#title Matt Walsh Hates Indigenous People
#author Atun-Shei Films
#date Jun 18, 2026
#source <[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIKUpIuYUVE][www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIKUpIuYUVE]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-07-14T09:40:36.112Z
#topics indigenous, history,
#notes This is a simple automatic transcript that’s useful for word searching and for helping people find this video by the topics included. It has been slightly cleaned up, however if anyone so desires to clean it up further, you’re welcome to do so.
The Daily Wire, a fascist propaganda outlet funded by fossil fuel money, released another racist history “documentary,” this time arguing how colonialism was cool actually. But what could the fossil fuel industry possibly have to gain by demonizing Native Americans? HMMMM...
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[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIKUpIuYUVE]]
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*** Introduction
The secret to a great cocktail on a hot summer day, a little bit of Italian ice. Just drop it right ******* in there. You will thank me later. That’s a good cocktail. It’s going to be probably the only good thing about my evening because I am watching Matt Walsh’s new documentary, which is now called “What Schools Don’t Teach You About American Indians”. It was called something else, but it wasn’t getting any views, so he changed the title.
So one thing I want to dispel just right away is the idea that this documentary is in any way a good faith attempt to educate the public about history.
The Daily Wire, the billion dollar production company that Matt Walsh works for was initially funded by seed money from fossil fuel executives. The reason it exists is to spread culture war nonsense to divide the working class from realizing what these executives are doing to our communities and our planet. You know, and as long as we’re squabbling among ourselves, then we can’t take care of them.
Matt Walsh is, I think, doing this knowingly and even if he is just some sort of like useful idiot, he is still taking millions of dollars of billionaire Epstein class money to spread these racist, untrue anti-intellectual narratives and considering especially that the fossil fuel industry is the primary cause of climate catastrophe and Earth’s 6th mass extinction that’s currently ongoing, I think you could make a very good argument that Matt Walsh is committing crimes against humanity.
Personally, I think that he should be arrested for those crimes and thrown in prison.
Now, when I said that in my last video, a number of you went to the comments to complain about how I was illiberal because I said that Matt Walsh belongs in prison just for free speech, man.
Well, free speech...
kind of has limits though, right? And I’m not talking about like saying something racist and getting fired.
I’m talking about like screaming fire in a crowded theater and there’s also a difference between holding these opinions privately and undertaking a highly financed, targeted disinformation campaign designed to further the interests of the fossil fuel vampires who are actively killing us all.
Right? I think there’s like a bit of a difference there.
If we’re talking about, you know, your, sort of garden variety neo-Nazi.
just walking around in the world believing what he believes, I agree.
I think that he should be able to do that and in fact, I think he should be able to march up and down the street with his Nazi flag so he can let everybody know what a ******* idiot and a ******* he is.
I mean, that’s what it means to live in a free, pluralistic society.
But at some point, when you were using the resources of corporate America, one of the biggest and most efficient and most elaborate power structures that the world has ever seen, practically nations unto themselves, to spread misinformation that you know is going to harm people and is going to ******* wipe out most of the ******* life on this planet eventually, then it’s not free speech, is it? It’s a crime against humanity.
Anyway, let’s watch this stupid ******* Nazi documentary.
*** Civilization
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.
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.
How do you define civilization? Clearly Walsh is defining it pretty myopically simply as early modern and modern European society and this is, I think, really dumb.
Obviously there’s measurable differences between a society like the Native American nations of the Eastern Woodlands at the time of early colonization and, 21st century America.
Obviously, there’s sort of measurable differences, but there’s also big differences, like definitional differences, between, say, the Native American nations of the Eastern Woodlands at the time of colonization and, you know, the British nations at the time of Roman colonization.
right? Even though I think traditionally, way back, 19th, 20th century historiography, traditionally people have sort of viewed those cultures as like in similar stages of development.
History is not like a video game age of empires tech tree.
You know what I mean? There’s not sort of this predetermined kind of course of how societies develop.
You know, you look at sort of Eastern Woodlands, indigenous people, indigenous people of pre-Roman Britain, even though they were both like tribal, I think to kind of categorize them as sort of just Stone Age or primitive is a flattening of all sorts of the different sort of societal, hierarchical, social, economic, cultural sort of details and nuances.
of those societies.
