Response to Beth Garcia's "A Tale of the Great American West".

Response to Beth Garcia's "A Tale of the Great American West".

Well, perhaps not a response so much as an add-on. I concur with Ms. Garcia's assessments. Her statement about the "coercive tactics and deceptive measures that Anglos consistently employed" in their dealings with Indians returned me to a thought I have been evolving over the past week. Conquest was not a new thing. Peoples have been conquering other peoples for millennia. Over those millennia, were the conquered always bad people who deserved what they got? Probably not. Conquest and its ugliness is not a phenomenon that sprung up in the 19th Century. It is a fact of human history. Perhaps our problem with it is that it does not jibe with how we Americans prefer to see ourselves. That may be so, but we should be careful about discussing the role of conquest in the American West -- indeed in America, period, since we also conquered Native Americans in the East -- as though it were unique. Conquest is not unique. It might be more interesting to examine how American conquest in the West differed from American conquest in the East, or even from Roman conquest of, well...insert conquered nation here.