The bounty years · 1851–1856
chu'nuuks
California's leadership called openly for extermination, and a bounty was put on Native lives. At the Tule Lake place the Modoc call chu'nuuks, later renamed Bloody Point, Modoc people were killed in the violence tied to Ben Wright. The arrest of Eneas in 1856 belongs to the same record.
The treaty · 1864
Council Grove
The 1864 Council Grove treaty moved the Modoc onto the Klamath Reservation, away from their Lost River homeland. Hunger, unkept promises, and life under another nation drove Kintpuash's band to leave and go home — the refusal the government would answer with war. The treaty and the agency reports are on the record.
The Modoc War · 1872–1873
The Lava Beds
From Lost River to the lava beds, a small band held out against the U.S. Army. The Peace Commission, its collapse, and the testimony that followed were recorded at the time, much of it by Alfred Meacham, who survived the parley and testified before Congress.
Prisoners & exile · 1873 onward
Fort Klamath
The executions at Fort Klamath, the confirmation and handling of the Modoc prisoners of war in October 1873, and the exile of the people to Indian Territory are documented in military and federal records. The survivors endured there as the Modoc Nation of Oklahoma.
The land
How it changed hands
Deeds, certificates of sale, and tax records, including the 1864 Fairchild land papers, trace how the country around the war passed from one set of hands to another. Land is its own kind of testimony.
Assimilation · after the war
What the exile became
The survivors were sent to Indian Territory, and the next generations into the assimilation era — the boarding schools, the 1907 death of the Modoc boy Charlie Fiester at the Klamath Agency, and the federal failures named in the 1928 Meriam Report. The endurance is documented too.
