The Matt Walsh Show - The Real History of the American Indians

00:00:00.960 If you grew up in the United States in the past 50 years, then you know about the Trail of Tears.

00:00:06.660 It's one of those stories that's beaten into our collective consciousness starting in grade school.

00:00:11.860 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,

00:00:20.680 and that thousands of Natives died in the process.

00:00:23.700 The government did this so that white men could seize Indian land and the valuable resources that it sat on. 0.79

00:00:30.580 In case you missed that lesson in the classroom, you might have caught it in the 2006 documentary narrated by James Earl Jones

00:00:37.020 or the sprawling national park with signs that note that the Indians did not want to leave

00:00:42.520 or the endless amount of online propaganda about it.

00:00:45.720 Much of what they're saying is a myth.

00:00:48.260 As it turns out, none of the Cherokee Indians who traveled the Trail of Tears

00:00:53.060 had ever heard of the Trail of Tears. That's because from 1830 to 1850 almost no one used the

00:00:58.500 phrase. The term was popularized a full seven decades after the Cherokees moved to Oklahoma

00:01:04.260 and even then it wasn't truly a household name. That didn't happen until the 1960s,

00:01:08.900 more than a century after it took place. But it isn't just the name that's at issue here,

00:01:14.340 It's the details that are so often omitted from the actual story.

00:01:18.580 The story begins in 1830 when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.

00:01:23.960 The law did not authorize the U.S.

00:01:25.920 government to forcibly remove Indians or march them westward against their will.

00:01:30.320 Instead, the law authorized the president to negotiate legally binding treaties

00:01:35.360 with the various tribes in which those tribes would be awarded compensation.

00:01:39.540 a new territory west of the Mississippi,

00:01:42.240 in exchange for voluntarily vacating the territory

00:01:45.500 that they currently lived on.

00:01:46.900 In accordance with that law,

00:01:47.820 many Indian tribes agreed to terms to relocate.

00:01:50.900 The first major treaty was the Treaty of New Echota in 1835.

00:01:55.000 In school, this treaty is presented as a fraudulent agreement

00:01:59.440 in which a tiny number of Cherokees

00:02:01.680 signed away all Cherokee lands in the Southeast, 0.85

00:02:04.720 allowing the U.S. government to obtain a pretext

00:02:06.720 to forcibly remove the Cherokees to Oklahoma, 1.00

00:02:09.060 resulting in the deaths of 4,000 Indians.

00:02:11.800 Well, every aspect of that narrative is false.

00:02:15.180 The first lie is that 4,000 Indians died.

00:02:18.140 That figure comes from a letter

00:02:19.320 written by Dr. Eliza Butler,

00:02:21.340 a member of the American Board of Commissioners

00:02:23.680 for Foreign Missions,

00:02:25.180 was hired by the Cherokees to embed on the relocation.

00:02:28.600 He admitted later that the number, quote,

00:02:30.860 was based on hearsay and guesswork.

00:02:33.720 Now, the actual figure is likely 10%

00:02:36.400 of what we were taught in school.

00:02:38.500 Although it's true that the Cherokee's chief,

00:02:40.800 John Ross, opposed the treaty,

00:02:43.260 it's also true that he was extensively involved

00:02:45.240 in negotiations, and though he opposed the version

00:02:48.100 of the treaty that got finalized,

00:02:50.260 it didn't stop him from enriching his family from it.

00:02:53.380 When the government started enforcing the treaty in 1838,

00:02:56.480 they allowed Cherokee to conduct their own removal. 0.76

00:02:59.560 13 of the 16 groups that went to Oklahoma

00:03:02.240 were managed by the Cherokee, not the army,

00:03:04.680 and the contract to handle removal logistics

00:03:07.080 went to Chief Ross's brother, Louis Ross.

00:03:09.600 He made about $65 per person,

00:03:11.580 which totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars

00:03:14.200 and was meant to make the journey more humane.

00:03:16.880 The money was intended for wagons, food,

00:03:19.960 medical care, provisions.

00:03:22.140 It was to ensure that there wouldn't be much of a death toll.

00:03:25.780 And that brings us to another lie

00:03:27.260 that the Indians were ripped off.

00:03:29.520 Well, in fact, the US federal government

00:03:31.400 paid the Indians $5 million or roughly $184 million

00:03:35.460 in 2025 dollars for seven million acres.

00:03:39.040 That is a far better price per acre

00:03:41.360 than Russia received for selling Alaska

00:03:43.720 to the United States in 1867,

00:03:45.840 or the French received in exchange

00:03:47.440 for selling the Louisiana Purchase.

00:03:49.680 The Indians received something like 70 cents an acre,

00:03:52.460 while Napoleon received just three cents an acre,

00:03:56.100 and Russia received two cents per acre.

00:03:58.400 In the words of Andrew Jackson, quote,

00:04:00.280 how many thousands of our own people

00:04:02.120 would gladly embrace the opportunity

00:04:03.900 of removing to the West on such conditions.

00:04:06.640 If the offers made to the Indians were extended to them, 0.85

00:04:09.780 they would be hailed with gratitude and joy.

00:04:12.860 So what are the odds that a central tenet

00:04:15.360 of anti-American history just suddenly popped up

00:04:18.540 in the 1960s, just as left-wing radicals

00:04:20.940 seized control of American universities?

00:04:24.400 Very high, it turns out.

00:04:26.120 As a matter of fact, one thing that left-wing academics

00:04:28.840 know very well is that historical narratives matter.

00:04:32.100 Who your people look up to matters.

00:04:35.500 The events that shape the country matter,

00:04:38.320 and it all can be very useful.

00:04:40.160 One group that found the Trail of Tears narrative useful

00:04:43.260 were the thousands of professional activists

00:04:45.280 who went to Washington in the early 1970s

00:04:47.760 and held a week-long occupation

00:04:49.580 of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building.

00:04:52.040 Protesters barricaded themselves inside with furniture,

00:04:54.920 fashioned makeshift weapons,

00:04:56.760 issued defiant statements to the press.

00:04:59.280 One leader reportedly told the New York Times

00:05:00.960 that Indians had taken a vow to fight to the death, 0.87

00:05:03.940 while another declared war on the United States.

00:05:07.160 Within days, President Nixon sent representatives

00:05:09.200 to hammer out a compromise.

00:05:10.680 He granted immunity to the militants

00:05:12.540 and paid for their trips home.

00:05:14.220 He signed legislation that handed millions of acres of land

00:05:17.180 over to Indian tribes, particularly in Alaska and New Mexico.

00:05:20.580 He lent his support to the Indian Self-Determination

00:05:23.000 and Education Assistance Act,

00:05:25.120 which would eventually become law.

00:05:26.640 The legislation allowed Indian tribes

00:05:28.260 to take over the administration of some federal programs,

00:05:31.480 which was a major coup

00:05:32.440 for the so-called American Indian Movement.

00:05:35.060 The Trail of Tears is often presented

00:05:36.880 as the ultimate symbol of American injustice,

00:05:39.600 but it is just one part in a much larger body

00:05:42.780 of pervasive myths that have shaped

00:05:45.100 our understanding of American history.

00:05:46.740 These myths amplified in schools and media

00:05:49.200 almost always portray American Indians

00:05:50.960 as peaceful, noble victims, stewards of the land,

00:05:54.480 overwhelmed by an unstoppable wave

00:05:56.260 of Imperial European and American forces

00:05:58.680 armed with superior technology.

00:06:00.360 Any violence on their part, we're told,

00:06:02.500 is merely a reaction provoked by white people.

00:06:05.180 We're told that as Americans, we live on stolen land

00:06:08.600 and that the US government perpetrated a literal genocide

00:06:11.800 against native nations. 0.55

00:06:13.120 These narratives are not only wrong,

00:06:14.880 but they're also a form of intellectual warfare

00:06:17.140 designed to dishonor our ancestors

00:06:19.460 and to foster a sense of collective guilt

00:06:22.300 that would undermine American confidence and unity.

00:06:25.320 And well, the thing is, it's working.

00:06:27.680 One poll sponsored by the Manhattan Institute

00:06:29.580 found that 45% of high school students were taught in class

00:06:32.800 that America was built on stolen land.

00:06:34.940 And another 22% heard it from an adult at the school.

00:06:38.760 Over the course of this video,

00:06:39.960 we will dismantle one by one,

00:06:42.720 the biggest myths about the Native Americans.

00:06:45.760 This is the real history of the American Indians.

00:06:49.280 So we need to start with a central, critical, and load-bearing myth that supports all the

00:06:58.760 others.

00:07:00.160 The widespread belief that the Indians were peaceful.

00:07:04.040 Nothing could be further from the truth.

00:07:06.020 Before we dismantle this claim, I have to warn you that to accurately convey the reality

00:07:10.560 of inter-tribal and frontier warfare, I have to use real historical examples.

00:07:15.240 And many of these accounts contain graphic violence.

00:07:18.400 The Indians were brutal to settlers and to each other. 0.99

00:07:20.960 Some of these details may be unsuitable for young children,

00:07:23.560 but they don't have any choice but to present them.

00:07:26.700 After all, this video is in pursuit of historical truth

00:07:30.120 rather than comforting myth.

00:07:32.400 Since the end of World War II,

00:07:34.000 American academics have pretended 0.83

00:07:35.700 that pre-modern humans lived in a state of peace.

