Time Immemorial – 1882

The people of this Basin

People were here through all of it. The Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin lived along these rivers, lakes and marshes for thousands of years before any of the events below, and their descendants live here now. The name for Link River is theirs: Yulalona, receding and returning water, for a river that in low years quit flowing altogether in late summer and left fish in the shallows and the mud. Modoc winter villages stood on the shores of Lower Klamath Lake, at the mouth of Lost River, along the eastern shore of Tule Lake, on the upper Lost River and at Clear Lake. What the maps later called reclaimable swamp was somebody's larder. And this is not distant history for the District. Link River runs through the lands the District serves, and so does the Lost River reach where Captain Jack's band camped, where the United States broke its own bargain with them, and where the first shots of the Modoc War were fired. The two rivers that carry most of what follows on this page water the same ground the District delivers to today.

Link River carries one more story, and it belongs to a Modoc woman. It was written down by her own son. She was born on Link River near the sacred lands of the La-la-cas, and as a child she was called Nan-ook-to-wa, the strange child — for going alone to the sacred springs, and for her fearlessness at the rocks where Ka-moo-kum-chux had left his footprints. Her father's lodge stood near the outlet of the lake, within sight of the Cascades and within hearing of the rushing water, and it was a favorite pastime of the children to paddle on it.

One day the canoe was drawn into the current — so swift, the account says, that “the stoutest-hearted brave would not venture into it.” Her father saw the danger and shouted, and was too late. The canoe was carried into the flood and through the rocky chute. He mounted his horse and rode down the bank “fast as speed could fly,” catching glimpses of the children as they rose on the waves and expecting each time would be the last. Undaunted, Nan-ook-to-wa stood in the canoe, steered right and left past the great boulders, and commanded the other children to calmness. She plied the paddle until the canoe reached the still water of the lower lake, and brought them in safely to meet her father and the friends who had joined the chase.

That day, for the first time, her own people called her Kaitch-ka-na, Wi-ne-ma — the little woman chief. Twenty years later she stood between her own people and the United States Army as an interpreter through the Modoc War, warned the peace commissioners of the plot against them, and saved a commissioner's life when they did not listen.

Source: Jeff C. Riddle, The Indian History of the Modoc War, pp. 202–204, first published 1919, as reproduced in Jim Spindor's “Yulalona,” The Trumpeter No. 44 (Klamath County Historical Society, 1996). Jeff Riddle was Winema's son.

Before the agreement — raw and unconquered

The phrase is borrowed from Carrol B. Howe, Unconquered, Uncontrolled: The Klamath Indian Reservation.

• Time ImmemorialThe Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin peoples live along the lakes, rivers and marshes of this Basin.
• c. 10,000 BPAncient Lake Modoc shrinks as the climate dries and the Keno reef erodes, leaving the lakes and valleys of the modern Basin.
• c. 7,700 BPMount Mazama erupts, forming what is now Crater Lake and reshaping the Basin's soils and hydrology.
• 1648 – 1668Twenty-one consecutive years below the median — the longest run of dry years in the entire Klamath reconstruction, which reaches back to 1507. Nothing in the gauged record approaches it; the longest measured run since 1949 is nine years. It happened with no dam on Link River, no canal, no farm, and nobody to blame.
• 1826 – 27Hudson's Bay Company trappers under Peter Skene Ogden work the country south of the Basin, encircling Butte Valley over four and a half months — the first recorded non-Indian travel in the area.
• 1843 – 1846Four consecutive years below the median in the tree-ring reconstruction of Klamath River flow at Keno. Both of Frémont's journeys into the Basin fall inside this run, and the Applegate Trail opens in the middle of it. The same four years appear in the Sacramento and San Joaquin reconstructions, so the dry was regional.
• Dec 1843John C. Frémont comes south from The Dalles and enters the Basin from the north, through the Klamath marshlands — the first of his two journeys into this country. On December 11 he visits a village on the marsh, describing the country as picturesque and beautiful, the land fertile and the forests full of game. He is standing in the first year of the dry run above, and it still looks like that.
• May 1846Frémont returns on his second journey into the Basin, this time from the south, with war between the United States and Mexico about to break out. Camped beside Upper Klamath Lake, he is overtaken by Lieutenant Gillespie carrying dispatches from Washington. In the night his camp is attacked and three of his men are killed. His party retaliates by destroying the Klamath fishing village of Dokdokwas — whose people may have had nothing to do with the attack. He had come north through Modoc country from Tule Lake, which he had named Rhett Lake, and had made no arrangement for the crossing. Frémont turns south for California and the Bear Flag Revolt. On this visit, at Rattlesnake Point, he refuses to let his horses drink from the lake. It is the fourth and final year of the same dry run he rode into in 1843.
• 1846The Applegate Trail is opened across the Basin, passing the northeastern floor of the Tule Lake basin from Bloody Point to the Stone Bridge on Lost River. Emigrants bring cattle, horses, surveying and agricultural practice; parts of the old road are still on the ground. They also bring pressure. Within a few years the meadows are overgrazed, the game thinned and the water fouled, and an epidemic — probably measles — moves through the Modoc villages, killing roughly a hundred and fifty of a people numbering about two thousand.
• 1848 – 1852After a single wet year, five more consecutive years below the median. Emigrant traffic on the trail is at its heaviest, the grass and game at their thinnest, and both the killings at Bloody Point and Ben Wright's massacre fall in the last year of the run.
• 1850 – 1852Modoc bands attack emigrant trains where the trail rounds the northeast shore of Tule Lake. The place takes the name Bloody Point — the southern edge of the lands the District serves. The worst comes in September 1852, when a train of some sixty-five people is attacked; accounts of the dead range from thirty-six to sixty-five, and rescue parties out of Yreka and Jacksonville find the remains of dozens more. Some accounts hold that the band at Bloody Point was led by Captain Jack's father.
• Nov 1852The answer to Bloody Point comes three months later. Under a flag of truce, Ben Wright and a party out of Yreka attack a Modoc camp on Lost River — on lands the District serves today — killing between thirty and ninety people. Modoc accounts hold that Captain Jack's father was among the dead, shot as he walked unarmed into Wright's camp.

