Transcription
For most of my life, I was sold a kinder, gentler version of Native American history. Noble chiefs, peaceful tribes living in harmony with nature until greedy Europeans came along and wrecked it all with destruction and death. That's what they teach us in schools. And that's what Hollywood tells us. It even makes us feel good just for feeling bad about it. And at the surface level, it makes a whole lot of sense. I mean, Indians once ruled North America. They were here first and now they're largely gone, confined to reservations that have a whole lot of problems. They're not a visible part of the United States and that essentially defines genocide.
But as I dug into the history of North American warfare, that neat good guys versus bad guys story fell apart. The scalping, torture, and Indian village massacres, they were common in North America long before the first white people showed up. It was a violent world. Now, that doesn't make European settlers the good guys. The frontier was a clash of two brutal systems, and the result was a cycle of massacres and reprisals that stretched over hundreds of years. Nobody walked away clean from this one.
I'm Ken Laort. I research uncomfortable topics and do my best to share what I learned, especially topics like this where the truth has been whitewashed to the point of painting a false narrative. So, let's dig into what I learned. And and it's not about making anyone a villain or a victim. It's about understanding reality even when it's awkward. We'll start with a look at America before Columbus. Then different values and clashing war codes of the two peoples. And if you really want to see how powerful and terrifying native warfare became, you have to look at the Comanche. So dominant that one US general said war with them would mean complete ruin. And finally, we'll take a look at the conflict's blood on both sides.
Okay, so how violent was North America before Columbus showed up? By our standards, it was insanely brutal. We grew up thinking Indian life was buffalo hunts and corn harvest, maybe the occasional dispute with neighbors. But for many tribes, violence was the rule, not the exception. In fact, violence is how young men prove themselves. If you were a boy on the plains, you didn't become a man by planting crops or building a home. You became a man by joining a raiding party, taking scalps. That was your resume. That's how you earned a wife, gained respect, built your reputation. Violence wasn't a last resort. It was social currency. And this wasn't some once in a blue moon thing. Raids happen constantly, sometimes weekly during raiding season. Their captives, depending on their sex and age, they might get adopted into the tribe or they might get forced into harsher slavery or tortured to death in public ceremonies that would make your stomach turn. Some victims were burned alive. Others had fingers cut off one by one, or they'd run gauntlets where the entire village lined up to beat them as they passed. To us, that looked savage, but to them it was tradition, a way to test courage both for the victim and the people watching.
Scalping is a good example. Many people blame it on Europeans who definitely used it as a tactic, but it was around for hundreds of years. A scalp wasn't just proof that you killed someone. It was a trophy you could dance with or display or use in religious ceremonies. The point wasn't just killing your enemy. It was humiliating them in a way that resonated with your tribe. And warriors didn't just target other warriors for scalping. Scalping a woman or a child that proved that a warrior had broken through the enemy defenses and reached the heart of the village. In a culture built around bravery, that made you a boss. At Crow Creek in modern South Dakota, nearly 500 villagers were massacred in the early 1300s with nearly all of the remains showing signs of scalping.
Torture was another constant. It wasn't really about punishment. It was ritual. Captives, especially warriors, were brought back to villages and subjected to public torture ceremonies that could last hours, sometimes days. Women slashed at them with knives. Kids threw burning embers at them. And the more stoically a prisoner faced the pain, the more honor he earned. With both the Europeans and other Indian tribes, the violence was cyclical. And one raid spurred on another. A death demanded revenge, and entire tribes got locked into blood feuds that lasted for generations. And the scale way bigger than most people realize. The Indian wars with other tribes and Europeans weren't just a few decades of clashes. They lasted for centuries and stretched across the entire continent. And there were genocides of entire tribes. The Irakquay fought the Beaver Wars in the 1600s, wiping out or pushing out dozens of tribes from the Great Lakes down to Ohio. The Sue expanded west by brutalizing other nations.
