Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 404 - The Battle of Beecher Island

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: http://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys In the aftermath of the Sand Creek Massacre, the traditional governance of the Cheyenne people fracture, the pro-peace chiefs lose power, and warrior societies promise revenge against the settlers and military for their crimes. A band of warriors trap a small patrol of American soldiers and frontiersmen leading to a plains siege that forces soldiers to eat raw horse meat and then get violently ill because they were eating raw horse meat. SOURCES: Norris, David. Desperate Last Stand At Beecher Island. Military Heritage. August 2012. Volume 14, No 2. Mort, Terry. Cheyenne Summer. The Battle of Beecher Island: A History Yenne, Bill. The Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West Monnett, John. The Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867- 1869 Grinnell, George. Bent, George. The Fighting Cheyennes. Grinnell, George. Bent, George. The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Lifeways. https://the-past.com/feature/looking-death-in-the-face-the-battle-for-beecher-island-september-1868/

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the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hey everybody and welcome to the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire world. I'm Joe and with me is Tom. Nate is still away recording

his yet to be released mixtape because I insist on calling it a mixtape. What's up, buddy? I'm excited for Nate to drop this album and it has like the Master P cover art. Yeah, you gotta make him say, Nate, no, nah,

na, Nate. It's gonna be saff driving a tank and Nate's coming out of the barrel. I'd buy that merch, even if it's just for me. How is that not something that we've done? I don't know. Like, you know, I'm pretty decent

in that Photoshop, but I don't think I am good enough at Photoshop to make a custom pen and pixel cover art where if it was also realistically it would be you driving the tank Nate is coming out of the barrel and I'm being squashed underneath the tracks

It's ironic because driving the tank was the one job I didn't have Like I, the only time I ever drove a tank was just like menial bullshit around the motor pool It was the only position the tank I was never assigned to

And like tank crews don't work Like they did in World War II or whatever like you don't go to tank driver's school and you are a tank driver. Like you just learn every position vaguely, including like gunner. But like, yeah, never got it. I end up being way too good at loading. So I ended up being everybody's loader. You got to be the military equivalent of the understudy for Jason Love.

It's great. I get the nickname Clydesdale for a multitude of reasons. Anybody who's seen me in person knows that I'm quite large. but because I could also carry anything for a long period of time and being a loader in a tank, I mean, they're throwing shells around the way hundreds of pounds and never slowed me down despite the fact that I was so tall. I mean, I still am, but I was then too,

that I had to come up with my own very unique way to load the main gun rounds and not smack them off the ceiling of the tank. Yeah, see, for anyone listening at home, just to bear that in mind, Joe being called a Clydesdale. So when you feed them an apple, make sure to do with an open palm. That's true. Maybe that's why I hate horses so much. So consciously, I hated being called the Clydesdale for eight years of my life.

They even gave me like a fake special forces rangers tab that just had Clydesdale on it. And I wore it. Yeah, because you're both a pack animal is not the correct term, but a draft animal. A draft animal that's quite large and both have anxieties. It's true. Yeah. It's true. Yeah, you can't make loud noises around horses or you'll scare them same as you.

Yeah, that's why whenever we do live shows, people aren't aware of this, but I actually have blinders on. So the term is blinkers. Is it blinkers? Yes. Are you sure that's not just like a UK or slash Ireland term for that? Could be. Could be.

Is this a train engine situation? Oh, we're not, we're not relitigating this. People were so mad about that. And the worst part was is that it happened live on stage. So it wasn't that one of the three of us could fact check it live and like bring it back up. Wait, no, I actually did that too. Yeah, you did. No, it's good.

I've never been heckled at my own show before or since then. You know, it's good to know that that's how a lot of stage performers feel all the time and they deserve more of it. Not us though. We're perfect. Yes, we are the perfect performers. And speaking of the perfect performance of. context. Oh boy, you're going to regret saying those words. Oh, God. So Tom last week, a little peek behind the show for those interested. This is only two days ago for us. We talked about

the Sand Creek Massacre. I kind of ended that episode by saying we're not really doing a series more of an anthology to talk about what happens in the aftermath of that. This isn't a complete aftermath. Obviously, we are going to do a series. I have one planned in the future. I'm not going to say when, because I haven't started it yet, but it is on the dreaded schedule for some time I want to say in 2026. The dreaded schedule, aka when Joe texts the group chat on a Sunday evening, fuck, we've ran out of episodes for this month. We have to record five times next week. This is what happens when we take a holiday. And especially because another peak behind the curtain here.

I manage the schedule and I am bad at it. And not bad in that I leave everybody uninformed. It's that the schedule is completely dependent on what I feel like researching. And that will change throughout the year. And nobody finds out about it until I do it. Yeah.

So welcome to your weekly dose of seasonal Joe oppression. Yeah. That's right. Except it's every season baby. Seasonal Joe Fective Disorder. Once the leaves start fall, you get really obsessed with World War I again. If I happen to step in a mud puddle somewhere, and I live in the Netherlands, so that's just like every day year round, I'm like, I should do a Psalm series.

