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. It did not investigate. It 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 not a war camp. There is no account that places its people at the killings near the expedition's camp. It was a village doing in the spring what it did every spring.

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.

Forty miles of "protection of the road"

The distance is the part that refuses to soften. Forty miles is not a reflex. It is 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. 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.

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 does not use plain words. 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.

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.

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 →