Matt Walsh

And this is because around that time, Mississippian Indians from the Midwest and the South were moving east and in constant conflict with the tribes they were encountering.

Before Columbus had even sailed the ocean blue,

Oneota Indians were chasing other Indians out of northern Illinois.

Tribes like the Anasazi and the Hohokam were vacating their farms in Arizona and New Mexico because their settlements were getting destroyed.

Archaeologists at Crow Creek in South Dakota discovered a mass grave with the remains of more than 500 people, including women and children.

They had been, according to Keeley, slaughtered, scalped, and mutilated during an attack on the village a century and a half before Columbus's arrival.

The attack seems to have occurred just when the village's fortifications had been rebuilt.

All the houses were burned, and most of the inhabitants were murdered.

Knife marks on the tops of their skulls and bone fragments is how they know that they were scalped and mutilated.

Not only were the Indians committing atrocities against each other before Europeans arrived, but they also got less violent after the white man got there.

According to Keeley, the percentage of burials in coastal British Columbia bearing evidence of violent traumas was actually lower after European contact, 13% from 1774 to 1874,

than the very high levels, 20% to 32% evidence in prehistoric periods.

As you'll see later in this episode, some tribes, including the vicious warlike ones like the Apache, actually sought protection from European powers.

But we'll get to that later.

First, more on what Indian-on-Indian violence was like.

According to S.C.

Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon, quote, enemies, meanwhile, were enemies, and the rules for dealing with them had come down through a thousand years.

A Comanche brave who captured a live Ute would torture him to death without question.

It was what everyone had always done.

What the Sioux did to the Assiniboine, what the Crow did to the Blackfeet, a Comanche captured by a Ute would expect to receive exactly the same treatment, which is why Indians always fought to their last breath on the battlefields.