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00:00:01If you grew up in the United States in the past 50 years, then you know about the Trail of
00:00:06Tears.
00:00:06It's one of those stories that's beaten into our collective consciousness starting in grade school.
00:00:11We're taught, in no uncertain terms, that Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands
00:00:17by the U.S. government between 1830 and 1850, and that thousands of Natives died in the process.
00:00:23The government did this so that white men could seize Indian land and the valuable resources that it sat on.
00:00:30In case you missed that lesson in the classroom, you might have caught it in the 2006 documentary narrated by
00:00:36James Earl Jones,
00:00:37or the sprawling National Park with signs that note that the Indians did not want to leave,
00:00:42or the endless amount of online propaganda about it.
00:00:45Much of what they're saying is a myth.
00:00:48As it turns out, none of the Cherokee Indians who traveled the Trail of Tears
00:00:52had ever heard of the Trail of Tears.
00:00:54That's because from 1830 to 1850, almost no one used the phrase.
00:00:59The term was popularized a full seven decades after the Cherokees moved to Oklahoma,
00:01:04and even then, it wasn't truly a household name.
00:01:07That didn't happen until the 1960s, more than a century after it took place.
00:01:11But it isn't just the name that's at issue here, it's the details that are so often omitted from the
00:01:17actual story.
00:01:17The story begins in 1830, when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.
00:01:24The law did not authorize the U.S. government to forcibly remove Indians,
00:01:28or march them westward against their will.
00:01:30Instead, the law authorized the president to negotiate legally binding treaties with the various tribes,
00:01:36in which those tribes would be awarded compensation, a new territory west of the Mississippi,
00:01:41in exchange for voluntarily vacating the territory that they currently lived on.
00:01:46In accordance with that law, many Indian tribes agreed to terms to relocate.
00:01:51The first major treaty was the Treaty of New Echota in 1835.
00:01:55In school, this treaty is presented as a fraudulent agreement,
00:01:59in which a tiny number of Cherokees signed away all Cherokee lands in the southeast,
00:02:04allowing the U.S. government to obtain a pretext to forcibly remove the Cherokees to Oklahoma,
00:02:08resulting in the deaths of 4,000 Indians.
00:02:11Well, every aspect of that narrative is false.
00:02:15The first lie is that 4,000 Indians died.
00:02:17That figure comes from a letter written by Dr. Eliza Butler,
00:02:21a member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,
00:02:25who was hired by the Cherokees to embed on the relocation.
00:02:28He admitted later that the number, quote,
00:02:30was based on hearsay and guesswork.
00:02:33Now, the actual figure is likely 10% of what we were taught in school.
00:02:38Although it's true that the Cherokees' chief, John Ross, opposed the treaty,
00:02:42it's also true that he was extensively involved in negotiations,
00:02:46and though he opposed the version of the treaty that got finalized,
00:02:50it didn't stop him from enriching his family from it.
00:02:53When the government started enforcing the treaty in 1838,
00:02:55they allowed Cherokee to conduct their own removal.
00:02:5913 of the 16 groups that went to Oklahoma were managed by the Cherokee, not the Army,
00:03:04and the contract to handle removal logistics went to Chief Ross's brother, Lewis Ross.
00:03:09He made about $65 per person, which totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars
00:03:13and was meant to make the journey more humane.
00:03:16The money was intended for wagons, food, medical care, provisions.
00:03:21It was to ensure that there wouldn't be much of a death toll.
00:03:25And that brings us to another lie, that the Indians were ripped off.
00:03:29Well, in fact, the U.S. federal government paid the Indians $5 million,
00:03:33or roughly $184 million in 2025 dollars, for 7 million acres.
00:03:39That is a far better price per acre than Russia received for selling Alaska to the United States in 1867,
00:03:45or that the French received in exchange for selling the Louisiana Purchase.
00:03:49The Indians received something like 70 cents an acre, while Napoleon received just 3 cents an acre.
00:03:56And Russia received 2 cents per acre.
00:03:58In the words of Andrew Jackson, quote,
00:04:00How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions?
00:04:06If the offers made to the Indians were extended to them, they would be hailed with gratitude and joy.
00:04:12So what are the odds that a central tenet of anti-American history just suddenly popped up in the 1960s,
00:04:19just as left-wing radicals seized control of American universities?
00:04:24Very high, it turns out.
00:04:26As a matter of fact, one thing that left-wing academics know very well is that historical narratives matter.
00:04:31Who your people look up to matters.
00:04:35The events that shape the country matter.
00:04:38And it all can be very useful.
00:04:40One group that found the Trail of Tears narrative useful were the thousands of professional activists
00:04:45who went to Washington in the early 1970s and held a week-long occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
00:04:51building.
00:04:51Protesters barricaded themselves inside with furniture, fashioned makeshift weapons, issued defiance statements to the press.
00:04:59One leader reportedly told the New York Times that Indians had taken a vow to fight to the death,
00:05:04while another declared war on the United States.
00:05:07Within days, President Nixon sent representatives to hammer out a compromise.
00:05:10He granted immunity to the militants and paid for their trips home.
00:05:14He signed legislation that handed millions of acres of land over to Indian tribes, particularly in Alaska and New Mexico.
00:05:20He lent his support to the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which would eventually become law.
00:05:26The legislation allowed Indian tribes to take over the administration of some federal programs,
00:05:31which was a major coup for the so-called American Indian Movement.
00:05:34The Trail of Tears is often presented as the ultimate symbol of American injustice,
00:05:39but it is just one part in a much larger body of pervasive myths that have shaped our understanding of
00:05:46American history.
00:05:46These myths, amplified in schools and media, almost always portray American Indians as peaceful, noble victims,
00:05:53stewards of the land, overwhelmed by an unstoppable wave of imperial European and American forces armed with superior technology.
00:06:00Any violence on their part, we're told, is merely a reaction provoked by white people.
00:06:05We're told that, as Americans, we live on stolen land and that the U.S. government perpetrated a literal genocide
00:06:11against Native nations.
00:06:13These narratives are not only wrong, but they're also a form of intellectual warfare designed to dishonor our ancestors
00:06:19and to foster a sense of collective guilt that would undermine American confidence and unity.
00:06:25And, well, the thing is, it's working.
00:06:27One poll sponsored by the Manhattan Institute found that 45% of high school students were taught in class that
00:06:33America was built on stolen land,
00:06:34and another 22% heard it from an adult at the school.
00:06:38Over the course of this video, we will dismantle, one by one, the biggest myths about the Native Americans.
00:06:45This is the real history of the American Indians.
00:06:53So we need to start with a central, critical, and load-bearing myth that supports all the others.
00:06:59The widespread belief that the Indians were peaceful.
00:07:03Nothing could be further from the truth.
00:07:05Before we dismantle this claim, I have to warn you that to accurately convey the reality of intertribal and frontier
00:07:12warfare,
00:07:12I have to use real historical examples.
00:07:15And many of these accounts contain graphic violence.
00:07:18The Indians were brutal to settlers and to each other.
00:07:21Some of these details may be unsuitable for young children, but they don't have any choice but to present them.
00:07:26After all, this video is in pursuit of historical truth rather than comforting myth.
00:07:32Since the end of World War II, American academics have pretended that pre-modern humans lived in a state of
00:07:39peace.
00:07:39Academic dishonesty was so out of hand by the 1990s that according to archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley,
00:07:46the most widely used archaeological textbooks contained no mention of war before civilization.
00:07:51Some of the biggest names in anthropology, archaeology, and history have gone out of their way to pretend that life
00:07:57before civilization was actually pretty great.
00:08:01This might be because so many post-World War II academics deliberately ignored war.
00:08:06In one case, academics were in such denial about pre-modern warfare that they pretended battle axes were a form
00:08:13of currency.
00:08:14Now, you might be thinking, who cares about intellectuals?
00:08:18Well, the myths they made ended up appearing downstream in our mass culture.
00:08:23Around the same time that references to the Trail of Tears were rising,
00:08:27Hollywood started portraying Indians as peaceful and noble.
