction toward Tulay Lake before circling back to the lava beds. As they moved, they took revenge.

Over the next two days, Hooker Jim and his men killed between 14 and 18 male settlers along the lake, men whose homesteads sat on land that had been Modoc territory within living memory. The Modoc spared women and children, but the body count was devastating. When Hooker Jim's band reached the lava beds, Captain Jack faced an impossible choice. He knew that allowing Hooker Jim's group to join him meant accepting the blame for the settler killings. but he couldn't turn away Modoc families with nowhere else to go, so he let them in. By the end of November, roughly 150 Modoc men, women, and children were sheltered in a natural fortress of volcanic rock on the southern shore of Tule Lake.

Among them were between 50 and 60 fighting men. They had the clothes on their backs, a cache of dried beef and edible roots in nearby caves, and outdated weapons. They also had the land, a labyrinth of large, black lava ridges, hidden caves, and razor-edged crevasses that no American soldier had ever explored. The place would be called Captain Jack's Stronghold. By 1872, the U.S. Army had fought Native American warriors on all types of terrain from Montana to Texas, but it had never faced a scenario like the one it faced in the lava beds of Northern California. Next time on Legends of the Old

West, the U.S. government sends 400 soldiers to pry the most of the most of the most of the most of the mowedoc out of the lava beds. The soldiers advance through freezing fog into an alien landscape. They take fire from everywhere, but they can see nothing. The first battle of the stronghold is an eye-opening shock for the U.S. Army. That's next week on Legends of the Old West. This story draws heavily on the work of Robert Aquinas McNally, whose book The Modoc War, a story of genocide at the dawn of America's gilded age, is the finest account of the conflict ever written. The book from Bison Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, is available in stores and through online retailers.

The series was researched and written by Matthew Curns. Additional research and writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier. To binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts or through our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Thanks for listening.