By Len Wilcox
WESTERN VIEWS
The story of the American West is a checkered one, with heroic struggles and devastating misdeeds. It’s war and peace on an immense scale, spanning a continent and hundreds of years. The men and women that built the West were made of the same clay and grit that we are – we are their descendants, and the beneficiaries of their efforts. Every one of us owes a debt for the world we have now to those hard-driven men and women, those cowboys, miners, farmers, vaqueros, warriors, squaws and slaves – all of them – for the world we live in today.
I remember that context when considering the atrocities and mistakes that the settlers made with the first Americans. I was at the site of one of those atrocities last month, in Oklahoma, at the Washita Battlefield.
It was here in November 1868 that General George Armstrong Custer attacked the home camp of a peaceful chief known as Black Kettle and his followers. Black Kettle was killed, along with his wife and others of the Cheyenne Nation. Custer said they had killed a hundred hostiles; the Indians said it was more like thirty –11 warriors and 19 women and children.
The survivors were left to starve. Custer destroyed 800 horses, dozens of teepees, and all the supplies they could find. The remaining Indians had no supplies to get through the winter. Custer left them on the Plains – to face winter alone with no food, clothing or housing.
That was the purpose of the raid. The U.S. government had opted for total war against the natives. Years of skirmishes had not ended the wars; they continued on and on, with settlers and Indians alike dying in battle or in ambushes. It was a frightful, dangerous time, and it was people like you and me who were losing their families in the war. It had to end, and the Generals decided the way to end it was to make the war too costly to the enemy.
It worked. It cost a lot of lives – even Custer himself at the Little Big Horn. There were more atrocities committed on both sides before it was over. But eventually the settlers won – and now, a hundred and fifty years later, we have cities like Denver and Dallas, Los Angeles and Bozeman, and farms and ranches that feed the world.
However we feel about the American Indian Wars, they are what made this civilization possible.
Learn more about the National Park Service Washita Battlefield National Historic Site here.
Editor: Please keep your comments civil.
Always worth a visit but I was just out there two weeks ago. The overlook on the battlefield has been ripped out and the place is a construction zone until October. Myself and another visitor had to keep getting off the trail to make room for construction vehicles. The Visitor’s Center is still open though
Glad the construction didn’t ruin the experience and it’s still a worthwhile stop.
The army was using the tactics that they perfected against Southerners during the 1861-1865 war.
I have often wondered what life would be like here in the US if we were able to live peacefully under the rules of the Indian tribes who possessed these lands (sort of a tenant/landlord situation) before the settlers arrived.
Kevin Richey, the Indians were always fighting, that’s what life was about for some tribes. They were not all sitting around smoking their peace pipes. The white people really did them wrong big time, but the Indians were not all one big happy family, not even close.