00:08:31Dances with Wolves portrays, of all people, the Lakota Sioux as a peaceful, harmonious community living in balance with the
00:08:39land and the buffalo.
00:08:43The Powhatan in Pocahontas were peace-loving environmentalists who sang about living in harmony with nature.
00:08:51And the list goes on, of course.
00:08:52None of that is accurate.
00:08:54According to the book War Before Civilization by archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley,
00:08:59somewhere between 90 and 95% of known societies in all of human history were warlike.
00:09:05The less civilized you were, as a rule, the more violent you were.
00:09:10Two-thirds of primitive societies were at constant war compared to 40% of civilized states.
00:09:16Now, at this point you might say, but what about the peaceful tribes?
00:09:19Not all of them were at war.
00:09:21According to Keeley, those tribes are the exception that proves the rule.
00:09:25Some 96% of American Indian tribes engaged in warfare.
00:09:29Some tribes were more violent than others.
00:09:31The most violent tribes were the Klamath-Modok, the Thompson tribe, the Navajo, the Apache, the Mojave, the Yuma, the
00:09:39Iroquois, the Sioux, and, of course, the Comanche.
00:09:41If you happen to be in their neighborhood, you probably spend a lot of time at war.
00:09:46In most cases, primitive warfare consisted of surprise raids on enemies' villages or camps.
00:09:51This is true for groups around the world, from Eskimos in the Bering Straits to natives in New Guinea.
00:09:57This kind of warfare generally consisted of quietly surrounding enemy houses under the cover of night,
00:10:03throwing spears through the walls, lighting the structures on fire, and shooting arrows through the doorways.
00:10:10The killing was often indiscriminate, and civilians, including women and children, frequently died.
00:10:15According to Keeley, the East Cree of Quebec slaughtered any Inuit, Eskimo families they encountered, taking only infants as captains.
00:10:24Neither age nor sex was any guarantee of protection from primitive raids.
00:10:29Among Western U.S. Indian tribes, 86% were raiding or resisting raids undertaken more than once each year.
00:10:36In some cases, violence was small-scale, but even if most battles may have had a small number of casualties,
00:10:42almost every male was participating.
00:10:44In one small-scale Eskimo community in northern Canada, every single male had killed someone at some point.
00:10:52Among prehistoric Illinois villagers, archaeological evidence suggests that the homicide raid would have been 70 times that of the U
00:10:59.S. in 1980.
00:11:00So it turns out that bloodshed in Chicago is, in fact, an ancient phenomenon.
00:11:05So just how savage were the Indians?
00:11:08We'll get into specific details of some of these raids, but for now we can focus on perhaps the most
00:11:13gruesome detail of all.
00:11:14Evidence of cannibalism among American Indian tribes.
00:11:18According to Keeley's book, War Before Civilization, at 25 sites in the American Southwest,
00:11:23anthropologists have discovered cannibalized human remains dated from roughly the year 900 to 1300,
00:11:29hundreds of years before Columbus arrived.
00:11:31We know they were consumed because the assemblages of disarticulated bones share a number of features.
00:11:37Butchering cut marks, skulls broken, long bones smashed for marrow extraction, bones burned or otherwise cooked, and disposal with other
00:11:46kitchen refuse.
00:11:47One Colombian chief, quote, consumed the bodies of 100 enemies in a single day following a victory.
00:11:54In another chiefdom, war captives were kept in special enclosures and fattened before consumption.
00:12:00Many of these groups smoked or otherwise preserved human meat to be eaten later.
00:12:04The Anserimo tribe in Colombia used human body fat as lamp fuel in their gold mines.
00:12:11Many groups in the Americas ate the hearts of slain enemies to absorb the latter's courage or to achieve an
00:12:17extended form of revenge.
00:12:19As recently as the 1800s, American soldiers and Texas Rangers were witnesses to cannibalism.
00:12:24The Tonkawa tribe in Texas, which allied with the U.S. Army in its mission to take on the brutal
00:12:30Comanche tribe, often ate their victims.
00:12:33One white captive named Herman Lehman, who lived with the Comanches and eventually became a Comanche warrior,
00:12:39wrote about his experiences in a book titled Nine Years Among Indians.
00:12:42The Comanche had been locked in a genocidal war with the Tonkawas for decades,
00:12:47and by the time Lehman encountered them, they were, in his words, nearly exterminated.
00:12:51But upon finding a Tonkawa outpost, Lehman wrote,
00:12:54We took possession of the camp, and what do you suppose we found on that fire roasting?
00:12:59One of the legs of a Comanche, a warrior of our tribe.
00:13:03Whipped into a furor at the sight of their fellow warrior being eaten, the Comanches massacred the Tonkawa.
00:13:09Lehman writes,
00:13:10A great many of the dying enemy were gasping for water, but we heeded not their pleadings.
00:13:15We scalped them, amputated their arms, cut off their legs, cut out their tongues, and threw their mangled bodies and
00:13:22limbs upon their own campfire.
00:13:24Put on more brushwood and piled the living, dying, and dead Tonkawas on the fire.
00:13:29Some of them were able to flinch and work as a worm, and some were able to speak and plead
00:13:34for mercy.
00:13:35Piled them up, put on more wood, and danced around in great glee as we saw the grease and blood
00:13:41run from their bodies.
00:13:43And we're delighted to see them swell up and hear the hide pop as it would burst in the fire.
00:13:48After the Battle of Plum Creek in Texas, Tonkawa allies cut up the body of an enemy Comanche and skewered
00:13:55it on sticks over a bonfire.
00:13:56The Texas Rangers were there with them and likely would have witnessed this.
00:14:01So, it's clear that the Indians were very violent, engaging in raids on one another, murdering women and children, burning
00:14:10entire villages, committing genocide, in some cases eating each other.
00:14:13Which brings us to our next myth.
00:14:18One common myth perpetuated by historians is that the American Indians only became violent after exposure to Europeans.
00:14:25One advantage academics have in perpetuating this myth is that the Indians didn't keep a log of their own history.
00:14:31So, we don't have written accounts of Indian battles from the 1300s.
00:14:36Luckily, archaeological evidence doesn't require written history.
00:14:40This is what we know.
00:14:41Almost all new settlements formed in eastern North America from 900 to 1400 AD were fortified.
00:14:48And this is because, around that time, Mississippian Indians from the Midwest and the South were moving east and in
00:14:54constant conflict with the tribes they were encountering.
00:14:57Before Columbus had even sailed the ocean blue, Oneota Indians were chasing other Indians out of northern Illinois.
00:15:05Tribes like the Anasazi and the Hohokam were vacating their farms in Arizona and New Mexico because their settlements were
00:15:12getting destroyed.
00:15:13Archaeologists at Crow Creek in South Dakota discovered a mass grave with the remains of more than 500 people, including
00:15:20women and children.
00:15:20They had been, according to Keeley, slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated during an attack on the village a century and a
00:15:26half before Columbus's arrival.
00:15:28The attack seems to have occurred just when the village's fortifications had been rebuilt.
00:15:32All the houses were burned and most of the inhabitants were murdered.
00:15:36Knife marks on the tops of their skulls and bone fragments is how they know that they were scalped and
00:15:41mutilated.
00:15:42Not only were the Indians committing atrocities against each other before Europeans arrived, but they also got less violent after
00:15:50the white man got them.
00:15:52According to Keeley, the percentage of burials in coastal British Columbia bearing evidence of violent traumas was actually lower after
00:16:00European contact.
00:16:0113% from 1774 to 1874, and the very high levels, 20 to 32%, evidence in prehistoric periods.
00:16:09As you'll see later in this episode, some tribes, including the vicious warlike ones like the Apache, actually sought protection
00:16:16from European powers.
00:16:18But we'll get to that later.
00:16:20First, more on what Indian on Indian violence was like.
00:16:23According to S.C. Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon,
00:16:26Quote,
00:16:27Enemies, meanwhile, were enemies, and the rules for dealing with them had come down through a thousand years.
00:16:33A Comanche brave who captured a live Ute would torture him to death without question.
