A book review

[Gdjjr]

Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Alfred A. Knopf, 2016, 576 pp., $35.00.

I'd like to read it- but, for 35 bucks, I'll pass- it does, however, offer a counter to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee- which I have read and have the book.

My sympathies lie with the Indians. I'll say that up-front- their homes were invaded. Period. It seems to me a prelude to what the US was to become. (see a comment from the website below)

One thing I noticed in the review is; there's no mention of the Comanche- I wonder at that.

American Settlers Meet Spartans











I was thinking of this conflict today after reading about peace talks with “the Taliban”. They are not one group with centralized control, just like the Indians, who had separate tribes with different languages. And each tribe had different groups, and even the chief of each tribal group lacked total control of all his warriors.
So the US Government could never sign a peace deal with “the Indians” and we can never sign a peace deal with “the Taliban.” We just need to leave.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Alfred A. Knopf, 2016, 576 pp., $35.00.

I'd like to read it- but, for 35 bucks, I'll pass- it does, however, offer a counter to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee- which I have read and have the book.

My sympathies lie with the Indians. I'll say that up-front- their homes were invaded. Period. It seems to me a prelude to what the US was to become. (see a comment from the website below)

One thing I noticed in the review is; there's no mention of the Comanche- I wonder at that.

American Settlers Meet Spartans











I was thinking of this conflict today after reading about peace talks with “the Taliban”. They are not one group with centralized control, just like the Indians, who had separate tribes with different languages. And each tribe had different groups, and even the chief of each tribal group lacked total control of all his warriors.
So the US Government could never sign a peace deal with “the Indians” and we can never sign a peace deal with “the Taliban.” We just need to leave.

Congrats!!!

Far too few read books of any sort.


I'll counter with this......

Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America
Peter Silver

1. This book is about how fear and horror can remake whole societies and their political landscapes. These events, between Europeans and Indians, surprisingly ran towards a) a democratic revolution and the dignifying of ordinary people; a commitment to toleration, or at least a deep hostility to bigotry between Europeans; and, in time, most of the American republic’s institutional beginning.
   1. When the experience of Indian war engulfed the mid-Atlantic, especially Pennsylvania, some of the many dissatisfactions that European colonists had felt toward one another would be trumped.
   2. Despite the use of words land phrases like “Indian” and “white people,” modern racial thinking played no part in most groups’ views of each other…until the end of the American Revolution… [when] new rhetoric for decrying Indians was genuinely worth calling racist. p.xxi
   3. [W]hite people in this period were nearly always depicted as suffering at Indians’ hands rather than triumphing over them, and if Europeans did not identify with, and move to mitigate this suffering, then they did not deserve to rule them: this served as a test first of Quaker’s, and then British rule in the middle colonies. This was an important source of the fundamental revolutionary idea of a sovereign people.
   4. Quakers during the Seven Years’ War, and Loyalists and British people during the Revolution, would bear the brunt of accusations of caring too much for the Indians.
2. In the 1680’s, William Penn and thousands of other English and Welsh Quakers had arrived on the lower Delaware River to found Pennsylvania. A central part of Penn’s vision was to tolerate all religious denominations. Eventually he attracted other persecuted minorities including Huguenots, Mennonites, Amish, Catholics, Lutherans, and Jewsfrom England, France, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, and Wales.
   1. Perhaps 100,000 immigrants from Ireland and 100,000 more from German-speaking Europe arrived via Philadelphia between 1700 and 1775.
   2. Many German-speaking immigrants, called ‘redemptioners,’ voyaging free in exchange for sale into indentured servitude, which would actually take the form of redemption through purchase by New World friends or relatives.
   3. Many hundreds of passengers died amid “vapors, terror, vomiting…diarrhea…mouth-rot and the like.” And “beat and used as if we were Slaves” by English-speaking crews. Mittleberger,“Reise nach Pennsylvanien,” pp. 92
   4. In 1750, Reading, Pennsylvania had a single house. Two years later there were 130.
3. The rapid increase in population resulted in abrasive relationships, by national origin, religion, custom, etc.
   1. Benjamin Franklin proposed that the Germans “will soon…out number us!”
   2. But, in November, 1747, Franklin writes "The Plain Truth," a pamphlet arguing for better military preparedness in PA. In the pamphlet is the first political cartoon published in America. Published in both English and German, and using many Old Testament examples, he tried to overcome the mid-Atlantic’s paralyzing divisions. The concluding sentence: “May the God of Wisdom, Strength and Power, the Lord of the Armies of Israel…unite the Hearts and Counsels of us all, of whatever SECT or NATION, in one…generous Publick Spirit.”
   3. But it would take a real war to transform the relations between colonial groups.
4. In the 1750’s, Britain and France began to contest the Ohio country, and Indian attacks attended the opening of the Seven Year’s War, as Ohio Indians sided with the French.
   1. France built a chain of forts in the region in 1753.
   2. 1755: Canadian and Indian forces devastated a large, vaunted expedition against Fort Duquesne by British troops under Maj, Gen, Edward Braddock. George Washington was in this expedition.
   3. Unable to have any success, the Quakers and Delawares in the east brokered a peace with the western Delawares in Easton, Pennsylvania in 1758.
   4. Defeat of Quebec in 1759; the tide of war changed.
   5. In 1756, the Rev. William Smith put on an adaptation of a popular play of the period, “Alfred, A Tragedy,” by David Mallett. The play celebrates King Alfred’s triumph over the savage Danes, 900 years prior. (The play contains the song ‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.’) He chose this due to similar circumstances of the colonies under incursions by the Indians.
5. Attacks by French-allied Indians hit Pennsylvania in October 1755. Sixty to one hundred arrived beyond the settlements, and divided into smaller groups, which went into different valleys to reconnoiter. Each spy ”lay[ing] about a House some days & nights, watching like a wolf” to see ”the situation of the Houses, the number of people at Each House, the places the People most frequent, & to observe at each House where there is most men, or women.” The individual farmsteads they chose a targets were at last attacked in parallel by still smaller groups, each only big enough to kill or capture the number of people it was likely to meet. Col. James Burd, “Pennsylvania Archives,” 199-104
   1. The brunt of these attacks fell on people who were outside doing field work. The attacks were manufactured to instill paralyzing fear- and they did.
   2. In 1756,William Fleming gave an unrivaled account of life in one of these little attack groups. Delawares stormed the house of Fleming’s neighbor, a farmer named Hicks, and took one of the Hicks boys as prisoner. The Indians then went on to instill fear by having Fleming witness the Hicks boys’ murder: they bludgeoned the boy to the ground with a tomahawk, split open his head- pausing at this point, in “Sport…to imitate his expiring Agonies” – and scalped him, and continued “all over besmared with [Hicks’s] blood.”
   3. Fleming wrote of watching while a youth from a neighboring family was taken by Indians while inside were “numerous Family of able young Men” and despite his “scream[ing] in a most piteous Manner for help,” his brothers made no attempt to help. A narrative of the sufferings and surprizing deliverances of William and Elizabeth Fleming [electron... | National Library of Australia
   4. Northampton County, Pennsylvania, 1778. Four men, two with wives and eight children, were attacked by Indians. [T]his occaion’d our men to flee as fast as they could,…before they were out of sight of the wagon they saw the Indians attacking the women & Children with their Tomahawks.” The net day, the three men came back to the scene for the corpses, which include the stabbed and scalped bodies of Smith’s wife, and of “a Little girl kill’d & sclped, [and] a boy the same.” Pa. Arch. 1:6:591
6. The essential fact about Indian-European warfare in the middle colonies was that the Europeans almost always did very badly. Though the American Revolution brought about a glorified, misleading view of frontier fighters and riflemen, during the eighteenth century country people practically never managed to mount even faintly convincing defenses against Indian attacks….The only thing that worked was leaving. (p.53)
7. Although the original diversity to the European colonies was the cause of much abrasive relationships, once public debate centered on the suffering of ordinary country people who had been dismissed in the cities as worse than Indians were reshaped into grander figures, defined by their hardships more than their religion, their nationality, or any of their own troublesome actions. And, increasingly, they made useful symbols for the country as a whole.
   1. Scalped and mutilated bodies were regularly brought into towns to document Indian barbarity. One strain of the rhetoric simply displayed abuses to the human body before and after death, especially scalping, as well as incineration, nonburial, and dismemberment.
8. It is more than interesting to consider the impressions of Capt. Joseph Shippen, of the Pennsylvania regiment, in 1755, considering frontier calamities: “To me, such tragical Scenes re sometime truly pleasing. Not that I rejoice…my Heart melts within me with Pity & Compassion for the unhappy Object….Yet as the softer passions of the Breast inflame the Soul with a Disposition, to do its utmost Efforts for its relief, I enjoy in that Respect a secret pleasure…”
   1. To make sense of this, we must begin with the aesthetics of the sublime. The pre-Romantic literature of sensibility , which rose during the 18th century to dominate poetry, drama, and especially the new genre of the novel, was the first body of writing in English to exploit the aesthetic value of emotion. At the heart of this was the fascination with sublime sensation: the felling of being awed, struck with wonder-or horror- at something outside oneself.
   2. The discourse on the sublime was shifting from “an ethico-aesthetic enquiry into a psychology of the individual” at about the time the mid-Atlantics scenes of Indian war became available. DeBolla, “The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject,”p.42 This writing of the ‘pathetic sublime’ overwhelmed the reader with emotion at the sight of the suffering.
   3. Edmund Burke (in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757) was the first to observe that terror and horror were the sublime emotions par excellence. The Beautiful, according to Burke, is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is what has the power to compel and destroy us. The preference for the Sublime over the Beautiful was to mark the transition from the Neoclassical to the Romantic era. Thus, the sight of physical pain and suffering was the wellspring of the strongest emotions we could feel. [p.84]

 

[PoliticalChic]

Peter Cozzens, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Alfred A. Knopf, 2016, 576 pp., $35.00.

