A Haunted Place: The Land Where a People Lost Their Culture

When you've been to a place a few times, it becomes possible to concentrate on the subtle changes that can happen at different parts of the day and under changing weather conditions. We arrived at Lava Beds National Monument on our recent field studies journey to the Cascades volcanoes of northern California ahead of the first storm of the season. I wandered out into the lava flows and took in the scene. I was remembering the events here that led to the destruction of a culture more than 140 years ago.

The gathering clouds could have been worrisome since we were camping out, but the park staff had generously allowed us to make use of the research center, so we had a warm dry place to retreat to at the end of the day. The rain fell all night, and when the morning arrived, the valley was filled with an ethereal mist. The land was barren and lonely. It was hard to imagine this valley as a home, but for centuries it was indeed home for bands of Native Americans, including the Modoc people.

Their presence could be felt in many ways. Our first stop was at Petroglyph Point in an outlier of the Park near the town of Tulelake. The lake once filled most of the valley, and waves used to break at the base of the cliff. The unusual looking rocks are the insides of a tuff cone, a volcanic edifice that formed during a mildly explosive eruption about 270,000 years ago.

Several thousand years ago, the people who lived here took canoes and made their way to what was then an island in the midst of the large lake. There they carved numerous petroglyphs, more than 5,000 of them, making this outcrop one of the largest petroglyph panels in the United States

The soft tuff was easy to carve, but the softness will be the undoing of these precious marks of the past. The water that filled the lake 140 years ago has been diverted and most of the lake has dried up. Wind now carries sand that blasts against the edge of the cliff, slowly eating away the enigmatic symbols.

And there is an even more horrible problem. Fifty of the petroglyphs were vandalized last year, leading to a closure of part of the panel. These are sick people who would do such things.

After leaving Petroglyph Point, we arrived at the epicenter of the battleground where the Modoc People lost their homeland and much of  their culture. They put up a hell of a fight against impossible odds.

The following is an excerpt of an earlier post I wrote about the saga of the Modoc People:

The Modoc people had lived in the Klamath Falls-Tule Lake region from time unremembered, and made first contact with Europeans in the 1840's as settlers arrived on the Oregon Trail. Relations between the cultures were rocky and sometimes violent, and eventually the Modoc people were forced to move to the reservation of their ancestral enemies, the Klamath people. After several years of intolerable conditions of neglect, some of the Modocs left the reservation and returned to their homeland on the Lost River near Lava Beds, led by Kientpuash, known to the settlers as Captain Jack.

The hostilities began on November 29, 1872. On that day, the U.S. Army tried to round up the Modocs at their Lost River encampment, north of Lava Beds, in order to return them to a reservation in southern Oregon. Shots were fired, both sides suffered injuries, and the Modoc people fled south, led by Kientpuash. A separate party, led by Hooker Jim, went on a rampage, killing 14 settlers. The bands made their way by canoe and horse to the site that came to be known as Captain Jack’s Stronghold. The band included 53 men of fighting age, and about a hundred women, children and aged Modocs.

The Stronghold was the site of two major battles and a long siege by U.S. troops and militia of the small band of Modoc peoples during the long winter.

The conflicts that took place on this barren surface reveal much about the need to take into account the geology and geography of the battlefield. Although outnumbered at least ten to one, the Modoc warriors were able to take advantage of the landscape to execute their defense, and in the two major battles that took place, they inflicted many casualties on their opponents while suffering very few among themselves. During the January 17, 1873 conflict, the attacking army did not kill or injure a single Modoc warrior while suffering 37 casualties, including 9 dead.

The Modocs could hardly have chosen a better spot to make their stand. The trail through the stronghold reveals a series of schollendomes (pressure ridges) and scarps that almost completely encircled the Modoc encampment. The fractures and fissures along the tops of the schollendomes were natural trenches that allowed quick access to any point along the defensive perimeter, and the Modocs had an excellent view of the flat open landscape that the U.S. Army had to cross in order to attack. In addition to defensibility, the stronghold included access to water and food along the shoreline of Tule Lake, a natural corral where cattle could be kept, and lava tube openings that provided shelter for the Modoc families.

