Murdered People

"It is a mistake to suppose that Sitting Bull, or any other Indian warrior, was of a murderous disposition. It is true that savage warfare had grown more and more harsh and cruel since the coming of white traders among them, bringing guns, knives, and whisky... It was the degree of risk which brought honor, rather than the number slain, and a brave must mourn thirty days, with blackened face and loosened hair, for the enemy whose life he had taken. While the spoils of war were allowed, this did not extend to territorial aggrandizement, nor was there any wish to overthrow another nation and enslave its people. It was a point of honor in the old days to treat a captive with kindness. The common impression that the Indian is naturally cruel and revengeful is entirely opposed to his philosophy and training..."

"...It was said of him in a joking way that his legs were bowed like the ribs of the ponies that he rode constantly from childhood... It is told that after a buffalo hunt the boys were enjoying a mimic hunt with the calves that had been left behind. A large calf turned viciously on Sitting Bull, whose pony had thrown him, but the alert youth got hold of both ears and struggled until the calf was pushed back into a buffalo wallow in a sitting posture. The boys shouted: "He has subdued the buffalo calf! He made it sit down!" And from this incident was derived his familiar name of Sitting Bull."

"It is not easy to characterize Sitting Bull, of all Sioux chiefs most generally known to the American people... The man was an enigma at best. He was not impulsive, nor was he phlegmatic. He was most serious when he seemed to be jocose. He was gifted with the power of sarcasm, and few have used it more artfully than he."

"Sitting Bull gave most of the money away to the band of ragged, hungry boys who seemed to surround him wherever he went. He once told Annie Oakley, another one of the 's stars, that he could not understand how white men could be so unmindful of their own poor. "The white man knows how to make everything," he said, "but he does not know how to distribute it.""

"They [Sitting Bull's people] would not have anything of the white man except his hatchet, gun, and knife. They utterly refused to cede their lands; and as for the rest, they were willing to let him alone as long as he did not interfere with their life and customs, which was not long..."

"For 64 years you have kept me and my people and treated us bad. What have we done that you should want us to stop? We have done nothing. It is all the people on your side that have started us to do all these depredations. We could not go anywhere else, and so we took refuge in this country. It was on this side of the country we learned to shoot, and that is the reason why I came back to it again. I would like to know why you came here. In the first place, I did not give you the country, but you followed me from one place to another, so I had to leave and come over to this country. I was born and raised in this country with the Red River Half-Breeds, and I intend to stop with them. I was raised hand in hand with the Red River Half Breeds, and we are going over to that part of the country, and that; is the reason why I have come over here. That is the way I was raised, in the hands of these people here, and that is the way I intend to be with them. You have got ears, and you have got eyes to see with them, and you see how I live with these people. You see me? Here I am! If you think I am a fool you are a bigger fool than I am. This house is a medicine-house. Yon come here to tell us lies, but we don't want to hear them. I don't wish any such language used to me; that is, to tell me such lies in my great Mother's house. Don't you say two more words. Go back home where you came from. This country is mine, and I intend to stay here, and to raise this country full of grown people. See these people here. We were raised with them."

"Because I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary, that eagles should be crows."

"I am here by the will of the Great Spirit, and by his will I am chief.… I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit has chosen anyone to be the chief of this country, it is myself."

"I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak."

"This is a good day to die. Follow me!"

"Sitting Bull joined in the attack on Fort Phil Kearny and in the subsequent hostilities; but he accepted in good faith the treaty of 1868, and soon after it was signed he visited Washington... [He] hoped [for] close adherence to the terms of this treaty to preserve the Big Horn and Black Hills country for a permanent hunting ground. When gold was discovered and the irrepressible gold seekers made their historic dash across the plains into this forbidden paradise, then his faith in the white man's honor was gone forever."

"After the Ghost Dance spread across the Rockies to the Plains tribes it ran amok. ...The fervor attacked the Plains tribes virulently, particularly the Sioux, who were at that time the largest and the most intransigent of them all. The Sioux had been forced to submit to a series of land grabs and to indignities that are almost unbelievable when read about today. ...they were being systematically starved into submission—by the White Bureaucracy—on the little that was left of their reservation in South Dakota. ...From Rosebud, the Ghost Dance spread like prairie fire to the Pine Ridge Sioux and finally to Sitting Bull's people at Standing Rock. The Sioux rebelled; the result was the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre of the Indians (despite their ghost shirts) at Wounded Knee in 1890."

"I am nothing, neither a chief nor a soldier."

"Look at me, see if I am poor, or my people either. The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee."

"I have killed, robbed, and injured too many white men to believe in a good peace. They are medicine, and I would eventually die a lingering death. I had rather die on the field of battle."

