In 1873, during the Modoc War, General E.R.S. Canby became the only general killed in an Indian War. In 1882, just nine years later, a U.S. soldier erected an original wooden cross here in the lava beds, where some of the same troops Canby had commanded were still involved in other Indian Wars and public feeling about such conflicts remained intense. What some Modocs considered a justifiable war tactic, the U.S. Army considered murder, and while this site came to represent Canby’s death, no monument marks places where Modocs may have felt their efforts to live peaceably were betrayed. More than any other Modoc War site, Canby Cross came to symbolize the vast gulf between the two sides’ wartime perspectives and the ways people view events through the culture and time in which they live, in a conflict in which there were no innocent parties.