Captain Jack’s Stronghold, Spring 2002, a brief walking tour

(First published in the High Desert Journal)


At Captain Jack’s Stronghold in early spring, smoke billows up in black clouds from the fields around Tule Lake. It is nearly planting season, but up above in the Lava Beds National Monument, snow lies thick on the volcanic hills. It’s a good day for a walk around the stronghold; blue, chilly and clear.

But first, the Park Service pamphlet at the trail’s beginning offers six pieces of advice:

Use common sense.

Wear sturdy shoes.

Know where your children are and protect them.

Watch out for loose rocks.

Be aware of snakes—they are sometimes seen when least expected.

Be aware of the hot dry heat of summer. It can be very tiring.

It is the last warning that bears extra attention in late spring of 2002. The hot dry heat of the coming summer not only causes fatigue and thirst, it demands irrigation of the acres and acres of crops in the Klamath basin. Lots of it. Irrigation makes crops, but dried up rivers make enemies.

Captain Jack—his Modoc name was Kientpoos—would have understood this. Long before Klamath basin became a battle cry in the sagebrush rebellion, long before the Endangered Species Act and center pivot sprinklers, Captain Jack fought a battle that caught the attention of the world in this isolated patch of lava tubes. When his band of fighters needed water, they snuck at night to the shore of Tule Lake, right about where the interpretive trail parking lot is now. But the shore of the lake has moved—actually it has dropped—about 20 feet since then.

Captain Jack was fighting the forced relocation of his tribe to lands to the north, where their ancestral enemies the Klamaths lived. The reason for the relocation was the usual; white settlers needed more land for raising cattle and what little had been allotted the Modocs around Tule Lake was becoming more and more attractive. The Modoc were expendable. 

Be aware of snakes—they are sometimes seen when least expected.

On November 29, 1872 a group of cavalry from Fort Klamath attacked a Modoc camp led by another leader, Hooker Jim. Several Modocs died, and Hooker Jim took revenge by knocking off twelve white settlers. When they were finished, they took refuge with Captain Jack, who decried their killing spree but took them in anyway. And thus the Modoc War began in earnest.

After six months of mostly fruitless attacks from white cavalry, which at its strongest outnumbered the Modoc nearly five to one , a peace commission organized at the order of President Grant was to meet Captain Jack under the direction of General E.R.S. Canby. Little progress was made, and Captain Jack was pressured by Hooker Jim and his followers into killing Canby under the protection of a peace council. In this way, says the pamphlet, Captain Jack reluctantly sealed his own fate and that of his tribe.

Watch out for loose rocks.

The trail leading from the former Tule Lake shore and into the stronghold follows a spine of lava rock that was famously suited to the guerilla warfare of the Modocs. Jagged parapets offer protection for snipers, collapsed lava tubes hide caves from the mountain howitzers and mortars lobbed by Canby and his troops. It’s a story as old as warfare in America; small numbers of desperate natives intimate with the landscape hold off regimented government goons with grit and determination.

From the highest point, near where the council at which Hooker Jim is said to have shamed Captain Jack into waylaying Canby, there is a view north into the former marshlands that supported the Modoc. In their place, modern irrigators wage a battle with government regulators over who controls the spigot to all those ditched waterways, the missing 20 feet of Tule Lake water. On the drive from Klamath Falls to the monument, one creative farmer has erected a billboard in perfect imitation of the Park Service’s brown information signs. It thanks the government for ruining his livelihood and the driver is confused for a minute, reading harsh, angry words written in the benign script of bureaucracy.

Know where your children are and protect them.

According to the interpretive pamphlet, the Modoc erected medicine flags and dyed red tule ropes to ward off the white soldiers and protect their warriors from harm. An illustration in the pamphlet, made by an artist from the Illustrated London News immediately after the Modoc fled, shows a flag made from the skin of a mink tied with hawk feathers and dangling from a stick.

In Klamath Falls, a shiny oversized bucket made of galvanized metal and covered with words of encouragement for the Klamath irrigators sits in front of city hall. It was delivered there from Elko Nevada, where locals and ranchers several years ago symbolically reopened a closed road into the Jarbridge Wilderness. They were infuriated that the government would close their access to the land to protect threatened trout.

The farmers and ranchers worry that the land and water their ancestors took from the Indians will be taken from their children.

The Indians worry that sucker fish and bull trout, steelhead and salmon, will be erased from the rivers which were long ago stolen from their ancestors.

Use common sense.

The conclusion of the interpretive pamphlet is an unusually blunt assessment of the cause of the Modoc Wars. It’s a wonder such a no-bullshit conclusion made it into the official brochure of the Park Service:

A people who had lived in the basin for thousands of years were wiped out so a few settlers could raise a few more cattle.

If the farmers of the basin in 2002 could write their own historical explanation for the shut off of water in 2001’s parched summer, I imagine it would go something like this:

Many of the families who had farmed in this basin for generations were wiped out so a few Indians and urbanites could have a few more fish in the river.

It can be quite difficult to apply common sense in a land of little water. What is pragmatic and what is political when it comes to water is entirely dependent upon whose hand is on the tap. Ask an irrigator about his right to divert rivers and streams and you are likely to be met with the language of religion, of divine right. But the taps will be turned back on this summer simply because the farmers have more friends in the government they hate than the Indians and the environmentalists.

Far down river from this dried up lake, a migration of coho salmon is starting in from the ocean. And when they find warm, stagnant water and start to die, the farmers will be on the defensive, sighting the complexity of the river system and the ambiguity of its many ills.

It is intriguing to wonder just what Captain Jack, the brilliant tactician and doomed leader, would make of the farmers’ plight. I wonder what he would make of white farmers adopting the language and mantle of dispossessed natives. I wonder what he would think of the network of ditches that are mostly younger than one man’s lifetime and the nearest thing to the sacred altars of this region.

Wear sturdy shoes.

The Modoc wore sandals of Tule reeds. They lived in houses of tule reeds and made boats of them. When their snipers were picking off white soldiers from the stronghold, the Modoc put their faith not in footwear but in the workings of a shaman who made medicine sticks and sang songs.

So this trail, where it is not rock, was probably created by treads of grass. On this day, hard rubber soles have pulverized the dirt into fine powder and marked it with traction patterns of different kinds. Radiating Vibram spokes and rippling waves, round polka dots and Nike swooshes. The whimsical engravings of modern leisure lead the way.

But where the squiggly footwear hieroglyphics end, a surprise. A spontaneous medicine flag leans out toward Tule Lake. At its foot there are pennies and Indian Power key chains. Clumps of snuff and Winston butts are scattered instead of sacred tobacco. Acrylic yarn streamers and bright orange surveyor’s ribbons blow in the breeze.

It is hard not to cheer a little by the time the trail winds its way past this 21st century medicine stick. I can’t really say what it means to see it here, standing funky sentinel over the last battle of the Modoc and the frustrated landscape of their conquerors. But it looks to me like a small victory for the long memory.