Now, I'm not saying tribes were mindless killers. They had sophisticated societies, complex diplomacy, incredible survival skills, but warfare was central to life for many of them, and it carried a brutality that shocks our modern sensibilities. Now, to be clear, the violence was widespread, but it wasn't universal. Some tribes were mostly peaceful at various points in time. But when Spain, France, and Britain arrive, they didn't walk into some tranquil paradise. They walked into a continent of waring nations. Each European power tried playing the game, arming certain tribes, making alliances, using them as buffers. So, the wars didn't stop when they arrived. They got bigger. New weapons and alliances. They just poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning, and it would continue there for another 300 years.
Look, I'm a good researcher, but I'm not a historian. If I mess up anything substantial, let me know and I'll address it in the description box below.
Okay, so the Europeans had radically different value systems as well, including how they fought battles. When they pushed onto the frontier, they carried their old world rules of war with them. Armies wore uniforms, governments declared war, and battles were supposed to be fought between soldiers, not civilians. There were written codes and expectations, even if they weren't always honored. Most nations followed the same basic rules of war, but it all broke down on the frontier. None of that applied in Indian warfare. And to colonialists, native warfare look like what today we'd call terrorism. There were no declarations, no front lines, no formal campaigns. Raiding parties might ride out with a dozen men, hit a homestead at dawn, and quickly vanish. Sometimes they'd kill everyone. Sometimes they'd take captives back. as slaves are to be tortured. That was a shock to settlers. They came from a world where women and children were usually off limits. On the frontier, they were often the very first victims.
Of course, to the Indians, European warfare looked baffling. Tribes saw colonialists line up in open fields, defend land and forts, and refuse to fight during the winter. They'd make treaties and break them, then they'd be shocked when their forts were burned down. Surrender. In most tribal cultures, it didn't mean mercy. It meant that you were theirs to be ransom, enslaved, or killed. The whole concept of a white flag was foreign. Even the concept of land ownership was foreign. Europeans saw land as property. You could own it, fence it, farm it, pass it down to your kids. But tribes saw land kind of the way that we look at the deep ocean. Nobody owns it. You travel across it, hunt in it, move through it. You don't fence off a wave and call it yours. So when settlers started carving up fields and saying this is mine forever, Indians saw it as absurd. They also had what Europeans would call magical beliefs in their daily lives and their approach to battle. Warriors painted themselves with sacred symbols, wore charms, and believe spirits made them bulletproof. Sometimes that gave them extraordinary confidence. Other times it cost them. They could interpret small signals as a sign to press ahead when they shouldn't or even retreat from a winning position.
Nevertheless, the European method of warfare was essentially useless. You can't march in formation against fighters who don't stand still. And when militias caught up to a war party, the Indians usually didn't fight. They scattered, regrouped later, and hit another soft target. Settlers eventually realized that if they couldn't adapt to that kind of warfare, they just wouldn't survive. So, they adapted. They formed ranging companies, small, fast units built for frontier warfare. These weren't polished soldiers in uniforms. They were trackers, scouts, gunmen who could move quickly and fight differently. Eventually, the biggest of these companies became known as the Texas Rangers, a reinvented fighting force. The shift was brutal, and now both sides were targeting civilians. Rangers learned to track like Indians. Strike fast, no mercy. They burned crops to starve enemies into submission. And they took scalps as trophies. The very tactics that horrified them at first became their standard operating procedure. Retaliation raids burned villages, destroyed their food stoages, and killed anyone they found. By the mid 1800s, settlers were fighting without the rules they brought with them. That collision of one side's formal rules versus the other side's more civilian-c centered violence. It created more cycles of atrocity and reprisal. Again, every massacre justified another, and nobody even had a common framework for peace.