00:07:39.640 Academic dishonesty was so out of hand by the 1990s

00:07:43.240 that according to archeologist Lawrence H. Keeley,

00:07:46.300 the most widely used archeological textbooks

00:07:48.300 contained no mention of war before civilization.

00:07:52.100 Some of the biggest names in anthropology,

00:07:54.100 archeology, and history have gone out of their way

00:07:56.780 to pretend that life before civilization

00:07:59.840 was actually pretty great.

00:08:01.680 This might be because so many post-World War II academics

00:08:04.860 deliberately ignored war.

00:08:07.020 In one case, academics were in such denial

00:08:09.360 about pre-modern warfare

00:08:11.360 that they pretended battle axes were a form of currency.

00:08:14.800 Now, you might be thinking, who cares about intellectuals?

00:08:18.120 Well, the myths they made ended up appearing downstream

00:08:21.940 in our mass culture.

00:08:23.080 Around the same time that references

00:08:24.720 to the Trail of Tears were rising,

00:08:27.000 Hollywood started portraying Indians 0.99

00:08:29.080 as peaceful and noble.

00:08:31.800 Dances with Wolves portrays, of all people,

00:08:34.500 the Lakota Sioux as a peaceful, harmonious community

00:08:38.020 living in balance with the land and the buffalo.

00:08:44.180 The Powhatan in Pocahontas 0.92

00:08:45.940 were peace-loving environmentalists

00:08:47.700 who sang about living in harmony with nature.

00:08:51.060 And the list goes on, of course.

00:08:52.840 None of that is accurate.

00:08:54.240 According to the book, War Before Civilization

00:08:56.540 by archeologist Lawrence H. Keeley,

00:08:59.520 somewhere between 90 and 95% of known societies

00:09:03.080 in all of human history were warlike.

00:09:06.280 The less civilized you were as a rule,

00:09:08.720 the more violent you were.

00:09:10.120 Two thirds of primitive societies were at constant war

00:09:12.880 compared to 40% of civilized states.

00:09:16.200 Now, at this point, you might say, but what about the peaceful tribes?

00:09:19.840 Not all of them were at war.

00:09:21.560 According to Keeley, those tribes are the exception that proves the rule.

00:09:25.040 Some 96% of American Indian tribes engaged in warfare.

00:09:29.820 And some tribes were more violent than others.

00:09:31.500 The most violent tribes were the Klamath-Modok, the Thompson tribe, the Navajo, the Apache, 1.00

00:09:37.760 Mojave, the Yuma, Iroquois, the Sioux, and, of course, the Comanche. 0.92

00:09:41.640 If you happen to be in their neighborhood, you probably spend a lot of time at war.

00:09:46.200 In most cases, primitive warfare consisted of surprise raids on enemies' villages or camps.

00:09:52.260 This is true for groups around the world, from Eskimos in the Bering Straits to natives in New Guinea.

00:09:58.020 This kind of warfare generally consisted of quietly surrounding enemy houses under the cover of night,

00:10:03.420 throwing spears through the walls, lighting the structures on fire, and shooting arrows through the doorways.

00:10:10.120 The killing was often indiscriminate, and civilians, including women and children, frequently died.

00:10:15.640 According to Keeley, the East Cree of Quebec slaughtered any Inuit Eskimo families they encountered, taking only infants as captains.

00:10:24.940 Neither age nor sex was any guarantee of protection from primitive raids.

00:10:29.280 Among Western U.S. Indian tribes, 86% were raiding or resisting raids undertaken more than once each year.

00:10:36.260 Now, 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.

00:10:44.660 In one small-scale Eskimo community in northern Canada, every single male had killed someone at some point.

00:10:52.140 Among prehistoric Illinois villagers, archaeological evidence suggests that the homicide rate would have been 70 times that of the U.S. in 1980.

00:11:00.600 So it turns out that bloodshed in Chicago is, in fact, an ancient phenomenon.

00:11:05.400 So just how savage were the Indians? 0.99

00:11:08.440 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.

00:11:14.660 evidence of cannibalism among American Indian tribes.

00:11:18.460 According to Keeley's book, War Before Civilization,

00:11:20.900 at 25 sites in the American Southwest,

00:11:23.160 anthropologists have discovered cannibalized human remains

00:11:26.200 dated from roughly the year 900 to 1300,

00:11:29.500 hundreds of years before Columbus arrived.

00:11:31.540 We know they were consumed because the assemblages

00:11:33.840 of disarticulated bones share a number of features,

00:11:37.280 butchering cut marks, skulls broken,

00:11:40.280 long bones smashed for marrow extraction,

00:11:43.160 bones burned or otherwise cooked and disposal with other kitchen refuse one colombian chief

00:11:49.800 quote consumed the bodies of a hundred enemies in a single day following a victor in another

00:11:55.400 chiefdom war captives were kept in special enclosures and fattened before consumption

00:12:00.280 many of these groups smoked or otherwise preserved human meat to be eaten later the ancerimo tribe 0.69

00:12:06.440 in colombia used human body fat as lamp fuel in their gold mines many groups in the americas

00:12:12.840 ate the hearts of slain enemies to absorb the latter's courage or to achieve an extended form

00:12:17.960 of revenge as recently as the 1800s american soldiers and texas rangers were witnesses to

00:12:23.960 cannibalism the takawa tribe in texas which allied with the us army in its mission to take on the

00:12:30.200 brutal comanche tribe often ate their victims one white captive named herman lehman who lived with 0.99

00:12:36.440 the comanches and eventually became a comanche warrior wrote about his experiences in a book

00:12:40.440 titled Nine Years Among Indians. The Comanche had been locked in a genocidal war with the Tonkawas 1.00

00:12:46.200 for decades, and by the time Lehman encountered them, they were, in his words, nearly exterminated.

00:12:51.640 But upon finding a Tonkawa outpost, Lehman wrote, we took possession of the camp and what do you

00:12:57.240 suppose we found on that fire roasting? One of the legs of a Comanche, a warrior of our tribe.

00:13:03.720 Whipped into a furor at the sight of their fellow warrior being eaten, the Comanches massacred

00:13:08.760 the tankawa lehman writes a great many of the dying enemy were gasping for water

00:13:13.640 but we heeded not their pleadings we scalped them amputated their arms cut off their legs

00:13:19.160 cut out their tongues and threw their mangled bodies and limbs upon their own campfire 1.00

00:13:24.520 put on more brushwood and piled the living dying and dead tankawas on the fire

00:13:29.640 some of them were able to flinch and work as a worm and some were able to speak and plead for

00:13:34.680 mercy piled them up put on more wood and danced around in great glee as we saw the grease and 0.97

00:13:41.320 blood run from their bodies and were delighted to see them swell up and hear the hide pop

00:13:46.520 as it would burst in the fire after the battle of plum creek in texas tonkawa allies cut up the body

00:13:52.920 of an enemy comanche and skewered it on sticks over a bonfire the texas rangers were there with

00:13:59.240 them and likely would have witnessed this so it's clear that the indians were very violent engaging 1.00

00:14:06.040 in raids on one another murdering women and children burning entire villages committing

00:14:11.080 genocide in some cases eating each other which brings us to our next myth

00:14:18.120 one common myth perpetuated by historians is that the american indians only became violent after

00:14:23.800 exposure to Europeans. One advantage academics have in perpetuating this myth is that the Indians

00:14:29.640 didn't keep a log of their own history, so we don't have written accounts of Indian battles from

00:14:35.520 the 1300s. Luckily, archaeological evidence doesn't require written history. This is what we know.

00:14:41.400 Almost all new settlements formed in eastern North America from 900 to 1400 AD were fortified,

00:14:48.400 and this is because around that time, Mississippian Indians from the Midwest and the

00:14:53.180 south were moving east and in constant conflict with the tribes they were encountering. Before

00:14:58.180 Columbus had even sailed the ocean blue, Oneota Indians were chasing other Indians out of northern 1.00

00:15:03.980 Illinois. Tribes like the Anasazi and the Hohokam were vacating their farms in Arizona and New 1.00

00:15:10.520 Mexico because their settlements were getting destroyed. Archaeologists at Crow Creek in South

00:15:15.080 Dakota discovered a mass grave with the remains of more than 500 people, including women and

00:15:20.260 children. They had been, according to Keeley, slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated during an

00:15:25.040 attack on the village a century and a half before Columbus's arrival. The attack seems to have

00:15:29.220 occurred just when the village's fortifications had been rebuilt. All the houses were burned,

00:15:34.360 and most of the inhabitants were murdered. Knife marks on the tops of their skulls and bone

00:15:39.040 fragments is how they know that they were scalped and mutilated. Not only were the Indians committing 0.98

00:15:44.120 atrocities against each other before europeans arrived but they also got less violent after the

00:15:51.000 white man got them according to keely the percentage of burials in coastal british

00:15:55.720 columbia bearing evidence of violent traumas was actually lower after european contact 13

00:16:02.200 from 1774 to 1874 and the very high levels 20 to 32 evidence in prehistoric periods as you'll see

00:16:10.280 later in this episode some tribes including the vicious warlike ones like the apache actually

00:16:15.720 sought protection from european powers but we'll get to that later first more on what indian on

00:16:22.280 indian violence was like according to sc guinn's book empire of the summer moon quote enemies

00:16:27.800 meanwhile were enemies and the rules for dealing with them had come down through a thousand years

00:16:32.760 comanche brave who captured a live ute would torture him to death without question it was 0.53

00:16:37.720 was what everyone had always done. What the Sioux did to the Cinnaboyne, what the Crow did to the 1.00

00:16:42.140 Blackfeet. A Comanche captured by a Ute would expect to receive exactly the same treatment, 1.00

00:16:46.940 which was why Indians always fought to their last breath on the battlefields. Often this 0.98

00:16:50.940 led to a tit-for-tat where one raid would lead to another ad infinitum. Those early Indian raids 0.97

00:16:56.840 were brutal and included tribes widely celebrated as advanced by modern historians. Consider the 1.00

00:17:02.820 case of the Iroquois were often presented as a sophisticated tribe who, according to the

00:17:08.060 documentarian Ken Burns, influenced America's founding fathers. Long before 13 British colonies

00:17:14.000 made themselves into the United States, the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, Seneca,

00:17:21.800 Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk, had created a union of their own that they called

00:17:30.620 the Haudenosaunee, a democracy that had flourished for centuries.