It’s just a very gross simplification.
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.
So unfortunately, I think Walsh is jumping off of a very real historical grievance that many reasonable people, including myself, have.
the, what I’ll call the sort of ecological Indian myth.
I made a whole video about it.
It’s the longest video on this channel.
It’s 2 hours long, which, you know, kind of portrays, I mean, we’ve all seen it in media, you know, where it portrays Native Americans as being in harmony with the land, as being essentially these sort of cartoonish environmental stewards, these people with this sort of innate, understanding of ecology and of non-human nature and all this sort of stuff and I think that’s essentialist and pretty racist and again, it also kind of flattens the complexities of those societies.
I mean, Native American nations definitely had a much more advanced conception of ecology than colonial societies did.
They had very ingenious methods of conservation, which again, I think kind of complicates this whole like civilization versus primitivity binary that Walsh is presenting to us because like, I would argue that a society that... brings cows and pigs into a landscape and lets them run wild and fells forests and to sell the lumber and basically and brings a bunch of invasive species and just like clears the landscape and clears everything in it and just ******* levels it so they can basically terraform, you know, ******* Surrey and Suffolk and East Anglia onto an ecosystem that’s already there.
Like, I wouldn’t call that civilized.
I certainly wouldn’t call that, you know, whatever that means.
I certainly wouldn’t call that moral or intelligent.
You know, that said, indigenous people also had lots of differences.
They could also be very destructive to their environment.
I kind of shudder to think what Walsh is going to make of this.
I think he’s going to kind of use the legitimate examples of, historical examples of Native Americans, kind of being ecologically reckless or kind of ******* up, you know, and sort of not living up to that stereotype and basically use that to portray them as, you know, ******* bloodthirsty savages instead of the complicated human beings who they were and are.
According to the book, War Before Civilization by archaeologist Lawrence H.
Keeley, somewhere between 90 and 95% 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.
It is absolutely true that Native American nations were pretty much constantly at war with each other, as far as we know.
Obviously, a lot of this information comes after colonization where we kind of start to see written records, we see Europeans kind of going in and compiling a lot of this anthropological information.
But at least in the Eastern Woodlands and throughout much of what is today the contiguous United States, this warfare was almost always low level.
So it was defined by raid and counter raid, by battles in which actually not a lot of people would actually be killed and in fact, a lot of these nations had sort of these sort of ceremonial kind of aspects to warfare where, captives were sort of more important than sort of wiping out your enemy.
having, taking lots of captives and, enslaving people would be sort of a sign of like toughness, of honor, of sort of your own power.
there wasn’t sort of, there was rarely kind of this genocidal intent that pervades so much of Eurasian warfare, before the Industrial Revolution.
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.
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.
So basically what he’s doing here is just a gish gallop of shocking scenes of indigenous violence against settlers.
There was quite a lot of indigenous violence against settlers.
No one reasonable denies that.
But this is an age-old colonial propaganda tactic.
By focusing on the the most shocking, the most depraved, the most brutal kind of example of these interactions and of the sort of warfare between these people, it essentially justifies indigenous people subjugation, right? It’s not a complete picture of these people and these cultures.
You could maybe argue that he’s sort of like trying to go the other direction or kind of correct the narrative.
But again, what you have to remember is that this is not a good faith attempt to educate.
This is racist propaganda designed to make you hate indigenous people, to play to your worst impulses and the goal is, of course, to further the interests of fossil fuel companies who would like nothing more than for, land defenders and various indigenous nations to get the **** *** their land so they could build a ******* pipeline through it or whatever the ****.
That’s what’s going on here.
So the focus on indigenous cannibalism is also very old, very tired.
I’ve made several videos about this.
Basically, when colonized people, you know, commit cannibalism, Essentially, what this does psychologically in the mind of the colonizer is it lessens, it puts those colonized people sort of below the threshold of humanity and into the realm of animality, right? It animalizes them.
animals in the colonial perception are acceptable targets of violence.
There was cannibalism, sure, in some indigenous societies, not that much, certainly not like what he’s sort of implying here and you know, I hate to use whataboutism, but I will just this one time, just because you know, it’s not a, I personally, I don’t judge anybody for a little bit of cannibalism, so you know, whatever, it’s no skin off my back.
which is that Europeans, at the time that he’s speaking of, had an extensive cottage industry of medical cannibalism.
