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The Indian Wars ain't over yet

  by

  Theo van Rossum

  Most of us have   been brought up   with a   stereotypical   image of the 19th   century Indian   Wars, the way it   has always been   portrayed by   Hollywood: an   overwhelming   amount of   howling Indians,   cavalry trumpets,

A classical image of the 19th century Indian Wars

  scalping (by Indians only), white people putting their wagons in a circle. stoic Indian scouts   betraying their own, a young handsome and heroic soldier protecting a damsel in distress...   and most of it didn't even happen that way. Nobody ever put their wagons in a circle and no   way that Indians would be exhausting their valuable horses by galloping around these   wagons. Same like the gun fights. Not many people could afford bullets and you wouldn't be   wasting them on duels if you need them in case you came across a rattle snake one day. I'm   not going to ponder on who invented the scalping or who started that practice. They may have   been a war trophee to Indians at the time but knowing that white people put financial   bounties on scalps and how materialistic they were, it is not hard to imagine that white people   scalped a whole lot more than the Indians ever did, but that didn't really fit into the Hollywood   propaganda machine. Same as the photographs of the railroad workers only showed white   people while in fact way more Chinese people worked on it, but they were just not allowed to   pose for the pictures. But okay, this topic was not supposed to be about stereotypings now.   Surely the Wounded Knee Massacre was the very last of the Indian Wars (if we can still call   that a war the way it happened) but it was never the end to any clashes between Indians and   the US. Not all of these clashes have been violent as other more political disputes can also   be classed under it as far as I'm concerned.

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