Another advantage of the site was the presence of an escape route. After suffering a long siege and cold winter, the Modoc people prepared for another assault by the Army, now numbering more than 700. On April 11, during a peace parley, the Modocs shot and killed General E.R.S. Canby, in the hopes that by killing the Army’s leader, the soldiers would go away. The opposite occurred, and on April 15 the Army forces began bombarding the stronghold and advancing past the outer perimeter of the Modoc lines. After two days of attack, with 6 dead and 17 wounded, the Army poured into the stronghold to find…no one. On the night of April 16, the entire Modoc party, 160 men, women and children, along with dogs and horses, had deserted the stronghold, moving south along a smooth area of the lava flow, only a few hundred meters from some of the Army encampments.

Despite their successful escape, the Modoc people were now caught in the open, and it was only a matter of time before they were captured. Within a few weeks, Hooker Jim betrayed Captain Jack’s location in return for amnesty. Ultimately the Modoc people were moved to Oklahoma, and Captain Jack, along with three others, was hanged. The last major conflict in California between the U.S. Army and the aboriginal peoples was over. As the park brochure notes: “The cultural identity of an entire people was lost here…so settlers could graze a few cows”

About 200 Modocs remain in Oklahoma, descendants of seven of the survivors of the war, and about 500 Modocs still live in Oregon. The Modoc people returned to Lava Beds in 1990 for the first time in 117 years to perform ceremonies on their ancestral lands, and now do so yearly.

A Convergence of Wonders: Day 2, Lava Beds and Newberry Caldera

A Convergence of Wonders is a chronicle of our recent journey through the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains. This the second day's story...

What is that blazing orange light interrupting my slumber?? June 16 dawned very early, with twilight beginning around 4:30 AM, and sunrise about 5:20. I was up for good at that point. There was no sleeping in the brightness; tents don't insulate you from the outdoors as well as solid walls. I've always loved dawn at Lava Beds National Monument, though. The sky is as big there as any place I know, with far-off horizons and clear air.

Our day was going to be spent on the two largest volcanoes of the Cascades, and hardly anyone has heard of either of them: Medicine Lake Highland, and Newberry Caldera. Crater Lake was slated to be on the day's menu, but 10-12 feet of snow still coated the rim, and we just weren't going to see it this time around. Both Medicine Lake and Newberry have been called basaltic shield volcanoes, but they are more complicated than "normal" shields with a variety of lava and magma compositions and are described as "shield-shaped volcanoes". We started the day on the flank of Medicine Lake Highland, but we couldn't actually see the volcano until mid-day, when we were far enough away. It is the largest single volcano in the Cascades with a volume of around 130 cubic miles (Shasta has around 85-100 cubic miles).

The best known part of Medicine Lake Highland is Lava Beds National Monument, where we spent the night. The park preserves a series of basalt flows that developed a network of lava tubes, underground conduits that allowed the basaltic lavas to flow for miles before cooling. The tubes drained at the end of the eruption, leaving a series of caves. Lava Beds preserves the largest concentration of lava tubes in North America, in excess of 700, with a combined length of more than 30 miles.

The students had explored a few of the lava tubes the previous night, so we sampled just two in the morning. Valentine Cave is in a separate younger flow, and is remarkably clear of debris and easy to walk through (the CCC cleared much of the talus in the 1930s). It has most of the interesting cave features such as lavacicles, bathtub rings (lava benches), rafted boulders, lava falls, and pahoehoe flows on the cave floor.

Outside the caves, there were an unusual number of wildflowers in evidence, given the long spring and cooler temperatures. This is an Indian Paintbrush on the flank of Mammoth Crater, the source for more than two-thirds of the lava flows in Lava Beds.

After a visit to the Visitor Center, where we were certified as free of white nose syndrome (this is a horrific bat disease, not a human one), we went to the more ominous sounding Skull Cave. The name is like something out of a campy adventure movie, and the reality is also kind of frightening. Skull is a cave with multiple levels, and the first drop to the second level down is just within the zone of total darkness. Animals and a few humans without sources of light would move into the cave, looking for water maybe, and just as it got dark they would step over the side into the abyss (literally and figuratively). Today there is a metal stairway to negotiate the dropoff, and we explored the icy depths (literally icy; water sinks into the cave in the winter, freezes, and stays there, even in summer).

Skull has the largest opening of any cave in the park because it is part of the main feeder tube that transported the lava for 10-15 miles. Unlike the smaller caves, the main tube is relatively unstable, and huge blocks of basalt have broken off the ceiling and littered the cave floor to the extent that few original flow features are visible. It was so large I half-expected to see Han Solo, the Millenium Falcon, and a giant space worm in there.

