The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

by Peter Cozzens

(In fact, the government’s response to what was commonly called the “Indian problem” was inconsistent, and although massacres occurred and treaties were broken, the federal government never contemplated genocide. That the Indian way of life must be eradicated if the Indian were to survive, however, was taken for granted.)

The Army and Navy Journal labeled the latest raids simply “one more chapter in the old volume,” the result of alternately feeding and fighting the tribes. “We go to them Janus-faced. One of our hands holds the rifle and the other the peace-pipe, and we blaze away with both instruments at the same time. The chief consequence is a great smoke—and there it ends.”

A perspicacious colonel offered an apt analogy: the army was the “stern but henpecked father”; the Indian Bureau, the “indulgent mother”; and the Indians the “recalcitrant children” who profited from the contention between their parents.

“No races of men,” General Pope reminded the reformers, “are in a condition to profit much by the lessons of kindness and charity taught by well-fed apostles whilst they themselves are suffering from want and hunger.”

“White man wants all. He will have it all, but the red man will die where his father died.”4