MARCH OF THE TITANS - A HISTORY OF THE WHITE RACE

Chapter Fifty

The Seventh Great Race War: The Amerinds

The settlement of North America by the White race in a wave of immigration was achieved only at the expense of the Nonwhite people already living on the continent: the Amerinds, or "Red Indians." The settlement of North America by the Whites is an outstanding example of the principle which has underlain every single rise and fall of every civilization: before the Whites arrived, North American culture was Amerind: after the Whites arrived and replaced the Amerinds as the majority population, White culture replaced the original civilization, virtually overnight.

The eternal truth of this simple and obvious principle was dramatically proven in the seventh great race war in which the Whites found themselves embroiled: a struggle which ultimately saw the United States of America extend its borders to the Pacific Ocean.

Amerinds of Mongoloid Stock

The invasion of North America by the Whites, in a manner so markedly similar to those of the Indo-European invasions of Europe and other parts of the world thousands of years before, caused natural dissent from those indigenous inhabitants in the new territories.

Unlike the ancient Indo-Europeans, however, the indigenous peoples of America were not of distantly related genetic stock, as were the Old Europeans: they were of Mongoloid racial stock, only called "Indians" because the first White explorers were looking for India; and only called "red" because of their habit of wearing red clay as face paint.

First Contact With the Amerinds

The first meetings of Whites in North America and Amerinds was mixed: generally the Amerinds were in awe of the technological wonders the Whites brought with them - starting with the ships themselves, which, with their billowing sails appeared like great spirits on the horizon: more than one instance is recorded of Amerinds fleeing in panic at the very sight of a White explorer ship. If they were in awe of the ships themselves, it needs no imagination to perceive what they must have thought of the other wonders from the world: clothes, steel, guns, mirrors, jewelry, copper, brass kettles and thousands of other things completely unknown to the native peoples of North America.

Later the Whites were to introduce yet another wonder to North America which was seized upon and used to great effect by the Amerinds: horses. The first horses were introduced to the continent by the Spanish: somehow a number escaped and by natural breeding formed large packs of wild horses which roamed the plains of America for nearly two centuries.

Finally, the new arrivals were not only light complexioned, but many of them also had beards and they all grew facial hair: this in itself was a subject of wonder by the Amerinds, who in their pure racial form did not grow facial hair at all, like their Mongolian cousins across the Bering straits in Asia.

New World Products

In turn, the Amerinds presented the White world with tobacco, cocoa and venereal disease - the rapid transmission of the latter disease back to Europe from South America serves as a graphic illustration of the levels of physical integration which took place on that continent, starting shortly after the Spanish and Portuguese first landed there.

However, the two traits for which the Amerinds became known - and for which they also became particularly disliked - were:

• the practice common amongst all the tribes of North America of cutting off the scalps of their vanquished foes to take as trophies for display in the tribal village. The appearance of White scalps - with blond, red, brown, or dark brown hair - were particularly prized, being outstanding compared to the pitch black haired scalps the Amerinds were more normally used to taking from each other; and

• in common with their racial cousins in Central and South America, ritualistic cannibalism was common. The full extent of these practices was noted by many early writers, with the most complete and detailed account of Amerind cannibalism and the habit of torturing White prisoners of both sexes appearing in the print in 1892 in The Works of Francis Parkman, published by Little Brown, Boston (Vol. III.)

The term cannibalism is derived from Canibales, the Spanish name for the man-eating Caribbean Amerinds who lived in the West Indies when Christopher Columbus arrived. The habit had clearly come across the Bering Straits when the Mongolian ancestors of the Amerinds had crossed into the Americas: in medieval times the Italian traveler Marco Polo reported that tribes from Tibet to Sumatra practiced cannibalism.

For the sake of political correctness, these disturbing traits are for the greatest part suppressed in modern histories of the Amerinds: but at the time they were well known and feared by the White settlers; going a long way to explaining the extended period of conflict between the Whites and the Amerinds, and the particularly ruthless methods of dealing with each other if captured.

