Remembering the Modoc War

On October 3, 1873, the US Army hanged four Modoc headmen at Oregon's Fort Klamath. The condemned had supposedly murdered the only US Army general to die during the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. Their execution marked the end of the Modoc War of 1872-73. But as Boyd Cothran demonstrates, the conflict's close marked the beginning of a new struggle over the memory of the war.