Robert Aquinas McNally - "The Modoc War" Launches Nov. 1

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Quick Links

"Cast out of Eden" featured on National Public Radio

Chris Cherniak of "This Green Earth" on Park City, Utah's KPCW interviews me about John Muir, Indigenous peoples, and the American wilderness (19:40).

"Cast out of Eden" on C-SPAN Book TV

My Commonwealth Club conversation about the book with Anthony Dudley of Earth Live independent media network is available for viewing on demand.

Journeys of Discovery: "Cast out of Eden"

NPR award-winning podcast host Tom Wilmer declares the book's revelations "game changing." Likely, Muir would agree.

A Book & Its Author: "Cast out of Eden"

In this podcast release I talk with host Mark Oxoby about how Cast out of Eden grew out of The Modoc War and what it means to take a journalistic approch to reporting and writing history.

On Judging a Book by Its Cover

Keep in mind that commonplace saying, "You can't tell a book by its cover." Like a lot of things we've been told, that's just plain wrong

A Book & Its Author: "The Modoc War"

In this March 2023 issue of the podcast, I talk with host Marc Oxoby about the war and the California genocide and read a sample of what is always a gripping narrative of a most disturbing tale.

Five Questions with Robert Aquinas McNally

In this feature from California Sun, I make the leap from Lava Beds National Monument as center of the created universe over the best burger in my hometown to dinner with John Steinbeck and friends. Scroll down.

Little Indian War Goes Big

The few ups and many downs of the Modoc War of 1872–73: gunfights, battles, hangings, decapitations in the name of science, all played out against the backdrop of California's state-sponsored genocide of Native peoples. A hard and necessary story.

Answers to Writing Questions You May Never Have Thought of

Carpentry is a good metaphor for explaining the difference between being a writer and being an author, for example. You'll also learn why backpacking with sons Darren McNally and Brian McNally is way cool, and how it is that partner Gayle Eleanor and I prefer wild places to cities.

A Dark History Hits Home (240 KB)

California's governor apologizes for the state's Native genocide before a gathering of tribal leaders and takes a first step toward healing a complex and bloody legacy. This article appears in the winter 2019 issue of California History.

California's Genocide Steps into the Light

In only the two years since The Modoc War was published, this state's extermination of Native peoples has lost its news value. More and more people, including non-Natives, have heard of it. There's a reason, and it's likely other than what you think.

Harte for the Wiyots

A young journalist working along the northern coast of California, Bret Harte found out how dangerous it could be to confront the genocidal reality behind a massacre of local Wiyot Indians.

California Governor Opens the Door on Native Genocide in the State's Closet and Apologizes

In an unprecedented move in front of a gathering of tribal leaders, Gov. Gavin Newsom took responsibility for California's state-sponsored attempt to wipe out its Native peoples in the second half of the 19th-century. He went on to apologize for this atrocity and to establish a Truth and Healing Council to address the genocide's unresolved justice issues.

Telling the Truth About the Modocs

Sometimes the book you set out to write differs from the book you finish. The truth may be other than what you imagined. Here's the backstory.

Selected Works

Nonfiction

Cast out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness

Telling the long-neglected part of Muir's story, Cast out of Eden lays out his take on the tribal nations he encountered and his embrace of an ethos that forced those tribes from their homelands. Although Muir questioned and worked against Euro-America's distrust of wild spaces and its deep-seated desire to tame and exploit them, his view excluded Native Americans as fallen peoples who stained the wilderness's pristine sanctity. Fortunately, in a transformation that a resurrected and updated Muir might approve, this long-standing injustice is beginning to be undone, as Indigenous nations and the federal government work together to ensure that quintessentially American lands from Bears Ears to Yosemite serve all Americans equally.

The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America's Gilded Age

Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of the Modoc War of 1872–73, one of the nation’s most dramatic conflicts against North American Indigenous peoples. The book won a 2018 gold medal from the Commonwealth Club as the year's best nonfiction focused on California.

Poetry

Songs of the Two Names

"… sheer elegance, impeccable craft, and… authority"

Simply to Know Its Name

"… a guide into how specifics of Nature reveal a constant presence of the Other…"

"The Modoc War" Launches Nov. 1

August 14, 2017

This is the time when writers of all genders feel like mothers-to-be. After years of work and anticipation, birth awaits — in this case, from the printing presses of Bison Books, the trade imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.

The Modoc War will appear in brick-and-mortar and online bookstores in about 10 weeks. You can pre-order at UNP.

A Byword on the Modoc War

Often, when I was researching and writing the book, folks would ask what I was working on. And when I told them, they’d say, “Oh, really,” under a quizzical expression. “And what was that, exactly?”

By way of answer:

• The Modoc War of 1872–73 was the only set-piece Indian war fought in California. The state saw more than its fair share of massacres, death squads, vigilante attacks, and murderous equivalents, but the Modoc War was the only national-level military campaign against a Native nation inside California.

• Until George Armstrong Custer led much of the 7th Cavalry to destruction at the Little Bighorn in 1876, the Modoc War received the most media and popular attention of any western Indian conflict to date. It served as the bellwether fight against Native peoples in the American West.

• One reason: the only general officer to die by hostile action against Indians — Brigadier General E. R. S. Canby — met his end in the Modoc War. (Custer was but a lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army.) Canby’s killing was attributed to Indian treachery, an explanation that supported the prevailing myth of American innocence.

• After the war ended, several Modoc leaders were tried by a military commission (yes, shades of Guantánamo) and hanged, the one and only time Native fighters were charged with war crimes.

• In truth, the war began long before the first shot was fired, and ended decades after the last. The Modoc War tells the whole story, from beginning to end and from both sides. It’s both wrenching and necessary.

Upcoming Events

• Thursday, Nov. 16, 2017, 7 p.m. Reading and signing, The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America's Gilded Age. Klamath County Museum, 1451 Main Street, Klamath Falls, OR 97626.

• Sunday, Nov. 26, 2017, 1–3 p.m. “Thanksgiving Nightmare: America’s Native Genocide.” Presentation on how European settlers disposed of the Indigenous peoples of this continent, using the Modoc War as a brutal case in point. Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church, 55 Eckley Lane, Walnut Creek, CA 94549. Enrollment information available on the MDUUC website in September.

To Find out More

Three other good books that deal with the war have been published in the past decade:

• Boyd Cothran’s Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence explores how memories and histories are created, particularly those asserting that, even in the midst of violence against Indians, Americans remained innocent. Yes, we were, and are, conning ourselves.

• Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 sees the Modoc War as the closing act in the purposeful destruction of the state’s Native populations. A grinding, painful accounting of this horrific body count.

• Cheewa James’s Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn’t Die takes a personal view of the war. Descended from a Modoc war leader, James tells the story of her family’s and her tribe’s survival in the face of violence and racism. She has good reason to be proud.