Eventually the more extreme White frontiersmen started retaliating against the practice of scalping by exacting the same punishment on the Amerinds - but there are no recorded incidents of Whites ever quite getting around to duplicating the cannibalistic habit of eating dead Amerinds, even though there are many recorded incidents of the reverse occurring.

Attacks

The initial friendly contact soon however gave way when the Amerinds realized that the Whites were thereafter arriving as settlers: from the time of the very first White settlements, even going back to the Viking landings in Newfoundland, the White pioneers were subjected to attacks by resentful Amerind tribes; realizing that the Whites represented a serious threat to their way of life, society and civilization, they tried their best to drive the settlers back into the sea. Against the superior White technology, however, the Amerinds really stood little chance.

The Lost Colony

In fact the very first English settlement in North America, a 117 strong group of White pioneers, situated on an island off the coast of North Carolina, was probably wiped out by an Amerind attack. Called the "lost colony", they were destroyed at some time between 1587 and 1590. Their remains were never found, which would have been the case had they starved to death or met some other natural end.

Virginia

In Virginia, the first successful large scale English colony, which was established in 1607, was subjected to repeated attacks by the Powhatan tribe which culminated in 1622, when 350 Whites were killed by the Amerinds in a single attack: as there were only just over 1000 Whites in the colony at the time, this reduced the entire White population by one third.

In April 1644, another attack by the Powhatan killed 500 more Whites: this very nearly destroyed the colony utterly. Incensed, the surviving Whites set out to exact retribution: a short vicious campaign followed which saw the Amerind tribes wilt and retreat inland.

Bacon's Rebellion

Bacon's rebellion was an uprising in Virginia led by a White farmer, Nathaniel Bacon, against the governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, in 1676. Bacon and a number of fellow White farmers came under renewed Amerind attack: when Berkeley refused to station troops in the outlying areas to protect the Whites, Bacon organized a militia and led this substantial private army against the Amerinds, inflicting some severe defeats upon them.

Berkeley proclaimed Bacon a traitor because of the private army he had illegally raised. Bacon then marched on the capital, Jamestown, with his militia in tow and seized control of the colonial government. Berkeley gathered together a force of loyal colonists and started a mini-civil war in the colony: it ended the same year it started, 1676, with Bacon's death.

New England

The creation of the colony of New England was also met with violent resistance: in 1675 the Amerind leader Metacom led a guerrilla war against the Whites until he was betrayed by one of his own people and executed: in the interim he had exacted a heavy toll in White settlers' lives.

New Netherlands

The first Dutch settlement in North America, in the area now known as New York and Manhattan Island, was, according to the popular story, purchased from Amerinds for $24 worth of goods in 1626. Despite whatever transaction may have taken place - and the lack of understanding of the concept of private ownership of land by the Amerinds probably made whatever agreement which was made, meaningless to the natives - Amerind attacks on the Whites in the area fast became the norm and never fully subsided until the continuing build up of White settlers saw the surviving Amerinds drift into the interior.

The Thirteen Colonies

As the numbers of Whites increased exponentially on the eastern seaboard of America, so the Amerinds settled in ever greater numbers in the middle of the continent: sometimes moving there as part of a natural migration, other times fleeing bands of avenging White militia. A particularly nasty White/Amerind conflict (sparked off by the Ottawa tribe, whose chief's name was Pontiac - later he would have the dubious distinction of having an automobile named after him) caused the British authorities in the colonies to issue a Proclamation of 1763, which restricted White settlement to the area East of the Appalachian Mountains. This was done in an attempt to prevent new race wars from breaking out.

By the time the 13 colonies - which made up less than one third of the territory that the United States of America was eventually to encompass - had declared independence from Britain, the vast majority of Amerinds were on the western side of the Appalachian mountains, away from the White settlers and their colonies.

The Creation of the United States and the Amerinds

When the American War of Independence broke out in 1775, the vast majority of the Iroquois Amerinds actively sided with the British, while in the south the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek Amerinds also seized the opportunity to launch a series of attacks on the White colonists, becoming formally allied to the British shortly thereafter.

