December 8, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Indian Wars did not begin with a single event or a single clash. They formed slowly along the edges of a growing nation, where unfamiliar customs and competing claims to land created a series of misunderstandings that deepened over time. But why did Native Americans and settlers enter into a conflict that lasted for centuries? Here to tell the story is Ken LaCorte, host of the popular YouTube channel Elephants in Rooms.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.
The American Frontier Wars are often told as a battle
between the good guys who wear the white hats and
bad guys who wear the black. For over a century,
the colonists wore the white hat, but for about a
four plus decade run, the colors have switched. So whose
(00:31):
narrative is correct you to tell the story? Is ken Lecourt,
host of the popular YouTube channel Elephants in Rooms. Let's
take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
You think I'm an ignorant savage, and You've been so
many places, I guess it must be soul. But still
I cannot see if the savage one is me? How
can there be so much that you don't know?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
You think you own whatever land you land on the
earth is just a dead thing you can claim. But
I know every rock, country, and creature has a life,
has a spirit.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
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
(01:52):
United States, and that essentially defines genocide. But as I
dug into the history of North American warfare, that neat
good guys versus bad guy's 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
(02:14):
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. And it's not about making
anyone a villain or a victim. It's about understanding reality,
even when it's awkward. Okay, So, how violent was North
(02:35):
America before Columbus showed up? By our standards. It was
insanely brutal. We grew up thinking Indian life was buffalo
hunts and corn harvests, 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
(02:56):
a man by planting crops or building a homecame came
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 happened constantly, sometimes weekly, during rating season
(03:18):
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
(03:41):
to them it was tradition, a way to test courage,
both for the victim and the people watching. 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 read with your tribe,
and warriors didn't just target other warriors for scalping. Scalping
(04:04):
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 five hundred villagers were massacred in the early thirteen hundreds,
with nearly all of the remains showing signs of scalping.
(04:25):
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
(04:46):
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 realizing.
The Indian wars with other tribes and Europeans weren't just
a few decades of clashes. They lasted for centuries and
(05:07):
stretched across the entire continent, and there were genocides of
entire tribes. The Iroquois fought the Beaver Wars in the
sixteen hundreds, wiping out or pushing out dozens of tribes
from the Great Lakes down to Ohio. The Sioux expanded
west by brutalizing other nations. Now I'm not saying tribes
were mindless killers. They had sophisticated societies, complex diplomacy, incredible
(05:31):
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 arrived,
they didn't walk into some tranquil paradise. They walked into
(05:52):
a continent of warring 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 three hundred years. Okay, so the Europeans had
(06:16):
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, war 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
(06:38):
rules of war, but it all broke down on the frontier.
None of that applied in Indian warfare, and to colonialists,
native warfare looked 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.
(07:00):
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
(07:22):
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 foreigned.
Even the concept of land ownership was formed. Europeans saw
land is property. You could own it, fence it, farm it,
(07:45):
pass it down to your kids. But tribesaw 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 yrs. So when settlers started carving up fields
and saying this is mine forever, Indian saw it as absurd.
They also had what Europeans would call magical beliefs in
(08:06):
their daily lives and their approach to battle. Warriors painted
themselves with sacred symbols or charms, and believe spirits made
them bulletproof. Sometimes that gave them extraordinary confidence, other times
it cost them. They can interpret small signals as assigned
to press ahead when they shouldn't, or even retreat from
a winning position. Nevertheless, the European method of warfare was
(08:29):
essentially useless.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
And you've been listening to Ken Lacourt tell one heck
of story about Indian tribes in America and Indian tribes
before Columbus ever got here, And my goodness, the details
are really well there. They make sense actually, And how
violent he asked, was North America before Columbus arrived? Violence
(08:52):
was the rule. I loved how he described becoming a man.
You became a man by joining a raiding party. Wasn't
just a way of life, it was a way to
win your wife. And by the way, what was done
to victims from slavery to being burned alive to being tortured.
