American Indian Wars :: essays research papers

American Indian Wars There is perhaps a ecstasydency to view the get down of the military in terms of conflict, that may be why the U.S. regular armys operational experience in the quarter century adjacent the polite War became known as the Indian wars. Previous efforts with the Indian, go out back to colonial times, had been limited. There was a period where the Indian could lose or be pushed into vast reaches of uninhabited and as yet discarded territory in the west. By 1865 the safety valve was fast disappearing. As the Civil War was closed, white Americans in wideer numbers and with greater efficacy than before resumed the quest for land, gold, commerce, and adventure that had been largely interrupted by the war. The beleaguer red man, with white civilization pressing in and a main(prenominal) source of livelihood, the buffalo, threatened with extinction, was faced with a fundamental choice repudiate or fight. Many chose to fight, and over the next 25 years the str uggle ranged over the plains, mountains, and the deserts of the American West. These guerrilla wars were characterized by skirmishes, pursuits, raids, massacres, expeditions, battles, and campaigns of varying size and intensity.In 1865, there was a least 15 million buffalo, ten years later, fewer than a thousand remained. The army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs went along with and purge encouraged the slaughter of the animals. By destroying the buffalo herds, the whites were destroying the Indians main source of food and supplies. The only occasion the Indians could do was fight to preserve their way of life. There was constant battle among the Indian and whites as the Indians fought to keep their civilization. Indian often retaliated against the whites for earlier attacks that whites had impose on them. They often attacked wagon trains, stage coaches, and isolated ranches. When the army became to a greater extent involved in the fighting, the Indians started to focus on the white soldiers. In 1862, when the sexual union and south were locked in Civil War, Minnesota felt the fury of an even more fundamental internal conflict. The Santees, an eastern branch of the Sioux Nation, having endured ten years of traumatic change on the upper Minnesota River, launched the first great attack in the Indian wars. Eleven years earlier the folk had sold 24 million acres of hunting ground for a lump sum of $1,665,000 and the promise of future cash annuities.