00:16:37It was what everyone had always done. What the Sioux did to the Cinnaboyne, what the Crow did to the
00:16:42Blackfeet.
00:16:42A Comanche captured by a Ute would expect to receive exactly the same treatment, which is why Indians always fought
00:16:48to their last breath on the battlefields.
00:16:50Often this led to a tit for tat, where one raid would lead to another ad infinitum.
00:16:55Those early Indian raids were brutal and included tribes widely celebrated as advanced by modern historians.
00:17:02Consider the case of the Iroquois, who were often presented as a sophisticated tribe, who, according to the documentarian Ken
00:17:09Burns, influenced America's founding fathers.
00:17:11Long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States, the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, Seneca, Cayuga,
00:17:22Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk, had created a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee, a democracy that
00:17:33had flourished for centuries.
00:17:35Somehow, strangely enough, Ken Burns forgot to tell us that when the Iroquois captured an enemy combatant, the combatant was
00:17:43not immediately executed, but instead tortured during the war party's return to camp.
00:17:47They made it back to the village. The hostages were given to the families of dead Iroquois soldiers, adopted by
00:17:54the families and given the names of the dead Indians, and then, according to Keeley, quote, tortured to death over
00:17:59several days.
00:18:00When the prisoner was dead, some parts of his body were eaten, usually including his heart, by his murderers.
00:18:06These kinds of misrepresentations are completely pervasive.
00:18:10The Mendocino Land Trust in California has land acknowledgments celebrating the Yuki and Kato tribes that once lived on land
00:18:19now occupied by rich liberal Californians.
00:18:22The Land Trust claims that these tribes were stewards of these lands for millennia, and we mourn the atrocities committed
00:18:29against them in the past while recognizing that these injustices continue today.
00:18:34But they failed to mention that the two tribes hated each other.
00:18:37When Yuki Indians discovered that Katos were encroaching on their obsidian mine and plant-gathering territory, they retaliated by killing
00:18:45four Kato girls.
00:18:46Such violence was par for the course in pre-modern California. At a thousand-year-old excavation site in central
00:18:53California, five percent of human skeletons were embedded with arrowheads.
00:18:58The Indians regularly massacred their rivals and burned their villages before Columbus arrived.
00:19:03The archaeological evidence is overwhelming and runs along the Missouri River in South Dakota and throughout the American Southwest.
00:19:08In 1280, the Pueblo at Sand Canyon was destroyed in a massacre. Artifacts were smashed and stolen, and a defensive
00:19:16wall was totally burned.
00:19:17The Pueblo of Cuaua in New Mexico was plundered and destroyed in 1400.
00:19:23No tribe blows up the peaceful Indian myth more than the Comanches, who ruled the southern Great Plains for centuries
00:19:30and even beat back the Spanish Empire, which had no problem conquering the Aztecs or the Incas.
00:19:35The Comanche would, quote, attack whole villages and burn them, raping, torturing, and killing their inhabitants, leaving young women with
00:19:42their entrails carved out, men burned alive, they skewered infants, and took young boys and girls as captives.
00:19:50Now, they did this to almost everyone they encountered.
00:19:53The Comanche were always brutal, but it wasn't until they were introduced to the horse, which was brought by Europeans,
00:19:58that they hit their apex.
00:20:00Because they were highly mobile and brilliant at horsemanship, the Comanche could move hundreds of miles faster than anyone else.
00:20:08Their nomadic lifestyle meant they could launch attacks from anywhere.
00:20:11By the mid-1700s, everybody feared them, from the Tonkawa in Texas to the Blackfeet in Wyoming, the Utes in
00:20:19New Mexico to the Pawnee in Kansas.
00:20:21Comanche attacks on Hickorya Apaches were so brutal that they begged for and received Spanish protection.
00:20:29The Comanche were such a force that, by the mid-18th century, powerful tribes like the Cheyenne refused to breach
00:20:36Comanche territory.
00:20:41As radical college professors were rewriting history to create the myth of the peaceful Indian, others were willing to acknowledge
00:20:47Native American violence, but blame that on white people.
00:20:51In 1969, an Indian author and activist named Vine Deloria argued that scalping was introduced prior to the French and
00:20:59Indian War by the English,
00:21:00framing it as a European invention that confirmed suspicions of Indians as wild animals to be hunted and skinned.
00:21:08Well, in fact, scalping was one of the many ancient traditions meant to cripple victims in the afterlife.
00:21:14As Lawrence Keeley notes, the custom of scalping enemy dead was observed at first contact among tribes ranging from New
00:21:22England to California and from parts of the subarctic down to northern Mexico.
00:21:26Scalps and scalping were embedded in the myth and rituals of so many tribes that the customs indigenous roots in
00:21:32North America are beyond serious question.
00:21:35Defiling an enemy's body supposedly denied them a place in the afterlife.
00:21:39It was humiliating.
00:21:41This photo shows the corpse of a U.S. Calvary man killed and mutilated by the Southern Cheyenne in 1867.
00:21:49Tribes in Colombia kept the entire skins of their dead enemies.
00:21:52Some tribes turned their enemies' bones into flutes.
00:21:56Women commonly flayed the victims.
00:21:58And at least one tribe treated their victims like we treat trophy bucks.
00:22:02They had them stuffed, waxed, and prominently placed in their homes.
00:22:06Different plains tribes mutilated their foes, corpses in different ways, and their traditions went back centuries.
00:22:12Anthropologists working the site of the Crow Creek Massacre, which happened in the mid-1400s in central South Dakota, found
00:22:19mutilated skeletons.
00:22:20After the Battle of Little Bighorn more than 400 years later, Indian women used marrow-cracking mallets to pound the
00:22:26faces of the dead soldiers into pulp.
00:22:29Name the tribe, and I will tell you their preferred method of mutilation.
00:22:33The Cheyennes slashed their enemies' arms.
00:22:36The Arapaho split their enemies' noses.
00:22:38The Sioux slit their enemies' throats.
00:22:40Indian warfare was dominated by superstitions and traditions, and mutilations and scalps weren't the only way to prove yourself as
00:22:47a soldier.
00:22:47On the Great Plains, the Indians had a tradition called Counting Coup.
00:22:51And it evolved demonstrating extreme bravery by touching or striking a living enemy warrior in battle with a hand, bow,
00:22:58whip, or special coup stick, and then escaping unharmed.
00:23:02This act was considered the highest honor in inter-tribal warfare, often more prestigious than killing from a distance because
00:23:09it required getting dangerously close, proving superior courage and skill while humiliating the opponent.
00:23:14As recently as World War II, an American Indian named Joe Medicine Crow completed the four traditional Crow war deeds.
00:23:22He counted coups by overpowering a German soldier in hand-to-hand combat.
00:23:26He captured an enemy's weapon by taking the soldier's rifle in the scuffle.
00:23:30He led a successful war party on a mission to capture explosives.
00:23:35And he stole his enemies' horses on a raid on an SS camp.
00:23:39And this made him eligible to be a warchief.
00:23:41Some of these traditions are admirable and impressive.
00:23:45No doubt Joe Medicine Crow was an American hero.
00:23:47But the ancient practice of scalping enemies and mutilating their bodies to deny them a place in the afterlife is,
00:23:54of course, appalling.
00:23:55The unfortunate reality is that, in some cases, whites, usually in mobs and militias, participated in scalping.
00:24:02But this is vastly overstated, especially cases in which the government supposedly encouraged scalping.
00:24:07For example, one professor from the University of Texas claims that, in California, scalp warfare, driven by scalp bounties, eliminated
00:24:15nearly 90% of some tribal populations.
00:24:18This view became pervasive in the 1990s, but it's almost totally false.
00:24:22In 2023, a professor at California State University Chico discovered that, in fact, quote,
00:24:27Indian scalp bounties remained extremely rare in Gold Rush, California, and were seldom offered anywhere except in a scattered handful
00:24:34of isolated and unincorporated rural communities.
00:24:37He further emphasized, quote,
00:24:38So routinely are these allegations made that they now go largely uncontested and appear to have one nearly universal acceptance
00:24:45as established historical facts.
