What do Snow White, Cinderella, and smallpox blankets have in common? They’re all fairytales. In this shocking episode of "Real History," Matt Walsh rips apart the myth of peaceful, noble Indians who were supposedly victimized by evil white settlers. Matt takes on the biggest mainstream myths and left-wing shibboleths about the settling of the American West. It’s time to ditch the self-loathing propaganda designed to demoralize us and replace it with raw, unfiltered history that radical academics and Hollywood don't want you to see.
Real History Ep. 2
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If you grew up in the United States in the past 50 years, then you know about the Trail of Tears.
It's one of those stories that's beaten into our collective consciousness starting in grade school.
We're taught, in no uncertain terms, that Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands by the U.S. government between 1830 and 1850, and that thousands of Natives died in the process.
The government did this so that white men could seize Indian land and the valuable resources that it sat on.
In case you missed that lesson in the classroom, Caught it in the 2006 documentary narrated by James Earl Jones, or the sprawling national park with signs that note that the Indians did not want to leave, or the endless amount of online propaganda about it.
Much of what they're saying is a myth.
As it turns out, none of the Cherokee Indians who traveled the Trail of Tears had ever heard of the Trail of Tears.
That's because from 1830 to 1850, almost no one used the phrase.
The term was popularized a full seven decades after the Cherokees moved to Oklahoma, and even then, it wasn't truly a household name.
That didn't happen until the 1960s, more than a century after it took place.
But it isn't just the name that's at issue here, it's the details that are so often omitted from the actual story.
The story begins in 1830 when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.
The law did not authorize the U.S. government to forcibly remove Indians or march them westward against their will.
Instead, the law authorized the president to negotiate legally binding treaties with the various tribes, in which those tribes would be awarded compensation.
A new territory west of the Mississippi, in exchange for voluntarily vacating the territory that they currently lived on.
In accordance with that law, many Indian tribes agreed to terms to relocate.
The first major treaty was the Treaty of New Achota in 1835.
In school, this treaty is presented as a fraudulent agreement in which a tiny number of Cherokees signed away all Cherokee lands in the Southeast, allowing the U.S. government to obtain a pretext to forcibly remove the Cherokees to Oklahoma, resulting in the deaths of 4,000 Indians.
Well, every aspect of that narrative is false.
The first lie is that 4,000 Indians died.
That figure comes from a letter written by Dr. Eliza Butler, a member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who was hired by the Cherokees to embed on the relocation.
He admitted later that the number, quote, was based on hearsay and guesswork.
Now, the actual figure is likely 10% of what we were taught in school.
Although it's true that the Cherokee's chief, John Ross, opposed the treaty, it's also true that he was extensively involved in negotiations.
And though he opposed the version of the treaty that got finalized, it didn't stop him from enriching his family from it.
When the government started enforcing the treaty in 1838, they allowed Cherokee to conduct their own removal.
Thirteen of the 16 groups that went to Oklahoma were managed by the Cherokee, not the Army.
And the contract to handle removal logistics went to Chief Ross's brother, Louis Ross.
He made about $65 per person, which totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars, and was meant to make the journey more humane.
The money was intended for wagons, food, medical care, provisions.
It was to ensure that there wouldn't be much of a death toll.
And that brings us to another lie that the Indians were ripped off.
Well, in fact, the U.S. federal government paid the Indians $5 million, or roughly $184 million in 2025 dollars, for 7 million acres.
That is a far better price per acre than Russia received.
For selling Alaska to the United States in 1867, or that the French received in exchange for selling the Louisiana Purchase, the Indians received something like 70 cents an acre, while Napoleon received just 3 cents an acre, and Russia received 2 cents per acre.
In the words of Andrew Jackson, quote, how many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions?
If the offers made to the Indians were extended to them, they would be hailed with gratitude and joy.
So, what are the odds that a central tenet of anti American history just suddenly popped up in the 1960s, just as left wing radicals seized control of American universities?
Very high, it turns out.
As a matter of fact, one thing that left wing academics know very well is that historical narratives matter.
Who your people look up to matters.
The events that shape the country matter.
And it all can be very useful.
One group that found the Trail of Tears narrative useful were the thousands of professional activists who went to Washington in the early 1970s.
And held a week long occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building.
Protesters barricaded themselves inside with furniture, fashioned makeshift weapons, issued defiance statements to the press.
One leader reportedly told the New York Times that Indians had taken a vow to fight to the death, while another declared war on the United States.
Within days, President Nixon sent representatives to hammer out a compromise.
He granted immunity to the militants and paid for their trips home.
He signed legislation that handed millions of acres of land over to Indian tribes, particularly in Alaska and New Mexico.
He lent his support to the Indian Self Determination and Education Assistance Act, which would eventually become law.
The legislation allowed Indian tribes to take over the administration of some federal programs, which was a major coup for the so called American Indian Movement.
The Trail of Tears is often presented as the ultimate symbol of American injustice, but it is just one part in a much larger body of pervasive myths that have shaped our understanding of American history.
These myths, amplified in schools and media, almost always portray American Indians as peaceful, noble, Victims, stewards of the land, overwhelmed by an unstoppable wave of imperial European and American forces armed with superior technology.
Any violence on their part, we're told, is merely a reaction provoked by white people.
We're told that as Americans we live on stolen land and that the U.S. government perpetrated a literal genocide against Native nations.
These narratives are not only wrong, but they're also a form of intellectual warfare designed to dishonor our ancestors and to foster a sense of collective guilt that would undermine American confidence and unity.
Well, the thing is, it's working.
One poll sponsored by the Manhattan Institute found that 45% of high school students were taught in class that America was built on stolen land, and another 22% heard it from an adult at the school.
Over the course of this video, we will dismantle, one by one, the biggest myths about the Native Americans.
This is the real history of the American Indians.
So, we need to start with a central, critical, and load bearing myth that supports all the others the widespread belief that the Indians were peaceful.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Before we dismantle this claim, I have to warn you that to accurately convey the reality of intertribal and frontier warfare, I have to use real historical examples.
Many of these accounts contain graphic violence.
The Indians were brutal to settlers and to each other.
Some of these details may be unsuitable for young children, but we don't have any choice.
But to present them.
After all, this video is in pursuit of historical truth rather than comforting myth.
Since the end of World War II, American academics have pretended that pre modern humans lived in a state of peace.
Academic dishonesty was so out of hand by the 1990s that, according to archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley, the most widely used archaeological textbooks contained no mention of war before civilization.
Some of the biggest names in anthropology, archaeology, and history have gone out of their way to pretend that life before civilization.
Was actually pretty great.
This might be because so many post World War II academics deliberately ignored war.
