Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 350 - The Modoc War

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/lionsledbydonkeys Once upon a time, the US went to war against a small tribe in the pacific northwest, and, despite winning due to the massive power imbalance, they managed to get their asses kicked the entire time. Sources: Arthur Quinn. Hell With the Fire Out: A History of the Modoc War Terry Johnston. Devil's Backbone: The Modoc War, 1872–3 Robert McNally. The Modoc War: A Little Indian War Goes Big https://www.historynet.com/the-modoc-war-a-little-indian-war-goes-big/ Kurt Nelson. The Modoc War of 1872. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-modoc-war-of-1872/ https://www.militarymuseum.org/Modoc1.html https://www.csuchico.edu/alva/projects/2012/the-beginning-of-the-end.shtml https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/labe/intro.htm

Hey everybody, our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live shows, specific merch, and wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store, LLBDMerch.com. So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if you want something, get your order in. Once again, that is LLBDMerch.com

and the link will also at Bydonkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Nate. We've come to the American West circa the 1800s. The frontier of Oregon is right out in front of us. And through the grace of God and corrupt government, any place we put our shitty log cabin and one large bed, just big enough for all of our families to sleep like the bucket family from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, becomes legally ours. We roll into town and are confused when we meet the locals, who for some reason really do not want us

here. They say something about this there being their land and it's sacred to them. Nate decides he's going to show them the light and the power of our civilization and presents them the finest audio cables Europe has to offer. In response, we're both quickly filled with enough arrows to kill God. How you doing buddy? I'm doing great. I was thinking when you said that like, oh, so circa the 1800s and it's like, you know, but that's a pretty, pretty broad swath there because it's like you could be late 1800s where it's basically like little bighorn, you know, or it's early 1800s where it's The Revenant. You know what I mean?

Like it could be anything. It could be Lewis and Clark. There you go. Yeah. We are just the 1800s. Yeah, the 1800s. Yeah, I was thinking about this too. It's like, oh, we're staring at Oregon.

We're like, there's going to be so many annoying vegan restaurants here when we establish paradise. This place is going to be so goddamn racist when we're done with it. Oh, hilariously, I just, it's a side note. I years ago, a friend of mine recommended I read the Willa Cather novel death comes for the archbishop. And it's talking about like the kind of settlement of New Mexico, you know, in a fiction treatment, but it's one of those things where you're

like, oh yeah, the great West and the frontier. And it's like everything about the peep encountering people is like, oh, this guy lets you stay at his house. And he turns out he's a serial killer. It's like, oh, the frontier in the wild west was basically Cormac McCarthy's the road. It was just like, this, the frontier in the wild west was basically Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It was just like, this is where you die. They eat your bones. Welcome to Oregon. You die here.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the Oregon Trail did teach us a lot about that when we were kids on shitty computers. We get a lot of digital dysentery. We're not going to be talking about the Oregon Trail today, but we are going to be talking about something that's loosely related. So the history of this show, we've often talked about the United States government's genocidal wars against the native peoples of North America.

However, most of the topics we've talked about in that context are East Coast, Midwest, the middle. What's the word for the middle of the country? It's not flyover country. Great Plains. Great Plains. Yeah, you say it can't be flyover country. Planes didn't exist yet.

They didn't exist, yeah. Unless you were a sorcerer. It's horse over country. The Great Plains, right. I don't know why I forgot that. Great Plains up until the Rockies and then on the other side of the Rockies, you basically got the Pacific basin,

sort of like that whole area. We love our basins on the show. Huge basin heads. We love some basins. Yeah, exactly. I'm a Ohio river Valley ish sorta kinda technically it's huge. So technically it's the Valley, even if it just feels flat. So yeah, a lot of basins. But anyway, yeah, the great Plains. Wow. Yeah. America's huge.

You know, it's just ended back in the day when you had to go by oxen cart. It was took longer. It's too big. We should make it smaller. Yeah. Well, you know what? I mean, that's what we're doing. We need to activate to get docks.

We need to activate to get docks. We need to activate to get docks. We need to activate to get docks. We need to activate It's too big. We should make it smaller. Yeah. Well, you know what? I mean, that's what we're doing. We need to activate the Gaddafi's plan to split up Switzerland, but to make the U.S. much, much smaller, not to give the land to anyone else necessarily, but to just eliminate it entirely. Like, what if Montana was an island? What if you just drew some lines like Gaddafi did, but then basically you create a situation where like you extend borders from Central American countries.

So basically like everywhere from more or less New Orleans all the way up through Minneapolis is just part of Belize now for some reason. Yeah, let's do it, man. Let's make really tall Honduras. But for this episode, we're going west and we're going to talk about the Modoc War. Have you ever heard of this? You know, the name rings a bell, but I don't know if it's because I've encountered it somewhere

or if it's because you had talked about it as like a potential script idea. And that's a little behind the scenes there for the show. But it's not the first time I've heard the term, but I genuinely don't remember where I've heard it. Well, the Modoc War for some background. The Modoc people are people native to North America, mostly around the Klamath region of southern Oregon. Beautiful place. I've been there. It's actually where I fought wildfires when I worked for the Bureau of Land Management.

Gorgeous area, yeah. And also northern California. Like most people native to the area, they lived off of salmon runs and forage and they built sick beehive looking homes out of mud when winter rolled around. And I've seen what drawings of what they should look like. Really cool, I have to say. We should build more beehive huts. If you're ever interested in a book that is not going to be very straightforward to comprehend,

but it's really phenomenal. Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin is basically like a fictional ethnography of a post-apocalyptic sort of like back to sort of Northern California, like indigenous tradition society. It's fascinating. And it basically envisions how does one live off the land and live in a like a non organized or not super fucking centralized society in a place like that. It's like, hmm, a lot of authors seem to envision this maybe because they's because they're all in goddamn California, or maybe it's just because they're like, yeah, this area, it's so wild and plentiful,

but also harsh, like imagine what it would be like to live here without sort of, you know, treats and Walmart. Imagine a land where there was not a single bar in which you could throw an ax. Imagine a land where no cop will stop you for drunk driving. Dude, I heard you I just describing the Midwest?

Unfortunately for the Modoc and for most other people in world's history, white people eventually showed up in the neighborhood. Mm hmm. The first of these were limited to explorations from the Hudson Bay Company. However, they didn't really want anything

to do with the Modoc land at first where the Modoc lived, the Lost River region. There wasn't really anything for them to exploit. At least nothing they were looking for yet. So those Hudson Bay Company people skirted around to the north and they made contact with other people like the Klamath tribe and things like that, the Paiutes. For the time being, the Modoc contact with these outsiders was pretty limited and only in passing. But that would change with the establishment of something called the Applegate Trail.

The Applegate Trail was one of many, let's call them immigration or settling routes that American settlers would take going from east to west, connecting to the famous Oregon Trail that Nate and I already talked about, the one that gave us all dysentery on the computer when we were kids. Yeah, when your mom has drowned, basically. Yes. This route was easy, comparatively so. Not that any trail was really easy, going west those days. It was really, really rough.

It was harsh. A lot of people died. Of course, some would argue, not nearly enough. Well, there was this northern route that was harsh, and then there was the slightly faster southern route with a part called Jornada del Muerte, or the Journey of Death through what's now New Mexico and Arizona.

And it was not just a cute coincidental name. I love to go to a place that's now called the Donner Pass. Brilliant stuff. I love some mountainous long pig. I just finished Octavia Butler's Parable of the sower and there's literally mountainous long pig is a thing that's directly relevant. So I was like, Oh, I can even envision it. Oh, look, those teens are out of campfire, but they got a nice meal. Oh, if you're going to be a cannibal, right? I can't imagine a better era to be a cannibal

than like back then, because you know, what does like a deer, like every Midwestern or we know what a deer tastes like if it's been eating out the trash, it's not good. And I imagine that's just like what all humans taste like nowadays. But back in the day when everybody's pretty much just living off of whatever actually came out of the ground, I mean, it's probably better, right? I feel like the cannibals of the Donner Party had the best cuts of meat available in the annals of cannibalism Yeah, I mean look Meanwhile, I'm like it's basically people are so riven with mercury poisoning that it's like a new form of Kobe beef that makes you trip

So marbled with laudanum. Yeah exactly marbled with laudanum and like fucking like, you know Chlorate and all these other things. I was gonna say yeah,, you're right. Donner Pass, no GMOs in sight. Yeah. Yeah. That is single seed oil. RFK is probably living off of a freezer full of human meat. But I mean, of course, you know, we don't condone cannibalism, but there's no ethical cannibalism under capitalism. So I've been sitting on that one for a while. But anyway, these trails are easily traversed for the time and well connected to other trails, meaning that before long, a fuckload of white people would be showing up on the Modoc's front door once the Applegate Trail opened in 1846. This is pretty late in the annals of settler colonialism in North America.

