[Downthestretch55]

Lies

I'll start by saying that I don't like them. Lies are lies, no matter how they're dressed. Some can see through them, some can't. Sorry for them.
Raise your hand if you like being lied to.
I thought so...me neither.
In the early 1870's the Kwahadis were fighting a guerilla war against cavalry troops led by Ranalds Mackenzie, the tough young colonel who had lost a finger in the Civil War. The insurgents called him Three Fingers.
Mackenzie and his cavalry men chased their opposition across the Staked Plains of the Texas panhandle, yet found that they were as much the hunted as the hunters. Quanah, their leader would not relent. He, afterall was trying to safeguard his lands and the buffalo they depended on from the encroachment of usurpers. Mackenzie was never able to defeat them, though he came close to death when they put an arrow into him.
Mackenzie was on a mission and used any and all excuse to justify his actions.
There was one lie after another.
The Kwahadis were free and untamed on the Staked Plains for many years. They would not negotiate with a liar, a butcher that tried to paint them as butchers. Kill them... disrespect and denegrate.
Sadly, once the buffalo had been killed off in Kansas, the US Cavalry found an ally, the white buffalo hide hunters that came south to find their slaughter, taking the great beasts for their hides and leaving the meat to rot on the wasted carcasses in the sun.
Though the Medicine Lodge treaty had been agreed to, which forbade the white hunters from continuing their slaughter in the panhandle, the Army did nothing to stop them.
A new white leader came. his name was General Philip Sheridan. He said, "Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance."
The whitemen's thinking was to take away the source of food from those that were in need, they would submit and go to reservations.
In response, other tribes, the Comanches, the Kiowas, the Cheyennes, and the Arapahos didn't see it that way. The battle of Adobe Walls was the result. The battle was fierce. Quanah had his horse shot from beneath him. The result was three whites killed, tweny-seven Indians.
After the warriors left, the remaining whites chopped off the heads of the warriors and stuck them on posts in the corral.
There was no end for many years. The actions of the invaders only inflamed the resistance.
Despite starvation, tattered tipis, and the real threat of having their old people, their children and infants, their women, slaughtered, the warriors lead a chase for many years across the plains, relying on their scrawny ponies.
In 1875, Quanah surrendered. Though he had never lived in a house, eaten at a table, or slept in a bed, he finally found that on the day of June 2, 1875, at
Fort Sill, he and those he led could go no further.
For the next twenty years, he learned from the liars he hated, those that had broken their treaty with him. He became a wealthy rancher, a major stockholder in the railroad, a friend of two presidents and many congressmen.
In the early 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt established the first National Park, Yellowstone, to protect the few remaining buffalo.
Quanah remained critical of the whitemen's ways. He spoke against wasteful farming and ranching practices, the carnage that turned the grasslands to mesquite-scrub prairie. His words remain, "This was a pretty country you took away from us, but you see how dry it is now. It is only good for red ants, coyotes, and cattlemen."
Quanah died on Feb. 22, 1911.
The "dust bowl" raged for many years on his once sacred lands during the 1930's, the Great Depression.
Seems that the whitemen saw the wisdom in their lies while others see the truth that Quanah spoke.
RIP Great Warrior, Quanah. Truth can only be seen by those that wish to see. Lies are easily seen.