🚀 go-pugleaf

"Everett Hickey" <lithium@ev1.net> wrote in message
news:3bbdc8fd$1_1@newsa.ev1.net...
| "Mapanari" <Mapi@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
| news:oTdv7.36246$pN2.11697491@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
| >
giant snip:

| Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're joking or not.
|
| Don't go by what any historian says.  Go by what people of the time said...
| in letters home, military reports, reports to government officials,
| newspapers, journals, etc.  One good thing about the 19th century is there's
| so much of it that was recorded by everyday people.
|
| Early settlers reported that the plains were "choked" with buffalos.
| Massive herds thundering around.  Indians were around for thousands of
| years, and for all their hunting they didn't seem to dent the population.
| Within a half century we'd reduced their populations to something that
| needed saving.  Indians had no real involvement in efforts to save the
| buffalo - all they wanted was for us to cut down our large-scale hunting.

You need to do a bit more critical thinking and a little bit more of high
school history.
You do realize that the horse came to the plain's indian only late in the
18th and 19th century?
The Sioux indians were the hardscrabble outcasts and perverted rejects,
thieves and murders and rapists of the more enlightened tribes to the East,
and they were forced to go into lands no one else wanted.
The Pawnees would kill them on sight if they came near their water or hunting
grounds.
They they stole some horses from the Southern indians and learned how to ride
them.
This helped.
But then they got some rifles and guns.
By the end of 1800, due to the buffalo hunters and plains indian riding huge
herds
of Buffalo still off of cliffs and with their increased skill in using rifles,
the buffalo
was gone.

The plains indian used to have to spend a whole day creeping up on a herd, then
jumping up and running and throwing flint spears at one buffalo, then spend the
rest of
the day and night tracking and following the wounded beast until it died so that
the wolves and other predators wouldn't get their first.  The women would be
following
pulling Travois with their own heads and shoulders and all their possesions.
Then the tribe would feast.
Then they cycle of starvation and the search would go on again.
The rifle and horse changed all that.
|
| And yes, movies and books try to portray native americans (I use the two
| terms interchangably) as incredibly noble, brave... the best of humanity.
| In some places this seems to have been true, to an extent - but in the end
| they were simply people.  For the most part, they were efficient and their
| culture had evolved around the ecology rather than over it.  But they were
| often brutaly savage, many tribes were guilty of genocide (against both
| white settlers and other tribes).  Many thrived strictly on warfare, and
| were only too happy to find a new foreign enemy to slaughter.  Overall their
| cultures varied from the relatively peaceful east (where there were plenty
| of resources) to the harsher west (where the land was about as harsh as they
| were), down to the central-american and south-american indians, who could be
| civilized one minute, monsterous the next.
|
Sure, simply people.  Just like us, they molested their children, raped women,
beat their wives, stole stuff and more.
But, after living in the land of incredible plenty for over 13,000 years, these
people
in North American never developed any real kind of civiliazation until the white
man
came.
We had to force them to accept civilization, to stop eating each other and to
dig pits
to put their feces in.
Our culture was superior, and we meet an inferiour culture, and we won.
Ascribing all sorts of bullshit noble crap to the indian is just false history
and another
attempt by the liberal propaganda minority machine to denigrate European culture
and drag it down to their own level.

mapi