Robert Aquinas McNally

Robert Aquinas McNally is a poet and writer based in Concord, California. He is the author of The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which was a general-nonfiction finalist in the 2018 Northern California Book Awards; it won a gold medal in the Commonwealth Club’s 2018 Book Awards as the year’s best book on California He is also the author of the poetry collection “Simply to Know Its Name,” which won the 2014 Grayson Books Poetry Prize, and the author or coauthor of ten nonfiction books.

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel would trigger the war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native America’s peoples and lands. The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age tells the wrenching story of California’s only true Indian war and one of the United States’ costliest campaigns against an Indigenous people, illuminating a dark corner in the state’s and nation’s past.