On October 3, 1873, the U.S. Army hanged four Modoc headmen at
Oregon's Fort Klamath. The condemned had supposedly murdered the
only U.S. Army general to die during the Indian wars of the
nineteenth century. Their much-anticipated execution marked the end
of the Modoc War of 1872–73. But as Boyd Cothran
demonstrates, the conflict's close marked the beginning of a new
struggle over the memory of the war. Examining representations of
the Modoc War in the context of rapidly expanding cultural and
commercial marketplaces, Cothran shows how settlers created and
sold narratives of the conflict that blamed the Modocs. These
stories portrayed Indigenous people as the instigators of violence
and white Americans as innocent victims.
Cothran examines the production and circulation of these
narratives, from sensationalized published histories and staged
lectures featuring Modoc survivors of the war to commemorations and
promotional efforts to sell newly opened Indian lands to settlers.
As Cothran argues, these narratives of American innocence justified
not only violence against Indians in the settlement of the West but
also the broader process of U.S. territorial and imperial
expansion.