Excellent article. In some ways, our past is still our present.

Stuff like this is tough to read:

The U.S. government, knowing that it couldn’t vanquish the powerful tribes of the northern plains, instead signed treaties with them. But it was also playing a waiting game. Buffalo, once plentiful, were being overhunted by white settlers, and their numbers were declining. Major General Philip Sheridan, a Civil War veteran tasked with driving Plains tribes onto reservations, cheered their extermination, writing that the best strategy for dealing with the tribes was to “make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.” (An Army colonel was more succinct: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”)