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The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America's Gilded Age
Contributor(s): McNally, Robert Aquinas (Author)
ISBN: 1496201795     ISBN-13: 9781496201799
Publisher: Bison Books
OUR PRICE:   $31.46  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: November 2017
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- History | Native American
- History | Military - United States
- History | United States - 19th Century
Dewey: 973.82
LCCN: 2017011122
Physical Information: 1.32" H x 6.42" W x 9.04" (1.73 lbs) 432 pages
Themes:
- Ethnic Orientation - Native American
- Chronological Period - 1851-1899
- Cultural Region - Northern California
- Geographic Orientation - California
- Geographic Orientation - Oregon
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. 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.

Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs.

The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. 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. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country's past.