The American revolutionaries then had to put down all these Amerind uprisings and fight the British at the same time, something which for a while seriously divided the American's fighting forces, although they were ultimately successful in this aim.

When independence was finally won from the British, the participation of the Amerinds in the anti-revolutionary campaign served to confirm the opinion of the new White nation that the Amerinds were irreparably hostile.

Thus it was that the American constitution, accepted by the 13 former colonies shortly after independence had been won, included the regulation of relations with the Amerinds under the clause of that constitution with dealt with the regulation of relations with foreign states: Article I, Section 8 of the constitution read:

"The Congress shall have Power . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."

George Washington and the other original founding fathers of the United States therefore had not the slightest intention of ever including the Amerinds into their republic, classing them as outside aliens along with other "foreign nations".

The Battle of Fallen Timbers

After the end of the American revolution, White numbers in America continued to grow: soon the desire for new farming saw White settlers start to fan out westward, moving into the Ohio Valley, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

In all of these regions lived large numbers of Amerind tribes, many of whom had been there before the Whites had first started settling in North America. Once again the scenario which had played itself out along the East Coast occurred: small White settlements being attacked by the Amerinds; then as the number of Whites increased, the ability to ward off and finally beat the Amerinds grew.

This time however - and this would set the pattern right until the last great Amerind-White race war in the late 19th century - the Amerinds had absorbed some of the White innovations: in particular the gun and the horse, both of which the Amerinds had obtained either from traders or from raids on White settlers.

Armed and mobile, the Amerinds of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee proved harder to beat: a White army dispatched to deal with the situation was badly defeated by the Amerinds near what is now Fort Wayne in Indiana.

Finally, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 in northwestern Ohio, a White American punitive force, sent to avenge a particularly nasty series of Amerind attacks, decisively defeated the natives. A treaty between the races, the Treaty of Greenville, established a definite boundary between what was designated "Indian Territory" and White settlement.

The Trade and Intercourse Acts

Despite the prevailing view amongst all White Americans of the Amerinds as being a particularly savage peoples, there was a desire to ensure that their lack of sophistication was not exploited by unscrupulous White traders or frontiersmen, of whom there were a small minority. So it was that the Trade and intercourse Acts, a series of laws passed by the US Congress at the end of the 18th century, attempted to regulate trading practices with the Amerinds. Amongst the measures were provisions allowing for the punishment of traders found to be defrauding the Amerinds.

Manifest Destiny

The White frontiersmen in the Ohio River valley relived the terror and anxiety of the first White settlers on the eastern seaboard: subjected to intermittent and unexpected attacks, they were forced to be constantly on their guard and soon became used to the rugged demands of life spent part at war and part at creating, from scratch, entire towns and farms.

This state of affairs helped to create what later became known as the "manifest destiny" syndrome: the frontiersmen began to regard it as almost their sacred duty to wrest new land away from the Amerinds and open it to White settlement: they saw the Amerinds as a savage race under whom the rich continent had lain idle for thousands of years. It was up to the frontiersmen to settle it and to break the soil.

This belief in ordained destiny to bring civilization to the interior of the continent was fed by the cruelty of the ongoing conflicts with the Amerinds: daily the frontiersmen had to deal with unspeakable Nonwhite brutalities which re-enforced their belief in their own cultural superiority.

This attitude was however opposed by a small but growing group of Whites on the now established and relatively easy living eastern seaboard who were not exposed to the dangers, violence and rigors of life at the frontier: this was the start of a split in the White population in America which would ultimately become associated with the issue of slavery and racial conflict, ending only in the American Civil war of 1865.

The War of 1812

During the American-British War of 1812, the Shawnee Amerinds sided with Britain, partly as a result of having suffered a defeat at the hands of an American force at the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana. The Shawnee had long been receiving British aid from British North America, or Canada, and this alliance was one of the causes of the outbreak of the war between America and Britain. The Shawnee chief, Tecumseh was however killed when the American revolutionaries defeated a combined British and Shawnee force at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813.