00:17:35.940 Somehow, strangely enough, Ken Burns forgot to tell us that when the Iroquois captured

00:17:40.800 an enemy combatant, the combatant was not immediately executed, but instead tortured

00:17:45.540 during the war party's return to camp.

00:17:47.840 They made it back to the village.

00:17:49.140 The hostages were given to the families of dead Iroquois soldiers, adopted by the families

00:17:54.360 and given the names of the dead Indians, and then, according to Keeley, quote,

00:17:58.220 tortured to death over several days.

00:18:01.060 The prisoner was dead.

00:18:02.240 Some parts of his body were eaten,

00:18:03.900 usually including his heart, by his murderers.

00:18:06.900 These kinds of misrepresentations are completely pervasive.

00:18:10.640 The Mendocino Land Trust in California

00:18:13.720 has land acknowledgments celebrating the Yuki

00:18:16.420 and Kato tribes that once lived on land

00:18:19.760 now occupied by rich liberal Californians.

00:18:23.060 The land trust claims that these tribes

00:18:24.620 were stewards of these lands for millennia,

00:18:27.440 and we mourn the atrocities committed against them

00:18:30.200 in the past while recognizing

00:18:31.760 that these injustices continue today.

00:18:34.100 But they failed to mention

00:18:35.240 that the two tribes hated each other.

00:18:37.860 When Yuki Indians discovered that Katos were encroaching 0.99

00:18:41.120 on their obsidian mine and plant-gathering territory,

00:18:44.480 they retaliated by killing four Kato girls.

00:18:47.280 Such violence was par for the course

00:18:49.340 in pre-modern California.

00:18:51.140 At a thousand-year-old excavation site

00:18:53.320 in central California, 5% of human skeletons

00:18:56.520 were embedded with arrowheads.

00:18:58.200 The Indians regularly massacred their rivals

00:19:00.680 and burned their villages before Columbus arrived.

00:19:03.060 The archeological evidence is overwhelming

00:19:04.860 and runs along the Missouri River in South Dakota

00:19:07.400 and throughout the American Southwest.

00:19:09.580 In 1280, the Pueblo at Sand Canyon

00:19:12.020 was destroyed in a massacre.

00:19:13.800 Artifacts were smashed and stolen

00:19:15.480 and a defensive wall was totally burned.

00:19:17.820 The Pueblo of Coahuwa in New Mexico

00:19:20.140 was plundered and destroyed in 1400.

00:19:22.480 No tribe blows up the peaceful Indian myth more than the Comanches, who ruled 1.00

00:19:28.240 the southern Great Plains for centuries and even beat back the Spanish Empire,

00:19:32.620 which had no problem conquering the Aztecs or the Incas. The Comanche would 1.00

00:19:36.760 quote, attack whole villages and burn them, raping, torturing and killing their 0.99

00:19:40.700 inhabitants, leaving young women with their entrails carved out, men burned 0.99

00:19:45.100 alive, they skewered infants and took young boys and girls as captives. Now

00:19:50.500 Now they did this to almost everyone they encountered.

00:19:53.100 The Comanche were always brutal, 1.00

00:19:54.540 but it wasn't until they were introduced to the horse,

00:19:56.680 which was brought by Europeans, that they hit their apex. 0.95

00:20:00.740 Because they were highly mobile

00:20:02.540 and brilliant at horsemanship,

00:20:04.540 the Comanche could move hundreds of miles faster

00:20:07.160 than anyone else.

00:20:08.560 Their nomadic lifestyle meant

00:20:09.980 they could launch attacks from anywhere.

00:20:12.420 By the mid 1700s, everybody feared them,

00:20:14.800 from the Tonkawa in Texas, to the Blackfeet in Wyoming,

00:20:18.520 the Utes in New Mexico, to the Pawnee in Kansas.

00:20:22.020 Comanche attacks on Hickorya Apaches were so brutal 1.00

00:20:26.180 that they begged for and received Spanish protection.

00:20:30.220 The Comanche were such a force that by the mid 18th century, 1.00

00:20:33.240 powerful tribes like the Cheyenne

00:20:35.600 refused to breach Comanche territory.

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00:21:42.840 as radical college professors were rewriting history to create the myth of the peaceful

00:21:50.740 indian others were willing to acknowledge native american violence but blame that on white people

00:21:55.880 in 1969 an indian author and activist named vine deloria argued that scalping was introduced prior

00:22:03.360 to the french and indian war by the english framing it as a european invention that confirmed

00:22:09.980 suspicions of Indians as wild animals to be hunted and skinned.

00:22:13.820 Well, in fact, scalping was one of the many ancient traditions meant to cripple victims

00:22:19.020 in the afterlife.

00:22:20.560 As Lawrence Keeley notes, the custom of scalping enemy dead was observed at first contact among

00:22:25.740 tribes ranging from New England to California and from parts of the subarctic down to northern

00:22:31.020 Mexico.

00:22:32.300 Scalps and scalping were embedded in the myth and rituals of so many tribes that the customs

00:22:36.640 indigenous roots in north america are beyond serious question defiling an enemy's body

00:22:41.920 supposedly denied them a place in the afterlife it was humiliating this photo shows the corpse of a

00:22:48.160 u.s calvary been killed and mutilated by the southern cheyenne in 1867 tribes in colombia

00:22:55.280 kept the entire skins of their dead enemies some tribes turned their enemies bones into flutes

00:23:01.200 women commonly flayed the victims and at least one tribe treated their victims like we treat

00:23:06.560 trophy bucks they had them stuffed waxed and prominently placed in their homes different

00:23:11.280 plains tribes mutilated their foes corpses in different ways and their traditions went back

00:23:16.480 centuries anthropologists working the site of the crow creek massacre which happened in the mid

00:23:21.600 1400s in central south dakota found mutilated skeletons after the battle of little bighorn

00:23:26.560 more than 400 years later indian women used marrow cracking mallets to pound the faces of the dead 1.00

00:23:32.640 soldiers into pulp. Name the tribe and I will tell you their preferred method of mutilation. 0.99

00:23:38.880 The Cheyennes slashed their enemies arms, the Arapaho split their enemies noses, 0.98

00:23:43.360 Sioux slit their enemies throats. Indian warfare was dominated by superstitions and traditions and 0.99

00:23:49.200 mutilations and scalps weren't the only way to prove yourself as a soldier.

00:23:53.120 On the Great Plains, the Indians had a tradition called Counting Coup and it involved demonstrating 0.76

00:23:57.920 extreme bravery by touching or striking a living enemy warrior in battle with a hand bow whip or

00:24:04.320 special coup stick and then escaping unharmed this act was considered the highest honor in

00:24:09.680 inter-tribal warfare often more prestigious than killing from a distance because it required getting

00:24:14.800 dangerously close proving superior courage and skill while humiliating the opponent as recently

00:24:20.960 as world war ii an american indian named joe medicine crow completed the four traditional crow

00:24:26.240 war deeds he counted coup by overpowering a german soldier in hand-to-hand combat he captured an

00:24:32.080 enemy's weapon by taking the soldier's rifle in the scuffle he led a successful war party on a

00:24:38.160 mission to capture explosives and he stole his enemy's horses on a raid on an ss camp and this

00:24:44.800 made him eligible to be a warchief some of these traditions are admirable and impressive no doubt

00:24:50.640 joe medicine crow was an american hero but the ancient practice of scalping enemies and mutilating

00:24:55.680 their bodies to deny them a place in the afterlife is of course appalling the unfortunate reality is

00:25:01.840 that in some cases whites usually in mobs and militias participated in scalping but this is

00:25:08.080 vastly overstated especially cases in which the government supposedly encouraged scalping for

00:25:12.720 example one professor from the university of texas claims that in california scalp warfare driven by

00:25:18.240 scalp bounties eliminated nearly 90 percent of some tribal populations this view became pervasive

00:25:24.560 in the 1990s but it's almost totally false in 2023 a professor at california state university

00:25:30.400 chico discovered that in fact quote indian scalp bounties remained extremely rare in gold rush

00:25:35.440 california and were seldom offered anywhere except in a scattered handful of isolated and

00:25:40.240 unincorporated rural communities he further emphasized quote so routinely are these

00:25:44.720 allegations made they now go largely uncontested and appear to have one nearly universal acceptance

00:25:50.480 has established historical facts. These facts, however, are false. The state of California never

00:25:55.840 offered, let alone actually paid, cash bounties for Native American scalps, heads, or other body 0.81

00:26:01.360 parts. We can safely say that the idea of systematic state-sponsored scalp bounties

00:26:06.640 as a primary driver of depopulation is now debunked as a modern myth.

00:26:11.840 Another pervasive myth about Native Americans combines two contradictory ideas into one.