It took a long time for people to get West and also more importantly for the government to make it worth people's while to bother. So one thing to bear in mind was that obviously in 1849 this changes significantly with the gold rush in California. But one of the things about it is that there were lots of Europeans in California before that, but they were almost all people from the Spanish empire. Yeah, yeah, of course. And the way they got there was not traveling over land, but rather going all the way around South America,

all down Fast Cape Horn, past all of the one big Portuguese colony in the Americas, and then back further on, all the way back up around again to California. Less so Oregon and Washington although they had if I remember correctly there were some missions and then obviously the Russians were not around this time Or maybe a little later in Alaska Yeah, but in general Russian attempts to colonize Alaska ended like most things that Russia's in hilarious failure. Oh, yeah

No, they absolutely did but it's just more along the lines of, like it wasn't that these were the first Europeans sort of like citing the Pacific for the first time. No, no, of course not. But it's more that, it's more that like, there hadn't been an economic incentive to go out there, like what would happen with the gold rush in California. Or just like homesteading and things of that nature.

And specifically in Washington and Oregon, where it's just like, yeah, if you go out there and just throw down a house, we'll give you all that shit. Well, I mean, that's just the thing. Some people got a little cheesed off with their governments in Europe between, let's say, 1791 and 1849. Can't think of anything.

Yeah, just some stuff happened. I can't think of all the reasons why we had so many German speaking units in the American Civil War, all of whom were strangely war veterans. But this kind of reality dawned on every native tribe at some point. And each one of them had a slightly different approach of what to do with these new white people coming in

and stealing their shit. Some tribes had heard what had happened to other tribes or had seen it if they tried to resist, especially by the mid 1800s when this shit was not a secret, the conduct of the American government was a known quantity to native peoples. So some tribes bit the bullet and tried to live peacefully with their new surprise neighbors.

Of course, that didn't work either, but you could see why they would pick that. Others would resist and resist fucking hard, either not knowing or not caring about the force that the US government would bring about them if they refused to lie down, get robbed, and slowly die out. Yeah, so I mean, by this point in American history, you have to understand that this hasn't reached the West, the far West yet.

It had been happening in California for quite some time I would argue in this stage of American colonialism in North America The settlers in California are probably the most psychotic and we'll get a little bit more than just a little bit No, I just wanted to mention that obviously on the East Coast However, like you've had massive forestry settlements and an ethnic cleansing and just generally like driving people out at gunpoint. Yeah, Oklahoma. Yeah, Oklahoma. Yeah, exactly. Out of things like the Trail of Tears and stuff like that. Jackson, Mississippi, not named by accident. And so these kinds of things, but most of the West, you know, the Louisiana purchase in the land that later becomes part of America after the Mexican American War, which is I'm jumping around historical periods here, but like this area, like there just there is some European presence, but it's scattershot aside from the Pacific coast.

Yeah. And California is the most heavily populated of all of these. And it's still not, you know, obvious. Of course, it's not yet bustling place yet. Post 1849, it grows exponentially, but we're not quite there. Yeah, the modox fell Strongly into the resist camp and as soon as white people began traveling down the Applegate Trail The modox began to raid them and these were by no means Small-scale things in wood raid the modox wiped out nearly an entire wagon train, killing 65 people. Which was a big fucking deal back then. Kids were taken back into the Modoc tribe, and what happened afterwards is still strongly up for debate.

Some believe that they were enslaved, while others believe they were simply adopted into the tribe. The Modoc would do both of these things from time to time. So in reality, it's probably a combination of the two. And you can imagine what kind of PR gets out after the slaughter of 65 people happens. Settlers or no. Yeah, they didn't really have press ombudsman. Yeah, get me the Modoc's public affairs officer. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, also, they were well within the rights of doing so. They were invading the Modox land. But also it's one of those things too where it's like, it's just, it's very difficult to point a finger and say this is what they did and it's good and bad in the sense of like the kind of conduct is so varied across this whole, I mean, when you think about just how impossibly variegated, you know, indigenous North Americans were in terms of everything about like how their societies were structured and like how they behave towards each other versus their enemies. Yeah, of course.

It's just, it's hard to be like, oh, this is indicative of thing. This is indicative of what happened on that specific wagon train. Yeah. And, and addictive to that specific band of Modoc. I mean, the Modoc are like most native people not unified in anything other than emergencies for the most part. So if a band of warriors just says, we're gonna go fuck those people up,

and the rest of the Modoc are like, wait, no, don't do that, they're probably still gonna go fuck those people up. Yeah, we just need to invent sunscreen for these kids that we're adopting. Right. This led to the Sheriff of Wyricka, California, Charles McDermott, declaring that the Modoc people

needed to, quote, be wiped from the face of the earth. So, yeah. That's so fucking, ugh. Now this is not uncommon to dip your toes in the depressing world of genocide studies in history. These kind of declarations from California sheriffs for this time period are actually not uncommon. It's one of the reasons why I said California settlers

were certainly some of the most psychotic of this period. You can see just straight up like extermination orders coming out of multiple different government offices in California around this period. The probably some of the most explicit ones to come out of any level of government at any point during the this period of American history. It's kind of absurd. It's like instead of it being like the world's most impossibly Prussian name signing it is by somebody named like, like shit drawers Jones, like the, you know, the constable of why Rica Charles Mcgloop, I have a big, because of, of having a attended

the funeral of one of my former soldiers who was buried on the reservation, Hoopa Indian reservation in, I believe since this Q County, I've been up to this area, I know this area actually. I was wondering basically, because I don't know where that's off my head. And when you mentioned Wairika, I'm like, well, Wairika was the last big city before we got to Hupa. And I think about it, I'm like,

I know exactly what this place looks like. I know exactly what this terrain looks like. Yeah, it's making it a little bit more personal. And yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, this sheriff McDermott whipped up his own personal insgruppen and went off into the hills massacring at least 40 modoc out of a population of only a few hundred. This is a catastrophic event for the modoc people.

The modoc people were never large in number and suddenly they lost 40, men, women and children. Eventually the US government got involved, doing what they always did, forcing an entire native population off their own land in exchange for a shit land that the government found worthless in the form of the reservation system. The government made one reservation, the Klamath Reservation, for several different tribes and ordered all of them to move there, regardless of the fact that the Modoc, for example, had their lands in the Lost River, and those were not included in the reservation.

And the reservation also included the Klamath and the Paiute tribes, two of the Modoc's traditional enemies, who were both larger and stronger than them. The Modocs signed the treaty, but within a few years of living on the reservation, it just became untenable. Living on the reservation was hard, the best-case situation, and it was made purposefully so by the U.S. government. And this was only made worse due to the fact that they were having constant conflicts with the other tribes they were now forced to live alongside with.

Food, shelter, water, everything was being stolen from them by other tribes, and the government, who per the treaty were supposed to keep a law and order on the reservation to make sure this did not happen, did absolutely nothing to protect the Modoc. So a fracture occurred within the Modoc tribe with their strongest warrior, a guy named Kintposs, or Kintpush, who went by the white name Captain Jack, telling people that, fuck this, let's leave. For people, maybe non-Americans or Americans who have never seen what a reservation looks like, it's not like it's a fenced in camp.

It's a large piece of land that people can just leave. And they weren't supposed to. You should put that strictly against the law at the time. So the old chiefs wanted to remain on the reservation, but Captain Jack said, fuck this, we're leaving. Anybody who wants to leave can come with me. So about 50 people followed them back to their ancestral lands on the Lost River. And they remained there for years. The government kind of just ignored them, giving them a pass, if you could call it that. And this wasn't because they didn't care or didn't mind that they were squatting on what was their own land. Instead, it was because despite the treaty being signed by the Modoc in 1865, the Senate didn't ratify it until 1869. So in the time between leaving

the reservation and the signing and ratification of the treaty, the government just kind of let the Modoc sit on their old land. However, once it was ratified, the superintendent of Indian Affairs in Oregon, a guy named Alfred Meacham, went to Captain Jack and tried to convince him, like, could you please go back to the reservation? Meacham, went to Captain Jack and tried to convince him, like, could you please go back to the reservation? Meacham told Captain Jack that he understood that they wanted the Lost River included in the reservation, and he would plead their case to the government. That was his job. But in the meantime, he needed to go back on the reservation in a show of goodwill towards the treaty, effectively. There was also a small detail of bad PR.

Now, Oregon obviously wanted settlers to move out that way, right? Captain Jack had started in the Lost River region what might be my favorite protection racket of all time. OK, he went to the white settlers who had settled in the Lost River since the modoc had

been forced out, literally went door to door with his warriors and said, you stole our fucking land. Now you have to pay us rent. It would be a shame if something bad happened to you. And here's the weird thing. The vast majority of people simply paid up and gave them no problems. They're like, yeah, sure. You're a landlord, buddy. Take the money. I feel like you show up and like, you know, a detachment sized element of dudes who know how to use every single part of the deer to make something that kills you. They're like, hey, you want to pay us rent? Do you want to get shot, stabbed, bowed, arrowed?

Which one is it? Give us 10 bucks. I got some gallbladder darts. You ready for that? Now, the white people paid the rent, but then Captain Jack, you know, he he flew too close to the sun. He began jacking up rents. He did what every landlord eventually does and turned into a dickhead. So this would cause those white people to complain to the government like, hey, this protection racket that gets out of hand, could you guys handle it?

