Author: Charles River Editors
Narrator: Colin Fluxman
Unabridged: 1 hr 33 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 03/02/2020
Genre: History - Native American
The new United States was faced with a fundamental problem: to expand, it had to settle lands to the west of the Appalachian Mountains, ceded to it by the British. However, the mountains were occupied by Native American groups who had no desire to make way for white settlers. The treaty had created a vast frontier for the fledgling nation, and any American settlers pushing west along it were bound to encounter hostile natives.
The conflicts that followed consisted mostly of the Native Americans suffering defeat in the face of a better-equipped adversary, interspersed with binding treaties, which, on the side of the federal government, proved not very binding at all. Occasionally, however, there arose a Native American leader of such ability that such defeats were temporarily reversed, and Little Turtle, the war chief of the Miami tribe, was one such man. Under his leadership, a confederation of Miami and other tribes inflicted the worst defeat ever suffered by an American army in the newly independent nation. Almost a quarter of the Army’s total strength was lost in a single battle, but while later Native American leaders such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse have become legends, Little Turtle is not as well-remembered. This is particularly odd, given that he actually defeated the American military and helped shape the development of the nascent United States and its military. Before Little Turtle’s War, it was believed that the U.S. did not need a professional army; that ordinary citizens would take up arms in times of threat and serve in militias as they had done in the fight against the British. After this war, the U.S. government was forced to recognize the need for a professional standing army.
In 1890, the US government feared an imminent Indian uprising among the displaced Sioux people. General Nelson A. Miles reported from the field summarizing the issue at hand. The government was failing to fulfill the terms of the treaty they had coe...
Red Horse, a Lakota chief, recorded a detailed eyewitness account of the Battle of Little Bighorn. He recalls seeing a rising cloud of red dust just before US soldiers charged their camp. With the hot sun bearing down on them, the Sioux took no pris...
Preserving Native American culture is an effort that is pervading the anthropological and cultural work of today, and without the work of past observers like Z.A. Parker – certain pieces of history could have been missing from books permanentl...
In 1877, the U.S. government ordered the Nez Perce Indians to leave their tribal lands in the Pacific Northwest for a reservation in Idaho. Though this mandate violated previous treaty agreements, the Army forced the Indians to flee. Led by Chief Jo...
Pauite leader Wovoka founded the Ghost Dance movement in the late 1880s as conditions for Native Americans became increasingly hopeless. Wovoka declared himself the messiah and spread the news that Indians were to prepare themselves for salvation th...
In 1831, the Cherokee Nation brought a case against the state of Georgia to the Supreme Court. They argued that as a separate foreign nation, certain Georgia laws overstepped their jurisdiction and wrongfully stripped Cherokees of their rights. The ...
As archaeologists quickly learned, there are numerous temples dedicated to Quetzalcoatl all across Mesoamerica. From the Aztec to the Maya, Quetzalcoatl - the Feathered Serpent - rears his beautiful head from magnificent relief carvings in temples ...
On December 29, 1890, the U.S. military entered the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation with the intention of disarming the natives. When met with resistance, the cavalry opened fire on the Lakota in a massacre that killed several hundred men, wome...
James McLaughlin worked as an Indian agent for most of his life. His most infamous act, however, was ordering the arrest of Sitting Bull for fear that his participation in the Ghost Dance movement would inspire Indian rebellion. “The newspaper...