Indigenous America was not the Garden of Eden. Indians like the Comanche had rich and beautiful traditions. They also practiced polygyny, raiding, murder, and rape across the continent.
European settlers killed and enslaved many Native Americans in cold blood. The natives fought back savagely with unequal weaponry and technology. But the Indians were massacred primarily by disease.
Previously I wrote that Comanche Indians were not Noble Savages. They were fierce warriors who engaged in unspeakable cruelty by modern standards. 12
The myth of the Noble Savage and the image of Black Indigenous People of Color as a sacred victim is commonly peddled by progressive activists. Yet I find myself and other libertarian/anarchist activists have also been guilty of sloppy thinking.
There was a more limited government prior to World War One in the United States and other Western countries. This was part of what enabled the Industrial Revolution. Yet it was marred by widespread corruption, imperialism, and systematic oppression.
There isn’t really a “good old days” of for us to go back to. But we can learn from our own past and other cultures to help move us forward in the future.
Today I will focus on the injustices the white settlers of America and Texas perpetrated on Native Americans. The settlers were aggravated by the depredations of Indians and particularly the Comanche tribe.
Again I warn the reader that there are graphic descriptions of violence in “Empire of the Summer Moon.” My review quotes from such passages. Author S. C. Gwynne details many times where settlers crossed the line from justifiable self-defense to genocide.
Run to the Hills: Texans go on the War Path
The first glaring story is that of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, the second President of the Republic of Texas. Mirabeau was a French-American settler who played a key part in the Texas Revolution which gained the future state its independence from Mexico.3
Lamar was the unanimous choice as the nominee of the Democratic Party for the president to succeed Sam Houston. Shortly after his election he turned his sights to drive the Cherokees and Comanches out of Texas.
What he had done that no high-ranking government official in the neighboring United States of America had ever done before was to explicitly deny that Indians in Texas had rights to any territory at all… It was an invitation to the outright slaughter of native peoples… The upshot of the Lamar presidency was an almost immediate war against all Indians in Texas….
Chief Bowles of the Cherokees agreed to leave if the government compensated his tribe for improvements they had made on the land… On July 15, 1839, [nine hundred Texas soldiers] attacked a Cherokee village. On July 16 they cornered five hundred Cherokees in a dense thicket and swamp and proceeded to kill most of them, including Chief Bowles. Two days later, the soldiers burned their villages, homes, and fields.
Former president Houston was a friend of Chief Bowles and was furious with Lamar. This shows how polarized the politics of the frontier was. Houston represented a pro-peace policy towards the Indians. Instead Lamar and his men chose violence.
Massacre of the Buffalo
The main killer of the Indian was disease brought by European settlers and their livestock. Surveyors then claimed former Indian frontier land for American settlers. Gwynne details how some Indians resigned to their fate.
In the words of one of their chiefs, Ketsumeh [of the Comanche Penateka band],
Over this vast country, where for centuries our ancestors roamed in an undisputed possession, free and happy, what have we left? The game, our main dependence, is killed and driven off, and we are forced into the most sterile and barren portions of it to starve. We see nothing but extermination left before us, and we await the result with stolid indifference. Give us a country we can call our own, where we may bury our people in quiet.
The Penateka band was the first to lose its identity and go to reservations. Then buffalo hunters arrived in the 1860’s to slaughter the natives’ main food source. This was the nail in the coffin for horse tribes like the Comanche and Kiowa.
Between 1868 and 1881 they would kill thirty-one million buffalo, stripping the plains almost entirely of the huge, lumbering creatures and destroying the last small hope that any horse tribe could be restored to its traditional life. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all…
If a buffalo saw the animal next to it drop dead it would not flee unless it could see the source of the danger. Thus one shooter with a long-range rifle could drop an entire stand of the creatures without moving. A hunter named Tom Nixon once shot 120 animals in 40 minutes. In 1873 he killed 3,200 in 35 days, making [Buffalo Bill] Cody’s once outlandish-sounding claim of 4,280 in 18 months seem paltry in comparison. Behind the hunters stood the stinking, sweating skinners, covered head to toe in blood and grease and the animal’s parasites… Except for the tongues, which were salted and shipped as a delicacy, the carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The profits, like the mass killing itself, were obscene….
The hide men were, on the whole, a nasty lot. They were violent, alcoholic, illiterate, unkempt men who were their hair long and never bathed. The skinners had body odors that defied the imagination. These plainsmen hated the Indians, and not just because they had brown skins… They believed what the government paid the Indians amounted to blackmail. “They are a lazy, dirty, lousy, deceitful race,” said hunter Emmanuel Dubbs in 1874….
Surprisingly, only a few voices cried out against the slaughter of the buffalo, which had no precedent in human history… It was simply capitalism working itself out, the exploitation of another resource. There was another, better explanation for the lack of protest, articulated best by General Phil Sheridan, then commander of the Military Division of Missouri.
These men [hunters] have done in the last two years … more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indian’s commissary…. For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy."
Colorado Christians Turn to Bloodlust
Gwynne details how Indian raids agitated the Colorado Territory. A force of local volunteers retaliated in the Sand Creek Massacre. It is one of the most heinous atrocities in American military history.
Wikipedia details how they murdered and mutilated hundreds of peaceful Indians including women and children. John Chivington and his men also took scalps and many other human body parts as trophies including unborn fetuses as well as genitalia.4
A preacher turned territorial officer named J. M Chivington presided over the bloodiest, most treacherous, and least justified slaughter of Indians in American history. It would pass into legend and infamy under the name of the Sand Creek Massacre. Cheyennes were the victims….