Ground up mummies and human bones were sold widely as medical cures.
So, you know, one could just as easily be like, oh, these ******* white people grinding up mummies and sniffing them for, you know, syphilis.
whatever the ****.
it’s just like, that wouldn’t be a very complete picture of European society in the early modern era, would it? This is, again, just such a flattening of these cultures and this people.
It’s such a one-dimensional portrayal.
Like, it would be like describing the Norse.
just as like brutal, bloodthirsty pirates.
I mean, they were also poets and farmers and great sailors and explorers.
Like, there was so much more to that culture and it’s such a ******* travesty.
It’s such a ******* injustice that he’s ******* doing this ******* stupid ****.
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.
So, obviously, colonialism disrupted the indigenous economy.
It disrupted indigenous foodways.
It made indigenous people much more materially uncertain.
So, yes, Obviously it increased violence.
That is what happens in times of material uncertainty is there is increased violence.
There is increased competition for resources.
This is like history 101.
Do you understand me? This is like very ******* basic ****.
So what happens when Europeans arrive on the eastern seaboard of this continent is they bring with them a bunch of trade goods.
Now, in the Eastern Woodlands, indigenous society, trade goods are so important.
This is a nomadic society.
Trade goods that you can carry with you, especially like ornamentation.
This is the sign of status, much more so than like land or owning animals or anything that really mattered to Europeans at the time.
So when Europeans show up with these amazing items, of course, these indigenous people immediately want them and immediately start trading for them.
So there becomes this very strong incentive for indigenous societies to buy into the European market economy and once that domino falls, then Europeans can basically dictate the terms of these interactions, right? You see this specifically with the fur trade, unbelievably disruptive to, you know, basically the entire continent of North America, where you have Europeans Demanding that indigenous people find them beaver pelts, so that to continue the trade of these items that are so high status now in indigenous society, as well as...
specifically sort of weaponry, specifically firearms, which very, very quickly, like almost as soon as there are populous colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America, become a necessity for national sovereignty for indigenous people.
Once indigenous people become dependent on the European market economy, then everything changes.
Everything changes.
You know, pre-colonial polities, of North America go the way of the dodo.
New confederacies, new nations, new coalitions of indigenous people come together.
I mean, by the time of the American Revolution, basically every organized political kind of, you know, nation or society or band or tribe or whatever you want to call it is post-colonial.
So it is utterly ignorant.
It is like shockingly ******* stupid to argue that there was any kind of continuity in indigenous society before colonization and after it and yes, absolutely, indigenous society became much more violent after colonization, both to Europeans and to each other.
That is unquestionable.
Almost all new settlements formed in eastern North America from 900 to 1400 AD were fortified and this is because around that time, Mississippi and Indians from the Midwest and the South were moving east and in constant conflict with the tribes they were encountering.
So this does nothing to argue against the idea that violence increased after colonization.
No one is arguing that there was no violence prior to colonization, only that it increased.
What’s happening here is, of course, that the Cahokia collapsed, that the Mississippian societies collapsed somehow.
We don’t quite know how.
So yeah, a lot of them did move E.
There was a period of warfare for a time.
There was a period of uncertainty.
There was also a period of, dare I say, degrowth, where the urban dwelling Mississippian cultures broke up into much smaller societies that, is kind of the sort of eastern seaboard of North America that Europeans eventually found, was this kind of like society that essentially had consciously, or not, rejected urban living and kind of, I guess, empire building, if you could call Cahokia an empire, in favor of much more decentralized non-hierarchical societies based on kinship networks.
That’s the world that Europeans stumble across.
Do you see how much more interesting indigenous history actually is than the way that these ******* fascists are portraying it? Do you see how much of A disservice that he’s doing? Like, never mind the ******* racism.
Do you understand like how he thinks you’re a ******* idiot? Like, truly, he thinks you’re such a ******* moron.
Not only were the Indians committing a 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.
Prehistoric periods could literally be thousands of years of history? So that essentially tells us nothing.
*** Lawrence Keeley
Let’s find this fucking book. He’s referenced it a number of times. *War Before Civilization* by Lawrence Keeley.