00:26:21.120 Native Americans had no concept of property rights, particularly over land, and that Europeans stole 1.00

00:26:26.820 the land from them. Well, obviously, these two claims cannot both be true. If the Indians truly 1.00

00:26:32.280 lacked any notion of property rights, then the land, by definition, could not have been stolen

00:26:37.280 in from them because theft implies the violation of rightful ownership.

00:26:41.960 Yet the same narrative often asserts both points simultaneously

00:26:45.560 without recognizing the logical contradiction.

00:26:48.120 This inconsistency reveals a deeper issue.

00:26:51.120 The first claim is frequently used to justify displacement

00:26:54.120 by portraying native land used as primitive or communal

00:26:58.440 in a way that didn't count as real ownership under European legal standards.

00:27:03.000 The second claim, meanwhile, appeals to modern moral sensibilities

00:27:06.720 about injustice. Holding both ideas at once allows the narrative to shift between them depending on

00:27:12.380 the argument being made while avoiding the underlying incompatibility. The way the revisionists

00:27:17.740 frame this debate is like a rigged game. There's no way to win if you accept the premise. And so

00:27:23.360 we don't accept the premise. The Indians, like the average toddler, absolutely had a notion of 1.00

00:27:29.840 property rights. They often went to war over them. In the 1830s in the Alexander Valley in northern

00:27:36.620 california pomo indians stole an acorn stash from an oak grove belonging to the wapo tribe 1.00

00:27:43.420 that was not a good decision the wapo immediately raided massacring the pomo and burning one of

00:27:48.620 their villages the remaining pomo then fled the area for the safety of other pomo villages 1.00

00:27:53.740 farther away from the wapo the wapo eventually occupied some of the abandoned villages and

00:27:59.020 just like that a dispute over territory led to a war and the winning tribe expanded its territory

00:28:04.700 as property rights. Those kinds of disputes happened literally all the time. They were

00:28:11.480 very, very violent. Surprise attacks in California Como villages killed between 5 and 15 percent of

00:28:18.420 the population. When the first Spanish explorers encountered the Barberay Neo Chumash in California,

00:28:23.760 the tribe had just had two of their villages massacred and burned, killing 10 percent of the

00:28:28.880 tribe. According to the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, in California were tribes depended heavily

00:28:33.860 on gathering wild plant foods and on hunting or fishing,

00:28:37.680 conflicts over resource poaching were very common.

00:28:40.920 He continued that, quote,

00:28:42.100 many California tribes often granted outsiders the right

00:28:44.480 to exploit their hunting and gathering grounds

00:28:46.540 when they were properly asked or awarded with gifts,

00:28:50.240 yet they would fight any group that poached.

00:28:52.840 The people who live in Northern California today

00:28:54.600 are much more communist than the American Indians 0.99

00:28:57.120 they replaced.

00:28:58.700 It's a shame they don't just give the land back.

00:29:01.720 But California tribes weren't the only ones going back and forth about property.

00:29:05.640 The Plains Indians continuously waged war over horses, which was their key metric of wealth.

00:29:11.200 Indians in the Pacific Northwest fought over water and fishing access.

00:29:15.960 Tribes in the Midwest fought for centuries over who got access to rice fields and hunting grounds in places like Minnesota.

00:29:22.620 Different tribes had different ways of allocating land, but they all had ways of doing it.

00:29:26.760 Most tribes had defined territories for hunting, fishing, gathering, or farming with boundaries recognized intertribally.

00:29:33.760 On the Great Plains, the Lakota allocated hunting grounds to families in the Pacific Northwest.

00:29:38.760 Tribes held potlatches to establish hereditary claims rooted in oral histories and legal traditions.

00:29:44.760 The Pueblo at Iroquois, who actually had farms, necessarily gave family their own plots for cultivation.

00:29:51.760 How exactly are you supposed to farm if everything is communally owned?

00:29:55.760 This is yet another myth that's easily debunked.

00:30:04.600 On the morning of May 19th, 1836, on the vast, untamed frontier of the newly declared Republic of Texas,

00:30:11.760 there was a small wooden stockade known as Parker's Fort.

00:30:14.840 It was very literally on the edge of civilization.

00:30:18.700 Built by the extended Parker family, the fort huddled along the Navasota River in what is now Limestone County, Texas.

00:30:25.700 Inside its log walls were homes, a garden, and 30 settlers working the surrounding fields.

00:30:31.780 And they included a pregnant 17-year-old named Rachel Plummer.

00:30:36.020 That morning, as the men worked outside the gates, a large band of warriors, primarily Comanche Indians, appeared on the horizon.

00:30:44.080 They carried a white flag signaling peace, but it was a ruse.

00:30:48.140 In moments, the fields erupted in chaos.

00:30:50.280 the Comanche warriors riding on horseback and covered in war paint charged the fort. Five

00:30:56.680 settlers were killed immediately including the family patriarch. Inside the fort Rachel witnessed

00:31:02.200 the carnage with her toddler. She tried to flee but was overtaken and dragged away. For the next

00:31:08.200 21 months she was held as a Comanche slave. That October she gave birth but the infant made her 0.99

00:31:14.680 less productive. Comanche's wouldn't have that. This is an actual excerpt from her memoirs.

00:31:21.700 Quote, my child was some six or seven weeks old when I suppose my master thought it was too much

00:31:26.780 trouble as I was not able to go through as much labor as before. One cold morning, five or six

00:31:32.640 large Indians came where I was suckling my infant. As soon as they came in, I felt my heart sink. 1.00

00:31:38.800 My fears agitated my whole frame to complete state of convulsion. My body shook with fear

00:31:44.500 indeed nor my fears vain or ill-grounded one of them caught hold of the child by the throat

00:31:50.740 and with his whole strength like an enraged lion actuated by its devouring nature

00:31:56.580 held on like the hungry vulture until my child was to all appearance entirely dead

00:32:02.740 but they didn't satisfy the comanche so they continued to attack the baby quote they by force

00:32:08.340 took the infant from me and threw his body up in the air and let him fall on the frozen ground

00:32:14.020 until he was apparently dead now miraculously the baby survived the strangling so the comanche quote

00:32:20.420 tied a planted rope around the child's neck and drew its naked body into the large hedges of

00:32:25.940 prickly pear cacti which were from 8 to 12 feet high they would then pull him down through the

00:32:32.180 pears this they repeated several times one of them then got on a horse and tying the rope to his

00:32:38.900 saddle rode around a circuit of a few hundred yards until my little innocent 0.90

00:32:44.300 one was not only dead but literally torn to pieces. This is how the Comanche and 1.00

00:32:51.680 many Indians fought. For the most part, wars between pre-civilized people are

00:32:56.180 almost always fought like total wars. Like Sherman marching to the sea or the

00:33:01.040 U.S. bombing of civilian targets in Germany in World War II, the Indians

00:33:05.060 would commonly engage in tactics like wringing fruit trees,

00:33:08.560 stealing or destroying herds and crops,

00:33:11.160 burning houses and canoes,

00:33:13.120 stealthily slaughtering individuals in small groups,

00:33:15.460 and gradually abrading a foe's manpower

00:33:17.940 in very frequent but low-casualty battles.

00:33:20.520 Often the Plains Indians would steal horses 1.00

00:33:22.340 from expeditions, leaving Americans alone in the prairie

00:33:25.060 with no way to get home.

00:33:27.120 One sub-Arctic tribe, the Kuchin, 0.88

00:33:29.500 annihilated its enemies, the Mackenzie Eskimos,

00:33:32.140 by surrounding their encampment and killing all but one male.

00:33:35.460 Their survivor, as he came to be known,

00:33:38.220 was all that was left,

00:33:39.060 and his purpose was to tell other tribes what had happened.

00:33:42.140 The anthropologist Lawrence Keeley claims, quote,

00:33:44.460 primitive warfare was much deadlier

00:33:46.240 than its modern counterpart.

00:33:47.880 An average Indian massacre killed 10% of the population.

00:33:51.660 An equivalent attack on the United States today

00:33:53.580 would kill more than 32 million people.

00:33:55.980 In other words, Indian tactics were extremely effective.

00:33:58.900 Throughout the 20th century,

00:33:59.940 Wars and their associated consequences,

00:34:02.520 such as famine and disease,

00:34:03.860 claimed an estimated 100 million lives.

00:34:06.440 This staggering toll reflects the devastating cost

00:34:08.740 of a world organized into nation states,

00:34:11.140 whose conflicts repeatedly escalated

00:34:12.820 into large-scale industrial violence.

00:34:14.680 But according to Keeley,

00:34:15.820 that figure is an estimated 20 times smaller

00:34:18.780 than the losses we would have experienced

00:34:20.740 if we fought like the Indians.

00:34:22.940 This is because modern civilized warfare is ritualized.

00:34:26.400 There are layers and layers of international law

00:34:28.520 that nation states are expected to fight by.

00:34:31.680 Not so for native population.

00:34:33.960 Concepts like prisoner exchange, parole,

00:34:36.920 the release after assuring the enemy

00:34:38.860 you won't take up arms again, and surrender are modern

00:34:43.060 and rely on agreements between opposing parties,

00:34:45.940 which almost never existed in pre-modern warfare.

00:34:48.660 Wave the white flag in a modern civilized war 0.65

00:34:51.300 and you're probably gonna be fine.

00:34:53.800 Not so with the Comanche. 1.00

00:34:55.240 Their language had no word for surrender.

