Indian War Blood
Scalps and guns
This is an excerpt from my book The Fate of White America (Multipolar Press, 2026).
This chapter turns to the frontier as a formative myth of American identity, examining the violence, expansion, and transformation that accompanied westward settlement. It considers how the memory of conquest continues to be active within the cultural and historical imagination of the nation.
Hagen von Tundra, a Faustian soul, tells a story of settlers who ventured straight into the heart of the untamed borderlands. They cut through grass, swamp, and plain, driven by a tide that turned westward. The blinding glare of the setting sun illuminated a heap of red corpses, setting the stage for the blood-boiling tale that was to unfold. Ashen-faced, with revolvers drawn and repeating rifles blazing, they fired down a desolate range, reclaiming the biosphere for noble treks that passed through icy winds at the break of dawn.
Remember the castle, besieged on all fronts. The wagon tents flapped in disgust at the invaders’ nonchalance, their defiance a mere murmur against the savage beasts that roamed the land. Kapow! Kapow! Down went one feathered fellow, barely limping like a weakling in a worn and stolen saddle. “Presents then! And where now?” sounded the question through the wild expanse, where the bears were too wild and the women too tame, setting tables and preparing the hearth while the men were out there, planting and digging their own graves.
Generations yet unborn would gaze inward, reflecting their refinement, while ahead the landscape stretched onward. Do you smell the firewatered palms, upturned and begging for scraps? In the middle of this passionate heartland, there was a red-boiled rage to kill the reds, to scourge the country of its plague. Line by line, they designed a complex grid of lanes and trains to modernize, to civilize an ancient land steeped in evil intent. Through the mercy of God, they washed it clean, making it shine with a thousand skyscrapers piercing the clouds. And in their merciless advance, they never listened to the dead half-beast’s cry, for theirs was a mission of divine destiny, a march to tame the wilderness and bring forth a new era of civilization.
Yet when the fires sank into embers and the rifles fell silent, a deeper murmur rose from the soil itself, and he spoke to me in a voice strained by some unseen pressure, “Do you think it ended with their victory?” I answered with uncertainty, for the land before us seemed altered in ways no tally of conquest could explain. “They believed they cleared it,” I said, though the words felt thin, insufficient. He gave a slow, deliberate shake of the head. “Nothing is cleared,” he replied. “Only covered. Only layered over with names, roads, and structures that pretend permanence.” A wind moved across the plain, carrying with it a faint scent of burned meat and something older, something that clung beneath the surface of things. “Then what remains?” I asked, though even as I spoke I felt the answer pressing upward from below. He leaned closer, his eyes fixed upon the horizon where the last light faded into a dull, metallic haze. “Impressions,” he said. “Residues of action, of violence, of will imposed and resisted. They settle into the ground, into memory, into the very arrangement of the world that follows.” The silence deepened, thick, almost tangible, and for an instant I sensed that the vast grids of roads and towers, the shining surfaces of the cities, stood not as a final triumph, but as a thin and trembling layer stretched over something that had never yielded, something that waited in patience beneath the measured lines of progress, enduring every attempt to define it, to master it, to claim it as complete.
They rode westward beneath the blinding glare of a dying sun, piling red corpses like offerings to unseen gods, while the wagon tents flapped in silent disgust and the savage beasts of the old land roared their futile defiance; yet even as they scoured the earth of its ancient plague and laid down the iron grid of lanes and shining rails, they never heard the dead half-beast’s final cry emanating from the soil they “civilized,” for in that merciless advance the frontier was not closed; it was merely internalized, festering now within the soul of the machine-age republic, waiting to erupt again when the last illusions of refinement crumble and the skyscrapers themselves begin to scream!
In the brutal Indian Wars, settlers clashed with indigenous tribes. Blood and fire marked this dark epoch, as conflicts and massacres swept across the land. Entire tribes, like the Yuki in California, were driven to the brink of extinction. Amidst the chaos, the cycle of violence and displacement carved a path of destruction, underscoring the effects of a civilization bent on conquest and domination.