And that is why Meacham was eventually sent back to talk to them. Captain Jack listened to Meacham and eventually decided the best course of action was to move back to the reservation. So they did move back. And again, the same problems happen. Constant conflict with other tribes and absolutely none of the promised assistance that Meacham told them that they would have to protect them from the government.

So within a few months, Captain Jack told his people, pack your shit, we're leaving again. In American idiom English, there's an expression saying someone's gone off reservation. And I don't use that expression because you have to understand it explicitly means and it was very, very, very unambiguous that it's what it meant when it started appearing in American journalism at the time. Like explicitly, even though people use it as a metaphor for like, you know, breaking with the side or like,

you know, doing something you're not supposed to, like what it means is it is drawn from more or less imprisoning Native Americans in tracks of land that where there were no fences, but they were not supposed to leave. Yeah. And it's like, that was a, that is the origin of it. And that's also the origin of what reservations were conceived of.

And so like, yeah, effectively concentration camps, but without walls. Yeah. Yeah. Like you leave, we will put you back on it or we'll kill you. Yeah. But like, but then also shitheads can move into the rez at not, you know, you don't have to approve that. Yeah. They can do what they want. You'll see that the borders of your reservation are quite fluid. Yeah. Yeah.

In one direction or, you know, in the case of the Lakota Sioux, like we talked about, they had a reservation that they thought was worthless land and then they discovered a whole bunch of shit that wasn't so worthless on it anymore. And the government came in and said, that's not part of your reservation anymore. Yeah. Like yourself. Yeah. Yeah.

Actually, um, we just got back from an Ayahuasca trip and we've determined we should abolish borders on your reservation only. Yeah, yeah. We believe in radical liberation theology, but only when it comes to you having rights. Yes. Now, Meacham again told him, please go back. I'll do my best to work things out. But at this point, Captain Jack didn't trust Meacham anymore. His band of Modoc moved south, back onto their land near the Oregon California border.

And I do need to point out something here in regards to Meacham and how Indian Affairs guys worked for his day. Meacham, for his day, was about as good as an Indian Affairs agent got. And I don't mean that as a compliment. He didn't want to massacre natives like most people did, especially in the Western United States. He really did argue on their behalf for the government, but in his own racist way. Like he absolutely did not like native people.

I need to point that, I mean, to make that crystal clear, this is not like the good one. Yeah, Tom Cruise won't be playing him in the historical revisionist film. I mean, he might. Well, he might, yeah. I feel like Scientology might fix all of this. Excuse me, Captain Jack, have you ever heard of Xenu?

But he saw an easier way of controlling native people in a way that wasn't so hard to look at for the American population. He would get in their good side, he would give them measures of good faith, take a little bit of what the government wanted in a kind of hard sell, give a little bit back and use his good relationship between himself and the tribes

to slowly but surely leverage things away from those tribes until there was nothing left. And he assumed after a little while, you know, generation two or three, well, you'd all be dead or assimilated. I wouldn't have to do this anymore. And he believed in eliminating the reservation system entirely, but not by giving native people rights by eventually getting rid of native people. Yeah, it's basically like the managed decline bureaucracy approach to genocide.

Yeah. Yeah. He was also not above using violence. I need to make that crystal clear. He had signed off before in the past of army action against native people. But unlike some people, he saw it as a last resort because he not because he didn't like violence or he wasn't a fan of it or he didn't see it as a bureaucratic necessity, but it made him look bad. I mean, this was an era of if there was a large-scale native massacre and it got in the press, it was unpopular. It was the era where a lot of people believed that the United States was simply above that kind of thing. Oh, wow. I wonder what that was like.

Yeah, certainly that would never keep happening forever. We've got like a really enlightened attitude now. We're we're we're not we're not fooled by such, you know, petty fucking Can't even think of the right word I almost want to say obsequies like, you know, just sort of like like saying nice little things to ourselves and repeating the phrase over and Over again, like America's better than this. It's like well, um, let me open a book. Oh god Yeah, I I have this feeling about I've heard that facts don't care about your feelings. Excuse me. I'll have you know that facts don't care about your feelings.

I care about your feelings. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's one of those things that people don't care what the empire does, as long as they don't have to look at it. Oh, I wonder what that's like. Yeah, because then that makes them feel bad and people don't like feeling bad. I mean, this is a thing that I think is a very useful comparison is that like when you can look at any kind of like great historical crime committed against people, there are

often parallels in terms of like how it was allowed to happen. And I think one that I would point out is that someone said recently about what's happening in Gaza is that if you look at how Americans made peace with slavery, even if they were like, oh, but I'm really against it, that is a very useful comparison because like so much, there's so many organizations, so many venues with which to kind of disassemble,

to pretend to be morally repulsed while doing nothing to stop it. And I feel like that- It's like writing a letter of deep concern. Exactly. It's taking the EU letter of deep concern. Exactly. It's taking the EU or UN approach to being upset by something. Thoughts and prayers approach to this. And it's like, I would argue that it's comparable.

I think that quite frankly, I don't want to speak on behalf of Native Americans in any way, but what I would say is that I think that the kind of eliminationist sentiment was far It stuck around a lot longer and is still around in a lot of places. Yeah, it just changed I mean, it's like, you know went from being massacred by dudes and cowboy hats to having your name taken away your religion Taking away your language taken away like it it went from a violent Eliminationist genocide to a cultural one to make you white. And then also having your own notionally sovereign land

policed by any random white dude who shows up and produces a fucking team you.com badge and says, I'm the cops now. And so it's just- The captain dire, horrific poverty. Yeah, it's a continued thing. I mean, it's just like was it Canada apologized for their treatment of Canadian native people? They call them First Nations in Canada.

And it's like, oh, cool, you apologize now. Like, thank you so much. That solves everything. No need to fix any of the damage that you've done or any of these other things. As long as you wrote a deeply sincere letter of apology, wipe your hands together. All generational trauma is healed to include victims that are still alive. I was going to say, can you send some Mormons up here to start fucking figuring out the names of these graves?

Yeah, it might help us a bit. Yeah, like, anyway, our countries are built on shit. The thing to bear in mind about this stuff is that in Canada, some of the discoveries are more recent. I think in the United States, there are recent ones, but there's also a long history of this. But I think if you just look at how long it took, how late into the 20th century it was before Native Americans had anything approaching the notion of equality under the law, you'll see that this attitude that's being

expressed here in the 1840s and the 1850s is it has never died out. And I think the idea that European supremacy and the idea that European culture, because it had technological advances that indigenous North Americans didn't have, Therefore, it was kind of like, it was like the ultimate UNO card to say, well then we deserve to have everything and you deserve to die. Like that's simplistic, but that is effectively the mentality that has never gone away.

Yeah, for sure. But we stole their diet. We stole literally everything that they grew, you know, because like it was insanely powerful. Meanwhile, all of our ancestors just lived on basically mud porridge. Delicious, delicious mud porridge. Yeah gruel that they'll give you dropsy or some other kind of fucked up disease we don't even have a real name

for. I have shitting ass disease. Yeah, exactly. I will say for Meacham though, he's the best it gets for an Indian Affairs guy, even if that does mean he's shit. And he did do his job insofar as he petitioned the federal government for either a separate modoc reservation or to include modoc lands in the Klamath reservation and the federal department of Indian affairs simply ignored it. So that's nice. Fuck this guy. I'm just pointing out, you know, the whole point of this was to explain that this is as good as it got because by 1870, Meacham had left his position for a different position in the government and had been replaced by a guy named Thomas Ordeniel. Now Ordeniel is the polar opposite of Meacham.

He did not see any point in talking to native people. He thought there was no need to talk, negotiate or anything else because the only language that native people understood was that of force. He also never once interacted with the Modoc before, despite now being in charge of them. He knew absolutely nothing about the Modoc people and just assumed all native people were the same. These two guys basically are the yin and yang of American counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah.

Just letting you know. Yeah, pretty much. So with Captain Jack's band still living out on their own, Ordeniel sent a request up the government chain to the army to ask for them to be deployed against the MODOC to force them back on the reservation if they wanted to, you know, square up. This request was sent to the Department of the Army of the Columbia, commanded by General Edward Richard Sprigg Canby,

which, name alert, we've also talked about Canby before. We had it back during our bonus episode on the Confederate campaign in New Mexico. Canby was on the Union side. I know normally when I bring that up it's because it's some shithead Confederate. If his nickname was Dick, then Dick Sprig Canby sounds like one of those diseases we don't have a medical name for anymore. You know what I mean? Like it's on par with like the itch and the gruff or something like that. He's got the Dick Sprig. Yeah, he's got Dick Sprig. And a real bad case of canby while he's at it. He's got the canby itch.

After the Civil War, Canby saw war and slaughter throughout pretty much all of the conflicts and massacres going on during that time frame, all of them involving native people. He also established a segregated mental hospital for black people, while military governor of Virginia Virginia with what has to be One of the most cursed names ever uttered on the show this central lunatic asylum for the colored insane Can I just say as a kind of like light energy name alert? I am always impressed with Native Americans picking the hardest fuck names in English to go by obviously captain Jack

Please do not ruin anything that happens later on in this episode. I mean, I'm just also gonna say that similarly in one of the wars in the Wabash near where I'm from in Indiana, there was a guy who led, you know, attacks and raids against white settlers whose name was Tobacco's son.

