Toby/Wi-ne-ma/Nanuokdomah Riddle (1848-1920) was a Modoc woman who acted as an interpreter and negotiator for the American army during the Modoc War. She saved the life of Alfred B. Meacham, an event which compelled him to write this biographical sketch of her, that also serves as a history of that war and her people.
Alfred B. Meacham (1826-82) served as the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon between 1869 and 1872, and in this time became acquainted with the Modoc tribe. Originally native to the lands surrounding Tule Lake in California, the American government’s relocation programme pushed the Modoc north into rival Klamath tribe land on the Oregon border. This resulted in a resistant Modoc faction headed by Kintapuash/Captain Jack (cousin of Wi-ne-ma) leaving the reservation they had been forced to migrate to and returning to their ancestral home. The American army’s attempts to re-relocate these Indigenous insurgents resulted in the Madoc War, wherein the rebels sought refuge in the naturally fortified lava beds. In the proceeding attempts to negotiate with Kintapuash’s warriors, Meacham assumed the role of Chairman of the Peace Commission, and enlisted Wi-Ne-Ma’s assistance as a translator and negotiator. Following pressure from within his tribe, Kintapuash and his warriors attacked a delegation of American army forces, killing General Canby and Rev. Eleazor Thomas. Wi-Ne-Ma, acting as interpreter alongside her bilingual white husband Frank Riddle at that meeting, tried to warn them, an effort which Meacham credits with saving his life. This ended the attempts at a peace treaty.
Kintapuash was captured and sentenced to death alongside other warriors from his tribe. His body was then dismembered, and parts of his remains sent to the Smithsonian institute to be studied under the auspices of ethnography.
Following the Modoc War, the compliant members of the Modoc Nation (including Wi-Ne-Ma) continued to live in the Klamath reservation in Oregon. Those loyal to Kintapuash were relocated to Oklahoma. In some ways sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans, Meacham took Wi-Ne-Ma with him on a dramatised lecture tour of the country to tell the story of the Madoc War and inform the public of the pressures that enforced relocation put on Indigenous peoples. His preface states the intention of this book to do “honour to the heroic Wi-Ne-Ma” and to “secure a most just and humane treatment of the remnants of the original owners of the continent of America”.