Protocols that existed all around the world until we had
something like the Geneva Convention. That's unheard of an idea
(09:15):
like the Geneva Convention prior to it. When we come
back more of the story of the Indian Wars with
Kennel Lacourt here on our American stories, and we continue
(09:40):
with our American stories and the story of the Indian
Wars in North America. Let's pick up where we last
left off with ken Lecourt.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
The European method of warfare was essentially useless. You can't
march information against fighters who don't stand still, and when
militia's caught up to 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
(10:14):
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
(10:34):
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 storages, and killed
(10:55):
anyone they found. By the mid eighteen hundreds, settlers were
fighting without the rules they'd brought with them. That collision
of one side's formal rules versus the other sides more
civilian centered violence, It created more cycles of atrocity and reprisal. Again,
every massacred justified another, and nobody even had a common
(11:16):
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 seventeen hundreds,
the most feared military power west of the Mississippi wasn't England,
(11:39):
France or Spain. It was the Comanche, and they came
to define frontier warfare. At their peak, maybe forty thousand,
Comanche controlled the territory the size of Texas, stretching into
New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma for one hundred and
fifty years. They ruled the Southern plains with such dominance
that historians called it an empire, not a centralized state
(12:01):
like European powers, but something that controlled who lived, who died,
and who owned what. Between the Rockies in 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
(12:21):
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,
(12:44):
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 hanged down to one
side of the horn under its neck, and from there
they could fire twenty arrows a minute and kill a
man thirty yards away, all while essentially using the horse
(13:07):
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
in warfare. It's how you became some Again, violence wasn't
(13:31):
a necessary evil. It was the path to everything that
mattered to you. Historians call them the mongols of the planes,
and they were just unmatched warriors, and they were feared
by everyone. In eighteen forty, 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,
(13:54):
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 Grande and not above it. If you
had to choose just one reason, it'd be the Comanche Indians.
Even for them, though, expanding a population while you're on
the move is difficult, and captives made up between ten
(14:17):
and twenty five percent of their communities. Nearly every Comanche
family owned slaves, mostly native of Mexican, and they were
even traded at markets in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico.
Some were adopted into families, while others were kept more
as property, and the line between the two wasn't always clear.
The most famous case was Cynthia Ann Parker. She was
nine years old when Comanche stormed into her families Ford
(14:40):
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 twenty four
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 joyosh reunion. She didn't recognize
(15:01):
her white relatives, and she didn't speak their language anymore,
and she certainly didn't want to be there. She screamed, resistant,
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 Commanchee. Texan saw her
story as proof of Commanche cruelty, but they saw it
as normal adoption into the tribe. She had raised three children,
(15:24):
one of them Kwana Parker, who would go on to
be the last and perhaps greatest chief of the Commanche nation.
The US Army struggled for decades against the Commanchee. Conventional
tactics completely failed. Soldiers chasing them across the plains. They
ended up exhausted, starving, and ambushed. One officer called it
fighting shadows. Still, after many years, crack started showing their
(15:46):
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, back quietly by the US Army, were wiping
out bison herds to starve the tribes, and in just
over a decade they killed nearly thirty million of them.
(16:07):
In eighteen seventy, Comanche leader Kwanta Parker launched a last
ditch assault on the trading post at Adobe Walls. It failed.
US Colonel Ronald Mackenzie countered with a brutal campaign and
burned the Comanche winter stores. He destroyed villages and slaughtered
over a thousand of their horses. That winner, starving an
out gun, the last Comanche band surrendered. Still for over
(16:28):
a century, the Commanche stood as the undisputed lords of
the planes, and everyone feared them for good reason. You know,
most of us like our history or any story with
clear heroes and villains, good guys in 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,
(16:52):
almost incomprehensible, and when it came to treaties, both sides
broke them at will. To Indians, a treaty often met
a temporary pause to regroup for the next season's raids,
but their violations they paled in significance to those broken
by the Europeans. In the United States, the United States
federal government negotiated over five hundred treaties and effectively broke
(17:14):
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. But historians say that hundreds of
(17:36):
thousands of Natives were killed in the Three hundred 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, muskets, or scalping.
It was something that nobody even fully understood at the time.
Germs European diseases like smallpox, measles, and the flu were
(17:59):
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
(18:19):
an estimated sixty to ninety percent of deaths among Native Americans.
And despite one documented case in seventeen sixty three 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,
(18:39):
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. Were 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 could
(19:00):
exist fighting a centuries long war where mercy was rare
and civilians paid the highest.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Price at a terrific job on the production and editing
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Ken Lacourt for sharing this stories, the host of the
popular YouTube channel Elephants in Rooms. Go there and learn
about things you don't know or think you knew, and
(19:27):
what's storytelling here? What he laid out essentially was a
clash of civilizations and this epic battle willin end between
and among Indian nations and then income the Europeans. It's
just not going to end well. Are there pure white
hats and pure black hats? Of course not, both sides
(19:49):
filled with human beings, different customs, different habits, different ways
of viewing the world, even viewing the land itself. But
in the end, the US Army, the USA, US population itself,
and the resources and the technology was simply going to
overwhelm the story of the Indian Wars Here on our
(20:11):
American Stories
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.