Hey, I just went to the bathroom, but I’ve been sitting here actually for like 15 minutes reading this book, and it’s actually pretty good.
So essentially what this guy, Lawrence Keeley, is trying to do, he’s writing in the 90s, and essentially he’s kind of responding to this idea that I basically just said, which is that as he calls it, “primitive war”, which is the title of the fucking dinosaur movie and should not be fucking seriously used in scholarship because like this whole idea of primitive versus civilized is entirely problematic and semantic and kind of means nothing, or at the very least means a different things to each people and is like full of fucking Eurocentric bias.
So yeah, there’s kind of a lot to dig in here, but he’s sort of basically saying that he’s presenting a bunch of evidence that ‘no, in fact, modern, I’ll just say, industrial and post-industrial warfare is less violent on average than sort of pre-industrial warfare.’
I’m definitely going to sit down and read this whole thing at some point because I don’t agree, but this guy seems pretty smart, seems like he’s got a good head on his shoulders, and I want to know, I want to know what his arguments are.
It’s interesting, he’s kind of making this comparison between the sort of Rousseauian view of the, you know, the Aum Sauvage, the savage man, you know, that basically humanity is inherently good and that society kind of corrupts him. But basically he’s kind of arguing that the opposite is true, sort of this kind of Hobbesian from what I understand...
Again, I’m just kind of skimming here. I’ll sit down and read the whole book later, which, again, seems very interesting and it’s free on The Ted K Archive. Thanks, Theo, for uploading this, if this was you.
So, yeah, this sort of is taking this kind of Hobbesian view that, you know, that humans are inherently ****** ** perverted little creatures and, you know, and must be governed.
So here’s a really interesting quote from the conclusion of this book that I want to read to you guys.
So Keeley says,
The real weakness of precivilized war making has been at the highest strategic level, rooted in the weaker logistic capacities imposed by small populations, slim economic surpluses, and limited transportation capacities. These true deficiencies, all determined by the social and economic features inherent in tribal life itself, have made it almost impossible for tribal warriors to conduct planned campaigns and prolonged sieges. It was the concentration of resources and power in hierarchical political organizations, the millions of cannon-fodder citizens subject to their disposal, the galleon, compass and sextant, the ox-wagon, steam engine, railroads, and factory production, as well as smallpox, measles, and weeds, that allowed the nations of western Europe to gain ascendancy over the “uncivilized” world during the past half-millennium.
He doesn’t put quotes on uncivilized. Tellingly, I do.
It was *not* the much discussed and theatrical weaponry, discipline, and tactical techniques that gave soldiers their eventual triumphs, but their mastery of the rather pedestrian arcana of logistics.
Very interesting, very interesting. Keeley argues that primitive societies would have done large-scale warfare if they could. I would argue that they had no reason to.
Saying that people will always do the worst possible thing in the right circumstances is, first off, pretty dismal and second of off, it ignores the real reason that people do horrible things, which is because they have an incentive to do them.
*** Disaster Anarchy
You know, in 2005, here in New Orleans, there was basically no state for like, I don’t know, like 3 months or something. No law, no order, people had to fend for themselves. They were on their own, right? Basically, modern life, the modern supply chain as we know it was gone.
You would think, and it was widely reported at the time, but almost all of the stories ended up being false, that people would, just fall into debauchery, that there would be rape and murder and crime, and people would, attack each other and fight over resources and all that kind of stuff.
What happened instead? People came together. People met up at bars. There’s a bar in my neighborhood that was like a meeting place for people during the storm where people camped out, where they shared resources, where they helped each other.
At the abandoned hospital where we shot most of my movie, which is coming out later this year, it’s a good excuse for me to plug it, The Vampires of New Orleans, the abandoned hospital where we shot Lindy Boggs Medical Center, one male nurse stayed behind with everybody’s pets when all the people who had fled to the hospital for safety got evacuated.
Wasn’t mass rape, wasn’t mass murder.
None of that happened.
Didn’t happen and in fact, when these things do happen, both today and historically, when people do commit murder, commit genocide, commit acts of violence, do horrible things, they’ve got to think up justifications for it.
Humans are really good at, we’re really good about this.
We’re really good at doing this.