In one case, academics were in such denial about pre modern warfare that they pretended battle axes were a form of currency.
Now, you might be thinking, who cares about intellectuals?
Well, the myths they made ended up appearing downstream in our mass culture.
Around the same time that references to the Trail of Tears were rising, Hollywood started portraying Indians as Peaceful and noble.
Dances with Wolves portrays, of all people, the Lakota Sioux as a peaceful, harmonious community living in balance with the land and the buffalo.
The Powhatan in Pocahontas were peace loving environmentalists who sang about living in harmony with nature.
And the list goes on, of course.
None of that is accurate.
According to the book War Before Civilization by archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley, somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of known societies in all of human history.
Were warlike.
The less civilized you were, as a rule, the more violent you were.
Two thirds of primitive societies were at constant war compared to 40% of civilized states.
Now at this point you might say, but what about the peaceful tribes?
Not all of them were at war.
According to Keeley, those tribes are the exception that proves the rule.
Some 96% of American Indian tribes engaged in warfare.
Some tribes were more violent than others.
The most violent tribes were the Klamath Modoc, the Thompson tribe, the Navajo, the Apache, Mojave, the Yuma, Iroquois, the Sioux, and of course the Comanche.
If you happen to be in their neighborhood, you probably spend a lot of time at war.
In most cases, primitive warfare consisted of surprise raids on enemies' villages or camps.
This is true for groups around the world, from Eskimos in the Bering Straits to natives in New Guinea.
This kind of warfare generally consisted of quietly surrounding enemy houses under the cover of night, throwing spears through the walls, lighting the structures on fire, and shooting arrows through the doorways.
The killing was often indiscriminate, and civilians, including women and children, frequently died.
According to Keeley, the East Cree of Quebec slaughtered any Inuit, Eskimo families.
They encountered, taking only infants as captives.
Neither age nor sex was any guarantee of protection from primitive raids.
Among Western U.S. Indian tribes, 86% were raiding or resisting raids undertaken more than once each year.
In some cases, violence was small scale, but even if most battles may have had a small number of casualties, almost every male was participating.
In one small scale Eskimo community in northern Canada, every single male had killed someone at some point.
Among prehistoric Illinois villagers, archaeological evidence suggests that the homicide rate would have been 70 times that of the U.S. in 1980.
So it turns out that bloodshed in Chicago is, in fact, an ancient phenomenon.
So just how savage were the Indians?
We'll get into specific details of some of these raids, but for now we can focus on perhaps the most gruesome detail of all evidence of cannibalism among American Indian tribes.
According to Keeley's book, War Before Civilization, at 25 sites in the American Southwest, Anthropologists have discovered cannibalized human remains dated from roughly the year 900 to 1300, hundreds of years before Columbus arrived.
We know they were consumed because the assemblages of disarticulated bones share a number of features butchering cut marks, skulls broken, long bones smashed for marrow extraction, bones burned or otherwise cooked, and disposal with other kitchen refuse.
One Colombian chief, quote, consumed the bodies of a hundred enemies in a single day following a victory.
In another chiefdom, war captives were kept in special enclosures and fattened before consumption.
Many of these groups smoked or otherwise preserved human meat to be eaten later.
The Anserma tribe in Colombia used human body fat as lamp fuel in their gold mines.
Many groups in the Americas ate the hearts of slain enemies to absorb the latter's courage or to achieve an extended form of revenge.
As recently as the 1800s, American soldiers and Texas Rangers were witnesses to cannibalism.
The Tonkawa tribe in Texas, which allied with the U.S. Army in its mission to take on the brutal Comanche tribe, often ate their victims.
One white captive named Herman Lehman, who lived with the Comanches and eventually became a Comanche warrior, wrote about his experiences in a book titled Nine Years Among Indians.
The Comanche had been locked in a genocidal war with the Tonkawas for decades, and by the time Lehman encountered them, they were, in his words, nearly exterminated.
But upon finding a Tonkawa outpost, Lehman wrote, We took possession of the camp and What do you suppose we found on that fire roasting?
One of the legs of a Comanche, a warrior of our tribe.
Whipped into a furor at the sight of their fellow warrior being eaten, the Comanches massacred the Tonkawa.
Lehman writes, A great many of the dying enemy were gasping for water, but we heeded not their pleadings.
We scalped them, amputated their arms, cut off their legs, cut out their tongues, and threw their mangled bodies and limbs upon their own campfire, put on more brushwood, and piled the living, dying, and dead Tonkawas on the fire.
Some of them were able to flinch and work as a worm, and some were able to speak and plead for mercy.
We piled them up, put on more wood, and danced around in great glee as we saw the grease and blood run from their bodies, and were delighted to see them swell up and hear the hide pop as it would burst in the fire.
After the Battle of Plum Creek in Texas, Tonkawa allies cut up the body of an enemy Comanche and skewered it on sticks over a bonfire.
The Texas Rangers were there with them and likely would have witnessed this.
It's clear that the Indians were very violent, engaging in raids on one another, murdering women and children, burning entire villages, committing genocide, in some cases, eating each other.
Which brings us to our next myth.
One common myth perpetuated by historians is that the American Indians only became violent after exposure to Europeans.
One advantage academics have in perpetuating this myth is that the Indians didn't keep a log of their own history, so we don't have written accounts.
Of Indian battles from the 1300s.
Luckily, archaeological evidence doesn't require written history.
Violence and Genocide Among Tribes00:05:57
This is what we know.
Almost all new settlements formed in eastern North America from 900 to 1400 AD were fortified.
And this is because around that time, Mississippian Indians from the Midwest and the South were moving east and in constant conflict with the tribes they were encountering.
Before Columbus had even sailed the ocean blue, Oneota Indians were chasing other Indians out of northern Illinois.
Tribes like the Anasazi and the Hohokam. were vacating their farms in Arizona and New Mexico because their settlements were getting destroyed.
Archaeologists at Crow Creek in South Dakota discovered a mass grave with the remains of more than 500 people, including women and children.
They had been, according to Keeley, slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated during an attack on the village a century and a half before Columbus' arrival.
The attack seems to have occurred just when the village's fortifications had been rebuilt.
All the houses were burned and most of the inhabitants were murdered.
Knife marks on the tops of their skulls and bone fragments is how they know that they were scalped and mutilated.
Not only were the Indians committing atrocities against each other before Europeans arrived, but they also got less violent after the white man got there.
According to Keeley, the percentage of burials in coastal British Columbia bearing evidence of violent traumas was actually lower after European contact, 13% from 1774 to 1874, than the very high levels, 20 to 32%, evidence in prehistoric periods.
