Ethics in Writing About American Indians
Different schools of thought like the Germ theory and Turner thesis have encouraged historians to ignore the original inhabitants of the entire western hemisphere. Why did this happen, if a…
Killing Shoshone Indians in Nevada
One of the earliest contacts between whites and Indians of Nevada occurred in August, 1832. The greeting was a rifle ball. Milton Sublette, with a company of trappers, had reached the headwaters of…
Violence of the Iroquois
This hard fact is what recent essays in the economic interpretation of the Iroquois Confederacy fail to account for. Professor Hunt, for instance treats the Iroquois as if they were…
Walla Walla
They were land travelers again when on April 27 they met a roaming band of Walla Wallas (kindred of the Nez Perces) and their chief. The captains, who called him…
Nez Perces
The Nez Perces were the charming tribe, a highly intelligent people who had an advanced culture. Like the Flatheads, they had absorbed much Plains and Coastal culture, and had paid…
John Colter and Blackfeet Antipathy
Colter reached the equator of the Missouri, the mouth of the Platte and there met a big party coming upriver, bound for the rich beaver country which the return of…
Indian Country
Canada had had an Indian Problem. In exactly that sense Great Britain had one from the moment when Quebec surrendered. The universal uprising, and especially the attempt of the Western…
Relations Between Paiute and Whites in Nevada
Relations between Indians and whites had never been good in Nevada. The first recorded incident of the cruelty of whites venturing into Paiute country was in August 1832 on the Humboldt River…
Origin of the Paiute War
Nevada historians agree that the events at Williams Station on May 7 were the trigger for the so-called Pyramid Lake Indian War, which is variously called the Paiute Indian War, the Pyramid…
Making a Robe From a Hide
Women's work and extremely hard work. A fresh buffalo hide might weigh up to eighty pounds and all the processes of tanning were done manually. How did a squaw make…
Blackfeet Indians
The true continuity is not offenses of the Americans but the character of the Blackfeet, who were an extreme specialization of savage life. Of the Plains tribes only the Comanches…
Vaccinations
As for compelling or persuading any great number of Indians to submit to the insertion of a certainly diabolical medicine in a scratch on their arms, consult the records first…
Pawnee Morning Star Sacrifice
Now as the children died and their parents wailed among the huts, the Skidis knew that they had sinned; they were no better than apostates. So they decreed a tribal…
1837 Mandan Cholera Epidemic
This was the second time smallpox had ravaged the Mandans, for it was an epidemic toward the end of the eighteenth century that had made them move from their old…
Clothing of Four Bears
But actually Four Bears [Mandan chief] had more iron in him than that. When he felt the fever come upon him he dressed in his most ceremonious garments. (Shirt of…