We invent elaborate justifications to get over our natural cognitive dissonance that our conscience that is trying to prevent us from doing bad things.
We have to talk ourselves out of that so that we can do them.
You have to dehumanize your enemies in war.
You have to create hierarchies.
So some life is more privileged than others and the non-privileged life, well, that’s just, you know, whatever.
We can just do whatever we want to them.
Because it’s like in our perception, in our ******* minds, where all of this ******* hierarchy **** exists, all of this ******* nation state **** exists, it’s only ******* here.
We’ve got to think about this stuff and that’s why we ******* go overseas and ******* bomb brown kids and that’s why we ******* are destroying the biosphere of this planet.
That’s why we do all these ******* horrible things, because we’ve invented stories in our own ******* minds that justify them.
This is so telling.
This is so foundational.
to the ideology of somebody like Matt Walsh, to the conservative and neo-fascist mind.
They are so misanthropic.
Some of you ******* idiots think I’m misanthropic because I like don’t think we should kill 80 billion chickens a year.
But you ******* idiots, you don’t ******* know misanthropic.
You wouldn’t know it if it ******* slapped you in the face with its ******* ****.
These are the ******* misanthropes.
They think that humans are inherently bad, that they’re born sinners, that they’re, that just, if they had no civilization, if there were no rules, that they would just go ******* wild and rape and murder and ******* do all these horrible things, and that it’s rules and authority that prevent them from doing these things.
Everybody’s born a sinner and if you only if you work very, very hard and do exactly what daddy tells you to do, can you possibly have the opportunity to be saved.
That’s what these people believe.
Well, I reject that because I don’t think we need these stories.
I don’t think we need these ******* rules.
I don’t think we need any of this.
I think that if we’re just left on our own in community with each other, things will actually just work out.
Because I don’t think that anybody naturally wants to harm anybody else.
They do it when they feel like they have to and when they’ve invented stories to justify doing it.
That’s the abandoned hospital, by the way and because I know you’re dying to see what it looks like inside, here’s a behind-the-scenes clip from the Vampires of New Orleans, coming fall 2026.
I’m terrified.
Like, I felt this immediate weight walking in here.
Like, just like...
New Orleans feels primed for telling vampire stories.
We’re, what, 10 grand, 15 grand over Budget V? Yeah.
It was crazy.
There was a lot of goo, a lot of bodily fluids.
But, you know, we got our shots, we think.
You know, moment of truth comes in the editing room.
Take three hard.
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.
My ******* God, this is so stupid.
Well, when Ken Burns mentioned that Einstein discovered the theory of relativity, he failed to mention that one time he also *********** into a dish towel.
Like, so? what? Like, what are democracies not capable of torturing people to death? Somebody ******* tell Dick Cheney that.
Another pervasive myth about Native Americans combines 2 contradictory ideas into one.
Native Americans had no concept of property rights, particularly over land, and that Europeans stole the land from them.
Okay, so there is no contradiction here.
What Walsh is describing basically loses the nuance of what was actually at play in these land deals and these interactions.
Private property is something very specific.
That is a very specific concept that is European and colonial, especially as it regards, as it relates, excuse me, to the legal system, right? The legal enforcement of private property.
That is a very specific concept.
It is different from the idea of personal property.
It is different from the idea of communal, national property, which is what was at play in these land disputes.
Europeans often understood this difference, unlike Matt Walsh.
You know, you often hear, especially in New England, you know, people will say like, oh, well, you know, most of this land was like bought legally and that’s true, like under the European legal system, but many of the people writing these contracts were very aware that this was not an equitable exchange.
They were very aware that the indigenous people on the other side of the table didn’t quite understand what the European, like what they were really agreeing to.
or rather that the indigenous people at the other side of the table thought that they were agreeing to something else than the European did.
So, it’s not a contradiction.
Matt Walsh is just a ******* idiot.
I’m sorry, I take that back.
He’s not an idiot.
He knows exactly what he’s doing.
He’s a stooge for the fossil fuel industry and for the billionaire class and he is basically trying to incite a pogrom.
This is a ******* passion play.
It’s a passion play.
Just like the passion plays in the Middle Ages stirred up pogroms against the Jews.
