America’s Conquest of the Native Americans

For over a thousand years prior to the arrival of the White man, Indians killed thousands of other Indians, ran them off their land and made it their own. Indian tribes exterminated other Indian tribes.

Between 1647 and 1649, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca) essentially exterminated the Huron Indians.(1) When Native Americans exterminated other Native Americans, it is generally ignored. It only matters if the white man did it.

Conquering someone else’s land was what people did since time began. The issue with the Indians was they ended up losing to the white man and can’t get over it. Indians DID manage to get over it when they were run off their land by another Indian tribe. The white man’s ‘crime’ was he won.

Some Native Americans believe the ‘white man’ is living on stolen land and demand land back from
the past. It is absurd to treat the “theft” of land by Americans as a unique evil in the world which we must
repent and take down our monuments in shame. No Indian tribe ever considered the land they conquered from another Indian tribe to be ‘stolen’ or pay reparations to the defeated tribes. The white man won this land using the same rules of conquest used by the Native Americans. This issue is settled. Only in the 20th century, with boundaries well established, did wars of conquest become unacceptable.

Some people claim ‘white Americans’ or ‘Anglos’ were illegal aliens 400 years ago and WE should be
deported. Obviously, 320 million non-Indians are NOT going to leave the U.S. To single out “Anglos” is
deceitful. To be consistent, ALL non-Indians: Spanish, blacks, Asians and whites would have to be
expelled. If all non-Indians left the U.S., the country would be depopulated, the world economy would
collapse and lots of people in Africa would starve to death. The US military would disappear, Russia and China would rule the world and occupy what used to be the U.S.- and take all the land from the Indians.

We all recognize the Indians were sometimes treated very badly. The Trail of Tears was horrific. Yet you can’t blame people alive today for the past. You can’t blame the Japanese of today for Pearl Harbor. We must also recognize that it is impossible for people living hundreds of years after the fact to fully understand conditions that existed at that time. America’s pioneers have been condemned while Spain and other countries who conquered other parts of the New World are mostly ignored and sometimes justified.

The conquest of the Native Americans with their primitive society was inevitable. The only question was who would do the conquering. The Spanish believed their conquest of the New World was God ordained. The Spanish conquered Central America, South America (except Brazil), large parts of North America and the Caribbean Islands. The English and French conquered parts of North America. Russia conquered Alaska.

Land conquered by the U.S. was conquered earlier by some other tribe. Humans have lived in the Black Hills of South Dakota since prehistoric times. Around 1500 AD, the Arikara tribe – who loved to scalp their enemies for war trophies – moved in. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Crow, and other tribes all arrived later to fight for their own share of the mountain range. Finally, the Lakota in 1780 drove out the Cheyenne.

So the U.S. did not take the Black Hills from its original occupants. The original occupants had long since been conquered by another Native American tribe, who received the same treatment from the next tribe, and so on. Most countries in the world occupy territory that originally belonged to someone else. The United States is no different.

The white man helped Indian society advance in numerous ways. The incessant wars between Indian tribes was outlawed. Starvation ended when Indians got horses and firearms. Today, Indians can live anywhere in the U.S. or they can live on the reservation.

Native Americans were not superior human beings. Some Indian tribes owned slaves and there was slave trading between tribes.(2) Indian men had three duties: hunt for food, make babies, and go to war with a competing tribe. In some tribes an Indian male was only considered a man once he killed his first human foe.[3]

The first permanent English settlement in the New World was at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. The company financing the settlement told the settlers “Do not offend the naturals” so they didn’t build fortifications,
living in tents until houses could be built. However, within two weeks of landing, settlers were attacked by Indians who killed one settler and wounded 11 more. Following the attack, fortifications where hurriedly built around the settlement. (4)

Following the wedding of Pocahontas to John Rolfe, there was a period of uneasy peace in eastern
Virginia. However in March 1622, an Indian chief named Nemattanew lured an Englishman away from Jamestown and was never seen again. When Nemattanew appeared again at Jamestown, he was
confronted about the missing man and then killed. The Indians used this as their reason to launch their attack on Jamestown and surrounding settlements. On March 22, 1622, a large number of Indians showed up with food to sell the settlers. Without warning, the Indians turned on the settlers and massacred 347 people, including women and children, a quarter of the population. The massacre at Jamestown set an
ominous tone for future relations between Indians and settlers.

Indian torture was one reason Americans viewed the Indians as savages. On occasion, tribes would adopt a prisoner into the tribe. Usually this wasn’t the case. Nearly all tribes tortured their captives to some degree – the common form of execution being burned at the stake. But some tribes developed grisely torture methods that could last days – and it didn’t matter if prisoners were a woman or a child. Indians didn’t torture to get information. The torture was pure sadism.[5][6]

The Comanche Indians arrived at San Antonio TX on 19 March 1840 for peace negotiations. As a ‘peace gesture’ they returned a 16-year-old girl held captive for 18 months. Her once beautiful face was disfigured beyond recognition. ‘Her head, arms and face were full of bruises and sores’ wrote one witness, Mary Maverick. ‘And her nose was actually burnt off to the bone. Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh.’ The Indians were oblivious to the effect the girl’s appalling condition would have on the Texans.

