First, I will comment that John Wayne’s basic character–that of a gruff asshole–would have likely been pretty common back then. A great many of the men of our nation had fought in both World War 2 and Korea, and done and seen things that traumatized them. This sort of thing makes you mean and impatient, if you don’t process it, and that idea in the main did not even exist back then. You dealt with it, by drinking, and by spending time with men who understood you, and by deflecting in various ways.
Secondly, it is often forgotten how long and how often women have been used as de facto sexual slave. The village or town or outpost or city is assaulted, the men killed, and the women carried away. This was in my view one of the main appeals of Islam in the early days. You were allowed four wives and unlimited concubines, who in most cases were sex slaves.
I will in fact wonder aloud of the slang “booty” is not in some way related to the older use of the term.
Third, I don’t know if such a list exists, but it would be interesting to see a compilation of the crimes committed by American Indians against white people, Hispanics, and other Indian tribes. “Comanche”, I read, is the name given to that group by another tribe, and which means, in the language of that other tribe, “enemy”.
I remember reading that Andrew Jackson, when he was young, dealt with a number of Indian atrocities in Tennessee. Some tribes–not all, but some–really did do the sorts of things portrayed in The Searchers. Rape and murder, plunder and pillage, arson. Men, women and children were slaughtered, occasionally in large numbers.
We read about what we did to them, but rarely about what they did to us, and the psychological background of, to take the obvious example, of what Jackson did in the Trail of Tears.
Now obviously we were the invaders, and in most cases they were, as they saw it, protecting their homelands. But it is equally true that in most cases these tribes were actively hostile to one another, and fought regular skirmishes and not infrequently what amounted to wars. We became in some respects the Alpha tribe, against whom no one could stand for long. If you want to call us the Christian Borg, I won’t argue with you, although I’m not sure that in some respects we did not bring a higher level of respect for human life, and formal justice. Certainly, it was not common practice to capture and trade women and children, even if of course we did engage in slavery up until 1865, and perhaps a bit longer in some places.
That would make for an interesting debate, if posturing and moralizing and haughtiness could be avoided on both sides. I’m always interested in understanding my world and my history better.
Now, I think a lot of human knowledge was lost with the loss of these cultures. But I think it is also always wise to paint complete pictures. These were not complete savages, but neither were they innocent. They committed very real atrocities. Sacajaweya was the young wife of an old trapper, who had bought her from a tribe who had captured her in a raid on another tribe, in which, presumably, at least some of her family was killed. These sorts of things need to be known.
And finally–until my next idea–I wanted to note how unobjectionable it was back then that Wayne served for the Confederacy. As a kid in the 70’s I remember stands selling both Confederate and Union caps. It was unobjectionable.
And to me–and I think to most of the people who fly the Rebel Flag (I’m not one of them, of course)–what that flag represents is FUCK YOU. No matter what you are telling me to do, I’m not doing it. Go to hell. Come and take it.
Leaving aside the elephant in the room of slavery, the South, in seceding, was in my view very certainly more in keeping with the spirit of the original American Revolution than the Union, which caused the deaths of 650,000 soldiers–and an unknowable number of civilians–to protect a nation whose founding document most likely allowed secession.
As I have noted several times by now, no doubt, Jefferson Davis was arrested for treason following Appomattox, but was never tried. He was held a year or two, then released without charges. The main reason he was never tried is that there was a valid fear that the Supreme Court would validate the asserted right of secession, making the whole Civil War the illegal and tyrannical incursion Southerners always insisted it was.
I will stipulate as a general rule that when you think any side is always right you are missing something. Most people and most peoples have both good and bad in them NO MATTER HOW YOU DEFINE THESE TERMS. Indians were certainly brave. I assume that is why they were called Braves. As in Atlanta Braves.
And Indians lived in harmony with nature. They also tended to be, en masse, rapists, killers and slavers, to a much greater extent than that tolerated by at least most American Christians.
And Christianity, ironically, was both the main source of objection to slavery, and one of the main means, in the South, used to justify it. When you are dealing in abstract principles, a talented sophist can make them say anything he wants. You start with the outcome you want–which is emotionally conditioned, and emanating from a somatic state–and work backwards.
Actually, I will add one more thing: most of the Indians in that movie were Navajo, if memory serves. Back in the 1930’s, when I think John Ford first went to Monument Valley, he had been coaxed there by a local who told him it was a great site to make movies. The locals, mostly Indians, were suffering a lot in the Great Depression. Ford started making movies there and injecting a lot of money into the economy. So those extras were getting paid well for playing what, for most of the movie (to his credit he did have a friendly tribe in there, and did mention passing through many other tribes, making Scar a sort of bandit even in the Indian world) were the “bad guys.”
I wonder how they felt about that. No doubt they liked the money, but felt some regret and nostalgia about their own submission and conquering. But I wonder if they thought: well those were COMANCHES, they were nothing like us. No connection at all.
One of my vivid recollections from Stephen Ambroses “Undaunted Courage” is how DIFFERENT all the tribes were as Lewis and Clark moved west. If they went just twenty miles, they would see radically different cultures. One tribe might be criminal and dishonest drunks, and the next tribe highly dignified, and telling them not to trust those people down the path.
As I will keep commenting, one of the obvious, large fallacies committed by the Left in thinking of groups as homogeneous is that they think that “blacks” are a bloc. “The Vietnamese” are a bloc.
Thus, in protecting black criminals, they are protecting “blacks”, when in reality those criminals prey most on other blacks, and thus they make black life in general WORSE, not better, and never realize it since they don’t live in those neighborhood, or interact with any blacks who are not also trying to profit from the gravy train politically. They don’t interact, in effect, with the end users of their policies, with the end of the line, with the final and true effects.
Likewise in Vietnam, to hear the lunatic left talk, you would think we were just shooting “the yellow man” everywhere we saw him. This is as laughable as it was ubiquitous among the idiot students. We were ALLIED with one group of Vietnamese, to prevent ANOTHER group of Vietnamese from conquering and enslaving them. We allied with one tribe against another tribe. And we fought well, bravely, and effectively, and all the sacrifices and successes of our soldiers were rendered null and void by sanctimonious and corrupt or brainwashed Democrats, who claimed the war was somehow “racist”. Lunacy. Pure fucking lunacy.