This is a passion play meant to stir up hatred and violence for indigenous people who, by the way, are murdered at a shockingly higher rate than other groups in this ******* country.
There are literally *******.
How many ******* thousands? Hundreds of thousands of ******* missing and murdered indigenous women? A 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice found that more than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women, 84.3%, have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56.1% who have experienced sexual violence.
These are people who are statistically overwhelmingly, more likely than not, who are going to experience getting beaten up, getting raped, getting ******* murdered and Matt Walsh is stirring up more violence against them.
This guy belongs in ******* prison.
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 away 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 26th, 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.
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.
This is very interesting because in a way he’s being quite complementary to Native Americans, right? He is emphasizing their military skill, portraying Native Americans as basically, you know, winning, you know, in the, you know, Indian Wars of the West.
In fact, this is like, this is so much like that Whitest Kids You Know skit where the Native Americans basically forced the Europeans to kill them all.
Settlers: There’s no need to be rash, Indians. We’re getting in our boats and we’re leaving.
Natives: If you go back without killing us all, we’re gonna follow you back to Europe and rape all your babies. Then we’re gonna rape all the babies in the world.
That is too ******* funny. But of course, everything about this is wrong.
So essentially kind of what he’s leaving out, you know, he glosses over the genocide of the buffalo, when in fact that was the primary tactic, right? I mean, Sherman and Sheridan knew that they had, that the indigenous people of the Great Plains were dependent on the buffalo for literally everything.
So you kill the buffalo and you kill the Indians.
It was as simple as that.
Also, and you know, of course, Matt Walsh would never mention this because he is a stooge of corporate America and yeah, just a ******* useful idiot for capitalism.
he would never mention, of course, the strong capitalist motives for the conquest of the West, namely the animal agriculture industry, the beef industry.
The West today is defined by cattle ranching, and the meat industry very consciously helped orchestrate the genocide of the buffalo, and in turn, obviously, the genocide of the plains nations.
so that they could have grazing land.
Okay, I’m done with this.
That was really ******* bad.
*** Conclusion
So to sum up, to sum up, Walsh is advancing a very particular philosophical viewpoint, you know, the viewpoint of this guy, Lawrence Keeley, which I think, you know, Keeley seems to argue it much better than Walsh does, obviously, but obviously it’s a very dismal view of human nature, you know, we need, he’s arguing we need civilization, we need authority, and we need structure to protect us from ourselves.
Not surprising, right, I guess, in terms of this time of rising authoritarianism, right? I mean, this video really is a defense of authoritarianism and of civilization and I want to wrap up here by just addressing a concern that some of you brought to me in the last Matt Walsh response video, which is like, oh, is this a lot of hand wringing about like, oh, is this helpful? Oh, is this, you know, you’re being so mean and so dismissive.
You know, what does this actually do? You’re not going to convince any conservatives, you know, that Matt Walsh is wrong and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, I guess what I have to say to that is that people like me, history and science communicators, people fighting against pseudoscience and historical misinformation, have been making videos that have been designed to deradicalize people and to sort of like gently coax fascists and conservatives into, the light of evidence-based reason for a long time.
I mean, really since Gamergate, right, that this has been like a thing.
It’s been more than 10 years at this point that this, that content creators have sort of embarked upon this mission and I guess what I have to say is, how’s that working out? Is that working out pretty well?
So, just to clarify this bit, I am continually frustrated how much we center the feelings and sensibilities of mediocre white sword bros, especially in the history community, that we baby these people, we coddle them, as though changing their minds is the most important thing in the world, when I simply think that the reason that we find ourselves at this authoritarian fascist impasse is because people are scared and frightened.
They’re angry because they have material uncertainty, because they can’t ******* afford to live and it’s the wealth inequality and unusual and severe weather patterns exacerbated by climate change that is causing people to lose faith in institutions and embrace magical thinking and embrace authoritarian politics.
Changing people’s mind, one, you know, mind at a time, is quite simply just not the best way to solve that problem.
We need to attack that problem at the root, which is to address their economic insecurity.
I think this is quite a bit like the period of the witch trials, for instance, I’ve talked about on this channel before also, that periods of witch hysteria often coincided to extreme and unusual weather.
as well as economic insecurity.