As you'll see later in this episode, some tribes, including the vicious, warlike ones like the Apache, actually sought protection.
From European powers.
But we'll get to that later.
First, more on what Indian on Indian violence was like.
According to S.C. Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon, quote, enemies, meanwhile, were enemies, and the rules for dealing with them had come down through a thousand years.
A Comanche brave who captured a live Ute would torture him to death without question.
It was what everyone had always done.
What the Sioux did to the Assiniboine, what the Crow did to the Blackfeet, a Comanche captured by a Ute would expect to receive exactly the same treatment, which is why Indians always fought to their last breath.
On the battlefields.
Often this led to a tit for tat where one raid would lead to another ad infinitum.
Those early Indian raids were brutal and included tribes widely celebrated as advanced by modern historians.
Consider the case of the Iroquois, who are often presented as a sophisticated tribe who, according to the documentarian Ken Burns, influenced America's founding fathers.
Long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States, the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk had created a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee, a democracy that had flourished for centuries.
Somehow, strangely enough, Ken Burns forgot to tell us that when the Iroquois captured an enemy combatant, the combatant was not immediately executed, but instead tortured during the war party's return to camp.
When they made it back to the village, the hostages were given to the families of dead Iroquois soldiers.
adopted by the families and given the names of the dead Indians, and then, according to Keeley, quote, tortured to death over several days.
The prisoner was dead.
Some parts of his body were eaten, usually including his heart, by his murderers.
These kinds of misrepresentations are completely pervasive.
The Mendocino Land Trust in California has land acknowledgments celebrating the Yuki and Kato tribes that once lived on land now occupied by rich, liberal Californians.
The land trust claims that these tribes were stewards of these lands for millennia.
And we mourn the atrocities committed against them in the past while recognizing that these injustices continue today.
But they failed to mention that the two tribes hated each other.
When Yuki Indians discovered that Katos were encroaching on their obsidian mine and plant gathering territory, they retaliated by killing four Kato girls.
Such violence was par for the course in pre modern California.
At a thousand year old excavation site in central California, 5% of human skeletons were embedded with arrowheads.
The Indians regularly massacred their rivals and burned their villages before Columbus arrived.
The archaeological evidence is overwhelming and runs along the Missouri River in South Dakota and throughout the American Southwest.
In 1280, the Pueblo at Sand Canyon was destroyed in a massacre.
Artifacts were smashed and stolen, and a defensive wall was totally burned.
The Pueblo of Kahawa in New Mexico was plundered and destroyed in 1400.
No tribe blows up the peaceful Indian myth more than the Comanches, who ruled the southern Great Plains for centuries and even beat back the Spanish Empire, which had no problem conquering the Aztecs or the Incas.
The Comanche would, quote, attack whole villages and burn them, raping, torturing, and killing their inhabitants, leaving young women with their entrails carved out, men burned alive.
They skewered infants and took young boys and girls as captives.
Now, they did this to almost everyone they encountered.
The Comanche were always brutal, but it wasn't until they were introduced to the horse, Was brought by Europeans, that they hit their apex.
Because they were highly mobile and brilliant at horsemanship, the Comanche could move hundreds of miles faster than anyone else.
Their nomadic lifestyle meant they could launch attacks from anywhere.
By the mid 1700s, everybody feared them, from the Tonkawa in Texas to the Blackfeet in Wyoming, the Utes in New Mexico to the Pawnee in Kansas.
Comanche attacks on Hicaria Apaches were so brutal that they begged for and received Spanish protection.
The Comanche were such a force that by the mid 18th century, powerful tribes like the Cheyenne refused to breach Comanche territory.
Myths About Scalping and Property00:09:27
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As radical college professors were rewriting history to create the myth of the peaceful Indian, others were willing to acknowledge Native American violence but blame that on white people.
In 1969, an Indian author and activist named Vine Deloria argued that scalping was introduced prior to the French and Indian War by the English.
Framing it as a European invention that confirmed suspicions of Indians as wild animals to be hunted and skinned.
While in fact, scalping was one of the many ancient traditions meant to cripple victims in the afterlife.
As Lawrence Keeley notes, the custom of scalping enemy dead was observed at first contact among tribes ranging from New England to California and from parts of the subarctic down to northern Mexico.
Scalps and scalping were embedded in the myth and rituals of so many tribes that the custom's indigenous roots in North America are beyond serious question.
Defiling an enemy's body supposedly denied them a place in the afterlife.
It was humiliating.
This photo shows the corpse of a U.S. cavalryman killed and mutilated by the Southern Cheyenne in 1867.
Tribes in Columbia kept the entire skins of their dead enemies.
Some tribes turned their enemies' bones into flutes.
Women commonly flayed the victims, and at least one tribe treated their victims like we treat trophy bucks.
They had them stuffed, waxed, and prominently placed in their homes.
Different plains tribes mutilated their foes' corpses in different ways, and their traditions went back centuries.
Anthropologists working the site of the Crow Creek Massacre, which happened in the mid-1400s in central South Dakota, found mutilated skeletons.
After the Battle of Little Bighorn, more than 400 years later, Indian women used marrow-cracking mallets to pound the faces of the dead soldiers into pulp.
Name the tribe and I will tell you their preferred method of mutilation.
The Cheyennes slashed their enemies' arms, the Arapahoe split their enemies' noses, the Sioux slit their enemies' throats.
Indian warfare was dominated by superstitions and traditions, and mutilations and scalps weren't the only way to prove yourself as a soldier.
On the Great Plains, the Indians had a tradition called counting coup, and it involved demonstrating extreme bravery by touching or striking a living enemy warrior in battle with a hand, bow, whip, or special coup stick, and then escaping unharmed.
This act was considered the highest honor in intertribal warfare, often more prestigious than killing from a distance because it required getting dangerously close, proving superior courage and skill while humiliating the opponent.
As recently as World War II, an American Indian named Joe Medicine Crow completed the four traditional Crow war deeds.
He counted coup by overpowering a German soldier in hand to hand combat.
He captured an enemy's weapon by taking the soldier's rifle in the scuffle.
He led a successful war party on a mission to capture explosives.
And he stole his enemy's horses on a raid on an SS camp.
And this made him eligible to be a war chief.
Some of these traditions are admirable and impressive.
No doubt Joe Medicine Crow was an American hero.
But the ancient practice of scalping enemies and mutilating their bodies to deny them a place in the afterlife is, of course, appalling.
The unfortunate reality is that in some cases, whites, usually in mobs and militias, participated in scalping, but this is vastly overstated, especially cases in which the government supposedly encouraged scalping.
For example, One professor from the University of Texas claims that in California, scalp warfare driven by scalp bounties eliminated nearly 90% of some tribal populations.
