Hardship defined the Tébessa region for four years before the spring of 1869. Drought and locusts destroyed harvests. Disease and migration devastated the population. Factional relations across eastern Algeria and western Tunisia strained under the weight of colonial border enforcement. In the spring of 1869, a caravan of Hammama based on the Tunisian side of the frontier crossed into Nememcha (and French Algerian) territory to buy grain at the Tébessa market. A faction of Nememcha cavaliers slaughtered them, possibly with the approval of the Arab Bureau officers of the region. The authors of this massacre only saw trial after the outcry raised by the colonial press made it impossible for the French military authority to ignore the deaths. There are many interesting facets of what would be called the Scandal of the Oued Mahouïne to consider; this paper is most concerned with why the massacre was not carried out by Ahmed Lakhdar. Head of the Ouled-Sidi-Yahia-ben-Taleb faction, Lakhdar refused the verbal request of the Arab Bureau officer de Boyat to raid the caravan in the days before the massacre, citing the lack of a written command. This paper examines the particular character of modernity in the Maghrib through this instance of colonial audacity: what did it mean for Ahmed Lakhdar to insist on written orders, to insist on the chain of command? What is the relationship between ecology and modernity? Can we arrive at a universal modernism through a history of local contingencies? In the discursive construction of “modernity,” colonial bureaucrats, officers, and writers often appealed to the reasonableness of their exercise of power, in contradistinction to the unaccountable nature of “Arab” authority. The rhetorical distance between despotic power and the rational authority of the French was precisely that putatively temporal dimension named “modernity.” By turning this discursive construction on its head, Lakhdar showed that modernity was always only a local contingency, not a universal, beneficent miasma emanating from imperial agents. The actions of Ahmed Lakhdar help us understand the peculiarly local way that ecology and empire could conspire to create modernity, and how “modern” forms of command, control, and power were understood and (re)produced at the eastern limits of French Algeria.