The Modoc War : a story of genocide at the dawn of America's Gilded Age / Robert Aquinas McNally.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McNally, Robert Aquinas, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modoc War, 1872-1873.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 409 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates :) illustrations, maps, portraits ;

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Lincoln, NB : University of Nebraska Press, [2017]

Summary:

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered awar that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States' conquest of Native America's peoples and lands. Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872-73, one of the nation's costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war. The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a "peace policy" toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country's past.

Contents:

Prologue: Duel at Lost River

Holy lands here and there

Bad to worse

Stone and story

Running the pagans out of the promised land

Death squads, sex slaves, and knights of the frontier

The peace that wasn't, the treaty that was, kind of

The bacon of three hundred hogs

Gray-eyed rancher to the rescue

True fog, real war

Glove and fist

Modoc steak for breakfast

A look inside

First fog of war

Celebration and postmortem

Firing into a continent

Give peace a chance

The news that fits

Heroic reporter dens with lions

Talking for peace, lying for war

The warrior takes command

Squeeze play

A homeland to be named later

Pride and prejudice in the peace tent

Martyrs at midday

The war goes cosmic

Girding for battle

Half-empty victory

Scalps and skulls

Into the volcanic valley of death

Things fall apart

The center cannot hold

Hounds and scouts

Hang 'em high

Varnishing vengeance

Still small voices swell

Strangled necks, severed heads

Exile and showbiz

Requiem

Epilogue.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781496204226

1496204220

9781496204240

1496204247

OCLC:

1017674702