The American Frontier Wars are often told as a battle
between the good guys who wear the white hats and
bad guys who wear the black. For over a century,
the colonists wore the white hat, but for about a
four plus decade run, the colors have switched. So whose
(00:31):
narrative is correct you to tell the story? Is ken Lecourt,
host of the popular YouTube channel Elephants in Rooms. Let's
take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
You think I'm an ignorant savage, and You've been so
many places, I guess it must be soul. But still
I cannot see if the savage one is me? How
can there be so much that you don't know?
Speaker 3 (01:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
You think you own whatever land you land on the
earth is just a dead thing you can claim. But
I know every rock, country, and creature has a life,
has a spirit.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
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
(01:52):
United States, and that essentially defines genocide. But as I
dug into the history of North American warfare, that neat
good guys versus bad guy's 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
(02:14):
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. And it's not about making
anyone a villain or a victim. It's about understanding reality,
even when it's awkward. Okay, So, how violent was North
(02:35):
America before Columbus showed up? By our standards. It was
insanely brutal. We grew up thinking Indian life was buffalo
hunts and corn harvests, 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
(02:56):
a man by planting crops or building a homecame came
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 happened constantly, sometimes weekly, during rating season
(03:18):
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
(03:41):
to them it was tradition, a way to test courage,
both for the victim and the people watching. 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 read with your tribe,
and warriors didn't just target other warriors for scalping. Scalping
(04:04):
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 five hundred villagers were massacred in the early thirteen hundreds,
with nearly all of the remains showing signs of scalping.
(04:25):
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
(04:46):
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 realizing.
The Indian wars with other tribes and Europeans weren't just
a few decades of clashes. They lasted for centuries and
(05:07):
stretched across the entire continent, and there were genocides of
entire tribes. The Iroquois fought the Beaver Wars in the
sixteen hundreds, wiping out or pushing out dozens of tribes
from the Great Lakes down to Ohio. The Sioux expanded
west by brutalizing other nations. Now I'm not saying tribes
were mindless killers. They had sophisticated societies, complex diplomacy, incredible
(05:31):
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 arrived,
they didn't walk into some tranquil paradise. They walked into
(05:52):
a continent of warring 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 three hundred years. Okay, so the Europeans had
(06:16):
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, war 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
(06:38):
rules of war, but it all broke down on the frontier.
None of that applied in Indian warfare, and to colonialists,
native warfare looked 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.
(07:00):
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
(07:22):
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 foreigned.
Even the concept of land ownership was formed. Europeans saw
land is property. You could own it, fence it, farm it,
(07:45):
pass it down to your kids. But tribesaw 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 yrs. So when settlers started carving up fields
and saying this is mine forever, Indian saw it as absurd.
They also had what Europeans would call magical beliefs in
(08:06):
their daily lives and their approach to battle. Warriors painted
themselves with sacred symbols or charms, and believe spirits made
them bulletproof. Sometimes that gave them extraordinary confidence, other times
it cost them. They can interpret small signals as assigned
to press ahead when they shouldn't, or even retreat from
a winning position. Nevertheless, the European method of warfare was
(08:29):
essentially useless.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
And you've been listening to Ken Lacourt tell one heck
of story about Indian tribes in America and Indian tribes
before Columbus ever got here, And my goodness, the details
are really well there. They make sense actually, And how
violent he asked, was North America before Columbus arrived? Violence
(08:52):
was the rule. I loved how he described becoming a man.
You became a man by joining a raiding party. Wasn't
just a way of life, it was a way to
win your wife. And by the way, what was done
to victims from slavery to being burned alive to being tortured.
