The whites placed avaricious and incompetent officials over them, forced them onto reservations, and allowed corrupt traders to exploit them mercilessly. Because the settlers followed the policy usual across the continent of lying to the Indians, breaking treaties, pushing them out of the best land, killing off the buffalo on which they depended and sometimes massacring whole villages. Why did the natives erupt in Minnesota and on the plains? Easy. Captured by the Indians, by Herman Lehmann consisting of fifteen accounts by captives, provides many examples. The Iroquois were famous for gruesome technique, being artists of the genre. Torture as amusement was not restricted to a few tribes. American soldiers took seriously the admonition, “Save your last bullet for yourself.” Gunga Din all over again. They took prisoners for the specific purpose, making village celebrations of the procedure. Why the grotesque torture? Because the Indians enjoyed it.
For example, a cavalry unit found a man who had been staked to the ground, disemboweled, and later burned to death. If the events in these books are judged inadequate, Scalp Dance: Indian Warfare on the High Plains, by Thomas Goodrich, provides accounts of similar grotesque torture by Western Indians. These spiritual beings were of the Stone Age by literal definition and were most assuredly savages by any definition. Both comport closely with many accounts I have read by men (usually) captured or even raised by Indian tribes. Both are by historians, not by lying heartless racist conservative Trump-loving just-like-Hitler and so on. If you think I am inventing, or exaggerating, read either of the books mentioned above. The descriptions are from original accounts by those who were there. These things actually happened, over and over, not as isolated incidents. Whole families tomahawked in their cabins, girls taken prisoner for later amusement. Children shot, quickly if they were lucky, otherwise left to die in agony. Tidbits: Children deliberately burned alive in flaming cabins. Teenage girls were staked to the ground, raped by a dozen or two of braves, then hacked to death. In one act of contemplation, they nailed children to a door and slowly vivisected them to death in front of their parents, who themselves were then tortured to death. War parties went from farm to farm, killing men, women, and children. It was not a rebellion against Federal troops of men, but butchery of families, usually defenseless. These recount the deaths of some 800 settlers, almost entirely civilians, at the hands of the noble, contemplative Sioux. I recommend to those imbrued with this dreamy understanding of Native Americans a couple of books, Over the Earth I Come, by Duane Schultz, a history of the entirety of the Sioux uprising in Minnesota of 1862, and Dakota Dawn, by Gregory Michno, of the first week.
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