KINTPUASH

The Modoc leader history called Captain Jack

Kintpuash.

He led the Modoc through the war that carries their name. For a century and a half the record has told his story from one side. This is where it is kept from his, grounded in the documented past and told from inside Modoc memory.

The man behind the name

A leader the official record kept in the margins.

Kintpuash, called Captain Jack by the settlers and soldiers who hunted him, was a leader of the Modoc people. His name belongs to the Modoc War, to the lava beds and the Tule Lake country of the California and Oregon line, and to the exile of his people to Indian Territory, where they endured as the Modoc Nation of Oklahoma.

The novel Captain Jack & The Original Renegades retells that history as fiction grounded in fact, from inside Modoc memory rather than the interpretive-center version. It opens in 1852, in the reeds of Tule Lake, and follows the land's long memory into the present. This site keeps the record behind it.

The novel Cover of Captain Jack & The Original Renegades by H.L. Delaney

Historical fiction · grounded in the record

Captain Jack & The Original Renegades

"What if the story you were taught wasn't the whole story?"

The Modoc War, the broken treaties, and the slow violence of assimilation, told through Kintpuash and his people. Drawn from archival records, oral tradition, and land-based memory, and retold from where it never left: the ground itself.

Paperback $19.99 · Kindle Unlimited★★★★★Top 10 · Amazon Native American Literature

Praise

What readers are saying

★★★★★

"The connections between past and present, and the way the author weaves recorded history with oral knowledge passed down by survivors, arrive at a far more truthful telling. The land does indeed remember."

Goodreads review
★★★★★

"The best book on the Modoc War I've read. Respectful, interesting, and a lot of it not told before."

Goodreads review
★★★★★

"An interesting and entertaining presentation of historical facts, backed with verifiable documentation. More than just a story."

Goodreads review

The Last Song

A Modoc song of new beginnings.

The Last Song is a Modoc song whose words speak of new beginnings, as old as time immemorial. Its survival is owed to Modoc elder Celia Langell-Jefferson, who returned it to her people. This studio-mastered rendition is by H.L. Delaney, shared freely for cultural preservation.

The record

The history beneath the book.

Captain Jack is fiction grounded in the documented past: the Modoc War, the bounty era, the prisoners and the exile, the land records, and the congressional testimony. The record it stands on is gathered on its own page.

Explore the record →