I'd like to read it- but, for 35 bucks, I'll pass- it does, however, offer a counter to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee- which I have read and have the book.

My sympathies lie with the Indians. I'll say that up-front- their homes were invaded. Period. It seems to me a prelude to what the US was to become. (see a comment from the website below)

One thing I noticed in the review is; there's no mention of the Comanche- I wonder at that.

American Settlers Meet Spartans











I was thinking of this conflict today after reading about peace talks with “the Taliban”. They are not one group with centralized control, just like the Indians, who had separate tribes with different languages. And each tribe had different groups, and even the chief of each tribal group lacked total control of all his warriors.
So the US Government could never sign a peace deal with “the Indians” and we can never sign a peace deal with “the Taliban.” We just need to leave.

"My sympathies lie with the Indians."


Those Indians were stone age savages some three millennia behind the settlers in societal development.
They killed for the sake of killing, caused the extinction of untold numbers of species, and burned down forests indiscriminately.


'Wounded Knee' is not what the America haters taught you it was.

Pop culture unfailingly paints the army as brutal killers, as in the famous South Dakota Wounded Knee ‘massacre,’ December 29, 1890. Robert Marshall Utley (born in 1929) is an author and historian who has written sixteen books on the history of the American West, including The Last Days of the Sioux Nation. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT (1963) in which he concludes that “the Indians fired at least 50 shots before the troops returned fire.”

 

[Sunsettommy]

When you look at the Indians of today, they still are in the stone age as most chose to stay on Reservations where alcoholism is bad and job and life style generally poor.

If they were actually smart they go get good jobs off the reservation, eventually buy good land and reestablish themselves there, away from the low quality reservation land.

 

[PoliticalChic]

When you look at the Indians of today, they still are in the stone age as most chose to stay on Reservations where alcoholism is bad and job and life style generally poor.

If they were actually smart they go get good jobs off the reservation, eventually buy good land and reestablish themselves there, away from the low quality reservation land.

Here in NY State they build skyscrapers.....seems they have no fear of heights.

 

[Sunsettommy]

When you look at the Indians of today, they still are in the stone age as most chose to stay on Reservations where alcoholism is bad and job and life style generally poor.

If they were actually smart they go get good jobs off the reservation, eventually buy good land and reestablish themselves there, away from the low quality reservation land.

Here in NY State they build skyscrapers.....seems they have no fear of heights.

It appears a few left the reservation there?

 

[Gdjjr]

Sublime over the Beautiful was to mark the transition from the Neoclassical to the Romantic era.

That's all well and good- maybe a little technical for most- I will say, I have for several years called myself have the soul of an artist and the mind of an engineer- I see beauty where others don't and I'm very analytical- (and introspective, I'll add)

Far too few read books of any sort.

On that we can agree- I'll go so far as to stating (based solely on my experiences) very few read more than a few sentences of anything-

 

[Gdjjr]

When you look at the Indians of today, they still are in the stone age as most chose to stay on Reservations where alcoholism is bad and job and life style generally poor.

If they were actually smart they go get good jobs off the reservation, eventually buy good land and reestablish themselves there, away from the low quality reservation land.

Nobody has said they were smart- have they? And why were they reserved on low quality land?

When "I" look at Indians of today, I see a people whose home was invaded, their lives and livelihood destroyed- no, I don't hate America, polichic- I love the concept it was founded on- I despise what it became and continues to be- a nation of self aggrandized, materialistic hypocrites who feel they are on a manifest destiny plan- where the only good person, regardless of his ethnicity, or race, or religious preference has to be approved of by the group- I also despise group think, no matter who or what institutionalizes it, especially religious and political (or vice versa in order) - and when it is forced it becomes evil- evil truly is a plant of rapid growth- a cancer that spreads like a wildfire- devouring everything and everyone in its path- leaving burned out husks behind- that, I don't believe was the plan of the founders- in fact, I'd point out the constitution was agreed to (ratified) because of the fear of that very thing happening and granting specific only authority (devolved into power) for specific actions- yet, here we are- the founders were correct in their assessment that; only virtuous men should be elected- they haven't been, with rare, rare exception- IMNSHO Davy Crockett is the most honorable politician to ever be elected- if I had to choose a political hero, it would be him-

 

[PoliticalChic]

When you look at the Indians of today, they still are in the stone age as most chose to stay on Reservations where alcoholism is bad and job and life style generally poor.

