Welcome to another packed issue of Against the Odds! Thanks again for choosing our magazine to meet your simulation and history needs. Readers old and new will find lots to ponder and use this time around. Our game and main feature is A Dark and Bloody Ground, known variously as Little Turtle's War, or the Ohio Campaign of 1790-1795, it represents a chapter in American history that many prefer to gloss. I watch American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies more than I rent videos or watch premium cable channels. I like nostalgia as much as I thrill to new movies, and there is a certain charm and epic scope to the old movies that today's movies lack (a notable exception being the Lord of the Rings). Since the 1960s, however, there has been a growing movement to set the record straight on American settlement and its treatment of the indigenous population. In the movies, Native Americans go from bloodthirsty savages who indiscriminately kill to noble beings that are unjustly massacred in the white lust for more land and more profit. What is the truth here? It's probably a little of both, with a whole lot more in between. I am not here to write a diatribe on the evils of Manifest Destiny. We live in different times where it is easy to pontificate. The truth of the matter is that there were growing pressures on all populations for land, food, and resources. Europeans were streaming across the Atlantic to North America to escape poverty and harsh governments. Populations were growing, due in no small part to an import from South America, the lowly potato. Populations in Europe had been relatively static up until the 16th century due to the various wars. Armies fed off the land as they marched, harvesting grain and making off with livestock. Millions died in Germany alone during the Thirty Years War. However, the introduction of the potato meant that a relatively small patch of ground could supply a family for a year. The potato patch was inconspicuous and the tuber could be kept underground until ready to be dug. The Irish under Cromwell discovered this first. A potato patch and enough grass to feed a cow could yield enough milk and potatoes to supply all dietary needs for a family (though the diet was somewhat boring). The Irish population boomed, while the English lords could not properly raise grain crops in the harsher climate and suffered. Frederick the Great was another adherent to the potato miracle and kept his population supplied and fed throughout the Seven Years War. The excess populations came to America and began to spread along the East Coast. Pioneers began to push inland, and pretty soon, the native population began to push back. The French had established good relations with the various tribes, but were uprooted by the British. When the United States won their independence, the British tried to set themselves up as the protectors of native interests in the interior. The new American government tried to establish good relationships with the natives, but the interests of land speculators and waves of new citizens combined to sour these efforts and cause the American government to be forever looked at with suspicion and hostility. Such bad feelings were not new. Indians, once the saviors of the Massachusetts colony at the first Thanksgiving, became competitors for rich farmlands and abundant game. Some natives accepted and adapted, others fought and were massacred or thrown out. They were seen as racially inferior by many whites and slaughtering them was given no more thought that shooting mad dogs. One colonial leader, Edmund Scarborough of Virginia, told his native guests that if they knelt in a certain ditch, they would hear the Great Spirit speak. Naively, they did so. Scarborough had concealed a cannon at one end of the ditch and reported that "the Great Spirit spoke loudly". Native Americans were unprepared for war on a continental scale. The new American nation had not only completed its war for independence, but its inhabitants were descended from nations who had long traditions of full-scale wars of conquest. The natives were superior warriors, and when allowed to fight their familiar type of battle, they usually won. As we shall see, technology and superior logistics doomed their attempt to unite and throw back the sea of immigrants from Ohio. Their supposed British benefactors proved a broken reed, and one hundred years of Manifest Destiny would sweep the proud native populations from the best lands on the continent, reducing them to tiny enclaves where, instead of roaming the plains and woods to hunt deer and buffalo, they depend on tourism and gambling to survive. In this issue, we break several myths, not only about America's treatment of the native tribes, but of the very fabric of our Western Civilization. It surprised me to learn that our culture depended not on European triumphs, but on a valiant, desperate stand by an army of Muslims against the Mongol menace. Also, while assassination as a state policy is supposedly taboo, it was certainly practiced in World War II, and "death from above" was the choice in those days, too. So, gentle reader, come inside and see the face of war from new perspectives, and never forget that, as Wellington said, "History, sir, will lie!" Even in the movies. Back to Table of Contents -- Against the Odds vol. 2 no. 3 Back to Against the Odds List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by LPS. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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