When I think about the West the first thing that comes to mind are the Westerns. Movies made about cowboys and Indians. When you watch one of those movies you get the idea in your head that Indians and Cowboys spent their days battling throughout the Great Plains of the West. This was totally proven wrong to me when I chose to bust the myth about cowboys and Indians. And I did just that, there was never any record of a single battle or even a brawl between Indians and Cowboys. I spent many days online and in the library trying to find at least some type of record about Indians and Cowboys, but truth be told there was none. When white settlers decided to move over to the West the Indians faced the US military not the heroic image of the cowboy that most people thought.
White settlers, immigrants and all types of people decided to move west for a better life. A lot of people thought they would find land and “strike†it rich in the west. Native Americans had been living in this land long before people decided to move here. Tribes like Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, Nez Perze and Cherokee lived in these lands [1]. Like anyone would do when someone comes to your land and invades your home, you’re going to get defensive and want to stay where you are. Well, to the US military the west, was their land and the Indians were supposed to go somewhere else. Indians were forced to reservations, even if they did not want to go. This caused many battles between Indians and the military, but no cowboys were involved in those battles. One of the most infamous battles was the battle of Little Big Horn. According to Colin Calloway “the battle of Little Big Horn stands as the classic Indian-White conflict†[1]. This was between the Sioux and Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry.
After that battle, a man by the name of William Fred Cody aka “Buffalo Bill†created the first ever Wild West Show. In 1883 people came out to see Buffalo Bill’s first show. Graham Larson explains that, “the shows staged huge battles between cowboys and Indians and these were loved by people all over the world†[4]. You could say that Buffalo Bill created the Westerns that we still watch today. Buffalo Bill was not even a real cowboy but portrayed as one, just like the shows that he created. It seemed that he created these Western skits because people were so angry at the Indians for battling with the US, that it would really bring in people to watch the show. These shows were only created to entertain people, but they were not based on any hard factual truths. These movies portrayed Native Americans as villains and vicious people that the cowboys had to kill.
Once the Indians accepted that they had to live on the reservations they were more concerned with staying true to their culture and spirituality rather than getting their land back. As Peter Iverson explains, “for Luther Standing Bear and for others the challenge of the twentieth century was that of maintaining a sense of themselves as Indians†[2]. The Indians were the ones who lost out by having to change their lives and move to a small reservation, where land was limited and boundaries were set.
Overall, I feel like Indians were and still are seen as “bad†and uncivilized people. This is entirely untrue. They were human beings trying to live on the land that white settlers so badly wanted. This led to many battles between the US and the Native American Indians, and over the decades the popular culture portrayed by these battles, were changed and warped into Cowboy and Indian battles for pure entertainment. Even now, the movies often show battles between the two, but in reality these battles never existed.
Author: Melinda Fleming
Bibliography:
Primary:
[1] Calloway, Colin. Our Hearts Fell to the Ground. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1996.
Secondary:
[2] Iverson, Peter. “Cowboys, Indians and the Modern West “. Arizona and the West.
Journal of the Southwest, 1986.
[3] “Battles & Massacres of the Indian Wars“. Legends of America. 10/6/09
[4] Larson, Graham. “The Wild West “. 10/3/09
