Chapter X.

Treaty With the Modocs is Made.

On the 14th day of October, 1864, the Modocs entered into a treaty with the Federal government by which they ceded all rights to the Lost river and Tule lake country for a consideration of $320,000.  In addition to this they were to receive a body of land on the Klamath reservation of 768,000 acres, or a little more than 420 acres for each man, woman and child.  Immediately after the ratification of the treaty all the Modoc Indians moved to the lands allotted to them, where the tribe remained, and yet remains.  This may be news to most of my readers, but it is a fact that the Modoc Indians as a tribe continued to keep faith with the government.  The band under Captain Jack were merely renegades who, dissatisfied with their new home, left the reservation and went back to Lost river and Tule Lake.  Jack himself was wanted for murder, and sought an asylum in the lava beds, or the country adjacent thereto, where he gathered around him renegades from other tribes—­renegades outlawed by Indians and whites alike.  Some of the Indians in Jack’s band were from the Columbia river region, others from coast tribes, and all were outlaws.  One of the leaders, Bogus Charley, was an Umpqua Indian and was raised by a white man named Bill Phips.  He spoke good English and asked me about many of the old timers.

In securing his ascendancy over this band of outlaws Jack was assisted by his sister, “Queen Mary,” so-called, who lived many years with a white man near Yreka.  In the opinion of Captain I. D. Applegate.  Mary was the brains of the murderous crew who gathered in the “hole in the wall,” under her brother.  She was the go-between for the Indians with the whites about Yreka, where they did their trading and where they supplied themselves with arms and ammunition, and it was through her that Judge Steele, a lawyer of Yreka, was interested in getting a reservation for them.  Steele made a trip to Washington to plead their cause, and received a fee of $1000.  He failed, but held out hope to his clients and urged them under no circumstances to go back to their lands at Klamath, advising them as counsel to take up lands in severalty under the pre-emption laws of the United States.  It is charitable to suppose that Judge Steele did not foresee the disastrous consequences of his counsel, yet he knew that Jack was wanted at the Klamath agency for murder.  In furtherance of his advice he wrote the following self-explanatory letter to Henry Miller, afterwards murdered in a most barbarous manner by the very men whom he had befriended: 

Yreka, Sept. 19, 1872.

Mr. Henry F. Miller—­Dear Sir:  You will have to give me a description of the lands the Indians want.  If it has been surveyed, give me the township, range, section and quarter-section.  If not, give me a rude plat of it by representing the line of the lake and the line of the river, so that I can describe it . . .  Mr. Warmmer, the County Surveyor, will not go out there, so I will have to send to Sacramento to get one appointed.  Send an answer by an Indian, so that I can make out their papers soon.  I did not have them pay taxes yet, as I did not know whether the land is surveyed and open for pre-emption.