The trail did not cross empty country, and passage across it had a price. The Modoc charged for the use of their land, and the record is plain about it: the 1864 agreement binds them to let travellers pass “without being molested, taxed for right of way” — a prohibition that exists because the practice did. In 1862 Fairchild paid for grazing rights. In the early 1870s Captain Jack was still demanding rent from emigrants occupying Lost River, and most of them paid it. Set beside the overgrazed meadows, the thinned game, the fouled water and the epidemic, the attacks on the road read less like banditry than like enforcement on a road nobody had asked permission to build.

The agreements, and the war

• 1862John Fairchild's agreement with the Modocs — three hundred dollars in horses and provisions to Kientpoos, known to emigrants as Captain Jack, for the privilege of running cattle unmolested on tribal land. Presley Dorris made a similar agreement. Both men were well regarded by the Modocs for the rest of their lives. Among the families party to the Fairchild agreement were the Chipps.
• Feb 14, 1864The “Valentine's Day Treaty” — Judge E. S. Steele, Supervising Agent of Indian Affairs for the Northern District of California, signs an agreement of peace and passage with the Modoc, Klamath, Shasta and Scott's Valley peoples. It is printed in the Commissioner of Indian Affairs report. Congress never ratifies it.
• Oct 1864Treaty with the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin, and removal to the Klamath Reservation. Not everyone went. Modoc families who had entered the 1862 agreement with Fairchild were allowed to remain on their own land. Among them were the Chipps, whose son Henry Robert Chipps — born in 1861, three years before the treaty — would live on those lands until 1936, and never be removed from them.
• Apr 1870Captain Jack's band leaves the reservation and returns to their camp on Lost River, on lands the District serves today. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs' own report gives the reasons: the band had begun splitting rails and farming, but the Klamath demanded tribute for the land they occupied and the agent did not protect them — and the issue of rations “seems also to have been suspended for want of funds.” The United States had not kept its side.
• Nov 29, 1872Troops from Fort Klamath and citizen militia from Linkville reach Jack's camp on Lost River, about a mile above Emigrant Crossing — now Stone Bridge. The first shots of the Modoc War are fired there, on lands the District serves. Hearing of it, Fairchild sends a messenger to the Hot Creek band; they meet, and the band agrees to stay out of the fighting.

The war ran seven months. Fifty-three Modoc warriors held off more than a thousand soldiers from the lava beds south of Tule Lake, in the most expensive Indian war the United States ever fought. It ended on June 1, 1873, when Captain Jack was taken at Willow Creek. The fighting was over. The prisoners were being gathered in and moved to the Army's headquarters, and it is at that point — with the war finished and the guns collected — that the worst thing on this page happens.