Whites Eaten by Amerinds at Fort Mims

In Alabama, the Creek Amerinds seized Fort Mims in 1812, cruelly massacring all the White inhabitants - men, women and children - and then engaging in a cannibalistic orgy on the remains of all the Whites they could find in the settlement.

Shocked, an avenging White army under Andrew Jackson was sent South: after two years of conflict the Creek were finally decisively defeated at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814. Andrew Jackson then went on to be elected president of the United States in 1828: his first hand experiences with the Amerinds made him turn a deaf ear to the liberals of the Eastern Seaboard and it was largely as a result of his maneuverings that the next great event in White-Amerind history was to take place in 1830.

The Removal Act

By 1830, the numbers of Whites in the region between the Mississippi Rover and the Appalachian mountains - essentially the present day Mid-Eastern states of America - had reached the point where it was no longer possible to efficiently regulate the very often violent interaction between the Whites and the Amerinds. In May of that year, the US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which empowered the president of the United States to move Amerinds west of the Mississippi, to the officially declared "Indian Territory" - the Mid-West of America, and in particular the state now known as Oklahoma.

To the White liberals on the Eastern Seaboard, the Removal Act was an outrage perpetuated by the same people who owned Black slaves, and they opposed it as best they could. The Removal Act would become another factor in the political divide amongst the Whites in America.

Resistance Flares Up

The original intention as stated in the Removal Act was that the removals were to be voluntary: while the vast majority were indeed peaceful (the Amerinds were as keen to get away from the Whites as the Whites were to get rid of the Amerinds), a small number were not: these forced removals later became an icon of oppression for the Amerinds.

The Sauk and Fox tribes rebelled in 1832, sparking off the Black Hawk War in Illinois and Wisconsin. This conflict ended in August of that year when the last major group of Sauk warriors were killed by White troopers while they were trying to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa. The circumstances of this battle - in which the Amerinds were caught halfway through the river - resulted in so many fatalities on the Amerind side that it became known as the Bad Axe Massacre.

The Seminole tribe in Florida also resisted violently: the Seminole War followed from 1835 to 1842 which eventually saw this native tribe defeated and rounded up into a reservation against their will. By the mid 1850s, virtually all of the eastern half of America had been cleared of Amerinds, either through voluntary departure or forced removal, a striking example of the "might is right" principle at work.

Reservations

By the middle of the 19th century, the rate of White expansion and settlement into the Mid-West and even beyond to the Pacific coast had made the concept of "Indian territory" unsustainable. In an effort to reach a compromise between the demands of the White settlers and the objections of the Amerinds, the concept of "Indian territories" was then changed into "Indian Reservations".

These reservations were smaller in territorial size that the "Indian territories" but as an exchange for accepting the smaller lands, the American government gave the iron clad guarantee that the reservations were exactly that: no Whites would ever be able to settle or own land in them and they would be the inalienable property of the various tribes, whose numbers by this stage had dropped from an estimated 850,000 in 1550, to just under 400,000 by the mid 19th century.

As there were only 400,000 Amerinds in the entire North American continent around 1850, the belief that reservations would protect the Amerinds, was not far fetched at all, and in real terms the land so set aside for the Amerinds was significant, given the numbers that were under consideration.

Gold Rush

The discovery of gold in the Western territories in 1849, created a wave of new White settlers in that region: this in turn sparked off attacks by the Amerind tribes who had by now seen what had happened in the east. In Idaho and Oregon, conflicts between White settlers and the Bannock and Shoshone broke out; the same happened in Nevada and Utah, where the Ute fought the White settlers, while in the southwest, the Apache and Navajo put up the most organized resistance.

In northern California, the White settlers were set upon by a particularly vicious Amerind tribe, the Modocs. After a series of attacks, the Modocs finally overstepped the mark with a particularly bad massacre of Whites in 1872: enraged, the White settlers formed a militia and the Modoc Wars of 1872-1873 followed, which saw the Amerinds in California utterly defeated.

