Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence, by Boyd Cothran

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Remembering Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and Making of American Innocence, by Boyd Cothran. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 264 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). Examining historical memory connected to Modoc War, historian Boyd Cothran discovers that settler colonial violence related to event has been reduced to a perceived conflict between criminality of Native people and victimhood of white Americans. In autumn of 1872, Modoc headman Captain Jack led a group of followers off of Klamath Reservation. In response, United States Army sent a detachment to capture them. After holding out in caves along Tule Lake for nearly a year, Captain Jack and his followers ambushed a peace commission, killing two American officers. In October of 1873, Captain Jack and three other Modoc leaders met their fates at gallows. Who was to blame for circumstances that led to attack? Who were victims of Modoc War? How have we come to remember events? Cothran adeptly positions construction of historical memories about Modoc War within broader context of economic, political, and racialized forces, which he dubs marketplaces of remembering (p. 8). Ultimately, he concludes, narratives about nineteenth-century American violence, particularly as they relate to western settlement, have been reduced to tales of American innocence that are meant to underplay brutality of colonization. Cothran chronicles a long history of making and remaking Modoc War. Even before an end to so-called Modoc War, reporters began molding story and shaping how subsequent Americans would understand event. Early reports centred on intrepid adventurer-journalists who interviewed Captain Jack, rather than Jack's explanation of resistance as product of failed American Indian policies. While interviewers acknowledged role that American Indian policy played in exacerbating tensions in West, their stories along with images that depicted event and its surroundings, ultimately focused on something different. Engravings that appeared in newspapers reinforced image of Native people as violent aggressors, as well as cast them into exotic and harsh landscapes that emphasized an underdeveloped West (and by extension an underdeveloped people). Far from presenting an unbiased version of events, Cothran argues, the Gilded Age press imposed cultural concepts of progress and modernity onto racialized representations of Modocs and in process turned actual American Indians into ideological, symbolical, and disposable caricatures (p. …