Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence by Boyd Cothran (review)

IN A CAREFULLY CHOREOGRAPHED CEREMONY, the U.S. Army hanged four Modoc headmen including Captain Jack, on Friday, October 3, 1873. The men had been convicted of murdering U.S. peace commissioners General Edward R. S. Canby and the Reverend Eleazer Thomas. While this public event marked the official end of the Modoc War (1872–1873), in his new book Remembering the Modoc War historian Boyd Cothran argues that the grisly trade in execution mementos that followed—lengths of the hangman’s ropes, cabinet cards with the prisoner’s portraits, locks of the dead men’s hair—symbolized the beginning of a new contest over its meaning and memory. This contest, however, expanded into diffuse and long-lasting “marketplaces of remembering,” including newspaper accounts, reenactments, traveling Wild West shows, memorial celebrations, and more. The process of historical knowledge production the author describes, created a framework in which Euro-Americans have and continue to justify their territorial acquisitions, conquest, violence, and colonialism as inevitable. Cothran contends “that individuals have shaped historical remembrances of the conflict, transforming an episode of Reconstruction-era violence and ethnic-cleansing into a redemptive narrative of American innocence as they sought to negotiate these marketplaces” (14–15).

Remembering the Modoc War moves beyond the problematic narratives of triumphalist military history and instead offers a nuanced, well-researched, sharply argued, far-reaching cultural history of Gilded Age settler colonialism in the American West that stretches to the present. Cothran engages with the history and historiography of the war itself, and in doing so critiques the scholarly discourse of memory studies. He asserts that much of the literature has transformed the “act of remembering . . . from a performative representation of the past to an interpretive object, and the analytical thrust is toward reading the object rather than understanding the lives of those who produced it.” Memory, the author notes, “is a noun, it is a thing; remembering is a verb . . . a kind of labor in the production of a version of the past” (23). With that critique in place, Cothran demonstrates how the circulation of historical remembrances of the Modoc War wove together the conflict and ideas about Native–settler violence in such a way that privileged Indian criminality and American innocence.

The book unfolds chronologically and thematically across three parts, focusing first on the initial newspaper coverage of the war. Reporters, Cothran argued, initially tied the conflict to partisan politics of the Reconstruction era but after the death of General Canby shifted the framework to one of American victimhood and Indigenous criminality. Here the author offers not only analysis of the newspaper stories but also intriguing close textual readings of the engravings that illustrated the innocence trope for Americans across the continent. The second part focuses on the life of Toby Riddle, a Modoc translator whose stage name in the 1870s became Winema, “the Pocahontas of the Lava Beds,” as she traveled the country and performed as part of the Alfred Meacham Lecture Company. By examining her forgotten career, Cothran is able to show how some Native women (and men) “used existing narratives of violence and gendered tropes of civilization and savagery” to earn national celebrity, participate in the emerging entertainment industry as performers, and even receive federal pensions, as Riddle ultimately did (83). The final part focuses on the ways early twentieth-century Americans commemorated the Modoc War. Tourism boosters and land promoters represented the war as a turning point in the region’s history, the first step in a movement from savagery to civilization and an ushering in of modernity. To the Modoc it was a moment of suppression and violent subjugation. Each part of the book ends with a coda in which the author offers personal anecdotes that bring the story up to the present.

Cothran ends his study with a stunning indictment of liberal multiculturalism in the late twentieth century. Through an examination of efforts to create an “Indian...