The Modoc War by Robert Aquinas McNally

Author:Robert Aquinas McNally [McNally, Robert Aquinas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies, HIS036050 History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877), HIS028000 History / Native American
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0422-6
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2017-08-27T20:00:00+00:00

• • •

The Applegates recognized that the killing of Canby and Thomas changed the political context. With Canby and Thomas venerated as martyrs and the war elevated to the cosmic plane, the Applegates’ plan to rid the range of every last Modoc now had every chance of succeeding. Opposition to a violent final solution was bound to fade away as so much Quaker Indian-loving.

“Your letter came yesterday—same day got news of killing of Genl Canby and Thomas and wounding Meacham &c,” Ivan Applegate wrote to brother Oliver; “we are all O.K. any how no man will dare more to hold up for ‘Capt. Jack.’ . . . Keep cool and quiet, and all will work out right yet.”15 Ivan grasped an important political point: now that the war had gone cosmic, no one outside the Stronghold dared argue that Canby and Thomas were ordinary wartime casualties.

Had they been there to comment, Canby and Thomas would have agreed. They saw the demise of the Modoc nation and the ethnic cleansing of their land as the inevitable working of God’s plan, civilization’s advance, and the nation’s manifest destiny. The general and the minister imagined themselves as divinely chosen representatives of the superior, Christian civilization commanding the pagan primitives to accept annihilation. When Canby asserted that the Modocs dared not attack the peace commissioners, he was claiming the protection of civilization’s inevitability and assuming, wrongly, that the Modocs saw matters in the same light. Thomas boasted that he placed himself in God’s hands, trusting that the Almighty had to be on the side of a man who claimed the purest of hearts. In a cosmic conflict, God sides with the good guys.

Canby and Thomas’s attitude toward Indians was paternalistic, in the word’s literal meaning. They saw themselves as parents possessed of wisdom and right and the Modocs as children needing direction and salvation. The Natives had no choice but to bend to God’s will and American civilization’s progress.

Just before Kientpoos shot him, Canby spoke in this demeaning manner to the Modocs, according to Fox: “Nothing could have been kinder than his speech to these savages, and the kind old gentleman talked to them as if they had been his own children.”16 Jeff Riddle, Toby’s son, recalled Thomas explaining to his mother the feelings he held for Indians: “We have got to deal with the Indian just the same as we have to with children. You see, Sister Tobey, we must treat them with kindness. . . . They will believe what we tell them.”17

Canby and Thomas’s refusal to heed Riddle’s warnings that the Modocs planned to kill them arose from this same cosmic paternalism. It blinded them, too, to the Modocs’ desperation. To believe Riddle and to see that the Modoc people were desperate to fend off their annihilation by any means necessary was to treat Indians as equals. That Canby, Thomas, and almost all of European America refused to do.

• • •

The pitting of good against evil in a cosmic war eliminated any rules of engagement tempered by ethics and morality.

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