00:34:57.900 For decades, the Comanche Indians raided settlements 0.80

00:35:00.080 of other Indians or Spanish and Texan colonizers.

00:35:03.120 According to the Empire of the Summer Moon,

00:35:05.080 which is an excellent history of the Comanche people, quote,

00:35:07.500 the logic of Comanche raids was straightforward.

00:35:09.780 All the men were killed and any of the men

00:35:11.780 who were captured alive were tortured to death

00:35:13.660 as a matter of course, some more slowly than others. 0.69

00:35:16.220 The captive women were gang raped,

00:35:17.940 some were killed, some tortured.

00:35:19.640 The portion of them, particularly if they were young,

00:35:21.720 would be spared.

00:35:23.000 Though vengeance could always be a motive

00:35:24.680 for slaying hostages, babies were invariably killed

00:35:27.760 while pre-adolescents were often adopted

00:35:29.580 by Comanches or other tribes.

00:35:31.420 Torture at the hands of Plains Indians 1.00

00:35:33.420 was so brutal and so common

00:35:34.880 that veteran Indian fighters preferred suicide

00:35:37.540 over capture and usually saved a bullet for themselves.

00:35:40.920 Their brutal tactics were far more effective

00:35:43.380 than the way Europeans fought.

00:35:45.480 That's how tribes like the Comanche and Apache

00:35:47.260 held off the Americans, the Mexicans, 1.00

00:35:49.200 and the Spanish Empire for more than three centuries,

00:35:52.320 the last of which took basically no time at all

00:35:54.420 to conquer the much more developed Aztecs 0.65

00:35:57.120 in central Mexico.

00:35:58.780 In 1758, the Comanche drew Spain 0.99

00:36:01.260 into its greatest military defeat in the New World

00:36:03.880 in a battle near a Spanish mission

00:36:06.000 at Santa Cruz de San Saba near present-day Menard, Texas.

00:36:10.080 There, the Indians stripped, murdered, mutilated, 1.00

00:36:13.240 and decapitated priests.

00:36:15.220 One early Spanish expedition to take out Plains tribes

00:36:18.280 from Mexico was wiped out by the Pawnees in Nebraska.

00:36:22.360 As a rule, the US Army often suffered major defeats

00:36:24.820 if it was outnumbered in battle,

00:36:26.420 and not just against the impressive

00:36:28.140 calvaries of the Plains Indians.

00:36:30.160 In 1835, Major Francis L. Dade led a column

00:36:34.460 of about 110 US soldiers from Fort Brook near modern Tampa

00:36:38.780 to reinforce Fort King near modern Ocala.

00:36:41.800 They were ambushed by about 180 Seminole warriors

00:36:44.880 near present day Bushnell, Florida.

00:36:47.500 It had all the hallmarks of a classic Indian attack. 1.00

00:36:50.420 Seminoles used surprise covered from tall grass

00:36:54.460 and superior knowledge of the terrain

00:36:56.240 to overwhelm the column.

00:36:57.720 They killed Major Dade and nearly all his men,

00:37:00.420 leaving only three survivors.

00:37:02.160 The Seminoles had basically no casualties.

00:37:04.820 The attack shocked the nation,

00:37:06.280 and today it's known as the Dade Massacre.

00:37:08.720 The U.S. launched a six and a half year punitive war

00:37:11.420 against the Seminoles.

00:37:12.840 The outcome of the war was indecisive.

00:37:15.520 In a description of his 30-year career,

00:37:17.880 Colonel R.B. Marcy complained that, quote,

00:37:20.800 the modern school of military science

00:37:22.560 are but illy suited to carrying on a warfare

00:37:25.140 with the wild tribes of the plains.

00:37:27.020 The vast expanse of desert territory

00:37:29.640 that has been annexed to our domain

00:37:31.280 within the last few years is peopled by numerous tribes

00:37:34.320 of marauding and erratic savages

00:37:36.100 who are mounted upon fleet and hardy horses,

00:37:38.400 making war the business and pastime of their lives

00:37:41.500 and acknowledging one of the ameliorating

00:37:43.380 conventionalities of civilized warfare.

00:37:45.860 Their tactics are such as to render the old system

00:37:48.600 almost wholly impotent.

00:37:49.860 The Indians, he continued, were here today

00:37:52.080 and there tomorrow, who at one time

00:37:53.900 stampedes a herd of mules upon the headwaters of the Arkansas,

00:37:57.320 and what next heard from is in the very heart

00:37:59.580 of the populated districts of Mexico,

00:38:01.400 laying waste to haciendas and carrying devastation,

00:38:03.960 rapine, and murder in his steps,

00:38:05.780 who is everywhere without being anywhere,

00:38:07.460 who assembles at the moment of combat

00:38:09.040 and vanishes whenever fortune turns against him,

00:38:11.300 who leaves his women and children far distant

00:38:13.700 from the theater of hostilities,

00:38:15.500 and has neither towns nor magazines to defend,

00:38:18.500 nor lines of retreat to cover.

00:38:20.660 In August 1854, a Lakota Indian named High Forehead

00:38:24.780 was waiting for an annuity payment

00:38:26.640 from the federal government when he killed a cow

00:38:28.900 being moved by a Mormon wagon train on the Oregon Trail.

00:38:32.340 Brevet 2nd Lieutenant John L. Groton,

00:38:35.320 a 24-year-old fresh from West Point

00:38:37.540 who hated the Indians

00:38:38.540 and didn't have much experience on the frontier,

00:38:40.920 volunteered to resolve the matter.

00:38:42.960 That was a mistake.

00:38:44.280 Leading 29 soldiers, two howitzers,

00:38:46.480 and a drunken interpreter,

00:38:48.040 he marched into the vast Lakota encampment

00:38:50.720 demanding the surrender of High Forehead.

00:38:53.680 The drunk interpreter started taunting the Lakota leader,

00:38:56.660 Conquering Bear, and a nervous U.S. infantryman

00:39:00.360 accidentally discharged his gun.

00:39:02.880 Groton then ordered his men to fire away,

00:39:05.380 killing Conquering Bear.

00:39:07.220 The Indians, infuriated by the attack and the insults,

00:39:10.380 laid waste to Groton and killed his entire detachment.

00:39:13.860 During the Civil War, Apache bands overcame 0.99

00:39:15.960 ruthless uprising involving U.S. troops, citizens, and tribes that had settled on reservations.

00:39:21.800 Because government forces were consumed with war, the wild nomadic tribes like the Comanche 1.00

00:39:27.160 waged total warfare against the tribes that had taken up farming on the reservation. Chickasaw,

00:39:31.960 Choctaw, and Creek Indians were the primary targets, and many were chased off the reservation

00:39:37.080 altogether. The U.S. government was incapable of stopping it. Even after the Civil War, American 0.69

00:39:41.960 forces were regularly getting outsmarted outmaneuvered and in some cases defeated by

00:39:46.440 supposedly inferior american indian forces but after the civil war defeats kept coming in 1866

00:39:51.960 an army captain named william fetterman was led into an ambush by oglala su chief red cloud which

00:39:57.560 led to a 20-minute battle that ended with the massacre of 80 u.s troops a post-massacre report

00:40:03.640 noted that their eyes were ripped out noses and ears cut off teeth removed brains scooped out

00:40:10.360 genitals severed and some of the men had been pulverized by hundreds of arrows.

00:40:15.080 In the treaties of 1868, the U.S. government conceded the Bozeman Trail and the Powder

00:40:19.800 River Country to the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors under Chief Red Cloud. On June 25, 1876, the most

00:40:26.520 famous and devastating defeat in the Indian Wars happened at the Battle of Little Bighorn, where

00:40:31.400 in less than an hour, George Custer and every man under his immediate command,

00:40:35.160 and almost 300 soldiers lay dead on the slopes

00:40:38.420 now known as Last Stand Hill.

00:40:40.680 So how then did we beat the Indians? 1.00

00:40:43.460 Well, it's simple.

00:40:44.620 It required embracing the tactics of the Indians. 1.00

00:40:47.640 In the end, their tactics were superior,

00:40:49.460 and the only way to beat them was to fight just like them.

00:40:53.480 In 1677, a New Englander acknowledged

00:40:56.040 that traditional tactics were pointless.

00:40:58.280 In our first war with the Indians,

00:41:00.000 God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill

00:41:03.180 in managing our arms after the European mode.

00:41:06.080 The guerrilla tactics they acquired from the Indians 1.00

00:41:08.920 proved essential in the later fight

00:41:10.500 against the British in 1776.

00:41:12.680 Campaigns against the nomadic, horse-riding plains Indians

00:41:15.540 were the most difficult because, quite frankly,

00:41:17.940 they were the most talented light cavalry on Earth.

00:41:20.780 White soldiers stood no chance of finding Comanches 1.00

00:41:23.520 without Indian guides, and even by the mid-1800s,

00:41:26.940 U.S. Army campaigns were generally pointless expeditions.

00:41:30.540 The first to figure out how to track them

00:41:32.160 were the early Texas Rangers,

00:41:33.720 who historian S.C. Gwynne described as

00:41:36.080 dirty, bearded, violent, and undisciplined men 0.60

00:41:38.540 wearing buckskins, serapes, coonskin caps, sombreros, 0.97

00:41:41.960 and other odd bits of clothing,

00:41:43.760 who belonged to no army, wore no insignias or uniforms,

00:41:47.400 made cold camps on the prairie,

00:41:49.360 and were only intermittently paid.