This view became pervasive in the 1990s, but it's almost totally false.
In 2023, a professor at California State University, Chico, discovered that, in fact, quote, Indian scalp bounties remained extremely rare in Gold Rush, California and were seldom offered anywhere except in a scattered handful of isolated and unincorporated rural communities.
He further emphasized, quote, so routinely are these allegations made They now go largely uncontested and appear to have won nearly universal acceptance as established historical facts.
These facts, however, are false.
The state of California never offered, let alone actually paid, cash bounties for Native American scalps, heads, or other body parts.
We can safely say that the idea of systematic state-sponsored scalp bounties as a primary driver of depopulation is now debunked as a modern myth.
Another pervasive myth about Native Americans combines two contradictory ideas into one.
Native Americans had no concept of property rights, particularly over land, and that Europeans stole the land from them.
Obviously, these two claims cannot both be true.
If the Indians truly lacked any notion of property rights, then the land, by definition, could not have been stolen from them, because theft implies the violation of rightful ownership.
Yet the same narrative often asserts both points simultaneously without recognizing the logical contradiction.
This inconsistency reveals a deeper issue.
The first claim is frequently used to justify displacement by portraying native land used as primitive or communal in a way that didn't count as real ownership under European legal standards.
The second claim, meanwhile, appeals to modern moral sensibilities about injustice.
Holding both ideas at once allows the narrative to shift between them depending on the argument being made while avoiding the underlying incompatibility.
The way the revisionists frame this debate is like a rigged game.
There's no way to win if you accept.
the premise.
And so, we don't accept the premise.
The Indians, like the average toddler, absolutely had a notion of property rights.
They often went to war over them.
In the 1830s, in the Alexander Valley in Northern California, Pomo Indians stole an acorn stash from an oak grove belonging to the Wapo tribe.
And that was not a good decision.
The Wapo immediately raided, massacring the Pomo, and burning one of their villages.
The remaining Pomo then fled the area for the safety of other Pomo villages farther away from the Wapo.
The Wapo eventually occupied some of the abandoned villages and just like that, a dispute over territory led to a war and the winning tribe expanded its territory.
Its property rights.
Those kinds of disputes happened literally all the time.
They were very, very violent.
Surprise attacks in California Como villages killed between 5 and 15 percent of the population.
When the first Spanish explorers encountered the Barbaray Neo-Chumash in California, the tribe had just had two of their villages massacred and burned, killing 10 percent of the tribe.
According to anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, in California, where tribes depended heavily on gathering wild plant foods and on hunting or fishing, conflicts over resource poaching were very common.
He continued that, quote, many California tribes often granted outsiders the right to exploit their hunting and gathering grounds when they were properly asked or awarded with gifts, yet they would fight any group that poached.
The people who live in Northern California today are much more communist than the American Indians they replaced.
It's a shame they don't just give the land back.
But California tribes weren't the only ones going back and forth about property.
The Plains Indians continuously waged war over horses, which was their key metric of wealth.
Indians in the Pacific Northwest fought over water and fishing access.
Tribes in the Midwest fought for centuries over who got access to rice fields and hunting grounds in places like Minnesota.
Different tribes had different ways of allocating land, but they all had ways of doing it.
Most tribes had defined territories for hunting, fishing, gathering, or farming with boundaries recognized intertribally.
On the Great Plains, the Lakota allocated hunting grounds to families.
In the Pacific Northwest, tribes held potlatches to establish hereditary claims rooted in oral histories and legal traditions.
The Pueblo and Iroquois, who actually had farms, necessarily gave family their own plots for cultivation.
How exactly are you supposed to farm if everything is communally owned?
This is yet another myth that's easily debunked.
Tactics of the Horseback Warriors00:15:36
On the morning of May 19, 1836, on the vast, untamed frontier of the newly declared Republic of Texas, there was a small wooden stockade known as Parker's Fort.
It was very literally on the edge of civilization.
Built by the extended Parker family, the fort huddled along the Navasota River in what is now Limestone County, Texas.
Inside its log walls were homes, a garden, and 30 settlers working the surrounding fields.
And they included a pregnant 17-year-old named Rachel Plummer.
That morning, as the men worked outside the gates, a large band of warriors, primarily Comanche Indians, appeared on the horizon.
They carried a white flag signaling peace, but it was a ruse.
In moments, the fields erupted in chaos.
The Comanche warriors, riding on horseback and covered in war paint, charged the fort.
Five settlers were killed immediately, including the family patriarch.
Inside the fort, Rachel witnessed the carnage with her toddler.
She tried to flee, but was overtaken and dragged away.
For the next 21 months, She was held as a Comanche slave.
About October, she gave birth, but the infant made her less productive.
Comanches wouldn't have that.
This is an actual excerpt from her memoirs.
Quote, My child was some six or seven weeks old when I suppose my master thought it was too much trouble, as I was not able to go through as much labor as before.
One cold morning, five or six large Indians came where I was suckling my infant.
As soon as they came in, I felt my heart sink.
My fears agitated my whole frame.
To a complete state of convulsion.
My body shook with fear indeed.
Nor were my fears vain or ill grounded.
One of them caught hold of the child by the throat, and with his whole strength, like an enraged lion actuated by its devouring nature, held on like the hungry vulture until my child was, to all appearance, entirely dead.
But that didn't satisfy the Comanche, so they continued to attack the baby.
Quote They by force took the infant from me and threw his body up in the air and let him fall on the frozen ground.
until he was apparently dead.
Now, miraculously, the baby survived the strangling.
So the Comanche, quote, tied a plaited rope around the child's neck and drew its naked body into the large hedges of prickly pear cacti, which were from 8 to 12 feet high.
They would then pull him down through the pears.
This they repeated several times.
One of them then got on a horse and tying the rope to his saddle, rode around a circuit of a few hundred yards, until my little innocent one was not only dead, but literally torn to pieces.
This is how the Comanche and many Indians fought.
For the most part, wars between pre-civilized people are almost always fought like total wars.
Like Sherman marching to the sea or the U.S. bombing of civilian targets in Germany in World War II, the Indians would commonly engage in tactics like wringing fruit trees, stealing or destroying herds and crops, burning houses and canoes, stealthily slaughtering individuals in small groups, and gradually abrading a foe's manpower in very frequent but low casualty battles.
Often the Plains Indians would steal horses from expeditions, leaving Americans alone in the prairie with no way to get home.
One subarctic tribe, the Kuchin, annihilated its enemies, the Mackenzie Eskimos, by surrounding their encampment and killing all but one male.
Their survivor, as he came to be known, was all that was left, and his purpose was to tell other tribes what had happened.