Yet, until the Europeans kept coming in greater and greater numbers, the Native Americans held their own, despite being vastly overwhelmed by technology and resources. And to really understand how effective they were, it makes sense to look at one tribe. Because by the late 1700s, the most feared military power west of the Mississippi wasn't England, France, or Spain. It was the Comanche. and they came to define frontier warfare. At their peak, maybe 40,000 Comanche controlled a territory the size of Texas, stretching into New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. For 150 years, they ruled the southern plains with such dominance that historians called it an empire. Not a centralized state like European powers, but something that controlled who lived, who died, and who owned what between the Rockies and central Texas. They turned the southern plains into an empire that demanded tribute from anyone who wanted to pass through. New Mexico settlements paid them off just to survive. Texas ranches lost thousands of cattles and horses every year. Even other tribes paid protection to the Comanche.
The key to their power, it was the horse and their amazing ability to use them in war. When the Spanish brought horses to the Americas, most tribes saw them as livestock. The Comanche made them into fearsome weapons. Now, the Comanche were always amazing fighters, but horses just supercharged their abilities. They stole them, bred them, and learned how to fight from their backs with a skill no one ever matched, even since. Comanche warriors trained from childhood on horseback. And when they fought, some people just couldn't believe what they were seeing. As they were riding at a full gallop, they'd hang down to one side of the horse under its neck. And from there, they could fire 20 arrows a minute and kill a man 30 yards away. all while essentially using the horse itself as a shield so you couldn't even see who was shooting at you. It was a revolutionary tactic that no one else ever mastered.
But what made them so effective wasn't just mobility. It was a ruthlessness built into their culture. The elements I mentioned earlier were practiced by the Comanche in spades. Young warriors earned status by raiding and warfare. It's how you became someone. Again, violence wasn't a necessary evil. It was the path to everything that mattered to you. Historians call them the Mongols of the Plains and they were just unmatched warriors and they were feared by everyone. In 1840, Comanche forces launched what became known as the legendary Great Raid. They rode hundreds of miles into Mexico, destroying entire villages, stealing thousands of horses and dragging captives back north. The raids were so devastating that Mexico's northern frontier basically collapsed. I mean, have you ever wondered why Spanish is the main language spoken south of the Rio Grand and not above it? If you had to choose just one reason, it would be the Comanche Indians.
Even for them, though, expanding a population while you're on the move is difficult. And captives made up between 10 and 25% of their communities. Nearly every Comanche family owned slaves, mostly native or Mexican, and they were even traded at markets in Santa Fe and Tais, New Mexico. Some were adopted into families, while others were kept more as property. and and the line between the two wasn't always clear. The most famous case was Cynthia Anne Parker. She was 9 years old when Comanche stormed into her family's fort in Texas, killing others but dragging her away alive. Like other captives who were young enough to assimilate into the tribe, she was given a whole new life, a new name, and eventually married a chief. It wasn't until 24 years later that the Rangers finally found her and freed her. But those events, they rattled Texans at the time because it wasn't some sort of joyouish reunion. She didn't recognize her white relatives and she didn't speak their language anymore and she certainly didn't want to be there. She screamed, resisted, tried to run. What to the Rangers was a rescue, to her was a kidnapping. By then, her identity, her family, her loyalties, everything was with the Comanche. Texans saw her story as proof of Comanche cruelty, but they saw it as normal adoption into the tribe. She had raised three children, one of them Quana Parker, who would go on to be the last and perhaps greatest chief of the Comanche nation.
The US Army struggled for decades against the Comanche. Conventional tactics completely failed. Soldiers chasing them across the planes. They ended up exhausted, starving, and ambushed. One officer called it fighting shadows. Still, after many years, cracks started showing. Their population was dwindling as warfare and disease wiped out thousands. New American weapons like the repeating rifles, they shifted the balance, and more settlers meant more resources to fight back. Commercial hide hunters backed quietly by the US Army were wiping out bison herds to starve the tribes and in just over a decade they killed nearly 30 million of them. In 1870, Comanche leader Quana Parker launched a lastditch assault on the trading post at Adobe Walls. It failed. US Colonel Ronald McKenzie countered with a brutal campaign and burned the Comanche winter stores. He destroyed villages and slaughtered over a thousand of their horses. That winter, starving and outgunned, the last Comanche band surrendered. Still, for over a century, the Comanche stood as the undisputed lords of the plains, and everyone feared them. For good reason.