00:24:47These facts, however, are false.
00:24:49The state of California never offered, let alone actually paid, cash bounties for Native American scalps, heads, or other body
00:24:56parts.
00:24:56We can safely say that the idea of systematic state-sponsored scalp bounties as a primary driver of depopulation is
00:25:04now debunked as a modern myth.
00:25:10Another pervasive myth about Native Americans combines two contradictory ideas into one.
00:25:16Native Americans had no concept of property rights, particularly over land, and that Europeans stole the land from them.
00:25:23Well, obviously these two claims cannot both be true.
00:25:26If the Indians truly lacked any notion of property rights, then the land, by definition, could not have been stolen
00:25:32from them because theft implies the violation of rightful ownership.
00:25:36Yet the same narrative often asserts both points simultaneously without recognizing the logical contradiction.
00:25:42This inconsistency reveals a deeper issue.
00:25:45The first claim is frequently used to justify displacement by portraying native land used as primitive or communal in a
00:25:53way that didn't count as real ownership under European legal standards.
00:25:57The second claim, meanwhile, appeals to modern moral sensibilities about injustice.
00:26:02Holding both ideas at once allows the narrative to shift between them depending on the argument being made while avoiding
00:26:09the underlying incompatibility.
00:26:11The way the revisionists frame this debate is like a rigged game.
00:26:15There's no way to win if you accept the premise.
00:26:17And so we don't accept the premise.
00:26:21The Indians, like the average toddler, absolutely had a notion of property rights.
00:26:25They often went to war over them.
00:26:28In the 1830s in the Alexander Valley in Northern California, Pomo Indians stole an acorn stash from an oak grove
00:26:35belonging to the Wapo tribe.
00:26:38That was not a good decision.
00:26:39The Wapo immediately raided, massacring the Pomo and burning one of their villages.
00:26:44The remaining Pomo then fled the area for the safety of other Pomo villages farther away from the Wapo.
00:26:50The Wapo eventually occupied some of the abandoned villages and just like that, a dispute over territory led to a
00:26:56war and the winning tribe expanded its territory.
00:27:00It's property rights.
00:27:02Those kinds of disputes happened literally all the time.
00:27:05They were very, very violent.
00:27:08Surprise attacks in California, Pomo villages killed between 5 and 15 percent of the population.
00:27:14When the first Spanish explorers encountered the Barbare Nio Chumash in California, the tribe had just had two of their
00:27:20villages massacred and burned, killing 10 percent of the tribe.
00:27:24According to the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, in California where tribes depended heavily on gathering wild plant foods and on hunting
00:27:31or fishing, conflicts over resource poaching were very common.
00:27:35He continued that, quote, many California tribes often granted outsiders the right to exploit their hunting and gathering grounds when
00:27:42they were properly asked or awarded with gifts.
00:27:45Yet they would fight any group that poached.
00:27:47The people who live in Northern California today are much more communist than the American Indians they replaced.
00:27:53It's a shame they don't just give the land back.
00:27:56But California tribes weren't the only ones going back and forth about property.
00:28:00The Plains Indians continuously waged war over horses, which was their key metric of wealth.
00:28:06Indians in the Pacific Northwest fought over water and fishing access.
00:28:11Tribes in the Midwest fought for centuries over who got access to rice fields and hunting grounds in places like
00:28:16Minnesota.
00:28:17Different tribes had different ways of allocating land, but they all had ways of doing it.
00:28:22Most tribes had defined territories for hunting, fishing, gathering, or farming with boundaries recognized intertribally.
00:28:28On the Great Plains, the Lakota allocated hunting grounds to families.
00:28:32In the Pacific Northwest, tribes held potlatches to establish hereditary claims rooted in oral histories and legal traditions.
00:28:40The Pueblo at Iroquois, who actually had farms, necessarily gave family their own plots for cultivation.
00:28:47How exactly are you supposed to farm if everything is communally owned?
00:28:50This is yet another myth that's easily debunked.
00:28:59On the morning of May 19th, 1836, on the vast, untamed frontier of the newly declared Republic of Texas,
00:29:06there was a small wooden stockade known as Parker's Fort.
00:29:09It was very literally on the edge of civilization.
00:29:13Built by the extended Parker family, the fort huddled along the Navasota River in what is now Limestone County, Texas.
00:29:20Inside its log walls were homes, a garden, and 30 settlers working the surrounding fields.
00:29:26And they included a pregnant 17-year-old named Rachel Plummer.
00:29:31That morning, as the men worked outside the gates, a large band of warriors, primarily Comanche Indians, appeared on the
00:29:37horizon.
00:29:38They carried a white flag, signaling peace.
00:29:41But it was a ruse.
00:29:43In moments, the fields erupted in chaos.
00:29:45The Comanche warriors, riding on horseback and covered in war paint, charged the fort.
00:29:51Five settlers were killed immediately, including the family of Kachiar.
00:29:55Inside the fort, Rachel witnessed the carnage with her toddler.
00:29:58She tried to flee, but was overtaken and dragged away.
00:30:02For the next 21 months, she was held as a Comanche slave.
00:30:05That October, she gave birth, but the infant made her less productive.
00:30:11Comanches wouldn't have that.
00:30:13This is an actual excerpt from her memoirs.
00:30:16Quote,
00:30:17My child was some six or seven weeks old when I suppose my master thought it was too much trouble,
00:30:22as I was not able to go through as much labor as before.
00:30:26One cold morning, five or six large Indians came where I was suckling my infant.
00:30:30As soon as they came in, I felt my heart sink.
00:30:33My fears agitated my whole frame to complete state of convulsion.
00:30:37My body shook with fear indeed.
00:30:40Nor were my fears vain or ill-grounded.
00:30:43One of them caught hold of the child by the throat, and with his whole strength, like an enraged lion
00:30:48actuated by its devouring nature,
00:30:51held on like the hungry vulture until my child was, to all appearance, entirely dead.
00:30:57But that didn't satisfy the Comanche, so they continued to attack the baby.
00:31:01Quote,
00:31:02They, by force, took the infant from me and threw his body up in the air and let him fall
00:31:07on the frozen ground until he was apparently dead.
00:31:10Quote.
00:31:11Now, miraculously, the baby survived the strangling.
00:31:14So the Comanche, quote,
00:31:15Tied a planted rope round the child's neck and drew its naked body into the large hedges of prickly pear
00:31:21cacti, which were from eight to twelve feet high.
00:31:25They would then pull him down through the pears.
00:31:28This they repeated several times.
00:31:30One of them then got on a horse and, tying the rope to his saddle, rode round a circuit of
00:31:36a few hundred yards.
00:31:37Until my little innocent one was not only dead, but literally torn to pieces.
00:31:44This is how the Comanche and many Indians fought.
00:31:48For the most part, wars between pre-civilized people are almost always fought like total wars.
00:31:54Like Sherman marching to the sea or the U.S. bombing of civilian targets in Germany in World War II,
00:31:59the Indians would commonly engage in tactics like wringing fruit trees, stealing or destroying herds and crops,
00:32:05burning houses and canoes, stealthily slaughtering individuals in small groups,
00:32:10and gradually abrading a foe's manpower in very frequent but low-casualty battles.
00:32:15Often the Plains Indians would steal horses from expeditions, leaving Americans alone in the prairie with no way to get
00:32:20home.
00:32:21One sub-Arctic tribe, the Kuchin, annihilated its enemies, the Mackenzie Eskimos, by surrounding their encampment and killing all but
00:32:29one male.
00:32:30Their survivor, as he came to be known, was all that was left, and his purpose was to tell other
00:32:35tribes what had happened.
00:32:37The anthropologist Lawrence Keeley claims, quote,
00:32:39primitive warfare was much deadlier than its modern counterpart.
00:32:42An average Indian massacre killed 10% of the population.
00:32:46An equivalent attack on the United States today would kill more than 32 million people.
00:32:50In other words, Indian tactics were extremely effective.
00:32:53Throughout the 20th century, wars and their associated consequences, such as famine and disease, claimed an estimated 100 million lives.
