The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age

Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native America’s peoples and lands. Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872–73, one of the nation’s costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. For the first and only time in U.S. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country’s past.   . The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war.The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a “peace policy” toward Indigenous nations. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. On a cold, rainy dawn in late November

One rarely comes across a historical account written with such verve, truly deserving to be called a page-turner. Rawls, author of Indians of California: The Changing Image  . “From the opening scene to the end, The Modoc War unfolds with an unrelenting pace and engaging immediacy. Here is ethnohistory at its best, an accounting of Indian-white relations from multiple perspectives.”—James J