My original point is that the situation is always complex, and regardless of who history decides are “the bad guys”, the bad guys themselves never seem to see themselves as bad. They can always justify what they are doing on the most noble and selfless grounds, whether it is ridding Germany of the Jews, ridding Russia of the counterrevolutionaries, ridding the country of bloodthirsty savages who don’t know how to properly use the land, or ridding our Holy Land of Palestinians (or Zionists) or ridding the nation of the statists and socialists who want to take away our freedom.

And you’re the one who brought up “black and white,” remember?

We wanted to expand into Indian Territory. We wanted their land for our puposes.

The Indians resisted.

We could not defeat them militarily, so we went after their food and and raw material supply, the buffalo.

At first we just killed the bison indiscriminately, then we developed an industry that got wealthy off the hides, leaving the rest of the carcass to rot. This way we dind’t have to pay professional hunters like Cody to kill the beasts, we let the hide trade itself develop and finance a market and an industry to do the job for us, while workers took the risks, both financial and physical. The Indians, after all, knew exactly what we were doing to them and they resisted.

Of course, I suppose you just see it as “market forces at work”. I concede we did not set up a committee of evil capitalists to mastermind this scheme, but it worked out excatly the same as if we had. A culture was exterminated–the definition of genocide, because we wanted their land for our farms and our railroads, and our hunger for minerals.

Or are you trying to imply that the Indians’ management of the range to maximize buffalo production in the pre-horse era justifies our activities because we were just a more efficient way of harvesting the resource.

Here’s an article on the subject, which is a bit more complex than you imply.

Mountain of buffalo skulls and hunters, mid-19th century.

Of course, if you were one of the hunters, the redskin savages were the bad guys, because they wanted to stop you from earning an honest buck.

Tom, your world is so simple, so straightforward, so cut and dry, so black and white. So American.

It’s usually number one on the list of what bad guys want to acquire.

This has been true for thousands of years, which is why disarming the good guys never actually results in violence ending.