Reading Room · 1846

Dokdokwas: The Klamath Village Burned Off the Map

Most of what the conquest destroyed reached the archive already renamed. One of the places it destroyed in the spring of 1846 was a Klamath fishing village the record calls Dokdokwas, a village that had attacked no one, burned by men who then wrote the burning down as a day's work.

In May 1846, John C. Frémont's armed "exploring" expedition was camped near Klamath Lake when three of his own men were killed in the night. What actually happened in that camp, who died first, who decided the cause, and whose name got attached to it, is one of the questions The Renegade Enos reopens rather than settles. What the record is clear about is what the expedition did next. Without an inquiry into who had done the killing, it saddled and rode.

The village that had attacked no one

Dokdokwas was a Klamath village on the water, a place of fishing weirs and canoes, of racks hung with drying fish, of cooking fires and families who had been living off that lake and its rivers for longer than the United States had been a country. It was a village doing in the spring what it did every spring, and nothing in the surviving accounts connects its people to the killings near the expedition's camp.

The expedition rode roughly forty miles to reach it. Kit Carson was among the men, and so were the Delaware scouts who traveled with the company. When they came down on Dokdokwas, they burned it, the racks, the canoes, the lodges, the food laid up for the season, and killed the people they found there. Carson himself, in later years, described the destruction of a Klamath fishing village on this expedition in flat, untroubled terms, as a thing that was simply done.

What burning the stores meant

The word burned covers more than the loss of buildings. A fishing village in spring was in the middle of its most important work. The racks hung with drying fish were the season's provision taking shape, the food meant to carry the community through the months when fresh food was harder to come by. Burning the racks destroyed the labor of weeks and the margin that stood between a family and a hungry winter.

The weirs and the canoes belonged to the same system. They were the means by which more fish could be taken, the tools that made the drying racks possible in the first place. Destroying the stored food and the equipment for gathering more in the same hour meant the loss reached forward past the day of the fire. A village could lose people to the killing and still be told, by the ashes of its stores, that the season it depended on had been taken with them. The food sits among the things that were burned, and the telling passes over it quickly. The weight of it sits in what a spring catch was for.

A fishing village stood where the fishing was. Its weirs were built into a particular stretch of water, its racks raised where the catch could be worked, its stores gathered against the coming winter in that one place. A settlement like that cannot be carried off in a day or rebuilt by nightfall somewhere safer. The people who survived the fire were left standing in the place that had fed them, with the work of the season in ashes and the season itself already moving on. The cost of the raid did not end when the expedition turned back toward its own road.

Forty miles of "protection of the road"

The distance is the part that refuses to soften. Forty miles was a decision made in daylight, carried across a long ride, and executed against a village chosen because it could be reached, without regard to whether it had done anything. A reflex happens in the moment of alarm. This happened after hours in the saddle. The killings at the camp became the cause, and the cause licensed a march. In the language the expedition and its friends would later use, this kind of ride became "protection of the road," a phrase that turned the burning of a fishing village into the maintenance of a public good.

The novel takes its title character, Enos, into that ride at the eye level of a man who was paid to be present and expected to keep quiet. He is close enough to see the racks and the fires and the people, and close enough to understand what he is watching: a place being erased on the strength of a story told about a different place, forty miles back.

The logic of reprisal

Reprisal is the name for punishment aimed at a group for the act of an individual. Responsibility is beside the point. What the logic asks is that the group be within reach and that someone in authority be willing to count it as answerable. The killings at the expedition's camp supplied the willingness. The forty-mile ride supplied the reach. Between them, a village that no account ties to the killings was made to stand in for whoever had done the killing. The choice of Dokdokwas shows what the ride was for. A search for the guilty would have looked for the guilty. This was a search for a target, and any Klamath village on the water within reach would have served.

How a village becomes "enemy dead"

What survives of Dokdokwas survives mostly as a number in someone else's report. The people killed there entered the record as "enemy dead," a category that did the work of erasing who they actually were, whether they had done anything, and whether they had been given any chance to be anything other than a target. A dispatch has no room for the full population of a fact. It has room for a figure and a justification, and Dokdokwas was reduced to both.

That reduction is the engine of the whole book. The conquest was fought in the field and then finished on paper, and the finishing is where the worst of it disappears. A burned fishing village is hard to defend in plain words, so the record reaches for other language. It uses "engagement," "enemy dead," "protection of the road." Restoring the plain words, a village, a spring, nets and children, a forty-mile ride to destroy people who had attacked no one, is most of what it takes to see what happened.

The names the record kept

The three men the expedition lost that night were named in the accounts that followed. Their deaths were written up, mourned, and folded into the story of the expedition as it was later told and retold. The people at Dokdokwas entered the same record as a quantity. One column kept its individuals, with their names and their manner of death. The other column kept a figure. That asymmetry runs through the whole way the conquest was set down. Whose death gets a name and whose death gets a number is decided at the moment of writing, and Dokdokwas lost that decision before its fires were out.

Naming the place back

Dokdokwas does not appear on most maps of the conquest, because the conquest did not keep the names of the places it destroyed. Keeping the name is a small thing and a necessary one. It marks that there was a there there, a specific village, specific people, a specific morning, behind the number the report was content to leave.

This is the erasure the novel keeps returning to. The record destroyed Dokdokwas twice. The first time was in the spring of 1846, with fire. The second time was in the writing, when it kept the name of the road and lost the name of the place, kept the count of the expedition's dead and let the count of the village's dead stand in for everything else. Enos is inside that second destruction as much as the first. He is a man the record used while he was useful and discarded when he was not, and he watches the same machinery close over a village on the water. To set the name Dokdokwas back down on the page is to refuse, in one small place, the work the report was built to do.

Reading a report like this one honestly means reading it against its own grain. The document was built to record a success and to leave the rest unspoken, so the work is to notice what it declines to say, the distance it crossed, the food it counted among the ruins, the name it never wrote down. The novel does that reading in the presence of a witness. Enos stands where the report would rather have no one standing, and what he sees is exactly what the report was designed to lose.

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. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel, and the killings that set this ride in motion are covered in Frémont at Klamath Lake. Get launch news →