Kintpuash

Kintpuash, also known as Captain Jack (c.1837 – October 3, 1873), was a chief of the Modoc tribe of California and Oregon. He led a band from the Klamath Reservation to return to their lands in California, where they resisted return. From 1872 to 1873, their small force made use of the lava beds, holding off more numerous United States Army forces for months in the Modoc War.

Kintpuash was the only Native American leader ever to be charged with war crimes, and he was executed by the Army, along with several followers, for their ambush killings of General Edward Canby and Reverend Eleazar Thomas at a peace commission meeting. Canby was the only general to be killed in the Indian Wars. The Modoc leaders were hanged for war crimes by the Army. Kintpuash's name in the Modoc language meant 'Strikes the water brashly.'

Life

Kintpuash was born about 1837 into a Modoc family in their ancestral territory near Tule Lake. The Modoc occupied about 5,000 acres here, along what became the California-Oregon border after European settlement.