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Aqui un gran articulo, aunque en ingles, sobre la conquista del oeste americano, vista desde los ojos de los colonos norteamericanos en su avance por el oeste, muchas tergiversaciones tenemos de la historia debido a Hollywood y a la educación que hemos recibido sin mirar mas allá.
El articulo fue escrito por Thomas Goodrich, destacado escritor y conocido entre otras cosas por libros como Hellstorm: la fin de la Alemania nancy.
Like most war movies in general, if one watched only the Hollywood version of the American Indian wars on the High Plains they might be left with the impression that the red man in battle comported himself somewhat similar to his blue-coated counter-poise, the US cavalryman. True, both sides in such films are a little rough around the edges, commit a few bloody barbarities here and there, but for the most part once the battle has been won or lost each side returns to his respective camp and that is pretty much where the film goes dark.
Curiously, it is only in some of the older American films of the 1930’s and 40’s where one even gets a whiff of how such contests really played out. Though he was released when Calamity Jane (played by Jean Arthur) broke down and tearfully revealed the route the soldiers were taking, Wild Bill Hickok (played by Gary Cooper) nearly got himself barbecued in the movie The Plainsman when the Sioux strung him up and stoked a fire around his legs. A few other movies at the time mentioned in passing Indian torture but for the most part, this grisly business was left to one’s imagination. It’s just as well.
In no movie of the past, and certainly in no movie of the politically correct present, have I ever seen an accurate depiction of Indian warfare and especially, of Indian torture, as it really occurred in the Nineteenth-Century.
(Debido a la corrección política del presente, no hay ninguna película que detalle los hechos de las guerras indias con veracidad, ni sobre sus crueles torturas, como solia ocurrir durante el siglo XIX.)
So wrote Alson Ostrander, expressing a antiestéticar felt by many a novice new to the prairie. Romantic and adventuresome as it might have seemed back in Rochester and Middlebury in the safety of their own homes, once a young “greenhorn” like Ostrander reached the frontier, reality soon set in. Suddenly, fighting with his comrades to “subdue the savage Indian” lost all of its charm. For good reason might the young private and his fellow troopers have cause to pause and reconsider.
Although unacknowledged as such by the US Congress, from 1865 to 1879 a war in all but name was waged on that great wide swath of America known as the Great Plains. Here, on a largely treeless, wind-swept wilderness of sage and cactus, of buffalo and hawk, the ill-prepared US Army was up against some of the best natural fighters and expert horsemen the world has ever known. Indeed, far from dealing effectively with the warring Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapahoe, Comanche, and other plains tribes, the average American trooper on his large grain-fed mount was utterly out-classed by his red counterpart on his fleet war pony.
According to one soldier who had faced Indians many times in battle, George Armstrong Custer:
Small, unsightly, ill-mannered, the Indian pony was also incredibly swift, resilient and could seemingly run all day on little more that a mouthful of buffalo grass and stagnant water. In virtually every contest with the much larger “American” horse of the US cavalry, the pony not only out-maneuvered but also out-performed and out-distanced his foe with seeming ease. Naturally, as a people devoted to war and violence, warriors placed much value in their animals. Again, George Custer:
When encounters occurred, it was almost always on the Indians’ terms. Though pitched battles and dramatic charges did occur, especially when the odds favored them, hit-and-run tactics were the warriors’ forte. And, after years of practice, the Indian had become a master of them. Expecting the open and “manly” combat displayed during the American Civil War, many novices to the plains at first laughed at what they construed as cowardly behavior.
“I only wish you could witness the Indian mode of fighting; it really is amusing sometimes!” Albert Barnitz wrote to his wife, Jennie. “The Indians maneuver so much like wolves! They always ride at full speed, whooping, and . . . are no sooner driven from one sand hill, than they pop up on another, always passing around its base, and ascending it from the far side.”
Cuando sucedían los enfrentamientos, casi siempre se producían por iniciativa india. Las batallas campales y violentos ataques eran constantes, especialmente cuando las circunstancias les favorecían, luego de años de práctica se volvieron expertos en ello. Con las experiencia de los aguerridos combates durante la guerra civil americana, muchos novatos de las planicies consideraban tal fistro actitud un tanto graciosa al principio.