Fuck yeah. Which is just a fucking hard ass name. Fucking rules. Tobacco's son was also Joe's name before he quit vaping So this lunatic asylum was segregated and that was not something that can be actually wanted Can be was not in favor of segregation. However, while military governor of Virginia He simply didn't feel like it was worth arguing and gave up So I'm not gonna say he was too too strident in his beliefs

He was he was very willing to fold what he needed to. Canby then passed orders to Colonel Frank Wheaton to have a force of cavalry ready when Ordeniel specifically asked for it. But then for reasons that nobody's entirely sure of, despite already having the authorization of military force to use against the MODOK, Ordeniel just didn't ask for them to be actively deployed for five months. And when he did, he didn't wire Wheaton, which he had been told to do. Instead, he wired Major John Green, who was stationed in Klamath with a very small detachment of cavalry,

to send help quote, at once. Like, anyone would that get that gets a message like that. They assumed something immediate and urgent had happened. Green deployed a company, which companies in the American West during this period are very, very weird. Normally, you know, 100, 150 men give or take. This one is 43 under the command of Captain James Jackson. And he did not tell Wheaton that he was being deployed and seemingly forgot orders he was given previously, which stated, if you go out to meet the Modoc,

bring a lot of people to try to dissuade them from fighting. And said he brought 43 people. All right. The cavalry rode down to where they knew Captain Jack would be on the banks of the Lost River, a short ways away from another native village under the leadership of a man known by the white name, Hooker Jim.

Fuck yeah. Hey, you know, like I said, Hooker Jim is definitely a better name than as I said, shit drawers Jones, who would be the sheriff of Wyricka. I tried really hard to find how Hooker Jim got his nickname. I couldn't find it.

I don't necessarily know if Hooker meant the same thing back then. Of course it didn't. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. We can pretend though. Maybe they meant he was a pimp of some kind. Pimp Jim. Maybe he swung a really good right hook. You know what I mean? Maybe he played rugby. Maybe he did.

He's really good at the local native rugby team. Yeah. Yeah. So how Captain Jack's village was not large, there's maybe 80 people in it, with 30 you might consider warriors. But still, between the two villages, Captain Jackson's men were pretty badly outnumbered. Though of course, to the minds of a white cavalry officer in the 1800s, he didn't think much about this and instead believed if he could muscle Captain Jack into going back to the reservation, Hooker Jim would simply follow him. Which may have been true, to be fair. So the cavalry troopers walked over to Jack's camp and warned him to return or quote else. Jack did agree to this ultimatum. He knew that the last thing he really wanted

to do was fight the government. He was smart enough to know how that shit ended for him and his people. So when the captain told him you need to disarm, when previously when they went back to the reservation, they just took their weapons with them. This time Captain Jackson told him you need to leave your weapons behind. Jackson agreed to this. He decided, you know, I know how this ends.

We might kill these guys today, but this doesn't end well for us. So they agreed, we'll put our weapons down. Then a cavalry trooper walked forward and punched a native man named Scarface Charlie. These names fucking rule because Charlie did not put his weapon down fast enough for his liking, of course.

This led to Charlie and the trooper drawing pistols on one another and getting in a point blank gunfight. Neither of them hit anything. Ha ha ha ha. Ah, and this tradition continues today with the NYPD and every other cop in America. What you just don't know is they actually spend all those like hundred trillion dollars to give each police department to buy dog seeking bullets. So that's the reason why they can hit anything.

Say what you will about the cavalry trooper having bad aim, but Charlie didn't hit anything either. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, that is true. Everybody just firing like fucking Yosemite Sam in every direction. Yeah, exactly. So what you're basically saying is that like for a brief moment, it became Northern California and Kurdistan. What? Celebratory firing.

Oh, sorry. A friend of mine who's Iraqi Kurdish and lives in Britain, sent once sent me a screenshot of a story where a woman had been bitten by a rattlesnake dropped by an eagle in Texas. And he says- Oh yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that video.

And he says every time I see stuff like this, I just think that Texas is just Kurdistan with fewer guns. These two guys were having celebratory gunfire. They're just really happy to meet one another. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is actually like a, you know, spur of the moment. It's like a dance off for celebratory gunfire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is actually like a spur of the moment. It's like a dance off for celebratory gunfire.

Yeah. Who can be cooler with it? Like spitting your revolver around, see if you could shoot with your toe or something. I mean, this is like the Joe of a cavalry, you know, an E1, E2 private and you know, whatever the native warrior version of that. So you know they're doing dumb shit. It's just funny because he probably is like 20 and a stupid private, but like because you have a saw photo, he like looks 40 and has like a general Custer mustache. Yes. Like it's just the style of the time.

Yeah. So at this point, a guy named Lieutenant Frazier Boutelais ordered his men to open fire. Now, a small side note here about Boutelais. He is something of an American Wolverine when it comes to war. You know the scene in Wolverine when he's just going through time fighting every war in American history? Yes.

Boudelay kind of did that. The man would end up serving in the US Army for 60 years. He fought in the Civil War. The wars against the natives was mustered out of the army for disability, came back somehow and then ended up serving in uniform during World War one. He was the oldest serving officer in the entire US military by the time he died when he finally left the military in 1919 and retired on three separate occasions. That would be like you're deploying like when we did in the mid to late 2000s and there's

just like a randomly a Korean war veteran in the ranks with you. Yeah. I mean, there was, I mean, okay, completely off topic here. This did happen to some people, not Korean War, of course, but there was the last serving conscripted soldier in the U.S. Army during the global war on terror. He had been conscripted during the Vietnam War era and then just stayed in and was a war officer, which must have been a really weird experience. Yeah. I had a friend who was a prior service enlisted guy that became an officer and he had been in a third Ranger bat as a private and we got back from deployment and one of the NCOs and other companies, like he was a good dude, but he was kind of a moron, was

like, somebody's to fucking tell that lieutenant he's wearing the wrong CIB. Like you don't wear the one with the star. And someone was like, he got his first CIB in Mogadishu. Don't worry about it, dude. Dude's older than dust. Yeah, so old, Jesus Christ. Anyway, the MODOK returned fire and held in place because they planned for this.

They had a planned evacuation route, which included boats on the banks of the nearby river and lake. And they were holding the government boys at bay long enough for their women and children to board the boats and get away. Once they did, they broke contact, very organized, got back to their other boats,

and also escaped towards the lava beds that were located there. So there's lava. Are there gonna be pits of spikes too? No, the lava beds that were located there. So there's lava. Are there going to be pits of spikes too? No, the lava beds are going to end up being a pretty big main character the rest of this story. Ah, I see. And there were differing accounts to what would eventually be called the Battle of the

Lost River. Of course, like most things back then. Differing accounts of what caused the gunfire to start. Of course, one group says the natives fired first, the other side say the cavalry fired first. There's a group in the middle that say both Scarface, Charlie and the trooper just kind of quick draw at one another.

But I mean, nobody really argues that the cavalry trooper punched the guy in the face. So I think I know who's at fault here. I was gonna say Battle of the Lost River sounds like a really, really bad fantasy book you'd get in like the donated books pile while deployed. Yeah, it sounds like something the guy would write. I wasn't going to be the one to say it, Joe.

And nothing could be worse though. You didn't at least do this. One time, one of the donated books we got was someone's self-published novel called Two Volcano, which I guess is the name of a mine somewhere in Montana. But for the cover art, he had just used like a 3D rendering of water. So it looked like a wave race 64 level.

That kind of rules. Yeah, I mean, I admire it. I fucking admire it. There are other accounts of what exactly happened that day. For example, how the Modox seemingly got away quite easily. And one of them is that the soldiers were blind drunk and or hung over from drinking they had been doing before they got randomly called up to go out to the modot camp and just you know throwing them back at the outpost which as far as the history of soldiers and specifically US cavalry goes at least I

mean I was in a cavalry unit after we don't even have horses anymore I'm gonna say this sounds really on-brand There's a really good chance these dudes were fucked up But anyway meanwhile hooker Jim and his band which had escaped the army so far They heard the gunfire coming from Captain Jack's camp decided let's get the fuck out of here But as they were trying to get away local ranchers showed up with guns and decided they wanted to get in on the action and started shooting at Hooker Jim and his people. His warriors fought them off and killed two of the ranchers before the rest of them decided to run

for it, at which case Hooker Jim and his band ran to keep up with Captain Jack. But on their way Hooker Jim decided he was gonna get some fucking revenge for this ambush by the ranchers and the soldiers. So every single settler they came across, they butchered, killing 14 of them in total before they made it into the lava beds. Once inside the lava beds, the two bands teamed up, pulling supplies from the area, stealing shit from settlers, and retreated into a natural defense fairy of high rocks and incredibly rough passes in the lava beds that would become known and is known today as Captain Jack Stronghold.

