The northeastern corner of California is a remote and sparsely populated place. The other day, we missed an unmarked turn-off and drove an extra hundred miles, regretting the trip not at all. Where else would we have encountered in a few hours such an expanse of second growth pine forest, fertile valleys, and high desert?
Our first destination was Lava Beds National Monument, acre on acre of rocky grassland that is actually a huge crater of a long ago volcano. The land is honeycombed with caves and hummocks formed by lava flows that have since eroded.
The Lava Beds were also the site of what one display in the visitor center called perhaps the most expensive war, for its size, this country has ever fought. In 1872-3, a tiny band Modoc Indian warriors held at bay some 600 U.S. soldiers attempting to capture and remove them from the land.
The Modocs even killed a U.S. army general during the hostilities.
It's not hard to imagine how a tiny group who knew the land could hide and fight in this sort of terrain. That's one of the hazards of fighting in other peoples' countries.
Nearby, a couple of forlorn signs behind a fence mark the undeveloped site of the Tule Lake Segregation Center, also a National Monument, though it would be hard to tell as the signs are the only evidence. (There's also a temporary museum several miles down the road, but it was too late in the day for us to go there.) A flyer available at the Lave Beds explains:
Out on the highway, the state of California, in cooperation with the Japanese American Citizens League, has placed a marker that even more bluntly repudiates this shameful episode.
Never again indeed.