“Yo solo desearía que pudieses presenciar su modo de pelea”, es graciosa a veces!” decía Albert Barnitz a su esposa Jennie. “ Los indios maniobran tanto como los lobos! Siempre corriendo a máxima velocidad, súbitamente aparecen de una colina a la otra, corriendo por la base y tomándola desde el lado más lejano”
If Barnitz initially found Indian tactics amusing, he and many others soon discovered that they were engaged in deadly serious work. The captain continues:
“n less time than it takes to write this, six Indians dashed up out of that ****** gully, filled Blair with arrows, took his scalp, then tomahawked him right before our eyes.” So wrote Alson Ostrander, sketching a scene he and hundreds of horrified soldiers would witness during their years on the plains. As Ostrander, Barnitz, and others learned firsthand, those who treated Indian tactics lightly, did so at their peril. Moreover, any who at first discounted the warriors’ weapons gained new respect after suddenly facing them. Although hostiles increasingly carried firearms, the bow and arrow remained their weapon of choice. As an officer’s wife, Margaret Carrington, sagely noted:
Added Captain Eugene Ware:
There was another item about which newcomers to the West were soon made aware of. Of all the horrors the plains had to offer, falling into hostile hands alive was the most terrible. “Save the last bullet for yourself” was stock advice uttered in deadly earnest.
“The great real fact,” declared one colonel, “is that these Indians take alive when possible, and slowly torture.”
“You could always tell which casualties had been wounded [first],” one sergeant reminisced, “because the little Indians and the squaws, after removing the clothes, would shoot them full with arrows and chop them in the faces with hatchets. They never mutilated a dead man, just those who had been wounded.”
“A favorite method of torture was to ‘stake out’ the victim,” revealed Colonel Richard Dodge:
A similar procedure used by the red torturers was to slice with a sharp knife a small inch of skin on the foot then peel it up slowly in long strips until the head was reached. This agonizing procedure was repeated on all sides of the body until the crazed victim eventually “seeped” to death hours, even days, later.
While such sadistic torture was deliberate and drawn out, hideous mutilation might occur in the blink of an eye. Soon after two soldiers left their column to cut hay near Julesburg, Colorado, drummer James Lockwood and his companions watched in disbelief as the men were jumped by Indians. “n less time than it takes to read this,” Lockwood later wrote, “they were stripped of their clothing, mutilated in a manner which would emasculate them, if alive, and their scalps torn from their heads.”
Ghastly mutilation and torture of comrades was terrible enough. When the young soldier had seen the results of an Indian raid on unsuspecting settlers, however, he often became a different sort of man. Captain Henry Palmer:
Not surprisingly—and in spite of attempts by officers to stop it—many men were quick to respond in kind.
“We were bewhiskered savages living under canvas,” admitted one soldier.
After a fight with troops near Fort C. F. Smith in 1867, Sioux warriors were forced to retire, leaving one of their slain behind. The whites soon decamped but, according to one witness, “before leaving the ground they scalped the dead Indian in the latest and most artistic style, then beheaded him, placed his head upon a high pole, leaving his carcass to his friends or the wolves.”
At another skirmish along the North Platte River in Wyoming, Lieutenant William Drew describes an incident that was all too common.
And, as in any army, a small but active minority used war as an excuse to live out their most sadistic fantasies.
“[T]hey were scalped, their brains knocked out,” admitted one soldier after whites captured an Indian village in Colorado. “[T]he men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children. . . .”
“In going over the battleground,” added a comrade from the same camp. . . .
Not surprisingly, because of the ghastly torture and mutilations, few victims survived an Indian massacre. One man who did was Bill Thompson, a section worker on the Union Pacific Railroad. When Thompson’s maintenance crew was ambushed one dark night in central Nebraska while looking for a break in the telegraph wire, the seriously wounded man wisely feigned death until the red raiders moved on. At length, on terribly weakened legs, Thompson stood up, then staggered back down the tracks to the nearest station—shot, stabbed and scalped.
Bill Thompson: Survivor.
Because Indians commonly dug up bodies and scalped them, when army columns moved out they marched over graves to obliterate all trace. Again, violation of burial sites was a ghoulish game some soldiers were not slow to learn. After discovering an Indian burial ground in Montana, Lieutenant Edward Godfrey recounted with disgust:
“Ten days later,” Godfrey added with a note of ironic satisfaction, “I saw the bodies of these same persons dead, naked and mutilated.”
Considering the unspeakable fate awaiting them should they fall into hostile hands, it is not surprising that, when facing Indians, many soldiers “skedaddled.” Occasionally, officers too showed the “white antiestéticather.” Recalled Captain R. G. Carter:
For every coward, though, there was a hero. Courage in a gallant, popular conflict was often rewarded with fame, fortune and rapid promotion. In a vicious, forgotten war waged in the wilderness, however, the reward for valor was often nothing more than a painful death, a dusty grave . . . and a simple memory that burned in a man’s soul forever. Lieutenant Charles Springer:
Savages: American Indian Warfare on the High Plains | Daily Stormer
El articulo fue escrito por Thomas Goodrich, destacado escritor y conocido entre otras cosas por libros como Hellstorm: la fin de la Alemania nancy.