Protocols that existed all around the world until we had
something like the Geneva Convention. That's unheard of an idea
(09:15):
like the Geneva Convention prior to it. When we come
back more of the story of the Indian Wars with
Kennel Lacourt here on our American stories, and we continue
(09:40):
with our American stories and the story of the Indian
Wars in North America. Let's pick up where we last
left off with ken Lecourt.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
The European method of warfare was essentially useless. You can't
march information against fighters who don't stand still, and when
militia's caught up to 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
(10:14):
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
(10:34):
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 storages, and killed
(10:55):
anyone they found. By the mid eighteen hundreds, settlers were
fighting without the rules they'd brought with them. That collision
of one side's formal rules versus the other sides more
civilian centered violence, It created more cycles of atrocity and reprisal. Again,
every massacred justified another, and nobody even had a common
(11:16):
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 seventeen hundreds,
the most feared military power west of the Mississippi wasn't England,
(11:39):
France or Spain. It was the Comanche, and they came
to define frontier warfare. At their peak, maybe forty thousand,
Comanche controlled the territory the size of Texas, stretching into
New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma for one hundred and
fifty years. They ruled the Southern plains with such dominance
that historians called it an empire, not a centralized state
(12:01):
like European powers, but something that controlled who lived, who died,
and who owned what. Between the Rockies in 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
(12:21):
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,
(12:44):
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 hanged down to one
side of the horn under its neck, and from there
they could fire twenty arrows a minute and kill a
man thirty yards away, all while essentially using the horse
(13:07):
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
in warfare. It's how you became some Again, violence wasn't
(13:31):
a necessary evil. It was the path to everything that
mattered to you. Historians call them the mongols of the planes,
and they were just unmatched warriors, and they were feared
by everyone. In eighteen forty, 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,
(13:54):
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 Grande and not above it. If you
had to choose just one reason, it'd be the Comanche Indians.
Even for them, though, expanding a population while you're on
the move is difficult, and captives made up between ten
(14:17):
and twenty five percent of their communities. Nearly every Comanche
family owned slaves, mostly native of Mexican, and they were
even traded at markets in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico.
Some were adopted into families, while others were kept more
as property, and the line between the two wasn't always clear.
The most famous case was Cynthia Ann Parker. She was
nine years old when Comanche stormed into her families Ford
(14:40):
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 twenty four
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 joyosh reunion. She didn't recognize
(15:01):
her white relatives, and she didn't speak their language anymore,
and she certainly didn't want to be there. She screamed, resistant,
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 Commanchee. Texan saw her
story as proof of Commanche cruelty, but they saw it
as normal adoption into the tribe. She had raised three children,
(15:24):
one of them Kwana Parker, who would go on to
be the last and perhaps greatest chief of the Commanche nation.
The US Army struggled for decades against the Commanchee. Conventional
tactics completely failed. Soldiers chasing them across the plains. They
ended up exhausted, starving, and ambushed. One officer called it
fighting shadows. Still, after many years, crack started showing their
(15:46):
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, back quietly by the US Army, were wiping
out bison herds to starve the tribes, and in just
over a decade they killed nearly thirty million of them.
(16:07):
In eighteen seventy, Comanche leader Kwanta Parker launched a last
ditch assault on the trading post at Adobe Walls. It failed.
US Colonel Ronald Mackenzie countered with a brutal campaign and
burned the Comanche winter stores. He destroyed villages and slaughtered
over a thousand of their horses. That winner, starving an
out gun, the last Comanche band surrendered. Still for over
(16:28):
a century, the Commanche stood as the undisputed lords of
the planes, and everyone feared them for good reason. You know,
most of us like our history or any story with
clear heroes and villains, good guys in 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,
(16:52):
almost incomprehensible, and when it came to treaties, both sides
broke them at will. To Indians, a treaty often met
a temporary pause to regroup for the next season's raids,
but their violations they paled in significance to those broken
by the Europeans. In the United States, the United States
federal government negotiated over five hundred treaties and effectively broke
(17:14):
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. But historians say that hundreds of
(17:36):
thousands of Natives were killed in the Three hundred 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, muskets, or scalping.
It was something that nobody even fully understood at the time.
Germs European diseases like smallpox, measles, and the flu were
(17:59):
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
(18:19):
an estimated sixty to ninety percent of deaths among Native Americans.
And despite one documented case in seventeen sixty three 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,
(18:39):
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. Were 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 could
(19:00):
exist fighting a centuries long war where mercy was rare
and civilians paid the highest.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Price at a terrific job on the production and editing
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Ken Lacourt for sharing this stories, the host of the
popular YouTube channel Elephants in Rooms. Go there and learn
about things you don't know or think you knew, and
(19:27):
what's storytelling here? What he laid out essentially was a
clash of civilizations and this epic battle willin end between
and among Indian nations and then income the Europeans. It's
just not going to end well. Are there pure white
hats and pure black hats? Of course not, both sides
(19:49):
filled with human beings, different customs, different habits, different ways
of viewing the world, even viewing the land itself. But
in the end, the US Army, the USA, US population itself,
and the resources and the technology was simply going to
overwhelm the story of the Indian Wars Here on our
(20:11):
American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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