Look, I summed up an empire in 5 minutes. But if you're interested in learning more, I highly recommended the book that inspired this video, Comanches, the history of a people. I read it years ago, and both the Comanche and the book stuck with me. In fact, it's the only book in my life that literally gave me nightmares. And and once you see The Frontier through its lens, the old Hollywood cowboy and Indian stories, they look like children's cartoons. I have a link to it below.
You know, most of us like our history or any story with clear heroes and villains. Good guys and white hats, bad guys in black. But the American frontier, it just didn't work that way. The brutality was universal. Again, by modern standards, almost incomprehensible. I mean, I could tell dozens of stories from either side, like when a Mormon militia dressed its Indians slaughtered 120 civilians, or when Tucson citizens and their allies killed over a 100 peaceful Apache, mainly women and children. Or the Comanche raid on Fort Parker, where they gang raped women before killing them. Or the Minnesota uprising of 1862, when Dakota warriors killed over 600 settlers, including babies. And when it came to treaties, both sides broke them at will. To Indians, a treaty often meant a temporary pause to regroup for the next season's raids. But their violations, they pald in significance to those broken by the Europeans in the United States. The United States federal government negotiated over 500 treaties and effectively broke every single one of them.
Yet, the more you dig into it, it's still clear that neither side's narrative holds the truth. It wasn't about a noble civilization defeating savages. And it wasn't about peaceful natives crushed by evil invaders. It was two muscular cultures colliding until one had better guns and bigger numbers. Looking at those numbers, population sizes and estimates, they're really tricky for historians to figure out. I mean, especially when one side didn't keep a written history. But pre-Colus, the average native population estimate is around 10 million, although the range varies widely. The European population, it was lower than that through the early 1800s before a massive wave of immigrants came. And the amount killed fighting, well, deaths in the wars between Indians and Europeans, they're probably even harder to measure. Battlefield deaths, especially, I mean, they're difficult to separate from things like starvation and disease because they're interrelated. But historians say that hundreds of thousands of natives were killed in the 300-year war and likely tens of thousands of Europeans.
Yet despite that violence, the primary cause of Indian deaths was biological by a long shot. The deadliest weapon, it wasn't torture, musketss, or scalping. It was something that nobody even fully understood at the time. Germs. European diseases like smallpox, measles, and the flu were deadly to the natives. For thousands of years, Europeans lived in dense populations near domesticated animals where many of these diseases originated. Over generations, Europeans were repeatedly exposed to them, and their survivors passed on genes that gave resistance. The native population had none of that, and those diseases caused an estimated 60 to 90% of deaths among Native Americans. And despite one documented case in 1763, where British officers suggested giving infected blankets to hostile tribes, death by germs, it just wasn't intentional. It just happened. European settlers and armies saw these deaths not as a military strategy but as fate or God's will. It was part of the overall conflict which was a clash of civilizations that played out as a sustained personal feud where each side told itself the same story. We're the victims. They're the monsters. They started it and we're going to finish it. The real story of the frontier is about cultures that couldn't exist. fighting a centuriesl long war where mercy was rare and civilians paid the highest price.
If you want to respect Native Americans, don't turn them into cardboard heroes or eternal victims because they weren't. The truth is that they were powerful, resilient, and often brutal, just like the settlers who fought them. History just doesn't clean up nicely, and the more you dig, the dirtier everything looks. Although sometimes you don't have to look far back in history to see shocking things like why are child soldiers so often used in warfare? When I dug into that one, I was really surprised to learn the answer because it was that in many conflicts, child soldiers make sense. I mean, not from a morality point of view, of course, but from a strategic one. They bring a whole lot of advantages to the battlefield that you just wouldn't think of. It's a horrible but effective tactic. So, there's an elephant in the room for you.
Hey, I'm Ken Laquort. Thanks for making it this far. I hope it was worthwhile.