00:33:01This staggering toll reflects the devastating cost of a world organized into nation states, whose conflicts repeatedly escalated into large
00:33:08-scale industrial violence.
00:33:09But according to Keeley, that figure is an estimated 20 times smaller than the losses we would have experienced if
00:33:15we fought like the Indians.
00:33:17This is because modern civilized warfare is ritualized.
00:33:21There are layers and layers of international law that nation states are expected to fight by.
00:33:26Not so for native population.
00:33:28Concepts like prisoner exchange, parole, the release after assuring the enemy you won't take up arms again, and surrender are
00:33:36modern,
00:33:37and rely on agreements between opposing parties, which almost never existed in pre-modern warfare.
00:33:43Wave the white flag in a modern civilized war, and you're probably going to be fine.
00:33:48Not so with the Comanche.
00:33:50Their language had no word for surrender.
00:33:52For decades, the Comanche Indians raided settlements of other Indians or Spanish and Texan colonizers.
00:33:58According to the Empire of the Summer Moon, which is an excellent history of the Comanche people,
00:34:02quote, the logic of Comanche raids was straightforward.
00:34:04All the men were killed, and any of the men who were captured alive were tortured to death as a
00:34:08matter of course.
00:34:09Some more slowly than others. The captive women were gang-raped, some were killed, some tortured.
00:34:14The portion of them, particularly if they were young, would be spared.
00:34:17Though vengeance could always be a motive for slaying hostages, babies were invariably killed,
00:34:22while pre-adolescents were often adopted by Comanches or other tribes.
00:34:26Torture at the hands of Plains Indians was so brutal and so common that veteran Indian fighters preferred suicide over
00:34:32capture,
00:34:33and usually saved a bullet for themselves.
00:34:35Their brutal tactics were far more effective than the way Europeans fought.
00:34:40That's how tribes like the Comanche and Apache held off the Americans, the Mexicans, and the Spanish Empire for more
00:34:45than three centuries.
00:34:47The last of which took basically no time at all to conquer the much more developed Aztecs in central Mexico.
00:34:53In 1758, the Comanche drew Spain into its greatest military defeat in the New World in a battle near a
00:34:59Spanish mission at Santa Cruz de San Saba near present-day Menard, Texas.
00:35:05There, the Indians stripped, murdered, mutilated, and decapitated priests.
00:35:09One early Spanish expedition to take out Plains tribes from New Mexico was wiped out by the Pawnees in Nebraska.
00:35:17As a rule, the U.S. Army often suffered major defeats if it was outnumbered in battle, and not just
00:35:22against the impressive cavalries of the Plains Indians.
00:35:25In 1835, Major Francis L. Dade led a column of about 110 U.S. soldiers from Fort Brook near modern
00:35:33Tampa to reinforce Fort King near modern Ocala.
00:35:36They were ambushed by about 180 Seminole warriors near present-day Bushnell, Florida.
00:35:42It had all the hallmarks of a classic Indian attack.
00:35:45The Seminoles used surprise covered from tall grass and superior knowledge of the terrain to overwhelm the column.
00:35:52They killed Major Dade and nearly all his men, leaving only three survivors.
00:35:56The Seminoles had basically no casualties.
00:35:59The attack shocked the nation, and today it's known as the Dade Massacre.
00:36:03The U.S. launched a six-and-a-half-year punitive war against the Seminoles.
00:36:07The outcome of the war was indecisive.
00:36:10In a description of his 30-year career, Colonel R. B. Marcy complained that, quote,
00:36:15The modern school of military science are but illy suited to carrying on a warfare with the wild tribes of
00:36:21the Plains.
00:36:22The vast expanse of desert territory that has been annexed to our domain within the last few years is peopled
00:36:28by numerous tribes of marauding and erratic savages who are mounted upon fleet and hardy horses, making war the business
00:36:34and pastime of their lives, and acknowledging one of the ameliorating conventionalities of civilized warfare.
00:36:40Their tactics are such as to render the old system almost wholly impotent.
00:36:44The Indians, he continued, were here today and there tomorrow, who at one time stampedes a herd of mules upon
00:36:50the headwaters of the Arkansas.
00:36:52And what next heard from is in the very heart of the populated districts of Mexico, laying waste to haciendas
00:36:57and carrying devastation, rapine, and murder in his steps, who is everywhere without being anywhere, who assembles at the moment
00:37:03of combat and vanishes whenever fortune turns against him, who leaves his women and children far distant from the theater
00:37:09of hostilities, and has neither towns nor magazines to defend, nor lines of retreat to cover.
00:37:15In August 1854, a Lakota Indian named High Forehead was waiting for an annuity payment from the federal government when
00:37:22he killed a cow being moved by a Mormon wagon train on the Oregon Trail.
00:37:26Prevay Second Lieutenant John L. Groton, a 24-year-old fresh from West Point who hated the Indians and didn't
00:37:34have much experience on the frontier, volunteered to resolve the matter.
00:37:37That was a mistake.
00:37:39Leading 29 soldiers, two howitzers, and a drunken interpreter, he marched into the vast Lakota encampment, demanding the surrender of
00:37:47High Forehead.
00:37:48The drunk interpreter started taunting the Lakota leader, conquering Bear, and a nervous U.S. infantryman accidentally discharged his gun.
00:37:58Groton then ordered his men to fire away, killing conquering Bear.
00:38:01The Indians, infuriated by the attack and the insults, laid waste to Groton and killed his entire detachment.
00:38:08During the Civil War, Apache bands overcame a ruthless uprising involving U.S. troops, citizens, and tribes that had settled
00:38:15on reservations.
00:38:16Because government forces were consumed with war, wild nomadic tribes like the Comanche waged total warfare against the tribes that
00:38:24had taken up farming on the reservation.
00:38:26Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Greek Indians were the primary targets, and many were chased off the reservation altogether.
00:38:33The U.S. government was incapable of stopping it.
00:38:35Even after the Civil War, American forces were regularly getting outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and in some cases defeated by supposedly inferior
00:38:42American Indian forces.
00:38:43But after the Civil War, defeats kept coming.
00:38:46In 1866, an army captain named William Fetterman was led into an ambush by Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud, which
00:38:52led to a 20-minute battle that ended with the massacre of 80 U.S. troops.
00:38:57A post-massacre report noted that their eyes were ripped out, noses and ears cut off, teeth removed, brains scooped
00:39:04out, genitals severed, and some of the men had been pulverized by hundreds of arrows.
00:39:09In the treaties of 1868, the U.S. government conceded the Bozeman Trail in the Powder River country to the
00:39:16Sioux and Cheyenne warriors under Chief Red Cloud.
00:39:19On June 25, 1876, the most famous and devastating defeat in the Indian Wars happened at the Battle of Little
00:39:25Bighorn, where, in less than an hour, George Custer and every man under his immediate command, almost 300 soldiers, lay
00:39:32dead on the slopes now known as Last Stand Hill.
00:39:35So, how then did we beat the Indians?
00:39:38Well, it's simple. It required embracing the tactics of the Indians.
00:39:42In the end, their tactics were superior, and the only way to beat them was to fight just like them.
00:39:47In 1677, a New Englander acknowledged that traditional tactics were pointless.
00:39:53In our first war with the Indians, God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill in managing
00:39:58our arms after the European mode.
00:40:00The guerrilla tactics they acquired from the Indians proved essential in the later fight against the British in 1776.
00:40:07Campaigns against the nomadic, horse-riding Plains Indians were the most difficult because, quite frankly, they were the most talented
00:40:13light cavalry on Earth.
00:40:15White soldiers stood no chance of finding Comanches without Indian guides, and even by the mid-1800s, U.S. Army
00:40:22campaigns were generally pointless expeditions.
00:40:25The first to figure out how to track them were the early Texas Rangers, who historian S.C. Gwynne described
00:40:30as dirty, bearded, violent, and undisciplined men wearing buckskins, serapes, coonskin caps, sombreros, and other odd bits of clothing.
00:40:38Who belonged to no army, wore no insignias or uniforms, made cold camps on the prairie, and were only intermittently
00:40:45paid.