The anthropologist Lawrence Keeley claims, quote, primitive warfare was much deadlier than its modern counterpart.
An average Indian massacre killed 10% of the population.
An equivalent attack on the United States today would kill more than 32 million people.
In other words, Indian tactics were extremely effective.
Throughout the 20th century, wars and their associated consequences, such as famine and disease, claimed an estimated 100 million lives.
This staggering toll reflects the devastating cost of a world organized into nation states, whose conflicts repeatedly escalated into large scale industrial violence.
But according to Keeley, that figure is an estimated 20 times smaller than the losses we would have experienced if we fought like the Indians.
This is because modern civilized warfare is ritualized.
There are layers and layers of international law that nation states are expected to fight by.
Not so for native populations.
Concepts like prisoner exchange, parole, the release after assuring the enemy you won't take up arms again, and surrender are modern and rely on agreements between opposing parties, which almost never existed in pre-modern warfare.
Wave the white flag in a modern civilized war, and you're probably going to be fine.
Not so with the Comanche.
Their language had no word for surrender.
For decades, the Comanche Indians raided settlements of other Indians or Spanish and Texan colonizers.
According to The Empire of the Summer Moon, which is an excellent history of the Comanche people, the logic of Comanche raids was straightforward.
All the men were killed, and any of the men who were captured alive were tortured to death as a matter of course, some more slowly than others.
The captive women were gang raped, some were killed, some tortured, but a portion of them, particularly if they were young, would be spared.
Though vengeance could always be a motive for slaying hostages, babies were invariably killed.
while pre-adolescents were often adopted by Comanches or other tribes.
Torture at the hands of Plains Indians was so brutal and so common that veteran Indian fighters preferred suicide over capture and usually saved a bullet for themselves.
Their brutal tactics were far more effective than the way Europeans fought.
That's how tribes like the Comanche and Apache held off the Americans, the Mexicans, and the Spanish Empire for more than three centuries, the last of which took basically no time at all to conquer the much more developed Aztecs in central Mexico.
In 1758, the Comanche drew Spain into its greatest military defeat in the New World in a battle near a Spanish mission at Santa Cruz de San Saba near present day Menard, Texas.
There, the Indians stripped, murdered, mutilated, and decapitated priests.
One early Spanish expedition to take out plains tribes from New Mexico was wiped out by the Pawnees in Nebraska.
As a rule, the U.S. Army often suffered major defeats if it was outnumbered in battle, and not just against the impressive cavalries of the Plains Indians.
In 1835, Major Francis L. Dade led a column of about 110 U.S. soldiers from Fort Brooke near modern Tampa to reinforce Fort King near modern Ocala.
They were ambushed by about 180 Seminole warriors near present-day Bushnell, Florida.
It had all the hallmarks of a classic Indian attack.
The Seminoles used surprise covered from tall grass.
And superior knowledge of the terrain to overwhelm the column.
They killed Major Dade and nearly all his men, leaving only three survivors.
The Seminoles had basically no casualties.
The attack shocked the nation, and today it's known as the Dade Massacre.
The U.S. launched a six and a half year punitive war against the Seminoles.
The outcome of the war was indecisive.
In a description of his 30 year career, Colonel R.B. Marcy complained that The modern school of military science are but illy suited to carrying on a warfare with the wild tribes of the plains.
The vast expanse of desert territory that has been annexed to our domain within the last few years is peopled by numerous tribes of marauding and erratic savages who are mounted upon fleet and hardy horses, making war the business and pastime of their lives, and acknowledging one of the ameliorating conventionalities of civilized warfare.
Their tactics are such as to render the old system almost wholly impotent.
The Indians, he continued, were here today and there tomorrow, who at one time stampedes a herd of mules upon the headwaters of the Arkansas, and when next Heard from is in the very heart of the populated districts of Mexico, laying waste to haciendas and carrying devastation, rapine, and murder in his steps, who is everywhere without being anywhere, who assembles at the moment of combat and vanishes whenever fortune turns against him, who leaves his women and children far distant from the theater of hostilities and has neither towns nor magazines to defend,
nor lines of retreat to cover.
In August 1854, a Lakota Indian named High Forehead was waiting for an annuity payment from the federal government when he killed a cow being moved by a Mormon wagon train on the Oregon Trail.
Brevet Second Lieutenant John L. Groton, a 24-year-old fresh from West Point who hated the Indians and didn't have much experience on the frontier, volunteered to resolve the matter.
That was a mistake.
Leading 29 soldiers, two howitzers, and a drunken interpreter, he marched into the vast Lakota encampment demanding the surrender of High Forehead.
The drunk interpreter started taunting the Lakota leader, Conquering Bear, and a nervous U.S. infantryman accidentally discharged his gun.
Groton then ordered his men to fire away, killing Conquering Bear.
The Indians, infuriated by the attack and the insults, laid waste to Groton and killed his entire detachment.
During the Civil War, Apache bands overcame a ruthless uprising involving U.S. troops, citizens, and tribes that had settled on reservations.
Because government forces were consumed with war, wild nomadic tribes like the Comanche waged total warfare against the tribes that had taken up farming on the reservation.
Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek Indians were the primary targets, and many were chased off the reservation altogether.
The U.S. government was incapable of stopping it.
Even after the Civil War, American forces were regularly getting outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and in some cases defeated by supposedly inferior American Indian forces.
But after the Civil War, defeats kept coming.
In 1866, an army captain named William Fetterman was led into an ambush by Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud, which led to a 20-minute battle that ended with the massacre of 80 U.S. troops.
A post-massacre report noted that their eyes were ripped out, noses and ears cut off, teeth removed, brains scooped out, genitals severed, and some of the men had been pulverized by hundreds of arrows.
In the treaties of 1868, the U.S. government conceded the Bozeman Trail in the Powder River country to the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors under Chief Red Cloud.
On June 25, 1876, the most famous and devastating defeat in the Indian Wars happened at the Battle of Little Bighorn, where in less than an hour, George Custer and every man under his immediate command Almost 300 soldiers lay dead on the slopes now known as Last Stand Hill.
So, how then did we beat the Indians?
Well, it's simple.
It required embracing the tactics of the Indians.
In the end, their tactics were superior, and the only way to beat them was to fight just like them.
In 1677, a New Englander acknowledged that traditional tactics were pointless.
In our first war with the Indians, God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill in managing our arms after the European mode.
The guerrilla tactics they acquired from the Indians proved essential in the later fight against the British in 1776.
Campaigns against the nomadic, horse riding Plains Indians were the most difficult because, quite frankly, They were the most talented light cavalry on earth.