If they were actually smart they go get good jobs off the reservation, eventually buy good land and reestablish themselves there, away from the low quality reservation land.

Here in NY State they build skyscrapers.....seems they have no fear of heights.

It appears a few left the reservation there?

Mohawks from upstate NY.

Regis Mohawk Reservation is a Mohawk Indian reservation in Franklin County, New York, United States. It is also known by its Mohawk name, Akwesasne.

St. Regis Mohawk Reservation - Wikipedia




"Men of steel: How Brooklyn’s Native American ironworkers built New York

Men of Steel: How Brooklyn’s Native American ironworkers built New York | 6sqft

Since 1916, when Mohawk men made their way to New York to work on the Hell Gate Bridge, ironworkers from Akwesasne and Kahnawake have been “walking iron” across the city.

www.6sqft.com

 

[Gdjjr]

Those Indians were stone age savages some three millennia behind the settlers in societal development.
They killed for the sake of killing, caused the extinction of untold numbers of species, and burned down forests indiscriminately.

So what? Who is the judge? Hypocrites? Really- that is some kind of audacity- by what authority is it assumed one has the right to force anothers beliefs to coincide with his?

ALL conflict begins when one forces his will on another. Period- you'd think? that an alleged civilized society would recognize that- instead it chooses to point a finger at someone else making it someone else's doing- hypocrites- good lord- what complete intellectual dishonesty- absolutely no introspection allowed. Correct?!

 

[Gdjjr]

Y;all excuse me- I'm feeling NGD (new gear day) and need to call Sweetwater music- there is a Martin guitar I have my eye that I became acquainted with yesterday at my closest Guitar Center store

Martin 000-15M Acoustic Guitar - Mahogany

6-string Acoustic Guitar with Mahogany Top, Mahogany Back and Sides, Mahogany Neck, and Rosewood Fingerboard - Natural

www.sweetwater.com

 

[PoliticalChic]

Sublime over the Beautiful was to mark the transition from the Neoclassical to the Romantic era.

That's all well and good- maybe a little technical for most- I will say, I have for several years called myself have the soul of an artist and the mind of an engineer- I see beauty where others don't and I'm very analytical- (and introspective, I'll add)

Far too few read books of any sort.

On that we can agree- I'll go so far as to stating (based solely on my experiences) very few read more than a few sentences of anything-

And, largely, that's why we are in the pickle we're in.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Those Indians were stone age savages some three millennia behind the settlers in societal development.
They killed for the sake of killing, caused the extinction of untold numbers of species, and burned down forests indiscriminately.

So what? Who is the judge? Hypocrites? Really- that is some kind of audacity- by what authority is it assumed one has the right to force anothers beliefs to coincide with his?

ALL conflict begins when one forces his will on another. Period- you'd think? that an alleged civilized society would recognize that- instead it chooses to point a finger at someone else making it someone else's doing- hypocrites- good lord- what complete intellectual dishonesty- absolutely no introspection allowed. Correct?!

"Really- that is some kind of audacity- by what authority is it assumed one has the right to force anothers beliefs to coincide with his?"

Are you nuts??????????


The savagery of the Indians is the issue.


Me....I decided that slaughter is wrong.


Either the settlers, colonials, needed to wait 3,000 years for the Indians to become as civilized, or the wars that you contend were against the poor Indians had to occur.



BTW....you can't go wrong allowing me to make all your moral decisions for you....I can see you require that help.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Y;all excuse me- I'm feeling NGD (new gear day) and need to call Sweetwater music- there is a Martin guitar I have my eye that I became acquainted with yesterday at my closest Guitar Center store

Martin 000-15M Acoustic Guitar - Mahogany

6-string Acoustic Guitar with Mahogany Top, Mahogany Back and Sides, Mahogany Neck, and Rosewood Fingerboard - Natural

www.sweetwater.com

Here's a bog ol' guitar.....

 

[Gdjjr]

Well, I called Sweetwater and talked to the guy I usually deal with and asked him to talk me out of my New gear Fever- he failed, spectacularly! and made me a deal I couldn't pass up- 125 bucks off and a set of strings and free shipping! (they ship for free anyway FYI)

I am pumped! A Martin. Made in Nazareth Penn.

 

[whitehall]

Native American Indians were treated unfairly by the U.S. government for a long time. You could write a book about atrocities inflicted by the U.S. Army but to be fair you could also include accounts of Oklahoma Tribes that got rich on oil and flaunted their wealth with White maids and servants. Indians got a raw deal but payback is a bitch when you enter one of their Tribal (tax exempt) gambling casinos and get fleeced. It didn't all happen in the 1800's either. The Arizona Pima Indians were experts in irrigation farming. Sometime in the early 20's president Coolidge visited the Pima's, smoked a peace pipe for the cameras and cut off their water forever.