After the war

• Jun 7, 1873The war is over and the killing is not. James Fairchild is driving seventeen Modoc captives in a mule wagon from the Fairchild ranch on Cottonwood Creek to General Davis's headquarters. At the Lost River crossing, two miles short of Dennis Crawley's house, two disguised men stop the wagon at gunpoint and shoot four of the prisoners dead — Little John, Teehee Jack, Pony and Mooch — and wound Little John's wife in the shoulder. The men were unarmed and in custody. Most were Hot Creeks who had taken no part in the war — they had stayed on their homelands with the Fairchilds through the whole of it. No steps were taken to apprehend the killers.
• Oct 3, 1873Four Modoc leaders are executed at Fort Klamath. Many of the surviving Modocs, the Hot Creek band among them, are removed to Oklahoma. Those who had stayed on under the 1862 agreement remain.
• 1874Lake County is established, named for the standing water everywhere in it, with Linkville as county seat.
• 1882Klamath County separates from Lake County, with Linkville as its seat.

The Lost River crossing, June 7, 1873

Of everything on this page, this is the one event with an eyewitness who spoke while it was still the same day. The Associated Press correspondent reached James Fairchild at Boyle's Camp within hours of the killings and took down what he said. It is worth hearing directly.

The party had left the ranch at daylight — John and James Fairchild and a dozen other men, seventeen Modoc captives, the armed riders out ahead and James alone at the back with the prisoners in a wagon drawn by four mules. Late in the afternoon, at the Lost River crossing, two men rode ahead of him, dismounted, set their hats on the sagebrush and tied on makeshift disguises — one a handkerchief, the other a trouser leg. They stepped to the front and rear of the wagon with cocked needle-guns.

Earlier that afternoon, at the crossing, he had met Captain Hiser's Oregon Volunteers heading home and been questioned about who he was carrying. All Hot Creeks, Fairchild told him, except Little John, a Lost River man. What kind of Indians are these? — “I guess these are not among the worst; there are no charges against them.” He considered asking Hiser to take the prisoners under his protection, because the volunteers looked as though they meant mischief, and decided instead to push on. He told them where he would camp.

Get down, the man in front told him. Fairchild asked by what authority. “By mine; I am going to kill the Indians and you too.”

The men were unarmed. The report says they knew resistance was useless and were the coolest people there. Little John died first, shot in the head in the wagon; the mules bolted and dragged Fairchild tangled in the lines while five more shots were fired. He reached Boyle's Camp at two the next morning with the wounded woman and her two children.

The dispatch is plain about what followed. Teams and an escort went out at once for the prisoners, dead and alive. “No steps were taken for the apprehension of the felons who performed the bloody work.” The men killed had not been charged with anything, and they had not fought. They had spent the war on their own homelands under the Fairchilds' protection. Headquarters called the killing atrocious and without excuse. Nobody was ever arrested for it.

Parts of the history above are carried by the descendants of the families who lived it. One such account is told separately here.

Where this comes from

Every date and figure on this page is drawn from a primary or published source, not from recollection.

• The Enterprise (Oregon City, Oregon), June 1873 — the Associated Press dispatch from Boyle's Camp carrying James Fairchild's eyewitness account of the killings at the Lost River crossing, and the paper's editorial, “An Outrage.”
• The Sentinel (Jacksonville, Oregon), June 14, 1873 — the killing of four Modoc prisoners on June 7, 1873, and the dispute over who did it.
• Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs — the 1864 agreement signed by E. S. Steele, and the account of the Modocs' departure from the reservation in April 1870, including the suspension of rations.
• Carrol B. Howe, Unconquered, Uncontrolled: The Klamath Indian Reservation, and Ancient Tribes of the Klamath Country (1985) — the Klamath and Modoc villages of Link River, and the phrase that heads the first timeline above.
• Butte Valley Chamber of Commerce, History — the Modoc presence in Butte Valley, the Fairchild and Dorris agreements of 1862, and the Hot Creek band during the Modoc War.
• “Agreement with the Modoc, 1864” — Oklahoma State University Tribal Treaties Database, from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs; the unratified agreement signed by E. S. Steele.
• The Trumpeter No. 34, Klamath County Historical Society, October–December 1993 — “Historical Society Tour #1,” written by Mae L. Smith; the Linkville Water Ditch Company, Steele's enlargement, the Van Brimmer and Adams canals, and the Carr and Dalton ranches.
• Klamath Echoes and other numbers of The Trumpeter, Klamath County Historical Society — emigration, the Applegate Trail, and the early ditches.

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