Our next stop was more sobering. California was never kind to the hundreds of native cultures that existed prior to the Mission era and the Gold Rush. Many were slaughtered or sickened to extinction without leaving any kind of record. The Modoc culture was destroyed, but not without a fight. Lava Beds was the site of the last battles between the U.S. military and native peoples in California, in 1872-1873. Despite being outnumbered as much as 10-1, the Modoc people held out for five months.

I've provided a detailed commentary on the battles that took place in my Other California series about Lava Beds. In short, the Modocs held the advantage of knowing the territory, and of taking shelter at Captain Jack's Stronghold, a natural fortress that was almost impossible to take as long as there were a few armed defenders. Pressure ridges and schollendomes provided the trenchs and "castle" walls that made the stronghold practically impregnable.

A fire swept through the Stronghold and much of the northern part of Lava Beds a few years ago, leaving just a few Junipers unscathed. Being the only trees for some distance, a lot of birds were in evidence, including a pair of juvenile Great Horned Owls.

Why do owls always look so perturbed? I suppose a bunch of tourists with cameras had something to do with it...

We moved on to an outlier of the park, a deeply eroded tuffaceous cone called Petroglyph Point. The cone had erupted in the midst of Tule Lake, and the yellow layers of tuff had been deeply eroded by waves on the lake, forming a striking west-facing cliff punctuated by tafoni, hollows formed by weathering. One can see the wave-cut notches running along the base of the cliff behind the chain-link fences. Why are the fences there? Oh yeah, petroglyphs. Petroglyph Point is the largest panel of petroglyphs in the country...

Most of the rock carvings in the cliff predate the Modocs. The lake lapped at the base of the cliff, and the artists would have required rafts or canoes to reach the site. Because the lake has been mostly diverted and dried up for agricultural purposes, blowing sand and dust threatens the integrity of the rock art. See more info on the panel here.

We were finally far enough away to see the full extent of the Cascade's largest volcano, by volume. Medicine Lake Highland is the broad gently sloping dome on the horizon. Mt. Shasta can be seen on the right skyline (click on the photo for an enlarged view).

Then came one of the dreaded "pushes". We had to put about 170 miles between us and our next destination, Newberry Volcano. Oregon has some pretty volcanoes, including Mt. Theilsen and Mt. McLaughlin, but they were only occasionally visible between stretches of dense forest. The road was very straight and monotonous after Klamath Lake. Eventually though, we arrived at Newberry Caldera, a shield-like volcano similar in many respects to Medicine Lake Highland. We also found a wall of snow. The bathrooms were unavailable, the camp we had reserved months earlier was not open yet (fortunately I knew this and had made alternate arrangements), and there was no official parking available to see our main site, the obsidian dome. We made do, and most of the students hoofed it over the snowbanks to see the obsidian up close (more than a few snowballs were launched as well).

I crossed the highway and climbed the hill to get a better perspective on the dome. Mountains like Newberry and Medicine Lake have multiple magma sources, probably because very hot deep mantle source basalts melt some of the more silica-rich continental crust. The volcanoes spew out plenty of highly fluid basalt flows, but also occasionally produce much stickier rhyolite flows, forming small plug domes. The rhyolite lava often forms obsidian and pumice, as it did here.

We were in the midst of a caldera on the summit of Newberry. A caldera forms from the collapse of the top of a volcano due to the withdrawal of magma during eruption sequences. Paulina Peaks on the rim of the caldera loomed high above us while we hiked through the snow. Crater Lake (which we were not able to visit) is one of the world's best examples of a recently formed caldera. The catastrophic explosion that accompanied Crater Lake's origin probably did not happen at Newberry. The caldera development was more gradual and less explosive.

We were ready to get to camp, and traveled the final 30 miles as quickly as we could. We set up in the group site at Tumalo State Park, a pleasant site just outside Bend, Oregon. The evening was nice enough, but somehow overnight, the temperature dropped to 28 degrees. This is summer??

On day three, we head for the coast and for great disappointment (this sentence has multiple meanings, as you will see).

The Other California: Cries from the Past

Continuing a web tour of Lava Beds National Monument, a place to go when you've seen all the postcard places...