White soldiers stood no chance of finding Comanches without Indian guides, and even by the mid 1800s, U.S. Army campaigns were generally pointless expeditions.
The first to figure out how to track them were the early Texas Rangers, who historian S.C. Gwynn described as dirty, bearded, violent, and undisciplined men wearing buckskins, serapes, coonskin caps, sombreros, and other odd bits of clothing, who belonged to no army, wore no insignias or uniforms, made cold camps on the prairie, and were only intermittently paid.
They owed their existence to the Comanche threat.
Their methods, copied closely from the Comanche, would change frontier warfare in North America.
Under one legendary leader named Jack Hayes, the Rangers adopted a totally different strategy for fighting Indians, the only strategy that ever proved effective use Indian tactics against the Indians.
Under Hayes, the Rangers moved in small groups, trained to fight on horseback, and traveled without tents.
They used saddles for pillows and carried a rifle.
Two pistols, a knife, a Mexican blanket, and a pouch with salt, flour, tobacco, and hardtack.
They slept outside, traveled at night, and attacked by surprise.
Yet the fight was still very one-sided.
One ranger estimated that about half the Rangers were killed off every year.
These outcomes disprove the myth that guns and technology guaranteed European or American victory over the Indians.
In fact, for centuries, the firearms the Europeans were using put them at a disadvantage against the Plains Indians.
A Comanche warrior could fire 30 arrows per minute from a bow, often while riding horseback at full gallop.
The Plains Indians used shields made of thick buffalo hides that could stop bullets, even from muskets and rifles.
The lances they used against U.S. forces were also used to hunt 3,000 pound buffalo, which they did at full gallop.
According to S.C. Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon, their lances were unmatched by anything the white man had at close range.
And to make matters worse, they were better riders and had better horses than the U.S. Army.
It took hundreds of years for white men to match the speed, accuracy, reliability, and rate of fire of the Indians.
When the Spanish first encountered the Plains Indians in the mid 1500s, their primary firearm was the Harquebus, which was a big, heavy, impractical muzzle loader.
It fired a lead ball using a slow-burning match to ignite gunpowder.
Because they were over five feet long and weighed close to 12 pounds, they couldn't be reloaded on horseback.
It had to be fired from the ground.
And they didn't work in the rain.
In the 1600s and 1700s, the Spanish upgraded to flintlock escopetas, which were better to operate but were still single-shot muzzle loaders.
And they also didn't work in the rain.
After Mexico gained independence from Spain, they inherited those single-shot muskets but also upgraded To pepperbox handguns and double barreled shotguns for frontier defense in the early 1830s and 1840s, the early Americans commonly used the Springfield Model 1842, a cumbersome musket that was difficult to carry on horseback and, assuming you were an experienced shooter, could only get two to three rounds off in a minute.
It wasn't until the 1860s that breech loading single shot rifles, which were easier to load and could get 10 to 15 shots off per minute, became standard.
In the 1860s and 1870s, Lever action rifles emerged, including many brands we know today, such as Henry Spencer, Winchester, which were much more reliable and accurate than the predecessors, allowing multiple shots without reloading.
In 1836, a New Jersey inventor named Samuel Colt introduced his first production revolver, the Colt Patterson.
This was the first time, a full 300 years since the Spanish arrived, that someone had finally leveled the playing field.
The Republic of Texas immediately realized its value and placed a large order.
The gun wasn't nearly as good.
As the revolvers we have today, it was fragile, needed to be disassembled for reloading, had a folding trigger, but critically, it introduced repeating fire.
Jack Hayes and the Texas Rangers always carried two, meaning they could get ten shots off very fast.
Ten years later, one of Hayes's top aides, Samuel Walker, collaborated with Colt to design the Colt Walker, a massive five-pound, six-shot, .44 caliber revolver with a nine-inch barrel and a fixed trigger guard loading lever.
It was the most powerful revolver for nearly a century until it was displaced by the .357 Magnum during the Great Depression.
Infantry vs. Superior Indian Tactics00:04:12
However, the U.S. government didn't catch on nearly as quickly as the Texas Rangers.
As late as 1849, the U.S. Army was still attempting to use infantry to fight Plains Indians on foot.
They were complemented by U.S. Army dragoons who wore white pants and blue jackets with orange camps and armed with single-shot pistols that were totally worthless against Plains Indians.
But even with faster-loading rifles and revolvers, the U.S. was still occasionally losing battles.
On November 29th, 1872, U.S. troops attempted to force a band of Modoc Indians back to a reservation.
The Indians, who included about 50 warriors plus their families, retreated to a natural fortress in lava beds south of Tule Lake in California.
And incredibly, the Indians held their ground for five months and fought U.S. forces to a stalemate.
Even though they were vastly outnumbered.
It ended when the Modoc chief, Captain Jack, assassinated General Edward Canby during peace talks.
Captain Jack was eventually captured and executed for murder.
The Indians repeatedly proved that their tactics could overcome superior weapons.
On June 17, 1876, a U.S. Army column of more than 1,000 soldiers led by Brigadier General George Crook set off to find an Indian village.
And that morning, while stopping for breakfast, an equally large group of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors Led by Crazy Horse, ambushed Crook and his men.
They battled for six hours, and though both sides had equal numbers of casualties, the Indians had stopped Crook's advance and forced him into a retreat.
His column was neutralized for months.
Eight days later, many of the same warriors defeated George Custer at Little Bighorn.
The next year, in 1877, the Nez Perce Indians proved again that superior tactics could still overcome the Americans' newly minted and technically superior weapons.
On August 9th, the U.S. Army's 7th Infantry Regiment. Launched a surprise attack on a Nez Perce village.
Miraculously, the Nez Perce warriors repelled the attack and they captured a howitzer and forced the Americans to retreat.
As late as the 1870s, it seemed like nothing could stop Comanche raids on settlers in Texas.
In 1871, Indian raids against civilian targets were so brutal, vicious, and numerous that some American military leaders expected all the settlers to leave.
Colonel Randolph Marcy, who was on tour with William Tecumseh Sherman, wrote, If the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems in far way of becoming totally depopulated.
By 1874, Comanche raiders were hitting towns from southern Colorado to Kansas to the Texas frontier.
Pioneers were terrorized over thousands of miles.
On July 26, President Ulysses S. Grant gave General Sherman permission to crush the tribes.
Control of the reservations was transferred to the Army, and the Army was to subdue all Indians who offered resistance to constituted authority.
The peace policy was over, and a man named Ronald McKenzie Was unleashed on the Indians.
Ronald Slidell Mackenzie was known to the Indians as Bad Hand because of injuries he suffered in the Civil War.
He was tough and mean, his soldiers hated him, but he was brutally competent, and he knew better weapons were not going to guarantee victory.
