True enough.
The various Indian "Nations" were NOT peaceful pastoral societies. They were brutal stone age tribes that wantonly attacked, savaged, and conquered each other continuously through the millennia.
Case in point: The Sioux Uprising of 1862, which liberals like to throw out as an example of government injustice, with Lincoln hanging 38 out of the some 300 sentenced to death for atrocities against white settlers in Minnesota. Just read about some of the awful things that those Sioux warriors did during their campaign to drive out the whites by slaughtering them wholesale:
https://www.famous-trials.com/dakotaconflict/1525-dak-accountTo understand the intense desire of Minnesotans for swift and terrible justice in the trials that followed the Conflict, one need only look at what happened in one settlement near the reservation on August 18. Fifteen to twenty Dakota, carrying knifes and hatchets, descended on the farmhouses of Milford, Minnesota. At each house, they gained entry to the house by going to the front door and asking for water. Once inside, the killing began. At one family homestead, they killed an entire family of six, including four children aged two to eight. The warriors disrobed the bodies of two of the girls; they decapitated one of them. The Milford attacks resulted in the deaths of 53 settlers, including twenty children. Not a single Dakota warrior died in the attacks.
Similar indiscriminate killing of whites occurred elsewhere during the first two days of the war. The Dakota wiped the village of Leavenworth off the map, killing everyone of its 23 residents. At eight different sites, Dakota killed 13 or more civilians. The majority of victims were women and children. In all, an estimated 250 whites died in the first three days of fighting. Killing whites, the Dakota decided, was as easy as killing sheep.
"Massacre" is a loaded word. Yet, by any measure, these killings by Dakota warriors were just that--massacres. Yet what these Dakota did do the white settlers of Minnesota was no different than what they had done in earlier conflicts with their hated enemies, the Ojibwes, who occupied the forested lands just to their north and east. When the Dakota went to war, they considered everyone on the other side fair game.
And then there were the Shawnees and Lenapes in the 18th century backcountry, who liked to bash out the brains of babies and torture and burn women... for example see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn%27s_Creek_massacre.
And then there were the Comanches, who took torture to whole new levels of barbarity...
https://www.forttours.com/pages/torture.aspEven worse fates could befall warriors brought back alive to Nermernuh encampments. Here, especially once the victim’s screams established that his medicine was broken, the work was left to the women. Most observers reported that the women were far more patient and vicious tormentors than the males. It may have been the exercise of vengeance against their lot in life, but at any rate, the females destroyed the captive by the most drawn-out and hideous means they could devise. They cut off his fingers and peeled his eyes; they stretched his tongue and charred his soles, and they invariably devoted fiendish attention to his penis and testicles. The torture went on for hours, even days, so long as the body survived.
I like Nelson Miles telling Sitting Bull to his face what they were:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN90wZRnyM0
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