A direct Modoc descendant, Cheewa James speaks out in this richly documented, carefully researched, non-fiction book. The Modocs, U.S. soldiers, and settlers come to life through fictionalized vignettes interspersed throughout the book. Her account is personal, revealing, and highly illustrated with rare, often unpublished photographs and documents passed through her family.
Professional speaker and writer, Cheewa James, has spent her lifetime building insight and collecting materials on the Modoc. Here for the first time the history of the Modocs from ancestral times to present day is put into perspective.
The Modoc War was the most costly Indian campaign in United States military history, in terms of both lives and money, considering the small number of Indians who battled—in the last days of the six-month war, approximately fifty Modocs were pitted against over one thousand soldiers.
“I have never before encountered an enemy, civilized or savage, occupying a position of such great natural strength as the Modoc stronghold. Nor have I ever seen a better armed or skillful foe” reported Lt. Col. Frank Wheaton, January 1873. The battlefield, today the Lava Beds National Monument in northern California, was one of the roughest and most challenging ever experienced by U.S. military troops.
For over 130 years the voices of two U.S. soldiers—one an officer and the other an enlisted man—have remained silent. Their unpublished letters, dormant and unknown to history, tucked away by relatives, now come to light, astonishing in their emotion and perception.
The Modoc Tribe was mercilessly split apart following the war. The practically unknown story of Modocs sent by train as prisoners of war to the Oklahoma Indian Territory is equally astounding and shocking. In the land of exile the Modoc survived an enemy more lethal than guns on the battlefield: disease and corrupt administration. The tribe lost a far greater portion of their population here than in the actual war. Today these two groups, having common ancestry and heritage, barely know each other.