You can go and visit it if you're in the area. I mean, it would really suck if you were like the one dude who read Thoreau and took it seriously. And then you're like, I'm just gonna live a life in peaceful nature out here in Northern California. You're the only important. It's some guy named Hooker Jim kicks you up when your front door stabs you in the face.

Yeah, exactly. And the guy named Hooker Jim kicks you up and your front door stabs you in the face. Yeah, exactly. And the guy named Hooker Jim comes out like fucking swinging blades and shit, like he's straight up, like he's got mantemum claws growing out of his hands, just shreds you to pieces. This is a good place for a stronghold. It was right near a lake,

so they had a easy supply of fresh and clean water. It overlooked the lava beds very well. It was a very well picked out stronghold and Captain Jack had it in mind already when they had to run. Which is good because as soon as word got back to Major Greene about what happened, the machinery of the Army began to move. 225 uniformed members of the US Army from across the frontiers were ordered to go on the march and another 100 volunteers from Oregon and California joined them.

Green and Wheaton thought Jack had as many as 150 warriors under his command. But in reality, between Jack and Hooker Jim, they only had about 60. In reality, it's more like 50-ish. So, well, the army thought they had a two to one advantage when in reality it was like four to one. So basically it stops being your standard

doctrinal defense ratio and you have to start hoping you can pull home alone, wet bandits shit. Yeah, pretty much. And of course the army was confident. I mean, why wouldn't they be in a situation like this on top of all of the racist bullshit bouncing around between their ears? But they were not ready for the dream team

of Captain Jack and Hooker Jim. A sentence that I just love saying at last. Yeah, I can tell. I'm getting a lot of fun out of the same Hooker Jim as many times as I can. I'm a huge rugby fan. As soon as the army made it into the lava beds, they realized, wow, this place really sucks to have a military campaign. There's virtually no roads, not even a trail.

It's harsh. It's a hard place to travel through. And the modak immediately begin raiding supply convoys. This is because the army sent in supply convoys guarded by as few as two guys. So the modock just rolled them up left right center. When Major Green saw this, he

thought that the modock are trying to break out of the lava beds. Sure. Like they're clearly they couldn't have the balls to strike out at our logistics system like this. Nah, Kevin Jack had no plan to run.

He was raiding them because it was easy and he wanted ammo. Yeah, I was gonna say, you get a little bit of a heart attack while you're at it, maybe a little bit of salt beef, you know what I mean? And I mean, they attacked them with no losses. The Modoc lost nobody attacking these convoys. And every time they raided a convoy, the soldiers either saw what was going on and ran for it or they got fucking slaughtered.

Yeah. Their only loss was that they had to use one or two of the anal gland of the deer darts and making those is just a fucking laborious process. You know what I mean? It stinks. And the hard part is using your teeth. Green went ahead with this plan and the encirclement was complete, regardless of the raids on the logistics system.

And I should point out here that even with this encirclement, raids kept happening. They never fully closed off the Captain Jack stronghold. It would be raiding teams of normally like four to six warriors that would slip through the encirclement every night. That must have been such a sick job. I mean, honestly, like, because you know that you said nothing is going to make them update their doctrine about like, we're going to send, you know,

just trying to think of like rude nickname, like, you know, like touch her Jones and sleeping Jack. And they're going to go, those guys are going to be the two guards posted on this huge loot box of a supply train. You know, it's like you shoot one cavalry trooper with an arrow and just ammo and hard tack flies out like a little cursor appears above your head that you've become.

Yeah. Now you're a level 50 crime boss. Hitting them with that vat like it's fucking fallout. Yeah. I would imagine it must be very, very enjoyable to be able to raid this and know that like the worst thing that could happen is that you might, you know, you might scrape your arm a little on some tree bark. Yeah. You might, might wing yourself on the really sharp lava rocks, but like you're probably

going to get out unwounded. Yeah, you'll be fine. Yeah, exactly. Meanwhile, those guys. You're either going to kill a couple dudes or they're going to run away. Yeah. You know? You're either going to add a scalp to the collection or you're going to watch people run in a way that humanity has only represented as like guys running away, wearing barrels for clothes. Hooker, Jim, why did you steal their clothing? I thought it'd be funny. I don't even want

this shit. I want to see how this thing scratchy wool pants. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The 1860s equivalent of run me those Nikes. Like run me that gunny sack cloth. It's like the time I got robbed for my fucking shitty ratty Chuck Taylors. It's like, why are you doing this? You don't even want these. Yeah, it's the principle of it, I suppose. But do you really want to wear my nasty shoes? Yeah, because fuck you, we don't like you, white boy.

Get out of here. All right, yeah, you can have it. Fair enough, I can argue with that. He meant to overrun the Modok and their lava rock fortress on the morning of December 16th. Of course, again, he thought so little of the Modok that he didn't even bother to send out scouting missions. So he had no idea what he was sending his men into. But one man, a guy named Captain Bernard, pointed out, well, sir, that's really fucking stupid. Maybe we should sit at some scouts. And he was ignored.

So Captain Bernard, this'll be a mark one in the prose I'm saying for an officer in this episode. He decided he would just do his own scouting mission rather than listen to his superior officers like, no, just throw your dudes at the lava rocks, you'll be fine. However, this was made much harder by the fact that morning a huge bank of fog settled over everything. But Bernard and his men inched forward very carefully closer and closer to the lava rock stronghold largely undetected. And then as if a bad like let's say a sci-fi novel that I may have written the fog lifts as

they're standing out in the open. The Modoc see them immediately in open fire. This forces Bernard and his men to retreat. And instead of letting them pull out, once the Modoc see them break and run, they countercharge them. They even sent out a flanking force trying to nearly cut them off completely.

But Bernard realized that he had a strength that the native warriors did not have, bayonets. The native warriors had rifles, but they did not have the bayonets that went with them, or they did have rifles, but they did not have bayonet lugs. So his men fixed bayonets and led a counter-countercharge to drive them back. It bought them enough time to retreat behind some actual cover, which became ominously known as Hospital Rock, to wait for medical care and the main attack to begin.

This is when the army discovered how rough the lava beds were going to be to march over. The terrain was completely broken. It's filled with crags, holes, giant boulders. That meant that when Green ordered a cavalry charge, it immediately had to stop. Horses just could not move over this kind of terrain. It trapped them in the open to get sniped at. Large bodies of infantry, like they're still fighting in skirmish lines in this era, were forced to break up into smaller groups because just the terrain was so

bad. There's nothing but a giant natural obstacle. Yeah. Other groups of infantry had their attacks just straight up halted. Otherwise they would have marched directly into a giant crack in the lava. It's like you show up at the lava, like the scree field of lava crags and there's just like a bunch of like horse skeletons still stuck with their feet in it.

And you're like, is that a good sign? I don't think we should have invaded Bowser's castle guys. I mean, yeah, when you talk about lava fields, all I can think of is it's like, yeah, is there going to be a blue shell involved? Is there going to be like a fire thing that just spins in a wheel? Captain Jackson unleashed the spiked shell, some troopers going to get hit. Yeah, and fly, fly across the screen.

And their attack was halted. All this is happening while the MoDoc are firing at them. Meanwhile, like officers and sergeants in the field are getting orders to just find an easier route of advance as if that was something they could do while getting shot at. Again, this is all things that scouting would have figured out. Yeah. Scouts come back and it's like, sir, they've got some kind of turtle in a cloud.

We recommend taking the rainbow road. Yeah, there's a, we've actually had a pretty high casualty count with this encounter with Lakudu. Got any recommendations? Our Koopa core has very thin sir. And all of this while the army began to hammer the Modox position with howitzers. But about those howitzers, their gun crews were firing completely blind. The fog had lifted on the approaches to the camp, but not the Modoc camp itself.

So gunners were just slinging shells blindly. Some of them were slamming down directly on top of Captain Bernard's head, as his men were trying to advance, already hiding behind a place called Hospital Rock and getting shells dropped on top of him. There's also another reason for the artillery's complete ineffectiveness. If you were gonna pick, Nate, one thing,

to make a battery of artillery work, what is the most basic thing that you'd wanna have? Observation, full of observers, something to make sure that my rounds are effective. I would say even below that, trained artillery crewman. Fair, yeah, fair enough. I was operating on the assumption that people knew how to pull string, make big bullet fire, but if not,

or hold gigantic matchstick Q-tip in flames to cannon to fire, depending on the era. So in a practice that was very common for the far-flung outposts of the American military frontier of the day, the men using the howitzers were simply repurposed cavalrymen and infantrymen with mostly on-the-job training, which of all of the weapons in the military, on the ground anyway, this is like the least thing that on-the-job training will work. There's some serious training that comes with using artillery effectively and correctly on beyond just making sure you don't blow yourself up. You know,

for instance, making sure you don't accidentally drop a shell on your buddy's head. Didn't have that. It was just some dude. And to be fair, most of these guys volunteered for this. Being in artillery, pretty sweet job. You're so far away. Most people aren't shooting at you. I would volunteer for this. The warfare of the era. Like, well, you mean I'm far enough away that nobody's gonna shoot me in the face? Sign me up. I think the problem is, is that then if like the other dudes who you're like, ha, sucks to be you, aren't able to successfully complete their task, you suddenly have to beat feet and run with basically like, you know,

what if a gun and a tractor had a kid? Oh, Nate, you're all wrong. Why would you run with the artillery? You leave that shit behind. I don't have to outrun the enemy, Nate. You see, I just have to outrun the infantry who is already fighting them. Yeah. I have to outrun the infantry who are also running away.

