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Not to any specific poster in general.

The slaughter of innocents on the Frontier was nothing new. TWO THOUSAND dead on just the Pennsylvania Frontier in the F&I war, extimates of SEVEN THOUSAND dead along the whole Frontier during the Rev War, and EIGHT HUNDRED in less than a month during the Santee Sioux Uprising of 1862.

All huge numbers relative to the population at the time.

I have heard the number fifteen hundred during the settlement of Texas. Comanches were the usual suspects post 1840 at least, but really, in any given area the list of possible Indian suspects could be a long one.

Native deaths gthroughout our Frontier history unknown as many would be random shootings, a few notable bloodlettings, but on the whole the Natives were fewer in number and harder to surprise.

But throughout the whole Frontier period to the very end more Indians were falling at the hands of other Indians than were getting shot by White folks.

But overwhelming all Native death totals.... disease.

To name but one disease... imagine if illegal immigrants to our own country were bringing in smallpox. Further imagine that we ourselves had little resistance and no cure. So that everywhere these illegals showed up sooner of later massive smallpox epidemics erupted, carrying off your wife, children, parents, everyone in a most horrible and excrutiating manner.

Imagine if this happened not once, but several times over the course of your family history and that said illegals were moving in everywhere, shooting at you on sight and throwing you completely off your prior home.

Imagine the motivation you would have to fear and despise those people, and to kill them at every opportunity.

OTOH, for a settlers, expert killers suddenly descend out of nowhere and kill and/or torture to death your whole family, absconding with your children and systematically gang-raping (in some places) and enslaving your wife and daughters. All without any provocation on your part.

A lifetime of devastating grief and loss arriving out of the blue, erupting in a single morning.

Its no wonder hate existed in abundance on both sides, the greater wonder is EVERYBODY wasn't consumed by hatred, all the time. But everybody wasn't.

And an interesting observation:

Among Texans the dialogue invariably runs to examples of settler's families being slaughtered, and in their popular history a highly omissive and slanted view of history, assigning to irrelevance or ignoring entirely much I have posted here.

OTOH, current PC correctness runs to the opposite extreme.

But point of interest, school business just brung me up to OK City overnight, and coming back I detoured through Shawnee, Tecumseh and Tishomingo, all not far east of I35.

Bear in mind Oklahoma is mainstream Americana, the Heartland, Flyover Country.

Yet my return trip took me literally through "The Indian Nations" as it was called: Absentee Shawnee, Sauk and Fox, Citizen Potawatomi, and Chickasaw in this particular instance.

Understand that people who claim Native on the census only comprise about 15% of the population in these areas, and most of even the Indians have only a fraction of Indian blood. Most everybody LOOKS White.

How surreal would it be to see THESE things in Texas, as part of the mainstrean culture (ya I know about the Alabama Cousattas and the Tiguas, but they are both tiny).

The Citizen Potawatomi Center, Tecumseh, OK, and the big golf course out front.










...and an anti-smoking billboard from the Absentee Shawnee Tribe, just east of Norman OK...



Be aware these areas ain't populated with retrograde PC Hippies, but rather mainstream rural Christian Protestant Redneck America.

What IS interesting is that their popular common dialogue about their history is quite different than what prevails in Texas.

In Texas History all these different people, if mentioned at all are pretty much relegated to "ya, we kicked 'em out in such and such a year" without much elaboration.

Seemed like a vindication of sorts for them to see them so prominent in the settlement, organization, culture and history of that whole 'nother state just across the narrow, sandy Red River.

YMMV,
Birdwatcher