So he decided, like the early Texas Rangers, to fight like an Indian.
He extensively used Tonkawa scouts, he emphasized aggressive mobility, moved at night, and engaged in deception, including leaving campfires going in places that they were leaving.
Rather than fight them in direct battle the way European powers would, Mackenzie relentlessly pursued the Indians, burned their villages, killed their livestock.
When he captured Comanche horses, he killed them, often thousands at a time.
It was total war.
In every single successful Western campaign, the U.S. Army had to use primitive methods and Indian scouts to defeat the natives.
As Mackenzie was subduing the Comanche, General George Crook was doing the same thing against the Apache, who were also raiding and pillaging settlements across the southwest.
Crook used small, mobile units consisting of Indians and Supplied himself by mule rather than wagon trains, which were extremely vulnerable.
The decline of the Yavu Pai, the Western Apaches, and the Chiricahua followed a total war campaign by the U.S. military that involved pursuing them through the winter and burning their teepees.
Smallpox Outbreaks and Total War00:15:08
The real reason the U.S. conquered the Indians had very little to do with supposedly superior technology, and it certainly wasn't tactics.
As you've seen, the Indians' tactics were far more effective.
The difference was that the U.S. Army was backed by a massive and growing country.
It was richer, more populous, had more access to mass transportation and technology.
The U.S. had better agriculture and could mass produce weapons.
It could move quickly by train.
Economic strength and better logistics is what helped America conquer the West.
But it was also by accident.
The final defeat of the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, and the Apache almost directly coincided with the decline of the great northern and southern bison herds.
Between 1868 and 1881, buffalo hunters killed 31 million buffalo.
And perhaps more devastating than anything else, the American Indians were wiped out by infectious disease.
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Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492.
He didn't really understand how diseases spread.
Back then, Europeans generally believed that people got sick from bad air.
There were some indicators that if you spent time around sick people, you'd get sick too, but that was it.
People didn't know diseases spread from germs.
They certainly didn't understand concepts like inoculation.
When the natives started getting wiped out by disease, and they truly did get wiped out, the conquistadors saw this as a sign from God that he was on their side.
By all accounts, diseases absolutely devastated the natives.
It was much more brutal than warfare.
An estimated 100,000 Aztecs were killed during the Spanish conquest.
In the decade that followed, 8 million more died from infectious disease.
Most tribes lost anywhere from a third to a half of their population.
Before 1820, roughly 30 epidemics hit the Plains Indians, including measles, malaria, whooping cough, and the flu.
Mexican raids in 1816 led to a resurgence of malaria and introduced syphilis.
In 1839, smallpox returned.
When it was brought back by Kiowas, thousands died.
Cholera, which is basically a form of extreme diarrhea, was especially brutal for the Plains Indians.
The disease first appeared in India in the early 1800s and then made its way to Europe and in 1832 arrived in the United States.
Cholera killed a lot of white people too, of course.
The Indians were exposed to it from wagon trains full of pioneers on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails.
Thousands of pioneers and 49ers died.
The Plains Indians were decimated.
Half of the Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne died.
In school, we're taught that smallpox was used as a bioweapon against American Indians.
This is considered a well settled fact among many historians, government officials, and activists.
Many of us were taught that white colonizers deliberately gave Indians blankets from hospitals that were treating smallpox patients.
Those blankets, the story goes, caused a smallpox epidemic among the Indians.
It's repeated ad nauseum in the media today.
Before the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, smallpox was in fact used as a weapon.
The problem with the story is that it never happened.
In 1736, Indians were sieging Fort Pitt, which was located near present-day downtown Pittsburgh.
The fort was about to be overrun, and as if that wasn't bad enough, the fort's hospital was home to an increasing number of smallpox patients.
This is an important point.
At the time, smallpox was killing nearly half a million Europeans every single year.
If this was bioterrorism, they were doing it wrong.
When Sir Geoffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America during the French and Indian War, Learned of the Indian siege, he sent a letter to one of his colonels.
Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?
We must, on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.
The colonel wrote back that he would try to infect the Indians with blankets, taking care, however, not to get the disease myself.
They weren't the first to think of it.
A fur trader named William wrote in his journal in 1763 that the British had given blankets from the smallpox war to two Indian diplomats.
Out of our regard to them, we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital.
I hope it will have the desired effect.
Reportedly, Trent also submitted an invoice for blankets to the British government to replace in kind those which were taken from people in hospital to convey the smallpox to the Indians.
So it's true that a couple of British officers and a trader wanted to spread smallpox through blankets, but there's no evidence that they succeeded in causing an outbreak.
Had it worked, the siege would have ended and the Indians would have moved to healthier areas.
but it lasted for many more months.
When the dignitaries at Fort Pitt met to discuss terms of surrender, the Indians who had received the blankets did not have smallpox.
It's worth noting that smallpox rarely ever spreads on surfaces, and when it does, it's substantially less dangerous.
George Washington knew this.
During the Revolutionary War, Washington ordered the first mass immunization campaign in American history where doctors rubbed small amounts of smallpox virus into the incisions that they cut in soldiers' arms.
That wasn't always effective, and it was certainly dangerous, but in general, the campaign worked.
Some historians credit the inoculation campaign for winning the war.
This is a virus that, as Washington Later demonstrated, it's substantially less dangerous when it's not inhaled into the lungs.
Even when you deliberately rub the virus into a soldier's bloodstream via the skin, it's more likely to inoculate him than to cause any kind of adverse effects.
And on top of that, it's a virus that doesn't last very long outside the body.
In human conditions, when it's contained in saliva or blister fluids, say when it's on a blanket belonging to a smallpox patient, the smallpox virus will often die within just a few hours.
The fact is, smallpox killed a lot of Indians.
killed a lot of everybody.
But they didn't catch it from blankets.
Philip Randlett, a historian at Hunter College, put it this way, quote, Since, as it appears, the smallpox at Fort Pitt originated with the Indians, the blanket gambit had to have been a complete failure.
Trying to infect Indians with smallpox that came from them in the first place was doomed to fail because the Indians vulnerable to the disease had just been exposed to it.
He also noted that, quote, plenty of evidence suggests that the smallpox virus was already dead on the unpleasant gifts.
And if Fort Pitt had been saved by the blanket stratagem, Trent would have done some gloating.
Only one conclusion can be drawn the plan flopped.
In August of 1762, a year before the smallpox blankets were supposedly distributed, the American military engineer Thomas Hutchins wrote the following journal entry from Fort Miami in Ohio.
The 20th, the above Indians met, and the chief spoke in behalf of his and the Kickapowit nations as follows Brother, we are very thankful to Sir William Johnson for sending you to inquire into the state of the Indians.