The Plains Wars

The creation of reservations was part accepted and part rejected by the Amerind tribes. Some immediately accepted the offer of guaranteed protection against further White excursions and either settled in the reservations, or found their already existing lands included into the reservations. However some of the larger tribes objected and the White-Amerind race war, which had continued in fits and starts ever since the first Whites arrived in North America - then entered its conclusive phase in a series of conflicts known as the Plains Wars.

The Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux all fought the White settlers as hard as they could: there were countless small localized engagements which saw hundreds, if not eventually thousands, of Amerinds killed, with ferocious fighting taking place over a massive area right through the 1860s and 1870s. The most famous of these engagements - and also the penultimate great clash, was the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Battle of Little Bighorn

The Battle of Little Bighorn was fought between a regiment of the US 7th Cavalry led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and a force of Sioux and Cheyenne Amerinds on 25 June 1876, in what is now the state of Montana. Gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills in 1874: this had led to the inevitable massive and overnight influx of White prospectors into what was Amerind land: immediately the Sioux and Cheyenne chiefs, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall, organized raiding parties on the White intruders.

By 1876, the US 7th Cavalry had been posted to protect the White prospectors: in June of that year, a single regiment - 655 men - of the 7th cavalry advanced on party of in excess of 4000 Sioux at the junction of two rivers, the Bighorn and the Little Bighorn rivers.

The White soldiers were, it transpired later, unaware of the actual size of the heavily armed Sioux force. Custer realized his error too late: in a desperate attempt to break the Sioux force, he personally led a frontal charge of 260 of his men into the waiting Amerinds: the charge failed and Custer and his tiny force were surrounded. Fighting standing literally back to back with each other, Custer and his White soldiers were slowly cut down one by one and all were killed.

Although this battle was a White defeat, it would be the last. Within a year, follow up operations by the White armies had crushed the last of the Sioux and Cheyenne resistance, most of the Amerind survivors were then moved to a reservation in Oklahoma. Isolated clashes then took place in the late 1870s, but by 1880 the conflict had all but petered out, only flaring up again briefly in 1890.

The Battle of Wounded Knee

The Plains Wars came to a final bloody end at the Battle of Wounded Knee in December 1890. Situated inside one of the reservations, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the area was populated by the Sioux Amerinds. In 1889, a Sioux Medicine Man, Wovoka, began prophesying amongst his fellow tribesmen that if they performed a tribal dance - the Ritual Ghost Dance - long enough, this would result in the return of all of their former lands, the resurrection from the dead of all their ancestors and the death of all the Whites.

The prophesies spread like wildfire amongst the Sioux, who then not only started performing the ritual dance in large numbers, but also began stockpiling guns and ammunition ready for a rebellion when called upon to rise up by the dead ancestors.

The White government soon became aware of the goings on, and in December 1890, a detachment of the US 7th Cavalry arrived in the Pine Ridge Reservation and arrested the Sioux Chief, Sitting Bull (the same one who had been instrumental in the clashes which led to the Battle of Little Bighorn), in a move designed to break the rebellion before it started. As he was being led away, a lone Amerind fired a shot at the White troopers: a full scale gunfight then erupted and 13 people were killed, including Chief Sitting Bull.

The Sioux then fled to the camp of a neighboring chief, Big Foot, who was settled near Wounded Knee Creek, with the 7th cavalry hot in pursuit. On 29 December 1890, the White troops entered the Sioux camp at Wounded Knee. A scuffle broke out and then a new gunfight erupted: it has never been established who fired the first shot, with both Sioux and the Whites claiming it was the other.

The end result was however that when the shooting stopped, around 200 Sioux and 31 Whites had been killed. About half of the Sioux dead were women and children caught in the crossfire as the gunfight had taken place in the middle of a settlement.

This engagement which was half a military operation and half a massacre, was the last of the major White-Amerind conflicts in North America, although Wounded Knee would feature once again in 1973 in another smaller standoff between the American government and the Sioux.

