would want to meet him, Albert Meacham, most of all. What greater acknowledgement of Jack’s status could he make, as Superintendent of Indians in Oregon, than to come all this distance and present himself?
Later, the sun hanging above the horizon, Meacham turned in the saddle as his agent moved up the line to him. Knapp came on at a trot, his head and shoulders swathed in a shawl, the strap on his hat pulled tight to hold it in place. Meacham knew from his own aching back that the man must be miserable.
“I hope this is worth our while,” Knapp muttered through clenched teeth as he pulled his horse abreast of Meacham’s. “We should have sent Ivan to do this. We’re not going to get there much before night.” He freed his hand from his coat pocket and pointed toward the sky. Sun dogs glinted feebly in the thin skiff of high clouds, reminding the men, as if it were necessary, that this would be the first week of winter. “What makes you think he will even let us in?”
Meacham didn’t answer that. Instead he said, “No, thanks. I don’t touch it,” to the flask Knapp proffered him. He started to express his disapproval, but the wind cut the words from his lips.
#16
Ever since the little party had left the agency, the stands of timber had grown sparser. They had dwindled entirely to chaparral hillsides and dried grass bottomland along the lake’s edge and the river by the settlement. Now, below Linkville, even that vegetation stopped and a sea of sagebrush took over. The chain of peaks they had kept to their right fell away abruptly, and the track angled toward the base of a final eastern hill. At the edge of a basin Meacham guessed to be twenty, maybe thirty miles in diameter, nearly empty of trees, buttes raised themselves up here and there like weird islands from what must have been an ancient lakebed. To the south and east it was dry. The last of the moisture was here, at the north end, in an icy sheen that seemed more mirage-like than real. Were it not for the wide rafts of white birds floating on its surface, Meacham might have thought the lake was a trick of his eyes and fatigue. Tule Lake, Rhett Lake, Modoc Lake: call it what you would. He knew it to be a vast, shallow body of water straddling the Oregon-California border. It was here, in the tules that lay not far ahead of them, one-half mile north of post 184 of the newly surveyed state line, that they would find their elusive quarry, the ephemeral Captain Jack. The past half year of Meacham’s life had been spent, one way and another, in pursuit of him, yet he remained to be seen by the superintendent. Like a lodestone, though, located just beyond the horizon, he had drawn Meacham to him. Off to the south-west, beyond the blue streak of far, encircling mountains, Shasta presided. Its white, symmetrical peak faded against the grey sky, but even in the washed-out winter light, Meacham could feel the volcano’s presence. Some said it was dead; others, merely sleeping. At the southernmost edge of the Modoc’s range, nothing could escape its knowing.
At the top of a little rise, in the cheerless late-afternoon sunlight, Meacham pulled his horse off to the edge of the track for a moment, letting the rest of the party pass him. He slipped his feet from the stirrups and sat stretching his cramped legs, getting the lay of the land, comparing it with what Ivan had told him earlier. He had said there were hot-springs, and now Meacham could find the columns of steam rising to form clouds of vapor that drifted off then dissipated over the lake. He would find flowers there, Ivan said, even in winter, scattered among the rocks where the warm water surfaced. Here and there, a few cattle were grazing, the sure sign of settlers.
This would be Lost River, then, edging toward them from the north-east around that butte. He could trace its course by the line of willows marking its banks as it made for the north shore of Tule Lake. Off there, six or seven miles, he guessed, where the lake and the river came together, he would finally meet the man.
Meacham’s eye followed the shoreline that bore east, then south, searching for the most likely place for the Applegate cutoff, Jesse’s and Lindsay’s old immigrant road, to have come in, but he couldn’t make out any feature that said it had to have passed just there. Somewhere in that vagueness, he knew, the trail had run down a rocky ramp, descending a quarter of a mile or so to lake level from the higher tableland to the east. Then it had arced along the shore toward the place he was headed: to the natural bridge, a stony ledge submerged a good two feet now below the surface of Lost River and over which the emigrants had forded their stock and wagons. Once they had crossed, they were able to swing off south and west past Lower Klamath Lake before heading for the California gold diggings in Yreka or turning finally north, just a few days’ drive from their destination -- the Willamette Valley of Oregon -- to farm.
That had been twenty-five years earlier, and the trail was no longer used. Other routes had replaced it to accommodate the rising, then surging, tide of people. In the intervening years, the wagon trains had dwindled away. Now a man could ride by rail clear across the country. What had taken treacherous months had been replaced by mere days of easy comfort. The country was connected, one edge to the other. It was a new age, the age of progress. That other era was over, soon to be forgotten, he supposed. But not just yet. He beheld -- at Lost River -- its remnant.
He looked again along the eastern shore, trying to identify the stony ramp he had heard about. It led down to the place called Bloody Point. 1852. He calculated: six years after Applegate’s road had opened. Two years after he himself had driven his own oxen safely through from Iowa to California, sticking with the older route down the Humboldt. Had he been one of those heading then for the Willamette or Yreka and heard the reports about this place, they might have made him change his mind and choose some other route instead. Forty-seven settlers, who could say how many wagons, cashed in at Bloody Point that year, didn’t they? Even now, in 1869, Bloody Point still was on people’s minds. Especially when the issue of the Modocs and what to do with them came up.
Packer named Coffin made it through. That name had stayed with Meacham partly because of its irony, partly because of the vividness of the picture he got in his mind about him. Another wave of Indians coming. All the mules bolting; the people Coffin had tracked with for months going down around him, the settlers’ firing growing less and less by the minute. Coffin had cut loose a mule from his string and leaped onto its back, pounding his heels into its sides and lashing at it with the remains of the harness. Shouting at the top of his lungs at the animal, he had turned the terrified beast toward the oncoming crescent of Indians, had flung himself forward onto the mule’s neck and run right through them. Charged them and just kept going, never looking back. The mule had run until it could run no longer and had stopped to cough and suck the air into its bellowing lungs. Some smoke from the pack train had hung over the skyline behind him. Days later, the rescue party had found him wandering afoot through the sagebrush.
That had been when Ben Wright first went out.
The Indian-fighter -- a young hot-shot -- newly arrived in Yreka. He and some men had come upon another surrounded wagon train there and had saved them. This Ben Wright had fought the Indians out into the water, would have won, but they wouldn’t stand, had gotten into canoes and scattered. He had claimed to have killed forty then. They were said to have been a band of Modocs from the eastern shore of Tule Lake. There came, too, the stories of an earlier train that no one had known about -- until its remains were found, same place, off in the brush. Burned wagons, scattered bones. All the goods gone. But people had remembered seeing settlers’ clothes for months on the local Indians most figured were Modocs. Then it had become clear that this had been a place of sacrifice for a long time, with the Indians hiding in the lava rocks and brush beside the ramp that ran down to the lakeside. Ben Wright, not satisfied, had gone looking for others and found them. Months later he had taken his revenge. At Lost River, with the Modocs who lived there. After that one was done, it took a week for the town of Yreka to get enough of its carousal.
Meacham recalled how similar tales blew into the dark sky all along the trail in ‘50 with
