Paying the Price for "Civilization"

General Philip Sheridan (left) is credited with the statement "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

Magazine making a statement about the slaughter of buffaloes: Caption for a cartoon (left, click for larger view) in an 1874 issue of Harper's Weekly has a buffalo saying to a hunter, "Don't shoot, my good fellow! Here, take my 'robe,' save your ammunition, and let me go in peace." Buffalo "robes" were a very popular fashion in those days. At right, Howard Terpning's painting "The Last Buffalo" depicts Native Americans gutting their vanishing food source.

Riding my high horse of historical injustice: Native Americans depended on the buffalo for food, clothing and shelter. So what should be done to advance "civilization"? Kill the buffaloes was thought to be a key. Came across the following on a website:

General Sheridan became leader of military actions against the native Comanches and Kiowa. He spearheaded efforts to exterminate the buffalo, which he knew the native American tribes depended on for survival.In 1875, a bill came before the Texas legislature that would have protected the buffalo, but Sheridan made an impassioned, racist speech against the plan:

"(Buffalo hunters) are destroying the Indians' commissary, and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered in speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of advanced civilization."

The joint assembly was so moved that they killed the bill. Millions of buffalo were slaughtered and left to rot on the prairies, and the Kiowa and Comanches and other tribes suffered and starved to death and were led off to the reservations.

Later in his career, Sheridan seems to have had some inkling of what he had done to the native American tribes: "We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?"