Yeah. And they're all tired and shit. I like my odds. Turns out that all of the dunnage for an 1860s artillery rounds is basically barrels You can wear like clothes Now green furious at the stall of his advance drew his sword jumped up onto a rock and urged his men forward saying the Moda couldn't hit shit with their rifles and Personally let a charge forward now. This is normally where I say Green was immediately killed by gunfire, but he wasn't.

He was wounded and his force was hit with so much incoming fire from the Modok that the infantry, the charge immediately breaks down. The infantry has to throw themselves behind cover and remain in place until the sun goes down before they can withdraw without getting shot at. The Modok just ripped that ass apart. Yeah. It's like, no, you didn't die, but you did get hurt.

And also you just got my hubris hole center masked by like a fucking projectile deer anal gland. And guess what? It's going to be a long night, buddy. You can be smelling bad. At the end of the first day, 16 soldiers were dead and another 53 were wounded. The California and Oregon volunteers had also lost several men, and they had joined hoping for what I assume was an easy massacre and some looting. Yeah. And when they realized that that wasn't the case, they simply packed up their shit and

went home. And then if that wasn't bad enough for the army, it began to snow, burying their camp. But of course, despite it being December, nobody thought that this whole thing was going to last so long that they need to bring all of their winter stuff. So now they're also freezing. Meanwhile, in D.C., Meacham reappears. He was actually in D.C. because he'd been chosen as an elector representing Oregon in the presidential

election that year, which would see Ulysses S. Grant be reelected. So he began to use his connections to tell people in DC, hey, we could end this whole standoff with a peace council rather than, you know, mass murder. I know how to do it. So the secretary of the interior, a guy named, name alert here, Nate, Columbus Delano. Oh, hell yes. He agreed with Meacham's idea and slapped together a council with Meacham at its head and sent him packing towards the Lava Bats.

I love it when my plan is signed off by Secretary of State Magellan Grundy. By the time word of this coming peace mission got to the Army in Oregon, General Canby had taken personal direct command over the battle since shit had gone so sideways. Wheaton had been relieved and replaced with a guy named Colonel Alvin Gillum, a man who despite being born in the south remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War and would eventually become a general. But like many generals during the Civil War, it was at a permanent rank and he was bumped back down. Now Canby heard about this peace council heading his way and he thought the entire process wouldn't work. Mostly because he was a really, I mean, Canby had

done a lot of genocide at this point of his career. But specifically in this case, because the MODOK had just won their first battle. He recognized what had just happened for what it was. It was a victory for the MODOK, and he thought, if I was them,'t talk right now. Yeah. So he called up more troops and actually really trained artillery personnel and began to prepare for an attack. But Canby did not order an attack because this might surprise you, Nate. We actually have a case of an officer in this show who followed orders. He sat back in his camp and waited for the peace council. And that's what happened.

Look, I mean, here's the thing, right? This is not where it ends, but that is what happened. I look at it sometimes. If you have done the sort of thing that you're supposed to do and a lot of this stuff, it's not like it's that much different now than it was then. Like in you have says you assess that they are very well supplied, extremely good with, you know, what their job is, their weapons, the stuff they've got tons of ammo. And the terrain is like, somebody basically was doing like a challenge level for a YouTube stream on like Hardest terrain to assault like you I wouldn't pay to watch mr. Beast try this to be fair. Yeah, yeah

Mr. Beast running face first into a potato digger machine gun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, monce and your beast He's like an adventurer from France who's decided to come up here and do like a daguerreotype reel. Lots of glass plates to fucking make the YouTube. Yeah, I think I would probably avoid unnecessary and notionally unordered attacks in this situation. I mean, Camby didn't care if they went back to the reservation or if he fought. Like, either one was a victory for him. But he also saw like, you know,

before we sit down and talk to these guys, we might want to win something first, hypothetically. But while they sat down at the peace council, everybody held strong to their deals. Nobody attacked anybody else. And each exchange at first, can be offered the only thing that the government would accept, which was unconditional surrender.

But both Meacham and Canby saw that as a starting point. They would and did plan to back down as they went, as did Captain Jack himself. He immediately like started with, you know, I want land back not in a reservation, but to be our own free people, knowing that he wasn't going to get that, and then would back down and compromise and eventually agree to his own reservation. They both were negotiating in good faith. And then something of a coup happened in Jack's camp. Other warriors under him began to think he was a coward for attending negotiations at all.

And they demanded that Jack use this white banner of the negotiations of surrender effectively, and the good faith that he had built during those negotiations to launch a surprise attack against Canby and Meacham while in the meetings. They were so vocal about this that Canby's modock translator overheard them yelling at Jack telling him, you need to kill these guys. And when the translator told that to Canby, Canby and Captain Jack had such a good rapport at that point that Canby didn't

believe them. Like he wouldn't do that. But on April 11th that's exactly what happened. One group of Modoc under a white flag made for the Peace Council while another under a different white flag went to the Army's Eastern Command post which was under the command of Major Edwin Mason. Thinking the Modocs were there for negotiations, as they had been for months now, they were not searched and were allowed into the camp. Were soldiers? Because remember, nobody was attacking one another at this point.

Soldiers weren't even carrying their rifles around. So soldiers inside the camp are unarmed, other than the guys pulling sentry duty on the outskirts. Once there, the Modok pulled out concealed guns and opened fire, killing one of Mason's lieutenants, and then ran out of the camp. At the same time this happened, the peace counselors, Canby, Meacham, and a reverend named Ellis R. Thomas, solid name, and a fourth man, Leroy Dalyer, were sitting down with the main party of Modokoc which was led by Captain Jack personally. While Canby was speaking, Jack pulled out a revolver and shot Meacham and Canby at nearly

point blank range. After that, the rest of the Modoc pulled out knives and began stabbing the ever living shit out of anyone they could before running. LSR Thomas and General Canby were both, while Meacham barely managed to survive. Now the repercussions for this assassination were immediate. Canby and Meacham were, as I pointed out, as good as it got in the form of understanding coming from the U.S. government towards Native people, which I have also said I am not defending, but I just need to point it out.

This is the 1800s and both of them are dickheads. Not to mention, Camby was a very well-loved and respected general of his own men, hundreds of which were still camped all around the Modoc and heavily armed. Furthermore, that American press, which had been leading towards negotiation with the Modoc as a small part of General Grant's larger idea

of making peace with native people rather than physically destroying them, and instead physically destroying them slowly over time. Well, the press turned into der Stürmer. They openly called for the Modoc to be exterminated in revenge for the assassinations. This was not one newspaper or two newspapers. This became the popular narrative that came out of the American media. The army, formerly under the command of Canby, now fell under the command of a guy named Jefferson Davis.

No relation. That must have been really awkward because he fought for the Union during the Civil War. Imagine the jokes that motherfucker heard back then. Another fun fact about Davis is probably better known as the guy who got really, really drunk, got very, very angry at his own superior officer. And in 1862, shot that motherfucker dead in a hotel lobby. I'm just imagining a dude like in the US army whose parents were just like really, really into like Orientalism and the Arabic language. So he's like a white guy from Kansas, but his name is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It's really awkward.

You guys should meet my brother Osama. So that was too easy. That one was too fucking obvious. So that's why I had to be like, no, I got to. It's really awkward. You guys should meet my brother Osama. So that was too easy. That one was too fucking obvious. So that's why I had to be like, no, I got to. You went for the three pointer. I laid up, you know, I do what I do. I'm tall. I got it. We only understand the world through basketball and burgers because we're from the Midwest. Two things I don't even personally. Yeah, I don't really care that much.

So yeah, General Jefferson Davis, parentheses Union, shot and murdered his superior officer. He escaped being executed for this, again, obvious crime of murder because it was 1862. The Union was badly in need of decent officers, of which he was one, despite his drinking and murdering problem. So everybody in the Union Army just kind of shrugged and forgot about it.