"I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men's blood that I have shed. The whites provoked the war; their injustices, their indignities to our families, the cruel, unheard of and wholly unprovoked massacre at Fort Lyon … shook all the veins which bind and support me. I rose, tomahawk in hand, and I have done all the hurt to the whites that I could."

"You come here to tell us lies, but we don't want to hear them. If we told you more, you would have paid no attention. That is all I have to say."

"The love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes of the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege."

"When Sitting Bull was a boy, there was no thought of trouble with the whites. He was acquainted with many of the early traders...and liked them, as did most of his people in those days. All the early records show this friendly attitude of the Sioux, and the great fur companies for a century and a half depended upon them for the bulk of their trade. It was not until the middle of the last century..."

"[His] history has been written many times by newspaper men and army officers, but I find no account of him which is entirely correct. I met him personally in 1884, and since his death I have gone thoroughly into the details of his life with his relatives and contemporaries..."

"(Q: Did people in your family tell stories about their own lives?) Some of the stories had to do with animals. My father told about black ghost dogs, espantos, and Mamágrande Ramona told rabid coyote stories and stories of Pancho Villa coming across the border and raiding the pueblos."

"Many Mexicans today remember Villa with pride for the part he played in the revolution, and for standing up to the American superpower. Yet, this is to ignore the reality that Villa was a homicidal warlord for whom the revolution served as a convenient excuse to justify his crimes. At his death, Villa was reputed to have said, ‘Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something’"

"Dubbed El Centauro del Norte (‘The Centaur of the North’), Pancho Villa has acquired a quasi-romantic reputation as a Mexican folkhero that masks his true legacy. Villa's intelligence, charisma and military effectiveness made him a major player in the revolutionary politics of his day, but his violence, ambition and cold-blooded brutality mark him out as the archetype of the South American caudillo."

"In 1913 John Reed, a young Harvard graduate already making a name for himself as a radical muck-raking journalist, spent four months with the rebel Mexican leader Pancho Villa. Reed happened to show him a pamphlet with the latest rules of war which had been agreed at the Hague Conference of 1907. Villa, reported Reed, spent hours going over it: ‘It interested and amused him hugely.’ Villa wanted to know more about the conference and whether there had been a Mexican representative there. Above all he found the whole endeavour absurd: ‘“It seems to me a funny thing to make rules about war. It is not a game. What is the difference between civilised war and any other kind of war?”’ Villa had put his finger on one of the several paradoxes that confront us when we think about war. How can we talk at all about controlling and managing something where violence is the tool and the domination, if not the total destruction of the enemy, the goal?"

"Also in the north were tough, mounted guerrilla fighters—bandits who took up the cause of the revolution, in some cases as paid mercenaries. The most brilliant of these was Pancho Villa. Villa was the only revolutionary leader to get good American press. Even Madero was criticized bitterly for suggesting a minuscule tax on the Mexican oil that was controlled and imported to the United States by American oil companies. But Pancho Villa had little of the "anti-Americanism" of which Washington suspected all the others. He did personally rape hundreds of women and murder according to whim, and he was a racist who killed Chinese people whenever he found them working in mining camps. His lieutenants were even more murderous and sadistic, devising hideous tortures. But General Villa was not anti-American. Ten thousand men rode with Villa, mostly in the northern state of Chihuahua. They robbed and raided, did as they wanted, and once won a spectacular military victory for the revolution at Zacatecas."

"Hated by thousands and loved by millions."

"Tengo el deber de informarle que Pancho Villa se encuentra en todas partes y en ninguna a la vez."

"The brutality and uncouthness of many of the revolutionary leaders has not prevented them from becoming popular myths. Villa still gallops through the north, in songs and ballads; Zapata dies at every popular fair. … It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death."

"I am not an educated man. I never had an opportunity to learn anything except how to fight.."

"Companions of arms and lords. Do not believe that the one who is going to speak to them is a philosopher, I am a man of people, but you will understand that these men when they speak, speak with the heart."

"I, Pancho Villa, was a loyal man that destiny brought the world to fight for the good of the poor and that I will never betray nor forget my duty.""

"The country must be governed by someone who really loves his people and his land, who shares wealth and progress. I have all that, only that I am ignorant. ""

"Men will not forget that Pancho Villa was loyal to the cause of the people."

"Cornstalk was often seen with his warriors. Brave without being rash, he avoided exposure without shrinking; cautious without timidity in the hottest of the battle, he escaped without a wound. As one of the warriors near him showed some signs of timidity, the enraged chief, — with one blow of his tomahawk, cleft his skull. In one of the assaults, Colonel Fields, performing his duty bravely, was shot dead. … The faltering of the ranks encouraged the savages. "Be strong! Be strong!" echoed through the woods over the savage lines in the tones of Cornstalk; and as Captain after Captain, and files of men after files of men, fell, the yells of the Indians were more terrific and their assaults more furious."

