By H.L. Delaney
The Ben Wright Massacre of 1852
In the late autumn of 1852 a party of armed men from the mining country gathered near Tule Lake and killed a great many Modoc people at a meeting the killers themselves had called under a flag of truce. The man who led them was Ben Wright, and the Modoc did not forget his name.
The killing took place in the broken lake and marsh country near the mouth of Lost River, on the line that would later divide Oregon from California, in the homeland of the Modoc. Ben Wright was a self-appointed Indian-fighter out of the mining settlements to the south, holding no military commission, and the men who rode with him were volunteers, miners and settlers who had put themselves under his command for a season of war against the Modoc. What that company did in November 1852 became known as the Ben Wright Massacre, and it fixed Wright in Modoc memory as a man who would ask for peace and then open fire. Four years later Wright was dead on the southern Oregon coast, and the man the settlers charged with leading the killing was Enos. The novel The Renegade Enos stands where those two facts meet.
The road through the Modoc country
The reason armed parties were moving through the Modoc country was a road. In 1846 the Applegate brothers cut a southern branch of the emigrant trail through the Klamath Basin, and by the early 1850s wagon traffic moved along the shore of Tule Lake every travel season, the subject of a separate piece here on the Applegate Trail through Modoc country. At a narrow place where the road ran close to the water, a point the emigrants came to call Bloody Point, wagon parties were attacked more than once. The settlers of the mining districts read those attacks as proof that the Modoc had to be punished, and they did not wait for the Army to do it. Regular troops were almost absent from the region, so the punishing fell to volunteers, and the volunteers answered to no law beyond their own sense of the account they were owed.
A self-appointed Indian-fighter
Ben Wright came up out of the gold country around Yreka, a young man already known for war against Native people. In 1852 he raised a company and led it into the Modoc country, first to recover captured emigrants and property taken along the road, and then, when that produced little, to make war on the Modoc outright. He carried no rank the government had granted him. His authority came from the men who followed him and from the settlers who wanted the country cleared and were glad to have someone willing to do the clearing. Wright's company spent weeks in the field before the killing that made his name. The record of those weeks is thin and partisan, set down afterward by men who had reason to justify how it ended.
The meeting under a flag of truce
Late in the autumn Wright arranged a meeting with a body of Modoc. He sent word through a Modoc who could carry his message, and by most accounts he offered a council to settle the trouble, with some accounts adding the promise of a feast to draw the people in. A large number of Modoc came to Wright's camp in the understanding that they had come to talk. What happened next is where the accounts split apart. In one telling, left by white participants, the Modoc meant to attack and Wright's men only defended themselves. In another, carried in Modoc memory and written down decades later by a Modoc historian, Wright planned the killing from the beginning and ordered his men to spare no one. A further claim, absent from the earliest reports and added in later ones, holds that Wright meant to poison the gathering with strychnine mixed into the food, and that the Modoc suspected it and would not eat. Anyone who wants certainty about that morning will not find it in the record. One careful institutional account concludes that the exact details of what happened will probably never be known.
What every account does agree on is that Modoc people who had come to talk were killed. How many died is contested, and the estimates that have come down vary widely, so no single figure can be set down as fact. The Modoc were not a numerous people, and a loss of that kind reached into every family that survived it.
The number the record would not fix
The killing at Lost River entered the written record already sorted. The men who did it wrote it up as a battle and themselves as its survivors, and Wright rode back toward the mining towns to a public welcome rather than to a courtroom. No official inquiry asked him to account for the Modoc dead. Those dead entered the record the way Native dead usually did, as a figure, and a figure the sources could never agree on. That disagreement is worth sitting with. When a killing is measured with care, it is because someone in authority thought the measuring mattered. The Modoc dead at Lost River were left in a wide and shifting estimate, and that estimate is its own quiet statement about how much the counting was thought to matter. The record kept Wright's name and Wright's version of events. It let the number of his victims blur.
This is the reduction the novel keeps circling. A war was fought in the field and then finished on paper, and the finishing is where the worst of it goes quiet. A killing done to people who had come to talk is hard to defend in plain words, so the record reaches for other language. It calls the morning a fight, calls the dead a number, calls the man who ran it a captain. Restoring the plain words, a council, a flag of truce, families who came in to make peace, is most of what it takes to see what was done.
What the Modoc carried
Wright's name did not blur. Among the Modoc the memory of Lost River stayed sharp, the memory of a man who called for peace and answered it with gunfire. That memory was still alive twenty years later, when the Modoc War brought soldiers back into the same lake and lava country and Modoc people could still name what had been done under Wright's flag of truce. The betrayal at a council shaped how the Modoc heard every later offer to talk. A people who had watched a truce turned into an ambush had reason to distrust the next flag that was raised. Historians of the Modoc War have pointed to Lost River as one root of that distrust, which the Modoc carried into the failed peace talks of 1873, where another council between the Modoc and the government ended in killing. The distrust was old by then, and it had been earned.
The killing on the coast, four years later
In February 1856 Ben Wright was killed at the mouth of the Rogue River, on the southern Oregon coast, during the Rogue River War, covered here in the account of the Rogue River Wars. By then he had left the role of volunteer captain for a government one and was serving as a sub-Indian agent on the coast. When the lower Rogue rose in a coordinated attack that winter, Wright was among the settlers and agents killed. In the settler record that followed, the name attached to his death was Enos, charged as a leader of the killing.
The distance between Wright's two appearances in that record is the whole subject of the novel. Wright was never brought before a court for what happened at Lost River. When Wright himself was killed, the government moved hard against the men it held responsible. Enos was arrested, held, tried, and acquitted for lack of testimony, and a mob then hanged him on a rock at Port Orford. The fuller account of that contested life sits in who was Enos. The record that could not fix a number for the Modoc dead had no trouble fixing a name to the death of the man who killed them. That is the machinery the book was written to show. Enos was hanged on testimony a court had already found too thin to convict on. Wright was never charged for what he did at Lost River. Enos stands in the novel where the record would rather have kept no one standing, close enough to see how blame was handed out and how it was withheld.
The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press, the conquest of the West at the eye level of the man it used and discarded. Ben Wright belongs to the same record the book reads against its grain. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel, and the coast where Wright was killed and Enos was blamed runs through The Rogue River Wars and Who Was Enos. Get launch news →
Sources & further reading
- "Ben Wright Massacre of 1852," The Oregon History Project (Oregon Historical Society)
- Jeff C. Riddle, The Indian History of the Modoc War and the Causes That Led to It (1914).
- Keith A. Murray, The Modocs and Their War (University of Oklahoma Press, 1959).
- Boyd Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
- Cheewa James, Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn't Die (Naturegraph Publishers, 2008).