It lies wide open for many a mile, veiled in no
mystery but the mystery of light.
The forest also was flooded with
sun-purple, not a spire moving, and Mount Shasta was seen towering
above it rejoicing in the ineffable beauty of the alpenglow. But
neither the glorified woods on the one hand, nor the lake on the
other, could at first hold the eye. That dark mysterious lava plain
between them compelled attention. Here you trace yawning fissures,
there clusters of somber pits; now you mark where the lava is bent and
corrugated in swelling ridges and domes, again where it breaks into a
rough mass of loose blocks. Tufts of grass grow far apart here and
there and small bushes of hardy sage, but they have a singed
appearance and can do little to hide the blackness. Deserts are
charming to those who know how to see them - all kinds of bogs,
barrens, and heathy moors; but the Modoc Lava Beds have for me an
uncanny look. As I gazed the purple deepened over all the landscape.
Then fell the gloaming, making everything still more forbidding and
mysterious. Then, darkness like death.
Next morning the crisp, sunshiny air made even the Modoc landscape
less hopeless, and we ventured down the bluff to the edge of the Lava
Beds. Just at the foot of the bluff we came to a square enclosed by a
stone wall. This is a graveyard where lie buried thirty soldiers,
most of whom met their fate out in the Lava Beds, as we learn by the
boards marking the graves - a gloomy place to die in, and deadly-looking even without Modocs. The poor fellows that lie here deserve
far more pity than they have ever received. Picking our way over the
strange ridges and hollows of the beds, we soon came to a circular
flat about twenty yards in diameter, on the shore of the lake, where
the comparative smoothness of the lava and a few handfuls of soil have
caused the grass tufts to grow taller. This is where General Canby
was slain while seeking to make peace with the treacherous Modocs.
Two or three miles farther on is the main stronghold of the Modocs,
held by them so long and defiantly against all the soldiers that could
be brought to the attack. Indians usually choose to hide in tall
grass and bush and behind trees, where they can crouch and glide like
panthers, without casting up defenses that would betray their
positions; but the Modoc castle is in the rock. When the Yosemite
Indians made raids on the settlers of the lower Merced, they withdrew
with their spoils into Yosemite Valley; and the Modocs boasted that in
case of war they had a stone house into which no white man could come
as long as they cared to defend it. Yosemite was not held for a
single day against the pursuing troops; but the Modocs held their fort
for months, until, weary of being hemmed in, they chose to withdraw.
It consists of numerous redoubts formed by the unequal subsidence of
portions of the lava flow, and a complicated network of redans
abundantly supplied with salient and re-entering angles, being united
each to the other and to the redoubts by a labyrinth of open and
covered corridors, some of which expand at intervals into spacious
caverns, forming as a whole the most complete natural Gibraltar I ever
saw. Other castles scarcely less strong are connected with this by
subterranean passages known only to the Indians, while the unnatural
blackness of the rock out of which Nature has constructed these
defenses, and the weird, inhuman physiognomy of the whole region are
well calculated to inspire terror.
Deadly was the task of storming such a place. The breech-loading
rifles of the Indians thrust through chinks between the rocks were
ready to pick off every soldier who showed himself for a moment, while
the Indians lay utterly invisible. They were familiar with byways
both over and under ground, and could at any time sink suddenly out of
sight like squirrels among the loose boulders. Our bewildered
soldiers heard them shooting, now before, now behind them, as they
glided from place to place through fissures and subterranean passes,
all the while as invisible as Gyges wearing his magic ring. To judge
from the few I have seen, Modocs are not very amiable-looking people
at best. When, therefore, they were crawling stealthily in the gloomy
caverns, unkempt and begrimed and with the glare of war in their eyes,
they must have seemed very demons of the volcanic pit.
Captain Jack's cave is one of the many somber cells of the castle. It
measures twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter at the entrance, and
extends but a short distance in a horizontal direction. The floor is
littered with the bones of the animals slaughtered for food during the
war. Some eager archaeologist may hereafter discover this cabin and
startle his world by announcing another of the Stone Age caves. The
sun shines freely into its mouth, and graceful bunches of grass and
eriogonums and sage grow about it, doing what they can toward its
redemption from degrading associations and making it beautiful.
Where the lava meets the lake there are some fine curving bays,
beautifully embroidered with rushes and polygonums, a favorite resort
of waterfowl. On our return, keeping close along shore, we caused a
noisy plashing and beating of wings among cranes and geese. The
ducks, less wary, kept their places, merely swimming in and out
through openings in the rushes, rippling the glassy water, and raising
spangles in their wake. The countenance of the lava beds became less
and less forbidding. Tufts of pale grasses, relieved on the jet
rocks, looked like ornaments on a mantel, thick-furred mats of emerald
mosses appeared in damp spots next the shore, and I noticed one tuft
of small ferns.
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