Like most war movies in general, if one watched only the Hollywood version of the American Indian wars on the High Plains they might be left with the impression that the red man in battle comported himself somewhat similar to his blue-coated counter-poise, the US cavalryman. True, both sides in such films are a little rough around the edges, commit a few bloody barbarities here and there, but for the most part once the battle has been won or lost each side returns to his respective camp and that is pretty much where the film goes dark.
Curiously, it is only in some of the older American films of the 1930’s and 40’s where one even gets a whiff of how such contests really played out. Though he was released when Calamity Jane (played by Jean Arthur) broke down and tearfully revealed the route the soldiers were taking, Wild Bill Hickok (played by Gary Cooper) nearly got himself barbecued in the movie The Plainsman when the Sioux strung him up and stoked a fire around his legs. A few other movies at the time mentioned in passing Indian torture but for the most part, this grisly business was left to one’s imagination. It’s just as well.
In no movie of the past, and certainly in no movie of the politically correct present, have I ever seen an accurate depiction of Indian warfare and especially, of Indian torture, as it really occurred in the Nineteenth-Century.
(Debido a la corrección política del presente, no hay ninguna película que detalle los hechos de las guerras indias con veracidad, ni sobre sus crueles torturas, como solia ocurrir durante el siglo XIX.)
So wrote Alson Ostrander, expressing a antiestéticar felt by many a novice new to the prairie. Romantic and adventuresome as it might have seemed back in Rochester and Middlebury in the safety of their own homes, once a young “greenhorn” like Ostrander reached the frontier, reality soon set in. Suddenly, fighting with his comrades to “subdue the savage Indian” lost all of its charm. For good reason might the young private and his fellow troopers have cause to pause and reconsider.
Although unacknowledged as such by the US Congress, from 1865 to 1879 a war in all but name was waged on that great wide swath of America known as the Great Plains. Here, on a largely treeless, wind-swept wilderness of sage and cactus, of buffalo and hawk, the ill-prepared US Army was up against some of the best natural fighters and expert horsemen the world has ever known. Indeed, far from dealing effectively with the warring Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapahoe, Comanche, and other plains tribes, the average American trooper on his large grain-fed mount was utterly out-classed by his red counterpart on his fleet war pony.
According to one soldier who had faced Indians many times in battle, George Armstrong Custer:
Small, unsightly, ill-mannered, the Indian pony was also incredibly swift, resilient and could seemingly run all day on little more that a mouthful of buffalo grass and stagnant water. In virtually every contest with the much larger “American” horse of the US cavalry, the pony not only out-maneuvered but also out-performed and out-distanced his foe with seeming ease. Naturally, as a people devoted to war and violence, warriors placed much value in their animals. Again, George Custer:
When encounters occurred, it was almost always on the Indians’ terms. Though pitched battles and dramatic charges did occur, especially when the odds favored them, hit-and-run tactics were the warriors’ forte. And, after years of practice, the Indian had become a master of them. Expecting the open and “manly” combat displayed during the American Civil War, many novices to the plains at first laughed at what they construed as cowardly behavior.
“I only wish you could witness the Indian mode of fighting; it really is amusing sometimes!” Albert Barnitz wrote to his wife, Jennie. “The Indians maneuver so much like wolves! They always ride at full speed, whooping, and . . . are no sooner driven from one sand hill, than they pop up on another, always passing around its base, and ascending it from the far side.”
Cuando sucedían los enfrentamientos, casi siempre se producían por iniciativa india. Las batallas campales y violentos ataques eran constantes, especialmente cuando las circunstancias les favorecían, luego de años de práctica se volvieron expertos en ello. Con las experiencia de los aguerridos combates durante la guerra civil americana, muchos novatos de las planicies consideraban tal fistro actitud un tanto graciosa al principio.