00:40:45They owed their existence to the Comanche threat. Their methods, copied closely from the Comanche, would change frontier warfare in
00:40:53North America.
00:40:54Under one legendary leader named Jack Hayes, the Rangers adopted a totally different strategy for fighting Indians.
00:41:01The only strategy that ever proved effective, use Indian tactics against the Indians.
00:41:06Under Hayes, the Rangers moved in small groups, trained to fight on horseback, and traveled without tents.
00:41:13They used saddles for pillows, and carried a rifle, two pistols, a knife, a Mexican blanket, and a pouch with
00:41:20salt, flour, tobacco, and hardtack.
00:41:22They slept outside, traveled at night, and attacked by surprise.
00:41:26And yet the fight was still very one-sided.
00:41:28One ranger estimated that about half the Rangers were killed off every year.
00:41:33These outcomes disproved the myth that guns and technology guaranteed European or American victory over the Indians.
00:41:39In fact, for centuries, the firearms the Europeans were using put them at a disadvantage against the Plains Indians.
00:41:44The Comanche warrior could fire 30 arrows per minute from a bow, often while riding horseback at full gallop.
00:41:50The Plains Indians used shields made of thick buffalo hides that could stop bullets, even from muskets and rifles.
00:41:57The lances they used against U.S. forces were also used to hunt 3,000-pound buffalo, which they did
00:42:02at full gallop.
00:42:03According to S.C. Guinn's book, Empire of the Summer Moon, their lances were unmatched by anything the white man
00:42:09had at close range.
00:42:10And to make matters worse, they were better riders and had better horses than the U.S. Army.
00:42:15It took hundreds of years for white men to match the speed, accuracy, reliability, and rate of fire of the
00:42:21Indians.
00:42:21When the Spanish first encountered the Plains Indians in the mid-1500s, their primary firearm was the Harkabas, which was
00:42:29a big, heavy, impractical muzzle loader.
00:42:32They fired a lead ball using a slow-burning match to ignite gunpowder.
00:42:35Because they were over 5 feet long and weighed close to 12 pounds, they couldn't be reloaded on horseback.
00:42:41It had to be fired from the ground. And they didn't work in the rain.
00:42:44In the 1600s and 1700s, the Spanish upgraded to flintlock escopetas, which were better to operate, but were still single
00:42:52-shot muzzleloaders.
00:42:53And they also didn't work in the rain.
00:42:55After Mexico gained independence from Spain, they inherited those single-shot muskets, but also upgraded to pepper-box handguns and
00:43:02double-barreled shotguns for frontier defense in the early 1830s and 1840s.
00:43:07The early Americans commonly used the Springfield Model 1842, a cumbersome musket that was difficult to carry on horseback and,
00:43:15assuming you were an experienced shooter, could only get two to three rounds off in a minute.
00:43:19It wasn't until the 1860s that breech-loading single-shot rifles, which were easier to load and could get 10
00:43:26to 15 shots off per minute, became standard.
00:43:28In the 1860s and 1870s, lever-action rifles emerged, including many brands we know today, Henry, Spencer, Winchester, which were
00:43:37much more reliable and accurate than the predecessors, allowing multiple shots without reloading.
00:43:41In 1836, a New Jersey inventor named Samuel Colt introduced his first production revolver, the Colt Patterson.
00:43:48This was the first time, a full 300 years since the Spanish arrived, that someone had finally leveled the playing
00:43:55field.
00:43:55The Republic of Texas immediately realized its value and placed a large order.
00:44:00The gun wasn't nearly as good as the revolvers we have today.
00:44:03It was fragile, needed to be disassembled for reloading, had a folding trigger, but critically, it introduced repeating fire.
00:44:12Jack Hayes and the Texas Rangers always carried two, meaning they could get 10 shots off very fast.
00:44:16Ten years later, one of Hayes' top aides, Samuel Walker, collaborated with Colt to design the Colt Walker, a massive
00:44:24five-pound six-shot .44 caliber revolver with a nine-inch barrel and a fixed trigger guard loading lever.
00:44:30It was the most powerful revolver for nearly a century, until it was displaced by the .357 Magnum during the
00:44:35Great Depression.
00:44:36However, the U.S. government didn't catch on nearly as quickly as the Texas Rangers.
00:44:41As late as 1849, the U.S. Army was still attempting to use infantry to fight Plains Indians on foot.
00:44:47They were complemented by U.S. Army Dragoons, who wore white pants and blue jackets with orange camps and armed
00:44:53with single-shot pistols that were totally worthless against Plains Indians.
00:44:57But even with faster-loading rifles and revolvers, the U.S. was still occasionally losing battles.
00:45:02On November 29, 1872, U.S. troops attempted to force a band of MODOK Indians back to a reservation.
00:45:09The Indians, who included about 50 warriors plus their families, retreated to a natural fortress in lava beds south of
00:45:16Tule Lake in California.
00:45:18Incredibly, the Indians held their ground for five months and fought U.S. forces to a stalemate, even though they
00:45:24were vastly outnumbered.
00:45:25It ended when the MODOK chief, Captain Jack, assassinated General Edward Camby during peace talks.
00:45:32Captain Jack was eventually captured and executed for murder.
00:45:35The Indians repeatedly proved that their tactics could overcome superior weapons.
00:45:40On June 17, 1876, a U.S. Army column of more than 1,000 soldiers led by Brigadier General George
00:45:46Crook set off to find an Indian village.
00:45:48And that morning, while stopping for breakfast, an equally large group of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, led by Crazy Horse,
00:45:56ambushed Crook and his men.
00:45:58They battled for six hours, and though both sides had equal numbers of casualties, the Indians had stopped Crook's advance
00:46:03and forced him into a retreat.
00:46:05His column was neutralized for months.
00:46:07Eight days later, many of the same warriors defeated George Custer at Little Bighorn.
00:46:13The next year in 1877, the Nez Perce Indians proved again that superior tactics could still overcome the Americans' newly
00:46:21minted and technically superior weapons.
00:46:23On August 9, the U.S. Army's 7th Infantry Regiment launched a surprise attack on a Nez Perce village.
00:46:29Miraculously, the Nez Perce warriors repelled the attack, and they captured a howitzer and forced the Americans to retreat.
00:46:37As late as the 1870s, it seemed like nothing could stop Comanche raids on settlers in Texas.
00:46:42In 1871, Indian raids against civilian targets were so brutal and vicious and numerous that some American military leaders expected
00:46:49all the settlers to leave.
00:46:51Colonel Randolph Marcy, who was on tour with William Tecumseh Sherman, wrote,
00:46:55If the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems in far way of becoming totally depopulated.
00:47:02By 1874, Comanche raiders were hitting towns from southern Colorado to Kansas to the Texas frontier.
00:47:09Pioneers were terrorized over thousands of miles.
00:47:11On July 26, President Ulysses S. Grant gave General Sherman permission to crush the tribes.
00:47:17Control of the reservations was transferred to the Army, and the Army was to subdue all Indians who offered resistance
00:47:23to constituted authority.
00:47:25The peace policy was over, and a man named Ronald McKenzie was unleashed on the Indians.
00:47:30Ronald Slidell McKenzie was known to the Indians as Bad Hand because of injuries he suffered in the Civil War.
00:47:36He was tough and mean. His soldiers hated him.
00:47:40But he was brutally competent, and he knew better weapons were not going to guarantee victory.
00:47:44So he decided, like the early Texas Rangers, to fight like an Indian.
00:47:48He extensively used Tonkawa scouts, he emphasized aggressive mobility, moved at night, and engaged in deception, including leaving campfires going
00:47:57in places that they were leaving.
00:47:59Rather than fight them in direct battle the way European powers would, McKenzie relentlessly pursued the Indians, burned their villages,
00:48:07killed their livestock.
00:48:07When he captured Comanche horses, he killed them, often thousands at a time.
00:48:12It was total war.
00:48:13In every single successful Western campaign, the U.S. Army had to use primitive methods and Indian scouts to defeat
00:48:20the natives.