But this is kind of an anthology. This is an aftermath of the Sand Creek Massacre. This is not going to go into crazy in-depth detail on the greater genocide of the Plains people. That is something that will have to be covered in as. series. We've kind of done bits and pieces over the years because it's a big topic. So, bear with me, I'm going to have to go through a lot of years to get to our topic today, which is the Battle of Beechers Island. Just know that in the future, I'm going to cover that topic specifically much more in depth. That's probably going to cover about 10 years

as of now. I have some very rough outlines that I'm working with here. So there's your little asterix. And another thing, there's another content warning here. Again, we're dealing with the genocide of the native peoples of North America. We're going to cover some dark topics. And again, I always encourage people to listen to it anyway because history cannot hurt you. It could only armor you for the future when people try to lie about it. That's my take. If you disagree with me, listen to something else until next week. Yeah, this isn't going to be the fun, jolly episode where we get all our goofs and gaffs. This is going to be...

I'll say it's not as bad as last week. Yeah. A.K. 2 days ago. If this is the scale we're going off of, this is not involving just an outright massacre. More of violence swinging back the other way and then back again. This is the story of military revenge on the part of the Cheyenne and military revenge on the part of the United States.

Because this is, some would say, blood work. You're welcome for that blood. Listen to Bloodwork. I have finally finished editing the AK-47 part one, which you will have heard by time this episode comes out. That's right. See, I'm part of the team.

Joe's a team player. He's the understudy for Jason Love. I do my best. This is something of consequences in some ways and yet exactly what the United States wanted. The tragedies of Sand Creek were multifaceted. and while we tend to focus on, well, the violence, which is only human, one thing that gets lost in all of this blood is repercussions. The peace-minded chiefs of the Cheyenne were largely slaughtered at San Creek.

They happened to be there, remember, believing they were under the protection of the United States for the purpose of negotiations. Some did survive, namely Black Kettle himself. He managed to survive through all of that. he continued to try to make peace between his people and the psychotic United States government, but they would really never gather the power that they had ever again. After the massacre, Black Kettle wrote, quote, Although wrongs have been done to me, I still live in hope.

I've not got two hearts. I once thought that I was the only man who persevered to be the friend of the white man, and since they've come and cleaned out our lodges, our horses, and everything else, It's hard for me to believe in white men anymore. So even the peaceful chiefs who are trying desperately to save their people are losing hope. I mean, he says he's not losing hope because he lives in. He has no choice. But, I mean, listen to his words.

He knows where this is leading. He knows he's going to be betrayed again, but he also doesn't see another option. Yeah, it's kind of between a rock and a higher place, you have to try and make a decision that, particularly the position that the Native Americans were in, it's like, this is about more than revenge, it's about the preservation of the safety of your people. Right. When in between that metaphorical rock and a hard place

where the rock and the hard place are just guns pointed at you, I mean, you have to try to think of a way where the least amount of people are going to suffer. And unfortunately, we do know how this ends. I mean, we're sitting here in 2026. We know the repercussions of the American policies and their genocide against native people. But it's hard to remember.

remember that Black Kettle doesn't know that. Why would anybody believe that? I mean, he knows that white people do not have his people's best interests in mind, but nobody that is in the pro-peace camp could ever fathom their people being locked into reservations for eternity, effectively. Yeah, there's a... How could they? Yeah, exactly. Like, there is kind of innumerable examples of people put in this position where they have to make decisions. You within the context of the moment. And the context is, you know, my people are dying. I want to make sure the least amount of them die because the reality is some of them are

going to die by because they're going to be killed by a dominant power. And it's kind of like, you have to try and, yeah, you can't like do mental gymnastics that we can do in the present retrospectively looking back at stuff. You have to decide in the moment because the unfortunate thing about decisions is that like even if you don't make one yourself, time will make the decision for you. Right. And the modern term that you would use for this is harm reduction. And it's something that you've seen through every genocide in recorded history. There's always one party involved that is desperately trying to work within legal frameworks as much as legal frameworks exist

to preserve their people. And it's easy because hindsight is 2020 to look back and see how flawed that is, but we're looking back with, you know, 100 plus years of experience and knowledge of the written history that he lived through. And it's also very easy to say, well, why didn't they just fight to the end? That's something that's really easy to say from the safety and security of your own. Even in the context of modern people who are facing pretty strict regulations and state violence. Like, it's really easy to judge people. Like, we've talked about this countless times in Revision's history on like the Armenian

genocide or the Holocaust where people say they went like lambs to the slaughter. It's a form of dehumanization and it's not true most importantly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also a way to create this kind of like a historical

absence of agency in the people like they have you know difficult decisions to make that they have to make because like I said if they don't then someone will make that decision for them. It's like, yeah, it's easy for us, like, looking back to think, like, oh, they should have tried this or tried that. And it was like, well, you know, those other choices might have led to the same point anyway. Yeah. And as we're going to see, I mean, like we've talked about a million times, like the Cheyenne, who we've focused on the most in the last two weeks is, you know, not necessarily unified.