“Yo solo desearía que pudieses presenciar su modo de pelea”, es graciosa a veces!” decía Albert Barnitz a su esposa Jennie. “ Los indios maniobran tanto como los lobos! Siempre corriendo a máxima velocidad, súbitamente aparecen de una colina a la otra, corriendo por la base y tomándola desde el lado más lejano”
If Barnitz initially found Indian tactics amusing, he and many others soon discovered that they were engaged in deadly serious work. The captain continues:
“n less time than it takes to write this, six Indians dashed up out of that ****** gully, filled Blair with arrows, took his scalp, then tomahawked him right before our eyes.” So wrote Alson Ostrander, sketching a scene he and hundreds of horrified soldiers would witness during their years on the plains. As Ostrander, Barnitz, and others learned firsthand, those who treated Indian tactics lightly, did so at their peril. Moreover, any who at first discounted the warriors’ weapons gained new respect after suddenly facing them. Although hostiles increasingly carried firearms, the bow and arrow remained their weapon of choice. As an officer’s wife, Margaret Carrington, sagely noted:
Added Captain Eugene Ware:
There was another item about which newcomers to the West were soon made aware of. Of all the horrors the plains had to offer, falling into hostile hands alive was the most terrible. “Save the last bullet for yourself” was stock advice uttered in deadly earnest.
“The great real fact,” declared one colonel, “is that these Indians take alive when possible, and slowly torture.”
“You could always tell which casualties had been wounded [first],” one sergeant reminisced, “because the little Indians and the squaws, after removing the clothes, would shoot them full with arrows and chop them in the faces with hatchets. They never mutilated a dead man, just those who had been wounded.”
“A favorite method of torture was to ‘stake out’ the victim,” revealed Colonel Richard Dodge:
A similar procedure used by the red torturers was to slice with a sharp knife a small inch of skin on the foot then peel it up slowly in long strips until the head was reached. This agonizing procedure was repeated on all sides of the body until the crazed victim eventually “seeped” to death hours, even days, later.
While such sadistic torture was deliberate and drawn out, hideous mutilation might occur in the blink of an eye. Soon after two soldiers left their column to cut hay near Julesburg, Colorado, drummer James Lockwood and his companions watched in disbelief as the men were jumped by Indians. “n less time than it takes to read this,” Lockwood later wrote, “they were stripped of their clothing, mutilated in a manner which would emasculate them, if alive, and their scalps torn from their heads.”
Ghastly mutilation and torture of comrades was terrible enough. When the young soldier had seen the results of an Indian raid on unsuspecting settlers, however, he often became a different sort of man. Captain Henry Palmer:
Not surprisingly—and in spite of attempts by officers to stop it—many men were quick to respond in kind.
“We were bewhiskered savages living under canvas,” admitted one soldier.
After a fight with troops near Fort C. F. Smith in 1867, Sioux warriors were forced to retire, leaving one of their slain behind. The whites soon decamped but, according to one witness, “before leaving the ground they scalped the dead Indian in the latest and most artistic style, then beheaded him, placed his head upon a high pole, leaving his carcass to his friends or the wolves.”
At another skirmish along the North Platte River in Wyoming, Lieutenant William Drew describes an incident that was all too common.
And, as in any army, a small but active minority used war as an excuse to live out their most sadistic fantasies.
“[T]hey were scalped, their brains knocked out,” admitted one soldier after whites captured an Indian village in Colorado. “[T]he men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children. . . .”
“In going over the battleground,” added a comrade from the same camp. . . .
Not surprisingly, because of the ghastly torture and mutilations, few victims survived an Indian massacre. One man who did was Bill Thompson, a section worker on the Union Pacific Railroad. When Thompson’s maintenance crew was ambushed one dark night in central Nebraska while looking for a break in the telegraph wire, the seriously wounded man wisely feigned death until the red raiders moved on. At length, on terribly weakened legs, Thompson stood up, then staggered back down the tracks to the nearest station—shot, stabbed and scalped.
Bill Thompson: Survivor.
Because Indians commonly dug up bodies and scalped them, when army columns moved out they marched over graves to obliterate all trace. Again, violation of burial sites was a ghoulish game some soldiers were not slow to learn. After discovering an Indian burial ground in Montana, Lieutenant Edward Godfrey recounted with disgust:
“Ten days later,” Godfrey added with a note of ironic satisfaction, “I saw the bodies of these same persons dead, naked and mutilated.”
Considering the unspeakable fate awaiting them should they fall into hostile hands, it is not surprising that, when facing Indians, many soldiers “skedaddled.” Occasionally, officers too showed the “white antiestéticather.” Recalled Captain R. G. Carter:
For every coward, though, there was a hero. Courage in a gallant, popular conflict was often rewarded with fame, fortune and rapid promotion. In a vicious, forgotten war waged in the wilderness, however, the reward for valor was often nothing more than a painful death, a dusty grave . . . and a simple memory that burned in a man’s soul forever. Lieutenant Charles Springer:
Savages: American Indian Warfare on the High Plains | Daily Stormer
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