00:41:51.340 They owed their existence to the Comanche threat. 1.00

00:41:53.960 Their methods, copied closely from the Comanche, 0.96

00:41:57.060 would change frontier warfare in North America.

00:42:00.020 Under one legendary leader named Jack Hayes,

00:42:02.400 the Rangers adopted a totally different strategy

00:42:04.880 for fighting Indians.

00:42:06.200 The only strategy that ever proved effective, 0.87

00:42:08.500 use Indian tactics against the Indians.

00:42:11.600 Under Hayes, the Rangers moved in small groups,

00:42:14.620 trained to fight on horseback, and traveled without tents.

00:42:18.820 They used saddles for pillows and carried a rifle,

00:42:21.960 two pistols, a knife, a Mexican blanket,

00:42:24.400 and a pouch with salt, flour, tobacco, and hardtack.

00:42:27.680 They slept outside, traveled at night,

00:42:29.520 and attacked by surprise.

00:42:31.240 And yet the fight was still very one-sided.

00:42:33.740 One ranger estimated that about half the rangers

00:42:36.160 were killed off every year.

00:42:38.140 These outcomes disprove the myth that guns and technology

00:42:41.240 guaranteed European or American victory over the Indians.

00:42:44.120 In fact, for centuries, the firearms the Europeans 0.97

00:42:46.740 were using put them at a disadvantage

00:42:48.440 against the Plains Indians.

00:42:49.660 A Comanche warrior could fire 30 arrows per minute

00:42:52.380 from a bow, often while riding horseback at full gallop.

00:42:55.640 The Plains Indians used shields made of thick buffalo hides

00:42:59.160 that could stop bullets, even from muskets and rifles.

00:43:02.440 The lances they used against U.S. forces

00:43:04.660 were also used to hunt 3,000-pound buffalo,

00:43:07.260 which they did at full gallop.

00:43:08.820 According to S.C. Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon,

00:43:11.680 their lances were unmatched

00:43:12.920 by anything the white man had at close range.

00:43:15.880 And to make matters worse, they were better riders

00:43:18.140 and had better horses than the U.S. Army.

00:43:20.320 It took hundreds of years for white men 0.98

00:43:22.080 to match the speed, accuracy, reliability,

00:43:25.220 and rate of fire of the Indians.

00:43:27.460 When the Spanish first encountered the Plains Indians

00:43:29.460 in the mid-1500s, their primary firearm was the harkabas,

00:43:34.020 which was a big, heavy, impractical muzzleloader

00:43:37.240 who fired a lead ball using a slow-burning match

00:43:39.720 to ignite gunpowder.

00:43:41.060 Because they were over five feet long

00:43:42.780 and weighed close to 12 pounds,

00:43:44.560 they couldn't be reloaded on horseback.

00:43:46.180 It had to be fired from the ground,

00:43:48.120 and they didn't work in the rain.

00:43:49.900 In the 1600s and 1700s,

00:43:51.860 the Spanish upgraded to flintlock escopetas,

00:43:55.120 which were better to operate

00:43:56.220 but were still single-shot muzzleloaders.

00:43:58.520 And they also didn't work in the rain.

00:44:00.720 After Mexico gained independence from Spain,

00:44:02.900 they inherited those single-shot muskets,

00:44:04.760 but also upgraded to pepper-box handguns

00:44:07.200 and double-barreled shotguns for frontier defense

00:44:10.220 in the early 1830s and 1840s.

00:44:13.200 The early Americans commonly used

00:44:14.800 the Springfield Model 1842,

00:44:16.820 a cumbersome musket that was difficult to carry on horseback

00:44:20.080 and, assuming you were an experienced shooter,

00:44:22.380 could only get two to three rounds off in a minute.

00:44:24.940 It wasn't until the 1860s that breech-loading

00:44:27.260 single-shot rifles, which were easier to load

00:44:29.980 and could get 10 to 15 shots off per minute,

00:44:32.820 became standard.

00:44:34.140 In the 1860s and 1870s, lever-action rifles emerged,

00:44:38.220 including many brands we know today,

00:44:39.840 Henry Spencer, Winchester,

00:44:41.780 which were much more reliable and accurate

00:44:43.420 than the predecessors,

00:44:44.560 allowing multiple shots without reloading.

00:44:47.260 In 1836, a New Jersey inventor named Samuel Colt

00:44:50.060 introduced his first production revolver,

00:44:52.080 the Colt Patterson.

00:44:53.920 This was the first time, a full 300 years

00:44:57.060 since the Spanish arrived,

00:44:58.820 that someone had finally leveled the playing field.

00:45:01.640 The Republic of Texas immediately realized its value

00:45:04.080 and placed a large order.

00:45:05.960 The gun wasn't nearly as good

00:45:07.200 as the revolver as we have today.

00:45:08.500 It was fragile, needed to be disassembled for reloading,

00:45:12.280 had a folding trigger,

00:45:14.220 but critically, it introduced repeating fire.

00:45:16.960 Jack Hayes and the Texas Rangers always carried two,

00:45:19.480 meaning they could get 10 shots off very fast.

00:45:22.840 Ten years later, one of Hayes' top aides, Samuel Walker,

00:45:25.940 collaborated with Colt to design the Colt Walker,

00:45:28.920 a massive five-pound, six-shot, 44-caliber revolver

00:45:32.660 with a nine-inch barrel

00:45:33.600 and a fixed trigger guard loading lever.

00:45:35.660 It was the most powerful revolver for nearly a century

00:45:37.920 until it was displaced by the .357 Magnum

00:45:40.600 during the Great Depression.

00:45:41.840 However, the U.S. government didn't catch on

00:45:44.020 nearly as quickly as the Texas Rangers.

00:45:46.480 As late as 1849, the U.S. Army was still attempting

00:45:49.240 to use infantry to fight Plains Indians on foot.

00:45:52.420 They were complemented by U.S. Army dragoons

00:45:54.500 who wore white pants and blue jackets with orange camps

00:45:57.960 and armed with single-shot pistols

00:45:59.960 that were totally worthless against Plains Indians. 0.56

00:46:02.620 But even with faster-loading rifles and revolvers,

00:46:05.120 the U.S. was still occasionally losing battles.

00:46:07.260 On November 29th, 1872, U.S. troops attempted to force

00:46:10.660 a band of MODOK Indians back to a reservation.

00:46:14.200 The Indians, who included about 50 warriors,

00:46:16.280 plus their families, retreated to a natural fortress

00:46:19.780 in lava beds south of Tule Lake in California.

00:46:23.820 And incredibly, the Indians held their ground

00:46:25.820 for five months and fought U.S. forces to a stalemate,

00:46:29.060 even though they were vastly outnumbered.

00:46:31.120 It ended when the MODOK chief, Captain Jack,

00:46:34.000 assassinated General Edward Camby during peace talks.

00:46:37.460 Captain Jack was eventually captured and executed for murder.

00:46:40.700 The Indians repeatedly proved that their tactics 1.00

00:46:43.040 could overcome superior weapons.

00:46:45.240 On June 17, 1876, a U.S. Army column

00:46:47.880 more than a thousand soldiers led by Brigadier General George Crook set off to find an Indian

00:46:53.140 village. And that morning, while stopping for breakfast, an equally large group of Lakota and

00:46:58.240 Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse ambushed Crook and his men. They battled for six hours and

00:47:04.640 though both sides had equal numbers of casualties, the Indians had stopped Crooks' advance

00:47:08.720 and forced him into a retreat. His column was neutralized for months. Eight days later,

00:47:14.420 many of the same warriors defeated George Custer at Little Bighorn. The next year in 1877,

00:47:20.180 the Nez Perce Indians proved again that superior tactics could still overcome the Americans' newly 1.00

00:47:25.940 minted and technically superior weapons. On August 9th, the U.S. Army's 7th Infantry Regiment

00:47:31.700 launched a surprise attack on a Nez Perce village. Miraculously, the Nez Perce warriors repelled the 1.00

00:47:37.460 attack and they captured a howitzer and forced the Americans to retreat. As late as the 1870s,

00:47:43.380 it seemed like nothing could stop Comanche raids on settlers in Texas. In 1871, Indian raids against

00:47:48.900 civilian targets were so brutal, vicious, and numerous that some American military leaders

00:47:54.260 expected all the settlers to leave. Colonel Randolph Marcy, who was on tour with William

00:47:59.460 Tecumseh Sherman, wrote, if the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems in far 1.00

00:48:05.300 way of becoming totally depopulated. By 1874, Comanche raiders were hitting towns from southern

00:48:10.820 Colorado to Kansas to the Texas frontier. Pioneers were terrorized over thousands of miles.

00:48:17.060 On July 26, President Ulysses S. Grant gave General Sherman permission to crush the tribes.