The Cheyenne and Comanche attacks of the summer and fall had created a feeling of grim panic in the streets of Denver. Citizens were desperate, sometimes hysterical, everyone knew someone who had been attacked or killed. Whatever sympathy the horse tribes may once have inspired was gone. The idea was now to annihilate them, both in retribution for what they had done and to prevent future attacks. Chivington was their champion and he believed God was on his side…
He spoke enthusiastically of “taking scalps and “wading in gore.”
Damn any man who sympathizes with the Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and I believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.
Those were the words of John Chivington. To paraphrase Gwynne’s description: after the massacre some disgusted soldiers told their story to the press. But other victors bragged proudly of what they had done. Denver newspapers in fact were full of praise.
The details of the massacre had tremendous impact on the Indian policy in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. The outcry in the eastern states was not echoed on the frontier. Decades of conflict had hardened western folks’ hearts towards the natives.
I often admire religious folks. It’s beautiful to see peoples’ conviction spur them to raise families and preserve tradition over millennia. Yet the moral tenants of religion are cast aside by adherents at war.
Widespread Corruption in Indian Affairs
William Tecumseh Sherman was a Union Army general during the American Civil War. He earned recognition for his command of military strategy. But he was criticized for his harsh scorched-earth policies against the Confederate States.5
In 1867 President Grant gave General Sherman a mandate to bring peace to the southern Great Plains by relocating the Indians to reservations. The Indian Peace Commission was responsible for negotiating the treaty. Native tribes were assigned smaller reservations than were defined by the previous 1865 treaty. Treaties were required to be ratified by a vote of native men. No such vote happened.
At Medicine Lodge, Comanche Chief Ten Bears gave an address that foretold his tribe’s future.
If the Texans had kept out of my country there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die. Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten. I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children, and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Father. I want no blood upon my land to stain the grass. I want it all clear and pure and I wish it so that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in and leave it when they go out.
Gwynne details the effects of the Medicine Lodge treaty on the Indians. He shows how the Office of Indian Affairs failed to live up to its end of the bargain. Emphasis is mine:
Medicine Lodge provided the framework for the last great betrayal of the Indians by a government that had betrayed and lied to Native American tribes more times than anyone could possibly count. The agent of the betrayal was the Office of Indian Affairs, one of the most corrupt, venal, and incompetent government agencies in American history….
Several thousand Kiowas and Comanches actually showed up at the agency in the winter of 1867-68, precisely what [office agent J. H. Leavenworth] wanted. But for some reason they had failed to anticipate that these Indians would need food. Shockingly, Medicine Lodge had not provided for Indian rations, and so the government had nothing to give them. Nor did it have any of the promised annuity goods… The Indians were disgusted, and furious….
None of these failures could be blamed on the tangled government bureaucracy. They were the product of the endemic corruption and graft for which the Indian office had justly became infamous by the 1860s. The Indian peace commission of 1867 had been so scandalized by what they found out in the various agencies that they wrote:
“The records are abundant to show that agents have pocketed the funds appropriated by the government and driven the Indian to starvation. It cannot be doubted that Indian wars have originated from this cause…. For a long time these officers have been selected from partisan ranks, not so much on account of honesty and qualification as for devotion to party interests and their willingness to apply the money of the Indian to promote the selfish schemes of local politicians.”
Given the lack of food on the reservations, the Comanche and Kiowa tribes turned again to raiding other Indian tribes as well as settlers. The Grant administration deployed General Ranald Mackenzie to finish the Indian Wars.6
Mackenzie’s forces applied the lesson’s learned by the Texas Rangers in their wars for independence and against the Comanches. This included mounted combat, the use of the Colt pistol, and employment of Tonkawa Indian scouts.
The “Tonks” were a tribe from Oklahoma. They had a reputation for ritual cannibalism against defeated enemies. Further, they were aligned with the Confederacy during the Civil War. A league of pro-Union tribes including the Comanche massacred the Tonkawas. After migrating to Texas, the Tonkawa harbored a hatred of the Comanche. The Tonkawa collaborated with the Rangers against the Comanche.7
Mackenzie took the fight to the Comanche and gained victory at the battle of Blanco Canyon. His men showed restraint. But the fury of the Tonkawa could not be controlled.
In historical terms, Mackenzie’s victory was stunning… Unlike Chivington’s drunken thugs, though, his men also knew restraint. They had been under orders to try to avoid killing women, children, and old men… The other side, predictably, had a somewhat different account. Captive Herman Lehmann, who was with the Comanches at the time, wrote:
“We arrived the next day after the fight and found the dead bodies scattered about. I remember finding the body of Batsena, a very brave warrior, lying mutilated and scalped, and alongside of him was the horribly mangled remains of his daughter, Nookie, a beautiful Indian maiden, who had been disemboweled and scalped. The bodies presented a revolting sight…. Other bodies were mutilated too, which showed the hand of the Tonkaway in the battle.
The Native American tribes like the Comanche and Tonkawa engaged in grisly war tactics. European settlers followed suit. “Empire of the Summer Moon” is a captivating history of violence and beauty on America’s plains.
Lose Your Illusions and Gain Intellectual Self-Defense
History is complex. One person who I’ve learned from tremendously is forensic historian Richard Grove. Richard is a reader, thinker and content creator who dives deep into controversial topics to discover the truth. Richard hosts a variety of free events as well as the flagship Autonomy course and weekly Grand Theft World podcast.
You can discover proven methods to lose your illusions and gain intellectual self defense. Discern truth, navigate tough conversations, and protect yourself from hidden agendas and mind control.
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