Keeper Of Skulls, Holder Of Secrets

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. - On Oct. 3, 1873, the U.S. Army hanged four Indian warriors at a fort north of here. An Army surgeon cut off their heads and shipped them to a museum in Washington, D.C.

The beheadings, done in the name of science, put a ghastly halt to a bloody uprising known as the Modoc War. But for descendants of the executed Indians, a new clash with the white government was just beginning. It wouldn't end until 1984, when a determined Modoc woman marched into the Smithsonian Institution to claim her people's history.

Debbie Riddle Herrera owns that history now. Plain-spoken, bull-headed Debbie Herrera. Distant cousin of the great Modoc chief known as Captain Jack. Great-great-granddaughter of war hero Winema Riddle.

Keeper of the skulls. And holder of the secret.

History describes Captain Jack as both a charismatic peace-lover who befriended white settlers and a Judas who butchered a U.S. general under a flag of truce.

To Debbie Herrera, 44, he is simply a long-lost cousin four times removed, and yet another ancestor wronged by a government that had long wronged Indians.

During the Indian wars, U.S. soldiers were ordered to crate up the heads of Indians who perished in battle, flu epidemics and executions.

The skulls were collected, in part, to test a popular theory that cranium size was related to intellect and that Indians were inferior to whites.

Scientists later rejected the theory - but not before the

remains of at least 4,000 dead Indians were stacked in the Army Medical Museum.

The bones were transferred to the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. Among them were the heads of the four Modoc warriors, kept in plain white cartons, in wooden drawers with dust-proof lids. The skull of Captain Jack, the great chief Kientpoos, was labeled: "Catalog Number 225,070."

The quest to return the missing Modocs began during the Indian rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In early 1974, one of Jack's descendants, Donald "Duck" Schonchin, tried to retrieve the skulls but was rebuffed when anthropologists argued that the Modoc crania were rare to their collection.

But a year later, scientists made plastic replicas of the Modoc skulls and prepared to return them.

Schonchin returned to Washington in 1976 to celebrate the Bicentennial and get the skulls. But the night before his appointment at the Smithsonian, he died of a heart attack in his motel room.

The skulls stayed put six more years, until Herrera, an ardent genealogist, stepped forward.

In the years of settlement before the war, the Modocs had adjusted well to white culture. They wore white clothes, trapped for fur and worked as timber splitters for white ranchers.

Yet when they sought a piece of their traditional homeland, the Army herded them onto a reservation with their longtime rivals, the Klamath Indians.

After clashing with the Klamaths, the Modocs moved back to their old home on the shores of Tule Lake in California. Fighting broke out in late 1872 when the Modocs resisted the Army's attempts to force them back to the reservation.

For six months, Jack led 52 Modoc warriors against 1,000 U.S. troops. They killed 120 soldiers.

Finally, Jack met Brig. Gen. Edward R.S. Canby in peace talks. But under goading from some of his warriors, Jack shot Canby in the face and made history: Canby was the highest-ranking officer ever killed in battle with Indians.

(George Armstrong Custer had reverted to the rank of lieutenant colonel after the Civil War and before the Little Bighorn.)

After Jack fled, some of his Modocs joined the Army as scouts to hunt him down. In June 1873, Jack - dejected about the betrayal and surrounded by the enemy - surrendered and proclaimed, "I am ready to die."

A military commission pronounced him and three warriors guilty of war crimes and hanged them. The Army decapitated the four and claims to have buried their corpses.

Riddle's book disputes that claim. The night after the execution, he wrote, someone dug up Jack's corpse and shipped it to Washington, D.C., where it was "exhibited to the public at ten cents a sight."

In 1983, Herrera inquired about the skulls of the Modocs hanged at Fort Klamath.

Smithsonian officials assured her they were well cared for; if she could prove she was a lineal descendant, and if her tribal government approved, the skulls would be turned over to her.

Herrera prepared a family tree to prove her lineage. But she refused to get approval from anyone to reclaim her own relatives. She demanded the Smithsonian honor its policy of returning remains to lineal descendants.

The next summer, the government flew Debbie Herrera and her husband, Tony, to Washington. They were ushered into Room 368 of the Museum of Natural History and given the skulls of the four executed men.

Behind the walls of the museum rested more dead Indians than the entire population of Klamath Falls.

"We didn't want to keep looking," Debbie Herrera said. "We just got this really weird, eerie feeling there."

Debbie Herrera spent that night with her ancestors' remains, then flew home.

She will say no more.

Leaders of the Klamath Tribes, which represents the Klamaths and the Modocs, have demanded she tell them what she has done with the skulls. Tribal elders, who preside over reburials, wanted to make sure the skulls were returned to the land with proper ceremony and dignity.

But Herrera, a stubborn woman who bears a passing resemblance to her great-great grandmother, Winema Riddle, refuses to talk.

Her work is done, she said. She will not parade her kin back into Mother Earth.

"They don't need to know," she said. "It's not the right time."

She will say only that she did not rescue the skulls from a museum just to display them somewhere else. She did not sell them. And she did not dishonor them.

"They're home," she said.

Copyright, 1996, Newhouse News Service