So, you know, it’s not that I think that this whole project of getting good information to the masses is useless, but my feelings about it have certainly changed.
I’m not saying that no one should post online.
I’m not saying that there’s...
You know, Taylor Lorenz kind of famously says, Oh, we shouldn’t cede the internet to the fascists.
But, you know...
I think you can do a little bit of, you can do some harm reduction with master’s tools, but you can’t tear down master’s house with master’s tools and the tech companies since 2024 have said, we’re taking a right-hand turn, and we want right-wing voices to be amplified, and we want left-wing voices, we want scientists, we want historians, and we want educated people silenced.
The fight isn’t on your phone.
It’s not in a ******* YouTube video.
It’s not in a ******* whatever, Doctor Who and Colonialism, Part 7, The Reckoning.
Not in any of that ****.
It’s out there.
It’s out there in the real world.
That’s where it’s actually going to happen and that’s where we’ve got the best shot.
Earlier tonight, I went to my local DSA chapter.
We started this little eco-socialist working group.
And, you know, just talking for two hours and chilling.
just hanging out.
We immediately set upon a plan to help this one guy in the city with his community garden.
Not enough volunteers are coming out to clean it up, so we’re going to go clean it up for him.
That’s 2 hours of my time.
That’s less time that I’m going to spend working on this video and we’re actually going to win something.
We’re actually going to accomplish something.
Stark times we’re living in.
Stay safe.
Get ready and keep fighting.
** Appendix: What Schools Don’t Teach You About American Indians
**Author:** Matt Walsh
**Views as of July 2026:** 3,941,620
**Date:** Apr 2, 2026
**Source:** <[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxapaXrHr1Y][www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxapaXrHr1Y]]>
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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.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Intro/Trail of Tears Myth
06:57 The “Peaceful Indian” Myth
14:19 Colonization escalated violence?
21:47 Counting Coup, Scalping, & becoming a War Chief
26:16 Indians & Property Rights
30:01 The Fort Parker Massacre
32:50 American Indian War Tactics
41:30 The Rise of Texas Rangers
43:28 Guns that Won the West
46:07 Major Indian Victories
49:55 How the US Finally Won
51:33 The Smallpox Blanket Myth
59:02 It Wasn’t a “Genocide”
📚 Reference Books:
- On the Border With Mackenzie https://a.co/d/03avxFNs
- War Before Civilization https://a.co/d/0884bcs6
- Nine Years Among the Indians https://a.co/d/08rYwyPJ
- Empire of the Summer Moon https://a.co/d/0hWoL564
- Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border https://a.co/d/099FtX7J
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[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxapaXrHr1Y]]
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*** Intro/Trail of Tears Myth
If you grew up in the United States in the past 50 years, then 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, you might have 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 7 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 Echota 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.
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.
13 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 three cents an acre and Russia received two 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 defiant 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 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.
And, 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 1 by 1 the biggest myths about the Native Americans.
This is the real history of the American Indians.
*** The “Peaceful Indian” Myth
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 inter-tribal and frontier warfare, I have to use real historical examples and 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 they 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 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% 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 enemy’s 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 captains.
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 100 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 Ansermo 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 Takawa 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 Tankawa.
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 brush wood and piled the living, dying and dead Tankawas 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.
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 we’re 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.
Texas Rangers were there with them and likely would have witnessed this.
*** Colonization escalated violence?
So 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.
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’s 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.
Gwyn’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.
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 *** 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 were often presented as a sophisticated tribe, who, according to the documentarian Ken Burns, influenced against 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.
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.
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 1,000-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 Kuwawa 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, ****** 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, which 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 Jicarilla 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.
*** Counting Coup, Scalping, & becoming a War Chief
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.
Well, 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 sub-Arctic 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. Caliber man killed and mutilated by the Southern Cheyenne in 1867.
Tribes in Colombia 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 Big Horn 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 Arapaho split their enemies’ noses.
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 evolved demonstrating extreme bravery by touching or striking a living enemy warrior in battle with a hand, bow, whip, or special acoustic, and then escaping unharmed.
This act was considered the highest honor in inter-tribal 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 He 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 that 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.
*** Indians & Property Rights
Another pervasive myth about Native Americans combines 2 contradictory ideas into one.