Wounded Knee, Little Big Horn, Sand Creek. The relationship between the indigenous people of the Americas and Europeans has not been a positive one, to say the least. Battles and conflicts were fought across the country over centuries, and invariably the losers were Native Americans. The history of the California is no exception, and many tribes who lived in the state for thousands of years were annihilated, often without even memories of the people being preserved. Whole cultures simply went extinct, whether from warfare, disease or neglect. A story is preserved in one place at least, at Lava Beds; a last stand for the culture and livelihood of the Modoc people, in 1872-1873.

The Modoc people had lived in the Klamath Falls-Tule Lake region from time unremembered, and made first contact with Europeans in the 1840's as settlers arrived on the Oregon Trail. Relations between the cultures were rocky and sometimes violent, and eventually the Modoc people were forced to move to the reservation of their ancestral enemies, the Klamath people. After several years of intolerable conditions of neglect, some of the Modocs left the reservation and returned to their homeland on the Lost River near Lava Beds, led by Kientpuash, known to the settlers as Captain Jack (picture below).


The hostilities began on November 29, 1872. On that day, the U.S. Army tried to round up the Modocs at their Lost River encampment, north of Lava Beds, in order to return them to a reservation in southern Oregon. Shots were fired, both sides suffered injuries, and the Modoc people fled south, led by Kientpuash. A separate party, led by Hooker Jim, went on a rampage, killing 14 settlers. The bands made their way by canoe and horse to the site that came to be known as Captain Jack’s Stronghold. The band included 53 men of fighting age, and about a hundred women, children and aged Modocs.


The Stronghold was the site of two major battles and a long siege by U.S. troops and militia of the small band of Modoc peoples during the long winter.

The conflicts that took place on this barren surface reveal much about the need to take into account the geology and geography of the battlefield. Although outnumbered at least ten to one, the Modoc warriors were able to take advantage of the landscape to execute their defense, and in the two major battles that took place, they inflicted many casualties on their opponents while suffering very few among themselves. During the January 17, 1873 conflict, the attacking army did not kill or injure a single Modoc warrior, while suffering 37 casualties, including 9 dead.

The Modocs could hardly have chosen a better spot to make their stand. The trail through the stronghold reveals a series of schollendomes (pressure ridges) and scarps that almost completely encircled the Modoc encampment. The fractures and fissures along the tops of the schollendomes were natural trenches that allowed quick access to any point along the defensive perimeter, and the Modocs had an excellent view of the flat open landscape that the U.S. Army had to cross in order to attack. In addition to defensibility, the stronghold included access to water and food along the shoreline of Tule Lake, a natural corral where cattle could be kept, and lava tube openings that provided shelter for the Modoc families.


Another advantage of the site was the presence of an escape route. After suffering a long siege and cold winter, the Modoc people prepared for another assault by the Army, now numbering more than 700. On April 11, during a peace parley, the Modocs shot and killed General E.R.S. Canby, in the hopes that by killing the Army’s leader, the soldiers would go away. The opposite occurred, and on April 15 the Army forces began bombarding the stronghold and advancing past the outer perimeter of the Modoc lines. After two days of attack, with 6 dead and 17 wounded, the Army poured into the stronghold to find…no one. On the night of April 16, the entire Modoc party, 160 men, women and children, along with dogs and horses, had deserted the stronghold, moving south along a smooth area of the lava flow, only a few hundred meters from some of the Army encampments.

Despite their successful escape, the Modoc people were now caught in the open, and it was only a matter of time before they were captured. Within a few weeks, Hooker Jim betrayed Captain Jack’s location in return for amnesty. Ultimately the Modoc people were moved to Oklahoma, and Captain Jack, along with three others, was hanged. The last major conflict in California between the U.S. Army and the aboriginal peoples was over. As the park brochure notes: “The cultural identity of an entire people was lost here…so settlers could graze a few cows”

About 200 Modocs remain in Oklahoma, descendants of seven of the survivors of the war, and about 500 Modocs still live in Oregon. The Modoc people returned to Lava Beds in 1990 for the first time in 117 years to perform ceremonies on their ancestral lands, and now do so yearly.

Aaron Waters (1992) has provided the most detailed account of the geology of the battlefield (Figures 5 and 6). A double-looping trail provides a choice of routes through the stronghold, one of 0.6 miles (1 km) and one of 1.1 miles (1.8 km). Either route reveals many interesting aspects of this unusual and tragic moment in American history, when a small band of Modoc people resisted a much larger force of U.S. soldiers.