00:48:22.580 Control of the reservations was transferred to the Army, and the Army was to subdue all Indians 0.98

00:48:27.540 who offered resistance to constituted authority. The peace policy was over, and a man named

00:48:33.060 Reynald McKenzie was unleashed on the Indians. Reynald Slidell McKenzie was known to the Indians

00:48:38.500 as bad hand because of injuries he suffered in the civil war he was tough and mean his soldiers hated

00:48:44.580 him but he was brutally competent and he knew better weapons were not going to guarantee victory

00:48:49.860 so he decided like the early texas rangers to fight like an indian he extensively used tonkawa

00:48:55.460 scouts he emphasized aggressive mobility moved at night and engaged in deception including leaving

00:49:01.620 campfires going in places that they were leaving rather than fight them in direct battle the way

00:49:06.900 european powers would mckenzie relentlessly pursued the indians burned their villages 0.72

00:49:11.780 killed their livestock when he captured comanche horses he killed them often thousands at a time

00:49:17.380 it was total war in every single successful western campaign the u.s army had to use primitive

00:49:22.980 methods and indian scouts to defeat the natives as mckenzie was subduing the comanche general

00:49:28.420 george crook was doing the same thing against the apache who were also raiding and pillaging

00:49:32.420 settlements across the southwest cook used small mobile units consisting of indians and supplied

00:49:38.900 himself by mule rather than wagon trains which were extremely vulnerable the decline of the yavu

00:49:44.420 pi the western apaches and the chiricahua followed a total war campaign by the u.s military that

00:49:50.740 involved pursuing them through the winter and burning their teepees the real reason the u.s

00:49:55.380 conquered the indians had very little to do with supposedly superior technology and it certainly 1.00

00:50:00.340 wasn't tactics as you've seen the indians tactics were far more effective the difference was that

00:50:05.860 the u.s army was backed by a massive and growing country it was richer more populous had more

00:50:11.220 access to mass transportation and technology the u.s had better agriculture and could mass produce

00:50:17.220 weapons it could move quickly by train economic strength and better logistics is what helped

00:50:22.900 america conquer the west but it was also by accident the final defeat of the sioux the cheyenne the

00:50:28.100 the Comanche and the Apache, almost directly coincided with the decline of the great northern

00:50:32.420 and southern bison herds. Between 1868 and 1881, buffalo hunters killed 31 million buffalo.

00:50:39.020 And perhaps more devastating than anything else, the American Indians were wiped out by

00:50:43.520 infectious disease. My show is proud to be sponsored by Grand Canyon University. It's an

00:50:48.680 affordable, private, non-profit Christian university based in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona.

00:50:53.020 At GCU, academically rigorous, industry-driven programs are built to provide you with practical skills and career readiness.

00:51:00.620 They believe education shouldn't be a privilege but an affordable path forward.

00:51:04.520 Because of this, GCU has kept tuition at the same rate on its traditional campus for the past 17 years and will continue into the 26-27 academic year.

00:51:13.100 Plus, they awarded over $404 million in institutional GCU scholarships last year to support and encourage education.

00:51:19.280 Grounded in Christian truth, GCU works to empower the next generation to lead with integrity, serve with purpose, and help transform their communities.

00:51:27.500 So take action and find your purpose at GCU. Visit gcu.edu to learn more.

00:51:36.140 When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, he didn't really understand how diseases spread.

00:51:42.060 Back then, Europeans generally believed that people got sick from bad air.

00:51:46.800 There were some indicators that if you spent time around sick people, you'd get sick too, but that was it.

00:51:52.480 People didn't know diseases spread from germs.

00:51:54.780 They certainly didn't understand concepts like inoculation.

00:51:58.280 When the natives started getting wiped out by disease, and they truly did get wiped out,

00:52:03.360 the Coquistadors saw this as a sign from God that he was on their side.

00:52:06.860 By all accounts, diseases absolutely devastated the natives.

00:52:10.540 It was much more brutal than warfare.

00:52:12.620 An estimated 100,000 Aztecs were killed during the Spanish conquest.

00:52:16.240 In the decade that followed, 8 million more died from infectious disease.

00:52:21.420 Most tribes lost anywhere from a third to a half of their population.

00:52:25.980 Before 1820, roughly 30 epidemics hit the Plains Indians, including measles, malaria,

00:52:30.640 whooping cough, and the flu.

00:52:33.000 Mexican raids in 1816 led to a resurgence of malaria and introduced syphilis.

00:52:38.240 In 1839, smallpox returned when it was brought back by Kiowas. 0.99

00:52:43.340 Thousands died.

00:52:44.600 Cholera, which is basically a form of extreme diarrhea,

00:52:47.420 was especially brutal for the Plains Indians.

00:52:49.860 The disease first appeared in India in their early 1800s

00:52:53.440 and then made its way to Europe

00:52:54.960 and in 1832 arrived in the United States.

00:52:57.540 Cholera killed a lot of white people too, of course.

00:53:00.400 The Indians were exposed to it from wagon trains

00:53:02.520 full of pioneers on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails.

00:53:05.740 Thousands of pioneers and 49ers died.

00:53:08.340 The Plains Indians were decimated.

00:53:10.380 Half of the Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne died.

00:53:13.260 In school, we're taught that smallpox was used

00:53:15.340 as a bioweapon against American Indians. 0.77

00:53:18.560 This is considered a well-settled fact

00:53:20.780 among many historians, government officials, and activists.

00:53:23.860 Many of us were taught that white colonizers

00:53:26.720 deliberately gave Indians blankets from hospitals

00:53:29.340 that were treating smallpox patients.

00:53:31.400 Those blankets, the story goes,

00:53:33.220 caused a smallpox epidemic among the Indians.

00:53:36.000 It's repeated ad nauseam in the media today.

00:53:38.540 Before the discovery of the smallpox vaccine,

00:53:40.880 Smallpox was in fact used as a weapon.

00:53:43.960 The problem with the story is that it never happened.

00:53:46.860 In 1736, Indians were sieging Fort Pitt,

00:53:50.640 which was located near present day downtown Pittsburgh.

00:53:53.960 The fort was about to be overrun,

00:53:55.960 and as if that wasn't bad enough,

00:53:57.500 the fort's hospital was home

00:53:58.700 to an increasing number of smallpox patients.

00:54:01.220 This is an important point.

00:54:02.560 At the time, smallpox was killing

00:54:04.080 nearly half a million Europeans every single year.

00:54:06.940 If this was bioterrorism, they were doing it wrong.

00:54:10.380 When Sir Geoffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief

00:54:12.740 of the British forces in North America

00:54:15.120 during the French and Indian War, learned of the Indian siege,

00:54:18.280 he sent a letter to one of his colonels.

00:54:20.160 Quote, could it not be contrived to send the smallpox

00:54:23.080 among those disaffected tribes of Indians?

00:54:25.620 We must, on this occasion, use every stratagem

00:54:28.240 in our power to reduce them.

00:54:30.500 The colonel wrote back that he would try

00:54:32.060 to infect the Indians with blankets, 0.98

00:54:33.940 taking care, however, not to get the disease myself.

00:54:37.900 They weren't the first to think of it.

00:54:38.980 A fur trader named William wrote in his journal in 1763

00:54:43.440 that the British had given blankets from the smallpox war

00:54:46.520 to two Indian diplomats.

00:54:48.660 Quote, out of our regard to them,

00:54:50.540 we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief

00:54:52.760 out of the smallpox hospital.

00:54:54.320 I hope it will have the desired effect.

00:54:57.120 Reportedly, Trent also submitted an invoice

00:54:59.500 for blankets to the British government.

00:55:01.600 Quote, to replace in kind those which were taken

00:55:04.740 from people in hospital to convey the smallpox

00:55:07.220 to the Indians.

00:55:08.700 So it's true that a couple of British officers

00:55:10.760 and a trader wanted to spread smallpox through blankets,

00:55:14.240 but there's no evidence that they succeeded

00:55:16.600 in causing an outbreak.

00:55:18.060 Had it worked, the siege would have ended

00:55:19.560 and the Indians would have moved to healthier areas, 0.94

00:55:21.820 but it lasted for many more months.

00:55:24.240 When the dignitaries at Fort Pitt met

00:55:25.760 to discuss terms of surrender,

00:55:27.320 the Indians who had received the blankets

00:55:29.200 did not have smallpox.

00:55:32.360 It's worth noting that smallpox rarely ever spreads

00:55:35.340 on surfaces, and when it does,

00:55:37.180 it's substantially less dangerous.

00:55:39.260 George Washington knew this.

00:55:40.360 During the Revolutionary War,

00:55:42.060 Washington ordered the first mass immunization campaign

00:55:44.960 in American history,

00:55:46.240 where doctors rubbed small amounts of smallpox virus

00:55:49.120 into the incisions that they cut in soldiers' arms.

00:55:53.460 That wasn't always effective, and it was certainly dangerous.

00:55:56.640 But in general, the campaign worked.

00:55:58.480 Some historians credit the inoculation campaign

00:56:01.200 for winning the war.

00:56:02.480 This is a virus that, as Washington later demonstrated,

00:56:05.100 is substantially less dangerous

00:56:06.720 when it's not inhaled into the lungs.

00:56:08.820 Even when you deliberately rub the virus

00:56:10.740 into a soldier's bloodstream via the skin,

00:56:13.480 it's more likely to inoculate him

00:56:15.840 than to cause any kind of adverse effects.

00:56:18.480 And on top of that, it's a virus

00:56:19.780 that doesn't last very long outside the body.

00:56:22.260 In human conditions, when it's contained

00:56:23.920 in saliva or blister fluids,

00:56:25.780 say when it's on a blanket belonging to a smallpox patient,

00:56:29.540 the smallpox virus will often die within just a few hours.

00:56:33.120 The fact is smallpox killed a lot of Indians,

00:56:35.860 killed a lot of everybody,

00:56:37.520 but they didn't catch it from blankets.

00:56:39.740 Philip Randlett, a historian at Hunter College,

00:56:42.100 put it this way, quote,

00:56:43.440 since as it appears the smallpox at Fort Pitt

00:56:45.600 originated with the Indians,

00:56:47.120 the blanket gambit had to have been a complete failure.

