lu Mattson
Shaman’s Dream
:
the Modoc War
Copyright © lu Mattson
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Shaman’s Dream: the Modoc War
ISBN 978-1-4566-0920-7
Literary Non-fiction
To the Burro
Introduction
This book owes its genesis to a burro that wouldn’t cross the bridge at Glen Aulin Falls on the Tuolomne River in Yosemite. My friend and I were starting out on what was supposed to have been a two-week excursion up Matterhorn Canyon in Yosemite.
In 1984.1
Let it be enough to report that the summer circumstance forced us to relinquish our well-laid plans. At a loss to know what to do next with all that now-unplanned vacation time and outdoor gear, we ate our steaks at a formica lunch-counter and cast about for an idea about what to do. We decided: we would head farther north on Highway 395, which runs on the east side of the Sierras, to the past, as it turned out -- or was it to the future. We would go to this place the roadmap showed: the Lavabeds National Monument. Modoc County. Right up at the California-Oregon state line. See what that might be like. Camp. Fish. Hike. Recruit our burro-bruised egos.
Twenty-five years later, after researching and writing and speculating and piecing-together, the story of the Modoc war we encountered that summer remains one of the best stories I know. And one of the worst.
Over time, following the trail of Captain Jack and the army and the settlers of northern California and Oregon eventually took us to army posts (and the abandoned sites of army posts), to a war-college, to national and state archives, to reservations (and abandoned sites of reservations), to colleges, to libraries prestigious or modest, out-of-the-way museums, riverbanks, sacred mountains, caves still marked by now-dimming sun-signs.
Now for me, with this book, my telling of it is at last finished.
Over the years, many have had a go at telling the historical fact of that little-known war. Some have focused primarily on the plot, occasionally introducing interlopers needed to fill out the story. Some have written histories. I wanted something else with the story that was growing richer for me the further I looked into it. I leaned on the shoulders of two reliable tellers-of-fact, Keith Murray and Edwin Thompson.2 I revisited their sources, read the original documents they had used whenever and where ever I could find them, wondering all along what I thought I was going to do with all that document-scouting. For a long time, then, my search consisted of re-reading what they had already ably read in the record so that I could . . . do what! Increasingly, a question was prodding me: What was I going to do with all that pile of fact?
Unable to answer that, I started. And when I did, a cascade of people appeared on my desk, most of them waiting to say their piece. I began just listening to each of them as they chimed in. I respected all of their points of view, tried to let them say what was on their minds and in their hearts. The actors could come and go as they chose; I tried to be spokesman for them, not arbitrator of outcomes.
As the chapters grew, I really did feel that I grew in the ability to suspend my own disbelief and listen to these people. When I turned unauthentic narrator and pushed the narrative, they usually let me know before it was too late.3
This book is an attempt at what is a relatively new genre: “literary non-fiction.” Its practitioners4 emphasize fact (not fantasy) at the same time that they use fact to tell a verifiable story employing devices usually reserved for fiction such as character, setting, language. There are those critics who believe the approach does a disservice to all concerned writing in the established disciplines. Shaman’s Dream readers can decide for themselves whether or not this ‘mixed’ increasingly popular new genre succeeds -- or just falls between two stools.
A word or two about the language the documents themselves speak: It surprised me that as the book grew and came to reveal how it wanted to be told, the pattern of its fabric grew. The language of the ‘real world’ of the memorandum and the telegram and the report had its own cadences and inflections. ‘Will’ and ‘do’ and ‘must’ preempt ‘might’ and ‘if’ and ‘perhaps.’ Stern, undecorated. Pointed. With its own formalisms. ‘Obedient servants’ abound there. Some were, some were not ‘obedient.’ The documents, designated by italics, offer a glimpse of the more constrained world where officialdom has its own grammar of hidings and disclosures.
Weft and woof. Words and meanings.
What was being written small here in this Tule Lake area, with these war deaths had already been written large, over and again, across all the land.
What seemed a good idea to President Grant when he unveiled his ‘Quaker Peace Policy’ was in effect an attempt at social engineering. What looked to be a good idea turned out to be nothing more than a grasping at straws. Unfortunately, for the Modocs, their lives were to change definitively because of those events.
The incantation of the Ghost Dance could have been heard as the death knell for something important. Most deeply unfortunate.
It signaled a passing away. The ministers -- of both the state and of the cloth -- were presiding at the death of the shaman seers. When the seers left, the vitality of one American non-Christian belief went with them.
Theirs was the obituary of a whole way of knowing, of a way of dreaming. Presiding at the death, the dreamer. What happened next was an inevitability. Its repercussions still can be heard, muffled, modulated to fit the times.
But then, everything else was changing, too, speeding up. Ideas. Notions. Just as the trolley cars and buses were overtaking the horse-drawn delivery wagons on the streets of the growing cities. And the next new thing was awkwardly scratching its way itself free from its past.
Black Kettle, Cochise, Chief Joseph . . . ? In another quarter-century the ‘resettlement’ issue would be closed, eclipsed by events European. Here, with this little war and a few ‘mopping-up’ operations, it would have been decided: The Indian Wars were finished, and with them had died a whole religion.
For easy access to the list of major actors in this account of the Modoc War of 1873 -- the dramatis personae -- please turn to the final pages of this book.
Notes:
1. See Sunset Magazine centerfold, May 1985.
2. See ‘Suggested Further Reading’: Keith Murray, The Modocs and Their War; Erwin N.Thompson, Modoc War.
3.
