Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History was published by Richard Bentley in London in 1873, appearing during the actual Modoc War in Northern California — a coincidence that gave the book enormous topicality and made Miller briefly an authority on the conflict in British eyes.
The book presents itself as autobiography: Miller’s account of his years in the 1850s and 1860s living with (or near) the Modoc people on the border of California and Oregon. He describes their customs, their relationship with the land, their conflicts with encroaching settlers, and their inevitable destruction — all framed as a personal narrative of a young white man adopted into a people he came to love and whose fate he mourns.
The degree to which the book is factual remains debated. Miller was a chronic self-mythologizer (even his name was invented), and scholars have demonstrated that many episodes are invented, compressed, or borrowed from other sources. But the book’s value lies not in its documentary accuracy but in its rhetorical position: at a time when mainstream American discourse presented Native Americans as savages requiring removal or extermination, Miller presented them as a civilization — with philosophy, law, art, and dignity — being destroyed by a cruder one.
The Modocs themselves — whose actual war (Captain Jack’s resistance in the Lava Beds) was happening as the book appeared — are rendered as noble, intelligent, and philosophically sophisticated. Miller’s sympathy is genuine even when his facts are unreliable.
Collecting Life Amongst the Modocs
First edition (Richard Bentley, London, 1873): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First London edition: $80–$200
- First American edition (as Unwritten History, 1874): $60–$150
- Later 19th-century reprints: $20–$50