Native Americans had no concept of property rights, particularly over land, and that Europeans stole the land from them.
Well, 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.
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.
It’s 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 Barbare Neo-Chumash in California, the tribe had just had two of their villages massacred and burned, killing 10% 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.
Most 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 inter-tribally.
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 at 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.
*** The Fort Parker Massacre
On the morning of May 19th, 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.
That 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 they 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 platted rope around the child’s neck and drew its naked body into the large hedges of prickly pear cacti, which were from eight 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 100 yards.
Until my little innocent one was not only dead, but literally torn to pieces.
This is how the Comanche and many Indians fought.
*** American Indian War Tactics
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 sub-Arctic 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, quote, 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.
The 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 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 6 1/2 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, quote, 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.
as 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.
Revey 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, 2 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 25th, 1876, the most famous and devastating defeat in the Indian Wars happened at the Battle of Little Big Horn, where in less than an hour, George Custer and every man under his immediate command 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 Rise of Texas Rangers
The first to figure out how to track them were the early Texas Rangers, who historian S.C.
Gwen described as dirty, bearded, violent, and undisciplined men wearing buckskins, cerapes, 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, 2 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 disproved 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.
The 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. Gwynn’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.
*** Guns that Won the West
When the Spanish first encountered the Plains Indians in the mid-1500s, their primary firearm was the Harquebus, which was a big, heavy, impractical muzzleloader who fired a lead ball using a slow-burning match to ignite gunpowder.
Because they were over 5 feet long and weighed close to 12 pounds, they couldn’t be reloaded on horseback and 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 muzzleloaders 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, 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 Paterson.
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 2, meaning they could get 10 shots off very fast.
Ten years later, one of Hayes’ top aides, Samuel Walker, collaborated with Colt to design the Colt Walker, a massive five-pound, six-shot, forty-four 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.
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.
*** Major Indian Victories
On November 29, 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, 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 17th, 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 and 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 away of becoming totally depopulated.
In 1874, Comanche raiders were hitting towns from southern Colorado to Kansas to the Texas frontier.
Pioneers were terrorized over thousands of miles.
On July 26th, 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.
peace policy was over and a man named Renald McKenzie was unleashed on the Indians.
Renald Slidell McKenzie 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, McKenzie 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.
Cook used small mobile units consisting of Indians and supplied himself by a 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.
*** How the US Finally Won
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.
*** The Smallpox Blanket Myth
When 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 a decade that followed, 8 million more died from infectious disease.
Most tribes lost anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of their population.
Before 1820, roughly 30 epidemics hit the Plains Indians, including measles, malaria, whooping cough, and the flu.
The 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 nausea in the media today.
For 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 Jeffrey 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.
Quote, Could it not be a tribe 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.
Quote, 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.
quote, 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 traitor 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, is 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...
It doesn’t last very long outside the body.
In humid 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 Brandlett, 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 1st 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 could 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 on behalf of his and the Kickapowa 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’s town and arrived 8th of September in the afternoon.
Could not have a meeting with the Shawnee’s, 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’s eyewitness testimony, quote, The smallpox has been very general and raging amongst the Indians since last spring.
It has killed many Mingoes, 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.
*** It Wasn’t a “Genocide”
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 Arapahos 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 in 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 troops in hopes of peace, awoke to the thunder of approaching hooves 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 Chivington’s own officers were appalled by the massacre.
Their accounts led to shock and moral outrage in East Coast newspapers among the public.
It 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 various 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 have 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 gassed with knives.
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, fighting hard to the last and evidently been wounded, was found chained between 2 wagon wheels and a fire having been made from the wagon pole, had been slowly roasted to death, burnt to a crisp.
he was still alive when the fiendish torture was begun, was shown by his limb 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 30th, 1871, near Camp Grant in Arizona.
The 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 They 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 Quanah Parker.
He spent his youth murdering white settlers and committing horrifying atrocities, but Quanah 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 McKenzie, the Indian warrior who subdued the Indians by fighting like an Indian.
Rather than live out his life as a prisoner of war, Quanah 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*, Quanah 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, 2 Sioux chiefs, and a Blackfeet chief.
Life on the reservations was never perfect, but it was better than what would have happened if they’d lost a war to a rival tribe and that’s what they don’t teach you in school.