00:48:20As McKenzie was subduing the Comanche, General George Crook was doing the same thing against the Apache, who were also
00:48:26raiding and pillaging settlements across the Southwest.
00:48:28Cook used small mobile units consisting of Indians and supplied himself by a mule rather than wagon trains, which were
00:48:36extremely vulnerable.
00:48:38The decline of the Yavu Pai, the Western Apaches, and the Chiricahua followed a total war campaign by the U
00:48:44.S. military that involved pursuing them through the winter and burning their teepees.
00:48:49The real reason the U.S. conquered the Indians had very little to do with supposedly superior technology, and it
00:48:55certainly wasn't tactics.
00:48:56As you've seen, the Indians' tactics were far more effective.
00:49:00The difference was that the U.S. Army was backed by a massive and growing country.
00:49:03It was richer, more populous, had more access to mass transportation and technology.
00:49:09The U.S. had better agriculture and could mass produce weapons.
00:49:13It could move quickly by train.
00:49:14Economic strength and better logistics is what helped America conquer the West.
00:49:19But it was also by accident.
00:49:21The final defeat of the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, and the Apache almost directly coincided with the decline of
00:49:26the great northern and southern bison herds.
00:49:29Between 1868 and 1881, buffalo hunters killed 31 million buffalo.
00:49:33And perhaps more devastating than anything else, the American Indians were wiped out by infectious disease.
00:49:42When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, he didn't really understand how diseases spread.
00:49:48Back then, Europeans generally believed that people got sick from bad air.
00:49:53There were some indicators that if you spent time around sick people, you'd get sick too, but that was it.
00:49:58People didn't know diseases spread from germs.
00:50:01They certainly didn't understand concepts like inoculation.
00:50:03When the natives started getting wiped out by disease, and they truly did get wiped out, the Conquistadors saw this
00:50:11as a sign from God that he was on their side.
00:50:13By all accounts, diseases absolutely devastated the natives.
00:50:17It was much more brutal than warfare.
00:50:19An estimated 100,000 Aztecs were killed during the Spanish conquest.
00:50:22In the decade that followed, 8 million more died from infectious disease.
00:50:27Most tribes lost anywhere from a third to a half of their population.
00:50:32Before 1820, roughly 30 epidemics hit the Plains Indians, including measles, malaria, whooping cough, and the flu.
00:50:39Mexican raids in 1816 led to a resurgence of malaria and introduced syphilis.
00:50:44In 1839, smallpox returned when it was brought back by Kiowas.
00:50:49Thousands died.
00:50:51Cholera, which is basically a form of extreme diarrhea, was especially brutal for the Plains Indians.
00:50:55The disease first appeared in India in their early 1800s, and then made its way to Europe, and in 1832
00:51:02arrived in the United States.
00:51:04Cholera killed a lot of white people, too, of course.
00:51:06The Indians were exposed to it from wagon trains full of pioneers on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails.
00:51:12Thousands of pioneers and 49ers died.
00:51:14The Plains Indians were decimated.
00:51:16Half of the Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne died.
00:51:19In school, we're taught that smallpox was used as a bioweapon against American Indians.
00:51:24This is considered a well-settled fact among many historians, government officials, and activists.
00:51:30Many of us were taught that white colonizers deliberately gave Indians blankets from hospitals that were treating smallpox patients.
00:51:37Those blankets, the story goes, caused a smallpox epidemic among the Indians.
00:51:42It's repeated ad nauseam in the media today.
00:51:44Before the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, smallpox was in fact used as a weapon.
00:51:50The problem with the story is that it never happened.
00:51:52In 1736, Indians were sieging Fort Pitt, which was located near present-day downtown Pittsburgh.
00:52:00The fort was about to be overrun, and as if that wasn't bad enough, the fort's hospital was home to
00:52:05an increasing number of smallpox patients.
00:52:07This is an important point.
00:52:08At the time, smallpox was killing nearly half a million Europeans every single year.
00:52:13If this was bioterrorism, they were doing it wrong.
00:52:16When Sir Geoffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America during the French and Indian War,
00:52:23learned of the Indian siege, he sent a letter to one of his colonels.
00:52:26Quote,
00:52:27Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?
00:52:31We must, on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.
00:52:36The colonel wrote back that he would try to infect the Indians with blankets, taking care, however, not to get
00:52:42the disease myself.
00:52:44They weren't the first to think of it.
00:52:45A fur trader named William wrote in his journal in 1763 that the British had given blankets from the smallpox
00:52:52war to two Indian diplomats.
00:52:54Quote,
00:52:55Out of our regard to them, we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital.
00:53:00I hope it will have the desired effect.
00:53:03Reportedly, Trent also submitted an invoice for blankets to the British government.
00:53:07Quote,
00:53:08To replace in kind those which were taken from people in hospital to convey the smallpox to the Indians.
00:53:14So it's true that a couple of British officers and a trader wanted to spread smallpox through blankets.
00:53:20But there's no evidence that they succeeded in causing an outbreak.
00:53:24Had it worked, the siege would have ended and the Indians would have moved to healthier areas.
00:53:28But it lasted for many more months.
00:53:30When the dignitaries at Fort Pitt met to discuss terms of surrender, the Indians who had received the blankets did
00:53:35not have smallpox.
00:53:38It's worth noting that smallpox rarely ever spreads on surfaces.
00:53:42And when it does, it's substantially less dangerous.
00:53:45George Washington knew this.
00:53:46During the Revolutionary War, Washington ordered the first mass immunization campaign in American history,
00:53:52where doctors rubbed small amounts of smallpox virus into the incisions that they cut in soldiers' arms.
00:53:59That wasn't always effective, and it was certainly dangerous.
00:54:02But in general, the campaign worked.
00:54:05Some historians credit the inoculation campaign for winning the war.
00:54:08This is a virus that, as Washington later demonstrated, is substantially less dangerous when it's not inhaled into the lungs.
00:54:15Even when you deliberately rub the virus into a soldier's bloodstream via the skin,
00:54:19it's more likely to inoculate him than to cause any kind of adverse effects.
00:54:24And on top of that, it's a virus that doesn't last very long outside the body.
00:54:28In human conditions, when it's contained in saliva or blister fluids, say, when it's on a blanket belonging to a
00:54:34smallpox patient,
00:54:35the smallpox virus will often die within just a few hours.
00:54:39The fact is, smallpox killed a lot of Indians.
00:54:42Killed a lot of everybody.
00:54:43But they didn't catch it from blankets.
00:54:46Philip Randlett, a historian at Hunter College, put it this way, quote,
00:54:49Since, as it appears, the smallpox at Fort Pitt originated with the Indians, the blanket gambit had to have been
00:54:54a complete failure.
00:54:56Trying to infect Indians with smallpox that came from them in the first place was doomed to fail
00:55:00because the Indians vulnerable to the disease had just been exposed to it.
00:55:04He also noted that, quote,
00:55:05Plenty of evidence suggests that the smallpox virus was already dead on the unpleasant gifts.
00:55:10And if Fort Pitt had been saved by the blanket stratagem,
00:55:13Trent would have done some gloating.
00:55:16Only one conclusion could be drawn.
00:55:17The plan flopped.
00:55:19In August of 1762, a year before the smallpox blankets were supposedly distributed,
00:55:25the American military engineer Thomas Hutchins wrote the following journal entry from Fort Miami in Ohio.
00:55:31The 20th, the above Indians met, and the chief spoke in behalf of his and the Kickapowit nations as follows.
00:55:37Brother, we are very thankful to Sir William Johnson for sending you to inquire into the state of the Indians.
00:55:42We assure you we are rendered very miserable at present on account of a severe sickness that has seized almost
00:55:48all our people,
00:55:49many of which have died lately, and many more likely to die.
00:55:53The 30th set out for the Lower Shawnees town and arrived 8th of September in the afternoon.
00:55:58We could not have a meeting with the Shawnees, the 12th, as their people were sick and dying every day.
00:56:04It's true that beginning earlier in the spring, an outbreak of smallpox was underway in the Ohio Valley and Great
00:56:10Lakes region.
