From: Lewrockwell.com
by Will Grigg
We took away their country and their means of support, broke up
their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay
among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could
anyone expect less? – General Philip Sheridan, who presided over the
expropriation of the Plains Indians, in the 1878 Annual Report of the
General of the U.S. Army
Following the War Between the States, as the formerly independent South was being re-assimilated into the Soyuz,
the US military took up the task of driving the Plains Indians off of
land that had been promised to them through solemn treaty obligations –
but was now coveted by the corporatist railroad combine.
In 1867, William Sherman wrote a letter to General Grant insisting
that “we are not going to let thieving, ragged Indians check and stop
the progress” of the railroad. About a year earlier, Sherman had urged
Grant to “act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to
their extermination, men, women, and children.” Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo points out that
Sherman set out to make the Sioux “feel the superior power of the
Government,” even if “the final solution to the Indian problem” required
that they be physically annihilated.
Writing in Smithsonian magazine,
historian Gilbert King observes that the post-war US military wasn’t
adequate to carry out that ambitious campaign. General Philip Sheridan,
who succeeded Sherman as Commander of the Military Division of the
Mississippi, complained that he had only 14,000 troops with which to
carry out “the reduction of these wild tribes and occupation of their
country.”
Note that Sheridan didn’t equivocate in describing his army’s role as
the occupier of a “country” that belonged, by right, to other people.
He had no moral scruples against being an occupier; his objections were
limited to practical concerns.
The Plains Indians were canny, elusive, and motivated. However, their
dependence on the buffalo provided the aggressors with an exploitable
vulnerability. Hunting the Indians was difficult and risky; slaughtering
buffalo was neither.
The railroads, acting as a military force multiplier, began ferrying
tourists to the West for the specific purpose of “sport-hunting”
buffalo.
Unlike the Indians, who never threatened to hunt the buffalo to extinction, or Bill Cody, who was restrained in his efforts to harvest them to feed construction crews for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, the Eastern tourists had no property interest in the continued existence of the species, and didn’t have to pay any price for the profligate destruction they wrought.
“Massive hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with
thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of
buffalo carnage in their wake,” recalls King. “Hunters began killing buffalo by the hundreds of thousands,” leaving their ravaged bodies to bloat and fester.
When legislatures in some states attempted to enact measures to
conserve the buffalo, their objections were overruled by the Feds. The
higher “national purpose” required a “total war” strategy that included
the destruction of the buffalo in order to break the resistance of the Plains Indians.
“These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in
the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire
regular army has done in the last forty years,” wrote General Sheridan with satisfaction.
“They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. And it is a well-known
fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great
disadvantage. Send them [the private buffalo hunters] powder and lead,
if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until
the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with
speckled cattle.”
No comments:
Post a Comment