Posted on 12/22/2010 12:55:23 PM PST by Academiadotorg
It turns out that John Wayne movies might be more accurate than American history textbooks. “In contrast, an alternative literature based on actual history concludes that the civil society of the American West in the nineteenth century was not very violent,” economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo writes in The Independent Review.
DiLorenzo teaches at Loyola University in Maryland. He notes that, at least for the first half of the nineteenth century, “private protective agencies,” rather than government ones, maintained order. “What were these private protective agencies?” he writes. “They were not governments because they did not have a legal monopoly on keeping order.”
“Instead, they included such organizations as land clubs, cattlemen’s associations, mining camps, and wagon trains.” It was when the federal government got proactive after the Civil War that problems, even calamities, ensued, particularly in dealings between Americans and Native Americans.
Before Fort Sumter, when Americans wanted land from Indians, they bought it. “By the twentieth century, some $800 million had been paid for Indian lands,” DiLorenzo notes. After Appomatox, the federales decided that land acquisition could be accomplished more cheaply through raids rather than trades. “Congress even voted in 1871 not to ratify any more Indian treaties, effectively announcing that it no longer sought peaceful relations with the Plains Indians,” DiLorenzo notes.
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That would explain this:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2646278/posts
(McClintock Offers History Lesson).
Johnson County War
The Johnson County War with its overtones of class warfare and intervention of the President of the United States to save the lives of a gang of hired killers and set them free, does not fit well with the American myth of the west.
3-7-77
Is there anyone who is actually ignorant enough of history to believe this?
I`d always thought Tom Horn was in on this war
Didn`t know they even lynched a woman trying to take over the range land
The author doesn't seem to have heard of the Trail of Tears.
It is aggravating when all sides in a historical “debate” foul things up so terribly.
To start with, by far the most aggressive action every taken by the US against the Indians was done by Andrew Jackson (D).
“Indian removal was a policy to relocate Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river. The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 26, 1830.”
When the Civil War came around, and the Union Army was pulled out of the western territories, the Indians saw it as a sign that they could do whatever they wanted, which meant raids, homicide, and theft on a grand scale.
Which is why when the Civil War ended, the Union Army headed West, to *stop* the Indians from this campaign of rapine. Generals Philip Sheridan (PBUH) and W.T. Sherman (PBUH) had no sense of humor about these things.
Typically, the Indians would raid in spring and summer, then go into winter camps. During winter, as far as *they* were concerned, they were peaceful, and “minding their own business”. The white man, however, did not have such a short memory. And they also had the ability to conduct winter military operations.
But even pointing this out is unfair, as most of the military leaders in the West went to great lengths to *not* be belligerent to the Indians, in fact, often acting as peacekeepers between hostile Indian tribes.
Washington, D.C., however, had its own ideas, and would have been more than happy to have seen the Indians wiped out. And it was the US military that usually stood in the way of such barbarity.
Indeed, parts of western history are filled with violence, but other parts are indeed peaceful, with the great desire of frontier people to again have civility and prosperity.
Actually, they did buy it.
The West was quite mild. Everyone was busy trying to make a buck and sometimes survival was pretty tough.
The Wild, Wild West was constructed by Eastern journalists to make larger sales of their newpapers. Most of them were good fiction writers, but pretty bad journalists. Sound familiar?
You have to read the books written by explorers, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger and others (General Custer)to get a real sense of the west. Basically farmers, ranchers and shopkeepers tending to their businesses.
How much did do you think that we paid the Indians for the eastern US, Florida, the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican Cession, respectively? What did the Indians do with the money?
As a Pennsylvania resident, the Quakers always purchased the land they wanted from the local tribes. Of course, when there was a problem they relied on the Scots-Irish immigrants to fight for them, as they were too “peace-loving” to get their hands dirty.
An armed society is a polite society.
Is he the most aggressively moronic man in America?
I don't know about that. My brother in law would give him a good run. I'll give him credit, though, for never letting facts get in the way of his agenda.
For entertainment sometime, look up what his students say about him on ratemyprofessors.com. "Simply the man, easy papers and gives everyone an A. I went to less than half of the classes and still breezed by! "
tell it to the Cherokee, Choctaw and Seminole who walked the trail of tears
This is more of DiLorenzo’s usual KKK propaganda about how evil the US is since 1861, how great slavery was, how the Confederates should have won the war, etc.
Malcolm Kline and AIA discredit themselves with this filth.
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