I don't know much about history when it came to the west and Indian wars. Who won the west? Was it the cowboys, the cavalry, or Hollywood? How did they defeat the Native American? Did they battle one another until defeated the Natives and was a treaty established? I need facts, events, documents, and books
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Cowboys didn't even show up in the west until it was all over. The west wasn't won at all. It was stolen.
The Indians signed peace treaties with the US government (at the US government's pleading) As soon as the Indians stopped fighting, the US promptly violated every single treaty. Every one. And then often massacred and murdered the very Indians who'd been at peace with them, and were flying the American Flag. http://wps.pearsoncustom.com/wps/media/objects/2428/2487068/documents/doc_d071.html
That is why, today, many tribes are recovering stolen lands and tribal rights, by suing the US in the courts. In 1980, the US supreme court ruled that the US had violated the Fort Laramie treaty when they stole the Black Hills from the Sioux. Of course, the US still refuses to give the land back.
eldots53
Honestly, it was a combination of factors, and you can't simply take any one factor out of context and point to it and say that was THE reason. And there were lots of treaties established - all broken by white folks and the government, by corrupt government administrators who starved and cheated the Indians out of what they were supposed to be provided. Which is to say, it wasn't heroic, it was a shameful theft of every Native American resource of value, and a land grab.
The reasons included grabby white settlers who pushed into places they had no business being, corrupt government Indian agency administrators, miners who were even grabbier than the settlers and just went to pillage Indian sacred places that happened to have gold and silver resources. railroad men, buffalo hunters almost exterminating the millions of wild buffalo populations, cultural conflicts between patronizing white missionaries and the Indians, and soldiers. No cowboys, and certainly not Hollywood. Hollywood misrepresented things; it's not history.
No one can give you a complete history of the Western Indian Wars and the key events of the same in the space of a few paragraphs. Many books have been written on the subject, and if you have an interest, you'll need to read some. You might start with Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" . It's a classic and written from a native's perspective. Another slightly dated book but one with good basic historical coverage of all the key points is Stephen Longstreet's "War Cries on Horseback." It includes some original accounts and soldiers' eyewitness reportings from the time, and gives a fair account of some of the atrocities on both sides. There's also the American Heritage History of the Indian Wars.
Wiininiskwe *Ajidamoon*
The west wasn't won. That's Hollywood garbled. The west was treaties for......and considering how the US has then gone on to violate each and every one of those treaties, the west is actually stolen,foreign occupied ground. The same sort of thing that Americans continually March into other countries to try and "help" with.
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Read "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown. That will provide a good starting point for learning how the West was "won" or "stolen" by white Americans, or "lost" or "captured" from Native Americans. More recent books provide additional awareness of the matter, but Brown's book is the classic and gives any reader a good point from which to begin a serious study of the history of the American west.
Note - there are also some excellent books about Blacks who took part in the settlement of the west. For example, "Buffalo Soldiers" provides a history of the 10th Calvary - an all-Black Calvary unit (called the "Buffalo Soldiers" by Native Americans) that protected some regions and outposts from raids during that era. Blacks were also actively involved as scouts, trailblazers, interpreters, as well as cowboys who helped drive cattle along the trails from Texas to the railroad towns in Kansas. A famous Black cowboy was Bill Pickett, who invented the rodeo stunt now known as "bulldogging" - there are several biographies of his life, along with books about men like James Beckwourth and other Blacks who were engaged in the settlement of the West.
Anonymous
By Breaking the Treaty of Gent and Killing the Indians to steal their land
the whole of the USA is based on Killing anyone who wanted to keep what the Americans wanted