We assure you we are rendered very miserable at present on account of a severe sickness that has Seized almost all our people, many of which have died lately, and many more likely to die.
The 30th set out for the lower Shawnee town and arrived 8th of September in the afternoon.
Could not have a meeting with the Shawnees the 12th, as their people were sick and dying every day.
It's true that beginning earlier in the spring, an outbreak of smallpox was underway in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region.
That's according to Gershom Hicks, who was held captive by the Indians at the time and described what he saw in a letter to his regiment captain, William Grant.
According to Hicks' eyewitness testimony, quote, the smallpox has been very general and raging amongst the Indians since last spring.
It has killed many Mingos, Delawares, and Shawnees.
But there's no reason to believe that blankets caused this outbreak because the outbreak preceded the distribution of the blankets by several months.
So that's it.
That's the sum total of the evidence that white colonizers massacred the Indians by using smallpox blankets as a bioweapon.
Hundreds of years ago, a mercenary trader and a couple of British officers had suggested giving smallpox blankets to the Indians, and the mercenary claims he actually followed through on the attempt.
The smallpox blanket myth is yet another central story involving the American Indians that we can officially say is now debunked.
The purpose of this report is not to whitewash history or present a mirror image of the Cartoon version of Indians were taught in schools.
The reality is that the Indians were victims of some horrible things, including unnecessary and inhumane massacres, sometimes at the hands of the U.S. Army.
In 1864, with the federal government consumed by the Civil War, Sioux, Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapahoes were regularly raiding and murdering white settlements across the West.
Hundreds of white settlers were dead, some were kidnapped, wagon trains heading west were under constant siege.
Obviously, this was a major issue for the fledgling and isolated city of Denver.
That November, along the banks of Sand Creek and Southeastern Colorado Territory, a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, led by Chief Black Kettle, who had raised both an American flag and a white flag of truce in hopes of peace, awoke to the thunder of approaching hoofs as U.S. Army Colonel John M. Chivington brought a force of over 675 Colorado volunteer soldiers in a brutal, unprovoked assault on the encampment of mostly women, children, and elders.
What unfolded over the next few hours was a scene of unimaginable horror.
Soldiers charging through teepees, firing indiscriminately.
Mutilating bodies, slaughtering more than 230 Native Americans, the vast majority who were women and children.
This was despite promises of protection extended by U.S. authorities just weeks before.
The citizens of Denver were elated and saw Shivington as a hero.
He paraded through the city with Indian scalps.
The entire event, of course, was a disgrace.
But some of Shivington's own officers were appalled by the massacre.
Their accounts led to shock and moral outrage in East Coast newspapers and among the public.
There was a military commission.
and there were two congressional investigations into the massacre.
The territorial governor was forced to resign from office.
The final congressional report called it a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were victims of this cruelty.
The Sand Creek Massacre deserves to be condemned, but it's easy to forget the circumstances that white settlers were living under.
It's easy to look down on what happened today, now that there's no risk that your wife and kids are going to be scalped on their way to the local grocery store.
But life back then was very different.
In 1871, General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose middle name notably is a tribute to a legendary Indian chief, was traveling across the Salt Creek Prairie when he was spotted by Indian warriors.
He got lucky.
A medicine man called off the raid on his caravan.
A few hours later, a less lucky convoy of 10 wagons loaded with corn and supplies for Fort Griffin rumbled westward along the same route.
The Comanche massacre.
According to Captain Robert G. Carter, who witnessed the aftermath, quote, the poor victims were stripped, scalped, and horribly mutilated.
Several were beheaded and their brains scooped out.
Their fingers, toes, and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths.
And their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines.
Their bowels had been gashed with knives.
and carefully heaped upon each exposed abdomen had placed a mass of live colts, now of course extinguished by the deluge of water which was still coming down with a torrential power almost indescribable.
One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who fighting hard to the last had evidently been wounded, was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, had been slowly roasted to death, burnt to a crisp.
That he was still alive when the fiendish torture was begun was shown by his limbs being drawn up and contracted.
Congress never condemned the attack, probably because they were so common.
The Indian chiefs involved were captured, convicted, and sentenced to death, but their convictions were commuted, and they were eventually paroled.
Overwhelmingly, the cruelest attacks on the Indians came from vigilantes.
On April 30, 1871, near Camp Grant in Arizona, a peaceful encampment of Apache Indians, mostly women and children and elderly, they were asleep and under the supposed protection of a federal treaty.
But 148 Tucson citizens, Anglo Americans, Mexican Americans, and American Indian allies, infuriated by ongoing Apache raids, Massacred more than 100 Apache, kidnapped 28 children to sell into slavery, and left a horrifying scene of devastation.
President Ulysses S. Grant was infuriated and demanded a trial.
The defendants, though, were acquitted.
That was, by and large, the sad saga of the conflict between Indians and settlers.
But in the end, the United States government never committed genocide.
To the extent that tribes or bands were killed to extinction or near extinction, as was the case with the Yaqui and Yuki in California, it was at the hands of local militias or rogue pioneers, and those events were usually condemned.
By the US government.
Rather than committing genocide against the Indians, the US federal government and the taxpayers who supported it did something radically different.
It offered them land.
This must have been shocking to a Comanche or Sioux chief.
When they won wars, as we've repeatedly demonstrated, they tortured and executed the losers.
Villages were pillaged and burned.
The women were enslaved and, depending on the tribe, raped.
Enemy warriors were eaten.
But when the US finally won the Indian Wars, The treatment was quite different.
The Comanche, which was one of the last tribes to go to the reservation, ended up with millions of acres of prime cattle land.
Their chief was a mixed race man named Quana Parker.
He spent his youth murdering white settlers and committing horrifying atrocities.
But Quana Parker was never put on trial or executed for crimes against humanity.
The women and children he undoubtedly killed and scalped were never avenged.
Instead, he moved to a massive tract of valuable cattle land and became friends with General Mackenzie, the Indian warrior who subdued the Indians by fighting like an Indian.
Life as Prisoners on Reservations00:00:39
Rather than live out his life as a prisoner of war, Juana Parker became a celebrity.
He lived in a 10 room mansion.
He dined with President Roosevelt, spent time lobbying lawmakers on Indian affairs.
According to the book Empire of the Summer Moon, Juana had one of the first residential telephones in Oklahoma.
He owned a car, an ambulance, had a bodyguard, frequently traveled on a railroad that was named after him.
He appeared in a Western movie called The Bank Robbery, and rode in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade along with Geronimo, two Sioux chiefs, and a Blackfeet chief.
Life on the reservations was never perfect, but it was better than what would have happened.