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  • Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence by Boyd Cothran
  • William S. Kiser (bio)
Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. By Boyd Cothran. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. 264. Cloth, $34.95.)

Using colonial violence and settler colonialism as organizing concepts, Boyd Cothran’s case study of the Modoc tribe argues more broadly that Euro-Americans shaped their historical memory of the Indian wars in a manner that portrayed a mythological narrative of American innocence. In a six-chapter analysis of the 1870s Modoc War, Gilded Age newspapers, the late 1800s entertainment industry, capitalist expansion, and twentieth-century tourism, the author contends that the biased accounts and perspectives of non-Indians have come to dominate the memory and memorialization of certain historic events in what he sees as a neocolonial process. As a cultural production of victors that denigrates the vanquished, Cothran believes history to be “a tool of colonial oppression” and argues that “histories of nineteenth-century U.S.-Indian violence should connect the present with the past to expose the role of professional history and historical memory in the colonization of western Indigenous spaces” (18, 109).

Critical to Cothran’s argument throughout the book—and the concept that is most compelling and widely applicable—is the interconnectivity of historical objects and capitalism. This commercialization of the past through material culture, ephemera, and public performance is termed the “marketplaces of remembering” (14). It is a theoretical concept that will prove especially useful for public historians, museum staff, and National [End Page 608] Park Service personnel, who most directly deal with the memorialization and interpretation of historic sites and artifacts. By understanding the portrayal of history at public sites as a cultural creation and a product of marketplace phenomena, such professionals and stewards can more accurately and equitably convey complex multicultural narratives of history.

The book begins with, and revolves around, one of the most significant events of the nineteenth-century Indian wars: the hanging of Captain Jack and several Modoc compatriots at Fort Klamath, Oregon, in 1873. These executions sought to vindicate the killing of General Edward R. S. Canby and the Reverend Eleazer Thomas during an earlier meeting between U.S. peace commissioners and Modoc leaders near what is now the Lava Beds National Monument. In a critique of President Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy” and American justice generally, Cothran follows the one-sided trial proceedings during which a military commission promptly convicted Captain Jack and condemned him to die for his role in the “murder” of Canby and Thomas. Subsequently re-created through pictorial journalism, macabre mementos, literary accounts, stage performances, and even an 1893 reenactment at Fort Klamath itself, the widely publicized executions—and the death of an American general that prompted them—became etched in collective memories of the Indian wars and took on a resonant symbolism of Euro-American martyrdom surpassed only by Custer’s death at the Little Bighorn.

In the second section of the book, Cothran discusses Winema, an Indian woman who became the caricature of an Indian princess in Alfred Meacham’s traveling western exhibitions. Based on gendered discourses of civility and savagery, Meacham’s Winema reflected the distortion of historical reality in the marketplace of remembering. From here, Cothran moves the critique of settler colonialism to the early twentieth century, examining capitalist exploitation of Klamath Basin timber and other natural resources, the impact of railroads, and privatization of Indian land through the Dawes Act. These three distinct processes wrought permanent economic and demographic transformations throughout the region. Romanticization of the Modoc War and selective appropriation of Indian history helped Euro-American settlers create new identities while forging their own sense of place in “the modern Klamath Basin,” where pioneer reminiscences propagated myths of closing frontiers and vanishing Indians (131).

An analysis of the Bureau of Pensions reveals that Native war veterans and their widows faced an uphill battle when seeking federal benefits and had difficulty attaining legitimacy as “faithful Americans” (141). A number of strategies, including political patronage, tribal networks of [End Page 609] cooperation, and even the hiring of non-Indian...

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