Racial Consequences of the Amerind Wars

Apart from the seizure of their land, which was brought about not primarily through military defeat but the simple swamping of that territory by Whites (yet another example of how a change in population causes a change in culture), the Amerind-White wars produced two significant results:

• Firstly, the Amerinds were virtually eliminated as a political, racial and socio-demographic factor; this situation allowed for the final flooding of North America by Whites, with all its resultant consequences for world history with the creation of the United States of America;

• Secondly, the subjugation of the Amerinds by masses of Whites led to a certain amount of racial mixing between the two groups taking place: but, it being America with its officially endorsed disapproval of racial mixing (which lasted in legal form right into the middle of the 20th century, with anti-miscegenation laws still being on the statute books as late as 1967 in many states) those mixed race persons born of White-Amerind unions - or indeed of Black-Amerind unions, were re-absorbed back into the Amerind population. This is the reason why many Amerinds may look fairer or darker than Mongolian peoples or may have markedly non-Mongolian facial features: true blood Amerinds are fairly rare, and most Amerinds have either some direct or indirect White or Black ancestry.

The Allotment Act

By the end of the 19th century, the successive wars, rampant alcoholism and natural shrinkage had seen the Amerind population of America drop to an all time low of 237,000, virtually to the point of complete extinction. As this number was split up into well over 100 tribes all speaking different languages, the realization dawned that if something was not done, they would disappear completely.

In 1871 then, the US Congress decided to abandon the system of treaties with the Amerind tribes and start making laws directly for their preservation - the notion of the Amerinds as being foreign nations was substituted for a policy of wardship, although they were still not granted citizenship of the United States of America.

A new law, the General Allotment Act of 1887, saw a determined effort by the American government to bring the Amerinds into the mainstream of White society: the concept of communally owned tribal lands was abolished, being replaced with individual plots and individual land ownership as was the norm in the rest of the country.

This policy, well intentioned as it was - with the belief that private ownership of land would help lift the Amerinds' standard of living as this process had with the Whites - was a total failure. Vast numbers of Amerinds simply sold their land as soon as they were given it: sometimes at pathetically low prices, often to unscrupulous White land speculators. The result of the General Allotment Act was that the Amerinds succeeded only in losing much of their tribal land without showing any benefit in return.

Citizenship

A series of chaotic and contradictory policies towards the Amerinds was then pursued by successive American governments, all of them ultimately failing in their aim of forcing the Amerinds into mainstream society. During the course of these policies, the Amerinds were finally granted American citizenship in 1924 - some 145 years after the United States of America had been created.

The Indian Reorganization Act

Finally it was acknowledged that the Allotment policy was a disaster, and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 saw the policy abandoned along with the forced integration policy. Amerind tribal lands lost during the allotment era were repurchased by the American government and the tribes were encouraged to set up their own governments in the restored semi independent regions. A credit program on very generous terms was set up, backed by the government, to lend money to Amerinds to re-establish their societies.

The Termination Period

This policy continued until after the end of the Second World War, when another change in policy occurred: arguments were raised against the preferential treatment in terms of jobs and federal government credit, saying that Amerinds should be treated like any other people in America. Thus by 1953, the Federal government undertook to slowly dismantle all its bodies and institutions devoted to dealing with the Amerinds as a separate racial group.

Despite this, the American government has to the present day maintained an army of civil servants - in excess of 16,000 - in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, mostly Amerinds who are still hired on a preferential treatment basis.

Modern Amerinds

The Amerind population has, through a process of natural increase and absorption of a significant number of Whites, gradually increased: by the end of the 20th century, it stood as over two million, the highest number ever in that group's entire existence. In spite of the gradual increase in the standard of living and education amongst the Amerinds, they still remain at the very bottom of the social scale in modern America.

This causes isolated outbreaks of violence, including a famous incident at the site of the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee which took place in 1973. However for the greatest part the Amerinds, who once were the most significant threat to the settlement of North America by the Whites, are destined never to be a major factor in American society again.

 

Chapter 51

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