If any Americans had been there, they would have suffered just the same.
Teddy Roosevelt
The Public Record
Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. A member of the Republican Party, he was born on October 27, 1858, in New York. Roosevelt was a prominent leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for domestic policies that included trust-busting, regulation of corporations, and conservation of natural resources. His administration is noted for significant reforms and the establishment of national parks and forests.
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He explained the necessity of their expedition, and remarked that if any innocent people, whether Frenchmen or Indians, had suffered in the attack, they had to blame themselves; they were in evil company, and the assailants could not tell…
No large war band attacked the settlements; but no hunter, surveyor, or traveller, no wood-chopper or farmer, no woman alone in the cabin with her children, could ever feel safe from attack.
The bane of the frontier military organization was the helplessness of the elected commanders, their dependence on their followers, and the inability of the decent men to punish the atrocious misdeeds of their associates.
But that instant another leaped into the doorway, and firing, killed the white man who had been struggling with his companion; but the woman instantly turned on him, as he stood with his smoking gun, and ripped open his body with a stroke…
Bozarth to hand him a knife; but instead she snatched up an axe and killed the savage on the spot.
More than once, when a cabin was attacked in the absence or after the death of the men, some brawny frontierswoman, accustomed to danger and violent physical exertion, and favored by peculiar circumstances, herself beat off the assailants.
It is less of a paradox than it seems, to say that one reason why the Indians were so formidable in warfare was because they were so few in numbers.
What one fierce partisan leader had done might dwindle or might grow in the telling or might finally be ascribed to some other; or else the same feat was twisted into such varying shapes that it became impossible to recognize which was…
Their deeds were not put into books while the men themselves lived; they were handed down by tradition, and grew dim and vague in the recital.
The real war, the war in which by far the greatest loss was suffered by both sides, was that thus waged man against man.
The Americans succeeded, the British failed; for the British fought against the stars in their courses, while the Americans battled on behalf of the destiny of the race.
It is impossible to dwell without a shudder on the monstrous woe and misery of such a contest.
When the clash comes between these men and their sombre foes, too often there follow deeds of enormous, of incredible, of indescribable horror.
A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality.
It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity.
All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost.
Yet the very causes which render this struggle between savagery and the rough front rank of civilization so vast and elemental in its consequence to the future of the world, also tend to render it in certain ways peculiarly revolting and…
American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,--in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.
The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.
The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman.
Nevertheless, it is the men actually on the borders of the longed-for ground, the men actually in contact with the savages, who in the end shape their own destinies.
All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious…
It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations.
It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind.
Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt
