By the way, Troll, the waves of migration and the taking over of other tribe's grazing and hunting lands indeed happened with great regularity. The thing we forget is that human history is the history of conquest and subjugation -- not all of it, but much of it. I keep thinking maybe we'll learn something from all this past horror and maltreatment of each other, but ... apparently not, if the Middle East is any indicator.

However, and I think this is an important thing to keep in mind, the westward push of the Cheyenne and Lakota was greatly exacerbated -- some say caused -- by the competition of the French and British fur companies who armed the Indian tribes and had an enormous financial stake in them making war on each other.

And also just the presence of guns among tribes caused great inequities between them that had and them that didn't. The ones who didn't kept being pushed farther and farther out of their traditional lands until one day they got their own guns and horses and started fighting back -- and then they became more ferocious than their fiercest foes. The "Fighting Cheyenne" were, until the mid-1800s, a pretty peaceable tribe. And even into the late 1800s, they tried every which way to accommodate and make peace with this savage hoarde of white settlers -- rude, noisy, no manners whatsoever -- who kept encroaching on their land and their lives.

AND ... if you want to talk about courage, compare the honor system among the Plains Indians to that of the British, Canadian and U.S. soldiers they fought against. In Plains society, killing a foe earned some points, but if you really wanted to score, you got close enough to touch 'em, then just touched your coup stick to them and rode away. The highest honors went, not to the one who had slaughtered the most enemy (the white way), but to the one who had the chutzpah to get close enough to be killed by the enemy, then went "Nyah, nyah," and rode away.

ww