00:56:49.740 Trying to infect Indians with smallpox

00:56:51.860 that came from them in the first place was doomed to fail

00:56:54.420 because the Indians vulnerable to the disease

00:56:56.680 had just been exposed to it.

00:56:58.360 He also noted that, quote,

00:56:59.500 plenty of evidence suggests that the smallpox virus

00:57:01.740 already dead on the unpleasant gifts and if fort pitt had been saved by the blanket stratagem

00:57:07.660 trent would have done some gloating only one conclusion could be drawn the plan flopped

00:57:13.100 in august of 1762 a year before the smallpox blankets were supposedly distributed the american

00:57:19.500 military engineer thomas hutchins wrote the following journal entry from fort miami in ohio

00:57:24.860 the 20th the above indians met and the chief spoke in behalf of his and the kikapaua nations as

00:57:30.700 follows brother we are very thankful to sir william johnson for sending you to inquire into the state

00:57:35.740 of the indians we assure you we are rendered very miserable at present on account of a severe

00:57:40.700 sickness that has seized almost all our people many of which have died lately and many more likely

00:57:46.220 to die the 30th set out for the lower shawnees town and arrived 8th of september in the afternoon

00:57:52.140 could not have a meeting with the shawnees the 12th as their people were sick and dying every day 1.00

00:57:57.820 It's true that beginning earlier in the spring, an outbreak of smallpox was underway in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region.

00:58:04.840 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.

00:58:13.000 According to Hicks' eyewitness testimony, quote,

00:58:15.800 The smallpox has been very general and raging amongst the Indians since last spring.

00:58:20.440 It's killed many Mingos, Delawares and Shawnees. 0.60

00:58:23.660 But there's no reason to believe that blankets caused this outbreak

00:58:26.500 because the outbreak preceded the distribution of the blankets by several months.

00:58:30.780 So that's it.

00:58:31.620 That's the sum total of the evidence that white colonizers massacred the Indians

00:58:35.900 by using smallpox blankets as a bioweapon.

00:58:39.240 Hundreds of years ago, a mercenary trader and a couple of British officers

00:58:42.940 had suggested giving smallpox blankets to the Indians,

00:58:45.820 and the mercenary claims he actually followed through on the attempt.

00:58:50.060 The smallpox blanket myth is yet another central story involving the American Indians

00:58:54.760 that we can officially say is now debunked.

00:59:00.340 The purpose of this report is not to whitewash history or present a mirror image

00:59:04.840 of the cartoon version of Indians were taught in schools.

00:59:08.000 The reality is that the Indians were victims of some horrible things,

00:59:11.280 including unnecessary and inhumane massacres, sometimes at the hands of the U.S. Army.

00:59:15.380 In 1864, with the federal government consumed by the Civil War, Sioux, Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne,

00:59:21.940 and Arapahoes were regularly raiding and murdering white settlements across the West.

00:59:26.740 Hundreds of white settlers were dead, some were kidnapped.

00:59:29.460 Wagon trains heading West were under constant siege.

00:59:32.580 Obviously, this was a major issue for the fledgling and isolated city of Denver.

00:59:37.140 That November, along the banks of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado territory,

00:59:41.780 A village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, led by Chief Black Kettle, who had raised both an American flag and a white flag of truce in hopes of peace, awoke to the thunder of approaching 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.

01:00:04.340 What unfolded over the next few hours was a scene of unimaginable horror. Soldiers charging through

01:00:10.260 teepees, firing indiscriminately, mutilating bodies, slaughtering more than 230 Native Americans,

01:00:17.300 the vast majority who were women and children. This was despite promises of protection extended

01:00:22.740 by U.S. authorities just weeks before. The citizens of Denver were elated and saw

01:00:27.540 Shivington as a hero. He paraded through the city with Indian scalps. The entire event, 1.00

01:00:33.140 of course, was a disgrace. But some of Chivington's own officers were appalled by the massacre.

01:00:38.660 Their accounts led to shock and moral outrage in East Coast newspapers among the public.

01:00:43.860 There was a military commission and there were two congressional investigations into the massacre.

01:00:48.500 The territorial governor was forced to resign from office. The final congressional report

01:00:53.620 called it a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the various savage among

01:00:58.740 those were victims of this cruelty the sand creek massacre deserves to be condemned but it's easy

01:01:04.740 to forget the circumstances that white settlers were living under it's easy to look down on what

01:01:10.340 happened today now that there's no risk that your wife and kids are going to be scalped on their way

01:01:14.900 to the local grocery store but life back then was very different in 1871 general william tecumseh

01:01:21.780 sherman whose middle name notably is a tribute to a legendary indian chief was traveling across the

01:01:27.460 salt creek prairie when he was spotted by indian warriors he got lucky a medicine man called off 0.99

01:01:33.300 the raid on his caravan a few hours later a less lucky convoy of 10 wagons loaded with corn and

01:01:40.020 supplies for fort griffin rumbled westward along the same route the comanche massacred according

01:01:47.860 to captain robert g carter who witnessed the aftermath quote the poor victims were stripped

01:01:52.740 scalped and horribly mutilated several were beheaded and their brains scooped out their

01:01:58.020 fingers toes and private parts have been cut off and stuck in their mouths and their bodies now 0.75

01:02:03.620 lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition

01:02:09.060 were filled full of arrows which made them resemble porcupines their bowels had been gassed with knives

01:02:15.780 and carefully heaped upon each exposed abdomen had placed a mass of live coals now of course

01:02:22.100 extinguished by the deluge of water which was still coming down with a tarantial power almost

01:02:26.900 indescribable one wretched man samuel elliott fighting hard to the last had evidently been

01:02:32.660 wounded was found chained between two wagon wheels and a fire having been made from the wagon pole

01:02:38.980 had been slowly roasted to death burnt to a crisp and he was still alive when the fiendish torture

01:02:44.980 was begun was shown by his limbs being drawn up and contracted congress never condemned the attack

01:02:50.900 probably because they were so common the indian chiefs involved were captured convicted and

01:02:55.300 sentenced to death but their convictions were commuted and they were eventually paroled

01:03:00.340 overwhelmingly the cruelest attacks on the indians came from vigilantes on april 30th 1871

01:03:05.700 near camp grant in arizona a peaceful encampment of apache indians mostly women and children and

01:03:11.060 elderly they were asleep and under the supposed protection of a federal treaty but 148 tucson

01:03:16.660 citizens, Anglo-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and American Indian allies, infuriated by ongoing

01:03:22.840 Apache raids, massacred more than 100 Apache, kidnapped 28 children to sell into slavery,

01:03:27.980 and left a horrifying scene of devastation. President Ulysses S. Grant was infuriated

01:03:32.320 and demanded a trial. The defendants, though, were acquitted. That was, by and large,

01:03:37.040 the sad saga of the conflict between Indians and settlers. But in the end, the United States

01:03:42.380 government never committed genocide to the extent that tribes or bands were killed to extinction or

01:03:47.420 near extinction as was the case with the yaki and yuki in california it was at the hands of

01:03:52.860 local militias or rogue pioneers and those events were usually condemned by the u.s government

01:03:58.860 rather than committing genocide against the indians the u.s federal government and the

01:04:02.060 taxpayers who supported it did something radically different it offered them land

01:04:07.420 This must have been shocking to a Comanche or Sioux chief.

01:04:10.780 When they won wars, as we've repeatedly demonstrated, 0.55

01:04:13.820 they tortured and executed the losers.

01:04:16.220 Villages were pillaged and burned. 0.99

01:04:18.700 The women were enslaved and, depending on the tribe, raped. 0.66

01:04:22.460 Enemy warriors were eaten.

01:04:24.940 But when the U.S. finally won the Indian wars,

01:04:27.580 the treatment was quite different.

01:04:29.340 The Comanche, which was one of the last tribes to go to the reservation,

01:04:33.260 ended up with millions of acres of prime cattle land.

01:04:36.300 Their chief was a mixed-race man named Quanah Parker.

01:04:39.500 He spent his youth murdering white settlers and committing horrifying atrocities,

01:04:43.580 but Quanah Parker was never put on trial or executed for crimes against humanity.

01:04:48.940 The women and children he undoubtedly killed and scalped were never avenged.

01:04:53.180 Instead, he moved to a massive tract of valuable cattle land and became friends

01:04:57.500 with General Mackenzie, the Indian warrior who subdued the Indians by fighting like an Indian.

01:05:02.620 Rather than live out his life as a prisoner of war, Quanah Parker became a celebrity.

01:05:06.300 He lived in a 10-room mansion.

01:05:08.060 He dined with President Roosevelt,

01:05:09.720 spent time lobbying lawmakers on Indian affairs.

01:05:12.480 According to the book Empire of the Summer Moon,

01:05:14.460 Tawana had one of the first residential telephones in Oklahoma.

01:05:17.260 He owned a car, an ambulance, had a bodyguard,

01:05:19.640 frequently traveled on a railroad that was named after him.

01:05:22.880 He appeared in a Western movie called The Bank Robbery

01:05:25.440 and rode in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade,

01:05:28.020 along with Geronimo, two Sioux chiefs, and a Blackfeet chief.

01:05:32.480 Life on the reservations was never perfect,

01:05:34.340 But it was better than what would have happened if they'd lost the war to a rival tribe.

01:05:39.340 And that's what they don't teach you in school.

The Matt Walsh Show - April 02, 2026

The Real History of the American Indians

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Summary

Transcript