00:56:11That's according to Gershom Hicks, who was held captive by the Indians at the time,
00:56:15and described what he saw in a letter to his regiment captain, William Grant.
00:56:19According to Hicks' eyewitness testimony, quote,
00:56:22The smallpox has been very general and raging amongst the Indians since last spring.
00:56:26It has killed many Mingos, Delawares, and Shawnees.
00:56:29But there's no reason to believe that blankets caused this outbreak,
00:56:33because the outbreak preceded the distribution of the blankets by several months.
00:56:36So that's it. That's the sum total of the evidence that white colonizers massacred the Indians by using smallpox blankets
00:56:44as a bioweapon.
00:56:45Hundreds of years ago, a mercenary trader and a couple of British officers had suggested giving smallpox blankets to the
00:56:51Indians,
00:56:52and the mercenary claims he actually followed through on the attempt.
00:56:56The smallpox blanket myth is yet another central story involving the American Indians that we can officially say is now
00:57:04debunked.
00:57:06The purpose of this report is not to whitewash history or present a mirror image of the cartoon version of
00:57:12Indians were taught in schools.
00:57:14The reality is that the Indians were victims of some horrible things, including unnecessary and inhumane massacres,
00:57:20sometimes at the hands of the U.S. Army.
00:57:22In 1864, with the federal government consumed by the Civil War, Sioux, Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapahoes
00:57:29were regularly raiding and murdering white settlements across the West.
00:57:32Hundreds of white settlers were dead. Some were kidnapped.
00:57:35Wagon trains heading west were under constant siege.
00:57:39Obviously, this was a major issue for the fledgling and isolated city of Denver.
00:57:43That November, along the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado territory,
00:57:48a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people led by Chief Black Kettle, who had raised both an American flag and
00:57:54a white flag of truce in hopes of peace,
00:57:57awoke to the thunder of approaching hooves as U.S. Army Colonel John M. Chivington brought a force of over
00:58:03675 Colorado volunteer soldiers in a brutal, unprovoked assault on the encampment of mostly women, children, and elders.
00:58:10What unfolded over the next few hours was a scene of unimaginable horror.
00:58:15Soldiers charging through teepees, firing indiscriminately, mutilating bodies, slaughtering more than 230 Native Americans, the vast majority who were women
00:58:26and children.
00:58:26This was despite promises of protection extended by U.S. authorities just weeks before.
00:58:31The citizens of Denver were elated and saw Chivington as a hero.
00:58:35He paraded through the city with Indian scalps.
00:58:38The entire event, of course, was a disgrace.
00:58:41But some of Chivington's own officers were appalled by the massacre.
00:58:45Their accounts led to shock and moral outrage in East Coast newspapers among the public.
00:58:49There was a military commission, and there were two congressional investigations into the massacre.
00:58:54The territorial governor was forced to resign from office.
00:58:58The final congressional report called it a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the various savage among those
00:59:05who were victims of this cruelty.
00:59:07The Sand Creek Massacre deserves to be condemned.
00:59:10But it's easy to forget the circumstances that white settlers were living under.
00:59:15It's easy to look down on what happened today, now that there's no risk that your wife and kids are
00:59:20going to be scalped on their way to the local grocery store.
00:59:23But life back then was very different.
00:59:25In 1871, General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose middle name notably is a tribute to a legendary Indian chief,
00:59:32was traveling across the Salt Creek Prairie when he was spotted by Indian warriors.
00:59:37He got lucky. A medicine man called off the raid on his caravan.
00:59:40A few hours later, a less lucky convoy of ten wagons loaded with corn and supplies for Fort Griffin rumbled
00:59:49westward along the same route.
00:59:51The Comanche Massacre.
00:59:53According to Captain Robert G. Carter, who witnessed the aftermath, quote,
00:59:57The poor victims were stripped, scalped, and horribly mutilated. Several were beheaded, and their brains scooped out.
01:00:04Their fingers, toes, and private parts have been cut off and stuck in their mouths.
01:00:08And their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition,
01:00:14were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines.
01:00:19Their bowels had been gassed with knives, and carefully heaped upon each exposed abdomen,
01:00:25had placed a mass of live coals, now of course extinguished by the deluge of water,
01:00:30which was still coming down with a tarantial power almost indescribable.
01:00:34One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded,
01:00:40was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole,
01:00:45had been slowly roasted to death, burnt to a crisp.
01:00:49And he was still alive when the fiendish torture was begun,
01:00:52was shown by his limbs being drawn up and contracted.
01:00:55Congress never condemned the attack, probably because they were so common.
01:00:58The Indian chiefs involved were captured, convicted, and sentenced to death.
01:01:03But their convictions were commuted, and they were eventually paroled.
01:01:06Overwhelmingly, the cruelest attacks on the Indians came from vigilantes.
01:01:10On April 30, 1871, near Camp Grant in Arizona,
01:01:14a peaceful encampment of Apache Indians, mostly women and children and elderly,
01:01:18they were asleep and under the supposed protection of a federal treaty.
01:01:21But 148 Tucson citizens, Anglo-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and American-Indian allies,
01:01:28infuriated by ongoing Apache raids, massacred more than 100 Apache, kidnapped 28 children to sell into slavery,
01:01:34and left a horrifying scene of devastation.
01:01:36President Ulysses S. Grant was infuriated and demanded a trial.
01:01:40The defendants, though, were acquitted.
01:01:42That was, by and large, the sad saga of the conflict between Indians and settlers.
01:01:47But, in the end, the United States government never committed genocide.
01:01:50To the extent that tribes or bands were killed to extinction or near extinction,
01:01:54as was the case with the Yaqui and Yuki in California,
01:01:58it was at the hands of local militias or rogue pioneers.
01:02:02And those events were usually condemned by the U.S. government.
01:02:05Rather than committing genocide against the Indians,
01:02:07the U.S. federal government and the taxpayers who supported it did something radically different.
01:02:11It offered them land.
01:02:13This must have been shocking to a Comanche or Sioux chief.
01:02:17When they won wars, as we've repeatedly demonstrated,
01:02:20they tortured and executed the losers.
01:02:22Villagers were pillaged and burned.
01:02:25The women were enslaved and, depending on the tribe, raped.
01:02:28Enemy warriors were eaten.
01:02:31But when the U.S. finally won the Indian wars, the treatment was quite different.
01:02:35The Comanche, which was one of the last tribes to go to the reservation,
01:02:39ended up with millions of acres of prime cattle land.
01:02:42Their chief was a mixed-race man named Quanah Parker.
01:02:45He spent his youth murdering white settlers and committing horrifying atrocities.
01:02:50But Quanah Parker was never put on trial or executed for crimes against humanity.
01:02:55The women and children he undoubtedly killed and scalped were never avenged.
01:02:59Instead, he moved to a massive tract of valuable cattle land
01:03:02and became friends with General McKenzie,
01:03:05the Indian warrior who subdued the Indians by fighting like an Indian.
01:03:09Rather than live out his life as a prisoner of war,
01:03:11Quanah Parker became a celebrity.
01:03:12He lived in a ten-room mansion.
01:03:14He dined with President Roosevelt,
01:03:16spent time lobbying lawmakers on Indian affairs.
01:03:18According to the book Empire of the Summer Moon,
01:03:20Quanah had one of the first residential telephones in Oklahoma.
01:03:23He owned a car, an ambulance, had a bodyguard,
01:03:26frequently traveled on a railroad that was named after him.
01:03:29He appeared in a Western movie called The Bank Robbery
01:03:31and rode in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade,
01:03:34along with Geronimo, two Sioux chiefs, and a Blackfeet chief.
01:03:38Life on the reservations was never perfect,
01:03:41but it was better than what would have happened
01:03:42if they'd lost the war to a rival tribe.
01:03:46And that's what they don't teach you in school.
01:03:49It was better than what they just had or were forced up to a hav be.
01:03:54It's better than what they were living in school.
01:03:57It was still a 25-year-old friend of all in the city.
01:03:57That's why it's a little bit.
01:03:57I think it's a little bit.
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