The Plain Truth is so Happy That You Have Been Enjoying Bob’s Broadcasts.
2000 years ago, a newscaster that we know of as Jesus Christ warned us about false Christianity. The warning was not against the devil but against false Christianity…about people who come in His name and deceive many.
For most of my life, I was sold a kinder, gentler version of Native American history. Noble chiefs, peaceful tribes living in harmony with nature until greedy Europeans came along and wrecked it all with destruction and death. That’s what they teach us in schools. And that’s what Hollywood tells us. It even makes us feel good just for feeling bad about it. At a surface level, it makes a whole lot of sense. Indians once ruled North America. They were here first, and now they’re largely gone, confined to reservations with deep and persistent problems. They’re not a visible part of the United States, and to many people, that alone feels like genocide.
But as I dug into the history of North American warfare, that neat good-guys-versus-bad-guys story fell apart. Scalping, torture, and the destruction of Indian villages were common in North America long before the first white people ever showed up. It was a violent world. That doesn’t make European settlers the good guys. The frontier was a collision between two brutal systems, and the result was a cycle of massacres and reprisals that stretched across centuries. Nobody walked away clean.
I’m Ken Laort. I research uncomfortable topics and try to share what I learn, especially subjects like this where the truth has been so whitewashed that it paints a false narrative. This isn’t about making anyone a villain or a victim. It’s about understanding reality, even when it’s awkward.
We’ll start with America before Columbus. Then we’ll look at the clashing values and war codes of two very different peoples. And if you really want to understand how powerful and terrifying native warfare could become, you have to look at the Comanche—so dominant that one U.S. general said war with them would mean complete ruin. Finally, we’ll look at the blood spilled on both sides of the conflict.
So how violent was North America before Columbus arrived? By modern standards, it was insanely brutal. We grew up imagining Indian life as buffalo hunts, corn harvests, and maybe the occasional dispute with neighbors. But for many tribes, violence was the rule, not the exception. In fact, violence was how young men proved themselves. On the plains, you didn’t become a man by planting crops or building a home. You became a man by joining a raiding party and taking scalps. That was your résumé. That’s how you earned a wife, gained respect, and built your reputation. Violence wasn’t a last resort. It was social currency.
This wasn’t a rare occurrence. Raids happened constantly, sometimes weekly during raiding season. Captives, depending on age and sex, might be adopted into the tribe, forced into harsh slavery, or tortured to death in public ceremonies meant to test endurance and courage. Some victims were burned alive. Others had fingers cut off one by one or were forced to run gauntlets while entire villages beat them as they passed. To modern observers, it looks savage. To the people practicing it, it was tradition.
Scalping is a good example. Many people blame Europeans for it, and they did use it as a tactic, but scalping existed for centuries before their arrival. A scalp wasn’t just proof of a kill. It was a trophy—something to dance with, display, or use in religious rituals. Warriors didn’t just target other warriors. Scalping women or children was proof that a fighter had breached the heart of an enemy village. In cultures built around bravery, that elevated status.
At Crow Creek in present-day South Dakota, nearly five hundred villagers were massacred in the early 1300s, with most of the remains showing evidence of scalping. Torture was another constant. Captives were brought back to villages and subjected to public ceremonies that could last hours or days. Women slashed them with knives. Children threw burning embers. The more stoically a captive endured the pain, the more honor he earned.
Violence was cyclical. One raid sparked another. One death demanded revenge. Entire tribes became locked in blood feuds lasting generations. And the scale was far larger than most people realize. Indian wars—between tribes and later with Europeans—weren’t brief episodes. They stretched across centuries and across the continent. Entire tribes were wiped out. The Iroquois fought the Beaver Wars in the 1600s, destroying or displacing dozens of tribes from the Great Lakes to the Ohio Valley. The Sioux expanded west by brutalizing other nations.
None of this means tribes were mindless killers. They had sophisticated societies, complex diplomacy, and remarkable survival skills. But warfare was central to life for many of them, and its brutality shocks modern sensibilities.
The violence wasn’t universal. Some tribes were relatively peaceful at different times. But when Spain, France, and Britain arrived, they didn’t enter a tranquil paradise. They entered a continent already at war. European powers armed tribes, formed alliances, and used them as buffers. Warfare didn’t stop—it escalated. New weapons and alliances poured gasoline on an existing fire, and it burned for another three hundred years.
European settlers brought radically different ideas about war. Armies wore uniforms. Governments declared wars. Battles were supposed to be fought between soldiers, not civilians. Those rules often broke down on the frontier. Native warfare had no declarations, no front lines, and no off-limits targets. Raiding parties struck at dawn, vanished into the wilderness, and targeted homesteads, women, and children. To settlers, it looked like terror. To tribes, it was normal.
Over time, settlers adapted. They formed ranger units and frontier militias that fought in similar ways—fast, ruthless, and without mercy. Crops were burned. Villages destroyed. Civilians targeted. The very tactics that once horrified Europeans became standard practice. Each atrocity justified the next, and there was no shared framework for peace.
Yet for centuries, Native Americans held their own. And no group demonstrated that better than the Comanche. By the late 1700s, the most feared military power west of the Mississippi wasn’t a European empire—it was them. Fewer than forty thousand Comanche controlled territory the size of Texas. For 150 years, they ruled the southern plains so completely that historians call it an empire.
Their power came from the horse and their unmatched mastery of mounted warfare. Trained from childhood, Comanche warriors could fire arrows at full gallop while hanging beneath a horse’s neck, using the animal as a moving shield. No one ever matched their skill.
Their culture rewarded violence. Status came from raiding. Captives made up a significant portion of their population. Slavery, adoption, and assimilation blurred together. The most famous case was Cynthia Ann Parker, captured as a child, raised Comanche, and later “rescued” against her will. To Texans, it was a rescue. To her, it was a kidnapping.
The U.S. Army struggled against the Comanche for decades. Conventional tactics failed. Disease, population decline, new weapons, and the deliberate destruction of bison herds eventually broke them. In 1870, after the failed attack on Adobe Walls and a brutal retaliatory campaign, the last Comanche bands surrendered.
The frontier wasn’t a story of heroes and villains. The brutality was universal. Treaties were broken by both sides. Hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were killed in centuries of war, and tens of thousands of Europeans died as well. But the greatest killer wasn’t warfare—it was disease. Smallpox, measles, and influenza wiped out between sixty and ninety percent of native populations.
The real story of the frontier is one of cultures colliding in a centuries-long war where mercy was rare and civilians paid the highest price. If you want to respect Native Americans, don’t turn them into cardboard heroes or eternal victims. They were powerful, resilient, and often brutal—just like the settlers who fought them. History doesn’t clean up nicely. The more you dig, the messier it gets.
I’m Ken Laort. Thanks for making it this far. I hope it was worthwhile.