In "Haunted America," Patricia Nelson Limerick takes a deeper look of the Modoc War of 1872-1873. In her patterns of writing she breaks down the war in forms of a better understanding. In each of her patterns she writes about the war in a narrative form and then in a present. Then she tries to convey her readers the about dilemmas and solutions that have came up in written history. And that it is important for one to have a better understandment of the past then to believe wrong interpretations that cause benightedness. .
One of the most curious words that have been used to explain things is measure. What is the proper way of measuring judgments and compares? It is shown that numbers in the late twentieth century was the standard way of measuring everything. Writer that writes about massacres and battles usually wrestles with the problem of numbers. Trying to calculate how many were killed and who killed whom. Historian Juanita Brooks wrote, "the total number [killed at Mountain Meadows] remains uncertain. We can be sure only that, however many there were it is to many" (497 Limerick). Does it help our judgment of an event to show how many people were massacred? .
We also learned, that in the twentieth-century there was not much that stood in the way of moral high ground. It provides no viewers" grandstand on which they can sit in self-righteous judgment of the cruelties of the nineteenth-century. .
The Modoc War brought "a perfect case study in American maladministration of its Indian affairs" (497). The government did not know what was going on or what they were even doing. The government did not learn anything from the war. That the "land-lust of white settlers" (498) gave the Modoc War its context. .
When talked about who should have the achievements of the war and that "it is hard to find a way to tell the national story that does justice both to those who benefited from the conquest and to those who literally lost ground" (501 Limerick).