It was the other Jefferson Davis. He was just on secondment. He was fucking doing a little TDY. TDY to a hotel lobby. Drunk Ulysses S. Grant just sees the memo and says like, Jefferson Davis killed one of my generals. Yeah, that sounds like something he would do. I remember him back at West Point. He was a piece of shit. Davis was stationed somewhere else though when this new command assignment came down to him, which meant command really fell to Gillum, who was not planning on waiting for him to show up before launching his vengeance mission. Gillum really liked Canby, had served under him for years. So

he took this whole campaign as to more of a personal mission of revenge than anything else. So he ordered an attack on the 15th. This time there'd be no charges, only a slow, methodical advance under the cover of artillery bombardment. And this bombardment went on for two days as the army slowly moved in, tightening the noose around the stronghold. The first part of the mission was cutting the modoc off from their water supply, which he did. The final attack on the camp was made on the 17th, and when it was launched, the army marched directly into the modoc camp, finding it completely and totally abandoned. It was then that they realized that they had probably been gone the whole time, probably for at least a week. The reason for this was again, they simply slipped between a gap in the lines The Modok war also created the origins of the ending of the Blair Witch project

They climb up to the top of it. It's just can be standing in the corner Breathing really heavily stare the whole time major green with a really gross snot bubble and once free of Army lines they just Vanished into the lava beds. This led to a small problem for the army. When they had the modoc trapped in their stronghold, they at least knew where they were. Yeah, exactly. Now they had vanished into the harsh lava beds and they had no idea where they went.

So Gillum marched his troops out to look for them. The modoc simply could not be found. They knew the lava beds like the back of their own hands and only reappeared to launch ambushes on the soldiers. Specifically at night, entire companies of soldiers fled through the darkness confused and terrified as ambush groups of five or so modoc opened fire on them. Good thing that's really easy terrain to navigate, especially with limited visibility. Yeah, just sprinting off into the night and, you know, the valley, which kills you. Yeah, I was going to say, like, they have their regimental reunion and the sort of

seal of their unit is just a broken ankle. And one of these attacks, a company under the command of Thomas Wright, was virtually wiped out as the modox surrounded them and shot them to pieces, all while they tried to run away. While retreating, they got lost in the darkness and only ran further into a second ambush as they fled. 25 soldiers were killed including all of the company officers by an ambush force of about seven modoc who were probably just laughing to one another like I can't believe this is so fucking easy. This shitty lever action rifle I have is overheating from all the white people I've killed.

He was gonna say like the sort of the semantic representation of an event passed down through culture is that this is why we have painting caves on rock faces and fucking, you know, the coyote slams his head into him. All of the kind of capers of Looney Tunes is just because it's representing the US Army fighting in Northern California. Like if it involves, you know, being floated through the air by the smell of a pie on a

window, that is a thing the MODOK used against the US Army and it worked. They built a windowsill. They set a nice apple pie on top. Exactly. Yeah. And a trooper just floated over. 57 dead, 23 wounded beyond all help. A whole company of infantry floated over. we beat them to death with hammers. Yeah, exactly. You know what? They reached out to a different tribe we hadn't made contact with called the Acme and they built some kind of contraption.

By the time general Davis showed up in May, Gillum had been driving his army into a string of never-ending ambushes for weeks. I feel like morale would be pretty low. It was piss poor. All of the troopers were like deeply depressed. Remember, it's also like winter, spring. So it's early spring is still cold and miserable and wet. They have drank themselves into a stupor

while being fed into a wood chipper. Not a stretch to say that Davis is a better officer than Gillum, but I also don't think it requires that much of a high thinking officer to decide that marching an army blind through the lava beds against people fighting in their own backyard was probably not the best strategy. Also, I just think about every time

that the California reservoir levels become news because the Pineapple Express is hit right around sometime in the, you know, the end of winter, middle of winter. And then it's like, Oh yeah, infinity rain is going to fall around. I don't know, Modoc County, Skew County, you know, it's just sort of like when all of the dams are on CCTV footage looking like challenge mode and cities, skylines, that's the climate they're in right now, except it's in, you know, Ulysses S. Grant as president. Yeah. Everybody is shitting, burning liquid into the lava beds from a combination of easily communicable foodborne illness and also whatever the fuck they're drinking that they call whiskey at the time. So Davis decides to come up with, okay, an incredibly disgusting plan, but one that

makes sense. He did not understand the lava beds, but he did understand them enough to know it's super harsh, there's no water out here, there's only very specific water holes, let's simply post soldiers around those. The natives have to come out for water at some point. And that's exactly what he did. He would make the modoc choose between coming out and fighting or dying of thirst. And it worked pretty much immediately. The modoc began launching attacks on dug in groups of soldiers that were defending the water sources

and they were torn apart. They didn't stand a chance at all. The Modocs were shattered in all of these attacks. In one attack specifically, a band leader named Ellin's Man was killed. Also that attack that killed him was led by an Irish guy named Thomas Kelly. So there's your Irish random dude of the episode.

Ah, always there. Yeah. Ellen's man was a pretty important leader in the allied bands of MODOK here. And the MODOK supplies were already dwindling fast and now they had no water. The death of Ellen's man really broke the cohesion of the various different MODOK bands with Captain Jack and the others getting into arguments about how to best continue the war effort. While Captain Jack himself by all accounts decided we're kind of fucked, we should see what our surrender terms are.

It's important to remember that going back to where all the start at the Lost River, Jack never wanted to fight. He was pushed to fight. However, there's a lot of more radical warriors in his band who want to fight to the death. Jack is there, like a lot of the other warriors, with his family. And he understands that, like, if we fight to the death, my wife and kids are dying too. Yeah. So this eventually led to them splitting up and going their own ways, which of course makes it easier for the army to chase them down. These smaller groups of modoc are now very outnumbered, outgunned, and desperate. And finally, Captain Jack, with his family, walks out of the lava beds and surrenders at the beginning of June. The Modoc War was effectively over.

By all measures, the Modoc War was the most costly war against the natives that the U.S. Army would ever fight. The modocs lost fewer most costly war against the natives that the US Army would ever fight. The Modocs lost fewer than 20 warriors the whole time, while they killed 83 soldiers and wounded another 46. They also managed to kill a commanding general, the only time that happened throughout any of the native wars. Not to mention, you know, an official emissary sent by the President of the United States and they almost killed a second one because Meacham did end up surviving. To further tilt things

in the hands of the Modok the cost of the war effort for the US government was massive. It actually cost them 20 times more to fight this conflict than if the government simply bought the small patch of land by the Lost River and gave it to the Modok like they had been asking for in the first fucking place. 20 times more. The army had deployed nearly a thousand men to the field to defeat the modoc, who never had more than 55 warriors at any point. But of course we know it doesn't end there. The surviving leaders of the modoc were arrested, including Captain Jack and Hooker Jim, and held as POWs facing what amounted to be a certain death sentence at the end of a rope. Then Hooker Jim became a traitor and turned informant.

Aww. Yeah. You had that cool name and yet. Hooker Jim turned on his homies. So Hooker Jim, turning government informant, saved his own life and he testified against everybody else. Captain Jack was executed on October 3rd, 1873. Hooker Jim and the rest of the Modoc tribe

were forcefully moved to Oklahoma as punishment for the rebellion, which as we kind of pointed out earlier, it's common practice for tribes who had risen against the government at that time. They were forced to stay there until 1909 when they were finally allowed to move to a reservation in Klamath.

But at that point, only a few people did. And the end? Sorry. Another great optimistic ending there. American history is dark and horrible and we've always been this way. Yeah, I mean, there are some Indian tribes, some Native American tribes in Northern California who have been able to stay without any period of relocation on their ancestral lands, but it's not a large number of them. It's, I mean, pretty much anywhere you go in North America, if the land was inhabited. And obviously there's some places where it just wasn't

because of the terrain or because of the climate. This is typically the story, one way or the other. And it's one of those things where people don't want to acknowledge it because they would just rather not have it be implicating themselves and who they are, where they're from and stuff. And it's like, you know, it's not necessarily, I don't know, it's one of those things where it's like,

acknowledging it doesn't even obligate you to something else, even if that something else would be morally correct, but people still won't even do the acknowledgement. And that's the, or in the most banal and kind of like gutless terms, in my opinion. I mean, I think there's also this idea of when people acknowledge a country's history, their own country, specifically in this case, in the case of Americans, Canadians, but we're

not talking about you guys today. Sorry, I know you love it. You love being mentioned, but no, we're not talking about Canada right now. By acknowledging the dark history of your country's history, it doesn't mean you did something. Or in a lot of cases, even your family, you're not guilty of anything by acknowledging where your country came from. You're government-ist! Yeah. And it's most important to... I mean, a lot of this, in the case of the United States, depending on where you live,

I mean, I went to public schools in Michigan. I didn't learn about anything to do with Native Americans in school. I'm willing to bet that's still the case and it's only gonna get worse. We only learned about it in Indiana as regards the French and Indian War. I didn't even learn about that.

I learned that we were best friends and that's why things get like this. I mean, this is typical canoe in Tyler too. We were so close to a thing that was important at one point in the war on the Wabashes of British origin, that kind of stuff. Like we were so, we kind of like, kind of had to, but if you didn't, yeah, you wouldn't at all.

Yeah, and I mean, there's a huge failure in public education when it comes to this stuff and actual decent American history. There's a huge failure in higher education now. And a lot of it is just, I mean, it's same as, I mean, there's no difference between that and what happens in Turkey about the Armenian genocide. Eventually through failure of education, people don't know about it.

