264 THE MODOK. 
them too well for that. They knew us better than we knew them, so far 
as fighting qualities were concerned. 
There was a burst of indignation on two continents when this bloody, 
treacherous thing was done; that the Modok had disregarded what all men, 
savage as well as civilized, have universally agreed to recognize as sacred, 
to wit, a flag of truce and the person of an ambassador. But when Ben. 
Wright did the same thing, the very same thing, in all essential particulars, 
where is the use of talking any more about the ‘code of warfare”? In 
fact, the plain and painful truth is that, since the day of Miles Standish, 
the ‘code of warfare” has been broken very many times on both sides, for 
the simple reason that when civilized men are arrayed against uncivilized 
men in a struggle for life, it ceases to be civilized warfare, or any other kind, 
except a war of extermination. Disguise it as we may, that is what the 
war has practically been on both sides from the settlement of the continent 
to this hour. 
Notwithstanding their acts of barbarous ferocity there is something 
melancholy in the whole history of the Modok. Seceders in the first place 
from the Mukaluk, they drew down upon their heads the bitterest hatred 
of the parent stock, who became their irreconcilable enemies. Being an 
offshoot without hereditary prescriptive rights and a patrimony, they were 
regarded by all the surrounding nations as interlopers, and warred upon 
accordingly, as was the case with the Lassik in California. Thus they be- 
came outcasts and outlaws to the whole Indian world, and who shall doubt 
that in this fact lay the secret of much of the rancorous cruelty and im- 
placable revenge with which they afterward always prosecuted their wars ? 
Finally they came upon the great enemy who leveled all tribes before 
him, and in two bitter, bloody wars, in which they saw their young men 
melt away before some strange and dreadful weapon, they were utterly 
broken down to the earth, and consented by treaty to go upon a reservation. 
3ut unhappily for them this reservation was situated on the ancestral soil 
of their old enemies, the Mukaluk, and their troubles began afresh. They 
had been able before to take care of themselves, and had established tradi- 
tional rights on Lost River; but now a second time they were taunted as 