Once handed over, Matilda Lockhart broke down as she described the horrors she had endured — the rape, the relentless sexual humiliation and the way Comanche women had tortured her with fire. It wasn’t just her nose, her thin body was hideously scarred all over with burns.

When she mentioned there were 15 other white captives at the Indians’ camp, all of them being subjected to a similar fate, Texan officials said they were holding the Comanche men as hostages until the white prisoners were returned. The Comanches tried to fight their way out. Texan soldiers opened fire, killing 35 Comanche, injuring many more and taking 29 prisoner. Seven Texans were killed.

The next day a Commanche woman was freed and instructed to tell the Indians they had 12 days to return the white captives or all the hostages would be killed. The Commanches ignored the ultimatum and tortured every one of the captives to death.

‘One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire. They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Matilda Lockhart’s six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates who died screaming. [7]

Disease and Indian population

The vast majority of immigrants to the US had little hope of bettering their lives in the ‘Old Country’ and decided to go to America – where hard work and self initiative would determine their fate. Some stayed in the East, but many headed west. Failure was not an option for the pioneers.

A large amount of land in North America was uninhabited. The Indian population – which had never been large – had been reduced even further by tribal wars and especially disease. Nobody really knows what the Indian population was when the White man arrived in the New World. However, everyone agrees that the vast majority of Indians lived south of the Rio Grande River. A middle estimate has about 53 million Indians south of the Rio Grane River including the Caribbean Islands and 4.4 million in North America.[8]

In 1830, Indian agents hired physicians to vaccinate Indians and treat diseases. In 1831, an especially vicious strain of smallpox began savaging Indian tribes. Indian agents appealed to Congress and In May 1832, Congress passed the Indian Vaccination Act. By February 1, 1833, more than 17,000 Indians living along the frontier had been vaccinated against smallpox.

Critics claim the only reason the Indian vaccination Act passed was to enable Indian removal to the west by the federal government. This is strange logic. Had the vaccination program NOT been passed, there would have hardly been any Native Americans left alive to move.

Some people want to place everlasting guilt on the Spanish and other Europeans for the diseases they brought to the New World – as if they had a choice. Europeans were victims of these diseases in the past just like the Indians became victims. If Asians or Africans had been the first people to explore the New World, they would have brought the same diseases with them.

Syphilis originated in the Americas and was brought back to Europe by he Spanish in 1494-1495. Syphilis raged in Europe and Colonial America until the advent of antibiotics.

The claims of genocide against the Native Americans are not true. If genocide was the goal there would have been no need for reservations, peace negotiations or vaccination programs. The Spanish conquistadors were responsible for the deaths of literally MILLIONS more Indians in the New World than the other Europeans who conquered what became the U.S. Sadly, much Indian warfare with whites and Spanish resulted in tit for tat massacres.

In 1851, while the Indian Chief Geronimo and other warriors were in the town of Janos on a trading mission, Mexican Colonel Jose Maria Carrasco and a detachment of around 400 Mexican soldiers attacked his encampment and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. When Geronimo returned later that night, he found that his mother, wife and his three young children had all been murdered.

“I had lost all,” he said in his autobiography. Following the massacre, Geronimo swore vengeance against Mexico and led a series of bloody raids on its soldiers and settlements. “I have killed many Mexicans,” he later wrote. “I do not know how many…some of them were not worth counting.”[9]

Indian Reservations

The U.S. does not have a good record with treaties signed with the Indians but there are factors involved few recognize. The biggest reason for broken treaties with the Indians was because the U.S. was such a wonderful country that MILLIONS of immigrants came to the U.S. and they needed somewhere to go.

Spain/Mexico never had to deal with millions of immigrants because their country was so dysfunctional. If millions of immigrants HAD gone to Mexico, they would have done what the earlier Spaniards did – taken whatever land they wanted from the Indians. If the U.S. would have had minimal immigration like Mexico, treaties with the Indians would probably not have been violated.

Some tribes received a huge amount of land. The Rosebud Sioux Reservation in S. Dakota has a population of 12,763, and a total land area of 1,442 square miles. Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe has a land area of 3,468 sq mi. About 32,000 Indians live on this reservation. The Navajo Nation has a 27,000 sq mi. reservation with a population of about 165,000.

Source:
1 – https://www.cbc.ca/history/EPCONTENTSE1EP2CH5PA5LE.html

2 – https://accessgenealogy.com/native/indian-slavery-and-slaves.htm

3 – http://www.native-net.org/na/native-american-warrior.html

4 – https://www.nps.gov/jame/an-unoccupied-site.htm

5 – https://smokymountainnews.com/archives/item/6413-different-tribes-treated-captives-differently

6 – https://truewestmagazine.com/indian-tribes-torture/

7 – Empire of the summer moon by S. C. Gwynne, p 84-88

8 – https://www.statista.com/statistics/1171896/pre-colonization-population-americas/

9 – https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/geronimos-decades-long-hunt-for-vengeance-71613221/

June 2025