And then when they hear about it, they have been taught a narrative of their own national history that is just so much different from reality that it forces them to reject it. And that is where we're, it's getting worse. It'll continue to get worse. Like unfortunately, most things. I know we try not to talk about what's happening in the United States right now, because it's not what we cover on this show. But you can look forward to more things like this changing and education getting worse. History programs, sociology programs, anthropology program, all those things going away,

getting their budgets cut, meaning more shit like this, if it exists in the books will not for much longer. One thing I will say though that I think is worth pointing out is that what you just described about Michigan and what I experienced in Indiana, I spent three years in New Mexico when I was younger and I went to school in a very, very poor school district. And we did actually, because of the Santa Fe Trail,

but also we learned about indigenous people in the region. That was a big part of, and granted it was earlier grade school stuff, and when they're like, oh, now we gotta get into important American history, they might not talk about, I don't know. But I will say that that was a thing that, that was a choice that they made and they did.

It's one of those things where it is really sad, because I think it's part of, you know, any one of these cultures were describing, you know, their kids get sent to school and say the Pledge of Allegiance. And it's like, what do you think the American flag represents to them? Yeah, exactly. And it's like, that's, that's just the nature of it. It's like, I mean, that that itself is part of the greater problem.

I I'm not going to lie. I used to believe a greater knowledge and understanding of genocides and crimes against humanity would lead to people being more compassionate and understanding of why they are horrific and why they need to be stopped while they're still ongoing. I don't think I believe that anymore, simply due to what's been happening in the last few years and what is happening today. Well, a few decades too. I don't know what the answer is

because we're just individuals. We only can speak to each other as individual people. None of us are our government or any international body. I do think it is still worthwhile to learn these things, to learn your national history and the history of other people's nations? Especially ones that your nation helped to oppress and destroy? Do I think it's going to help people become more compassionate or understanding so maybe they don't support something like this

in the future? I don't believe that anymore. The end. I don't know where to go from here. No, me neither. But Nate, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can support the show on Patreon. You can ask us a question on our Patreon, DMs, or in the Discord, which you'll also have access to. Or you can attach it to a horse and ride it into the lava beds and we will read it on air.

Today's question is, have you ever had a real life Sir, this is a Wendy's moment? Yes. Ironically, it actually happened in Oregon. Really? Yeah. It's the one I can really think of off top of my head. I went into a GNC, which is like a supplement store for people who aren't aware of what that is. I was in Bedford, Oregon, when I was working for the Bureau of Land Management. I of course needed pre-workout and I went in there. It's like most GNCs in a strip mall, nobody's in there other than me and the woman who works there.

I'm looking around, this old man comes in and just begins preaching to this woman about how pharmacia, his word exactly, as it is written in the Bible, is actually the Antichrist. And this goes on for a very long time. I have already found my pre-workout that's on the shelf and I am trying to buy it, but he has monopolized the poor woman's time

and I cannot buy my pre-workout. So finally, I don't say, sir, this is a Wendy's, of course, because that's not something that will ever leave my mouth unironically in real life, but I do kindly tap him on the shoulder, tell him to shut the fuck up and move so I can buy my pre-workout. And he does.

Also the whole time he is wearing like, for a lack of a better term, like burlap shorts, no shirt, and he is barefoot. I am trying to think about it, whether I was the person, I talk a lot, so maybe sometime maybe I did that. Or if I was the bystander or I was the person having to say, sir, this is a Wendy's. I worked in fast food and I can recall I worked at Steak and Shake, a woman accusing me of dropping napkins on the floor and putting them back in the bag. And I said, interesting. Okay. Did you do this? I was

working drive through and I dropped some napkins and I picked them up and she couldn't see me throw them in the trash. Oh, right. And I was like, I threw them in the trash, man. I'm getting you new ones. And she's like, Oh, you calling me a liar? I was like, this is escalating badly. So she parks her car and she comes and she goes to speak to the manager. Like your employee just called me a fat liar. And I'm like, well, I mean, that's true, but I didn't call you that.

And you can't read my mind, ma'am. And my manager who, you know, he's like, he's got like, instead of having a relaxation vein in his forehead, like Milo does when he gets furious, he had relaxation carotid artery and fucking jugular vein. Like he wasn't an in-shape guy, but when he was stressed, they just stood out on their own. Like you could tell he was stressed. Shouts out to Mike, sorry dude, I wasn't a great employee.

And he was finally, he was just like, Neither of us were the best food. Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, what do you want me to give you so you can just go away? And that's what she wanted, free food. I'm like, of course, yeah, of course you want a free food because you. Yeah, I had a similar thing. So I had a job in fast food.

I worked at a McDonald's. Whatever the lowest range of ages in Michigan to get a job there part-time is what I, I think it's 14 or 15. Oh, it was 14 I think. Cause I was 15 when I worked in a butcher shop and there were 14 year olds who worked with us. And this was far enough back where super size

is still a thing. Yeah. For people who are maybe too young or not American and don't remember that, it's when food was in a bucket. It's absolutely egregious sizes, even bigger than most American sizes. And a woman asked for a super size cup full of the fudge that goes in a McFlurry or an ice cream. And that isn't how the fudge machine works. It can't possibly

pump up that much fudge, right? And there's no way you can ring that up on the computer. I have been working there like a week. I barely know what the fuck I'm doing. Also, I am higher than shit. I don't know how to deal with this. And I tell her, I'm like, ma'am, I don't know if I can do that. I'll ask my manager. And my manager was my older sister at the time. And shout out to her again, like Nate, horrible employee I was. And she said, you know, just like telling her, and we can't do that. There's no way to ring that up. We would have to cut open a bag that this fudge comes in and put all of it in a cup Which I don't think like corporate would even let her do and this woman is just getting angry and anger and angry You know that the stereotypical angry person at a fast food employee type, you know

privilege and just righteous fury of everything that she is mad about in life is coming out on us and Finally, my sister is just like, okay, fine, you want it? Take it. And she rings it up as like three McFlurries or some shit in the computer, cuts open the plastic bag full of fudge, squeezes it all by hand into a super-sized cup

and just hands it to her. And then, yep, argumentally ends, she leaves. I was like, you shouldn't eat one, one two things you shouldn't eat that much fudge No, I think I'm too. I am way too high for this. I kind of want to eat the fudge Yeah, I was trying to think if there's any other thing I can think of where I mean I recently I was at the grocery store And I was like I have enough stuff It's gonna be annoying to do self-checkout So I'll wait in line and I went up waiting in line behind like a guy in a trench coat with

I went up waiting in line behind like a guy in a trench coat with bandages on both hands, buying a big LED flashlight with coins and counting out. Is he wearing his shirt that says I'm doing crime? Or he was wearing like a felt, like not quite fedora, he was old. There's a kind of like old francophone world, just weird dude that's just a different vibe than the same weird dude in the English speaking world. Sure. And he was just counting out like the price of this LED flashlight, which I'm sure it's probably like 40 francs in mostly like small change on the conveyor belt. So they

didn't want to move the conveyor belt until he was done counting his like fucking, you know, Gollum's coin stash. And it's just like, he really wanted that flashlight. Yeah, exactly. Maybe he'd lost some coins and needed to go find them. And there was a part of me and it wasn't a service. This is a Wendy's thing so much as like, I think there was just this expression on my face and expression on the cashier's face. And there was a part of me, and it wasn't a, sort of this is a Wendy's thing so much, it's like, I think there was just this expression on my face and expression on the cashier's face. And I was like, I'm just going to go to the other line. And they're like, it's fine. You know what I mean?

So it's like those moments, they're there, but thankfully I haven't had one. That moment of recognition between you and the cashier where you're just like, I'm sorry. And they're like, me too. But Nate, I believe that it's an episode of The Lines of My Donkeys podcast. But you have other podcasts. You can plug those other podcasts.

So I am the co-host and producer of Trash Futura podcast about the tech world and why it sucks and also British politics. I am the co-host and producer of What a Hell of a Way to Dad, a podcast about being a dad and also why you shouldn't join the military. And I am the producer of Kill James Bond, an extremely funny film criticism podcast hosted by extremely funny people you should watch slash listen to, because you can't really watch it. It's a podcast, listen to it. This is the only podcast that I host

and you can support us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you seven years of bonus content, gets you eBooks, audiobooks read by me, gets you side series like History of Armenia and the Kupyansk Dispatches. It gets you side series like History of Armenia and the Kupiantsk Dispatches. It gets you every episode early. It gets you first dibs on live show tickets and merch when they're available.

And it gets you one barrel which you can wear with suspenders. Your experience may vary. Also, there's a figurine, Doug the Donkey, it's on sale. Plug it at the beginning of the episode. I'm telling you though, it's cool as hell. You should get it. Get it while supplies are there.

It's really fucking cool. People have painted it in ways that surprise me in how talented people can truly be in painting miniatures. Genuinely, yes. So yeah, check that out. Get yours, get your shirts, get your totes, get your whatever, get your barrels of suspenders on them. Leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts.

It helps us a lot, especially when it comes to booking venues for live shows. So if you want us to do more live shows, you must leave us more good reviews. No bad reviews. Bad reviews will get you put in the barrel.

Exactly. Until next time, strap on that barrel right into the law. Exactly. Run, run, run in the dark. Your ankle will thank you later.