"All savages seem to us alike as the trees of the distant forest. Here and there one unites in his own person, all the excellencies, and becomes the favourable representative of the whole, the image of savage greatness, the one grand character in which all others are lost to history or observation. Cornstalk possessed all the elements of savage greatness, oratory, statesmanship and heroism, with beauty of person and strength of frame. In appearance he was majestic, in manners easy and winning. Of his oratory, Colonel Benjamin Wilson, Senr., an officer in Dunmore's army, in 1774, having heard the grand speech to Dunmore in Camp Charlotte, says — "I have heard the first orators in Virginia, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, but never have I heard one whose powers of delivery surpassed those of Cornstalk on that occasion." Of his statesmanship and bravery there is ample evidence both in the fact that he was chosen head of the Confederacy, and in the manner he conducted the war of 1774, and particularly by his directions of the battle at Point Pleasant."

"There was a time when the name of Cornstalk thrilled every heart in West Virginia. Here and there among the mountains may be found an aged one, who remembers the terrors of Indian warfare as they raged on the rivers, and in the retired glens, west of the Blue Ridge, under that noted savage. Cornstalk was to the Indians of West Virginia, what Powhatan was to the tribes on the Sea Coast, the greatest and the last chief."

"My son, the Great Spirit has seen fit that we should die together; and has sent you here. It is his will. Let us submit. It is best..."

"When I was a young man and went to war, I thought that might be the last time, and I would return no more. Now I am here among you; you may kill me if you please; I can die but once; and it is all one to me, now or another time."

"What shall we do now? the big knife is coming on us and we shall all be killed. Now we must fight or we are done. Then let us kill all our women and children and go fight until we die? I shall go and make peace!"

"Pretend to be friendly. Eat with them. Laugh with them. When they are sated and trust you, attack them, kill all their men and kidnap their women and children!"

"Upon reaching a place of safety, the Indians held a council. They had been defeated in their long expected great battle. The "long knives" were pressing on. Cornstalk enquired, what should be done. No one spoke. After a solemn pause, Cornstalk arose. "We must fight, or we are undone. Let us kill our women and children, and go and fight till we die." He sat down. After a long pause, he rose again and striking his tomahawk into the council post, said — "Then I'll go and make peace.""

"When Cornstalk arose, he was in no wise confused or daunted, but spoke in a distinct and audible voice, without stammering, or repetition, and with peculiar emphasis. His looks while addressing Dunmore were truly grand, yet graceful and attractive."

"Then, after the storms of battle, were heard the calm words of peace spoken by the conquering nation, saying to the foe that lay prostrate at its feet: "This is our only revenge — that you join us in lifting into the serene firmament of the Constitution, to shine like stars for ever and ever, the immortal principles of truth and justice: that all men, white or black, shall be free, and shall stand equal before the law.""

"Twenty-five years ago this Republic was bearing and wearing a triple chain of bondage. Long familiarity with traffic in the bodies and souls of men had paralyzed the consciences of a majority of our people; the narrowing and disintegrating doctrine of State sovereignty had shackled and weakened the noblest and most beneficent powers of the national government; and the grasping power of slavery was seizing upon the virgin territories of the West, and dragging them into the den of eternal bondage. At that crisis the Republican party was born. It drew its first inspiration from that fire of liberty which God has lighted in every human heart, and which all the powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish. The Republican party came to deliver and to save."

"Not in Chicago, in the heat of June, but at the ballot-boxes of the Republic, in the quiet of November, after the silence of deliberate judgment, will this question be settled. And now, gentlemen of the Convention, what do we want?"

"Gentlemen of the Convention, your present temper may not mark the healthful pulse of our people. When your enthusiasm has passed, when the emotions of this hour have subsided, we shall find below the storm and passion that calm level of public opinion from which the thoughts of a mighty people are to be measured, and by which final action will be determined."

"Nothing touches my heart more quickly than a tribute of honor to a great and noble character; but as I sat in my seat and witnessed this demonstration, this assemblage seemed to me a human ocean in tempest. I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured. When the storm has passed and the hour of calm settles on the ocean, when the sunlight bathes its peaceful surface, then the astronomer and surveyor take the level from which they measure all terrestrial heights and depths."

"[To his chief of staff, David G. Swaim] Oh Swaim, there is a pain here. Swaim, can't you stop this? Oh, oh, Swaim!"

"Garfield: "Old boy! Do you think my name will have a place in human history?" Rockwell: "Yes, a grand one, but a grander one in human hearts. Old fellow, you mustn’t talk in that way. You have a great work yet to perform." Garfield: "No. My work is done.""

"Strangulatus pro republica."