They have a government in the form of the Council of 44. They have the military societies, but people can just ignore them. So, like, you have factions that are pro-peace and factions like the military society like we're going to talk about that are actively saying war is the only option. We tried peace. Look what happened at Sand Creek. Look what happened at this other massacre. Look what happened at this other massacre. Clearly talking is not working. So, like, this creates a lot of ripples. And we're going to focus on the effects within Cheyenne society because the U.S. government is the U.S. government. As we've established, there are no repercussions for the U.S. government. and what it's doing. Even in the context of the San Creek massacre, it involved like one guy losing his job. This isn't worth looking into the U.S. at this point because we're living in it. The army is unchanged, the government's unchanged, and by the late 1860s in Colorado, the politics of genocide are still mostly unchanged as well. Like we talked about in our last episode, Cheyenne Society and the government had, for the most part, two branches of government. I already brought them up, the Council of 44 and the military societies. Though it's not a

as simple as thinking of them as two separate branches of government either. The military societies are not their own bands or tribes. They live within the bands and tribes. They are the warriors of the Cheyenne people. And they are supposed to be subjects of the Council of the 44. I mean, they are part of the equation. Like the elders of the societies are certainly people that people respect and their opinions are respected along with them. But they have the same culture. They live together. There's no real separation. They have different. different rituals and traditions, especially in regards to the preparation of battle, but they're the same. But at Sand Creek, eight members of the Council of 44 were killed. Those eight happened to be

some of the eldest and most respected pro-peacemen on the council. There were some leaders of the military study there, elders, older people who are no longer like frontline warriors, more of the politicians of the military society that were killed as well. This makes sense, seeing how they believed, again, that they were under protection to do negotiations. And at that point, Cheyenne society had already been slowly changing thanks to the growing pressure from American invasions. Starting a few decades before, the military societies and the most famous one that gets brought up a lot is the one known as the dog soldiers or the dog men.

They'd been pulling themselves away from their, let's call it an integrated society, into their own bands, developing leadership, different cultures and different traditions, and most importantly leading themselves. This had really never happened before. This is also happening in the Sioux and the Lakota and the Arapaho for that matter, but we're staying within the boundaries of the Cheyenne to make this an easier episode to do. The cultural fracture or evolution, whatever you want to call it, was combated by the peacemited elders of the 44,

and we can obviously see why. An independently governing military society is going to do what that sounds like it's going to do. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And also as well, from the American government's perspective, through the Battle of Sand Creek, like getting rid of quite a lot of the people who were approaching this with a mind. It was like, we want to make peace, we want safety, we want kind of avoiding violence at all costs by eliminating them.

Then they, you know, pressure warrior bands who will expectantly want to fight into fighting. And that's further justification for more violence and kind of pushing that even further. Yeah, absolutely. Even if the U.S. didn't mean to do that because they don't really see a difference between the two. That's what they got. Yeah. They killed the peace-minded people. They didn't kill the majority of them, but they did make it seem like a bad route.

He was like, well, they all got killed. And the warriors who largely were not at Sand Creek because they left, they didn't want to take part in negotiations, were suddenly all still alive? And empowered by the fact that we are right. Look what happened when we tried to talk. They said that we were being protected and now hundreds of people are dead.

And the warrior societies are in general younger. They are more hot-headed. They are more impulsive. They haven't been around as long. They haven't kind of learned the pain of generations of war. They've grown up in it. But obviously they're not

diplomats, let's say. Yeah, and like the older generation part of, you know, the more kind of, I suppose, the side that was more aimed at peace. Like, you learn the consequence of war by surviving it and it kind of convinces you as like, okay, we choose war. Most of us will die. Some of us will survive and know that, okay, that is the cost of going to battle. Maybe we'll try a different way. When you have people who haven't gone through that, then it's like, oh, okay, that's obviously going to be the natural option that they're going to choose. imagine how bad any government would be if it was ran by 20 year old soldiers, raised by other 20 year old soldiers. You know what I mean? Like, it's going to create, it doesn't matter what society or culture you're from. It's going to create a military government that only looks towards war and champions it. Or alternatively, you could have a government run entirely by broccoli hair frat bros. That is part of the one that America's getting. Yeah. You just have broccoli hair, Don Draper showing up. up to your office saying, give me all of your records?

That's right. And, you know, after San Creek, the power and the influence of the pro peace council of 44 kind of enters a terminal decline period. And that cultural change is only sped up as the dog soldiers and other military societies, because the dog soldiers is just the most, the one that everybody thinks of the most. So I'm leaning on them the most here. They could point to the actions of the U.S. government and say, see, we fucking told you. And as the men of the dog soldiers gained in power and their people struggle for survival, more and more people moved into the villages and bands that

they controlled. One of those men was Wokini, probably best known by his English name Roman Nose. Oh, hell yeah. Congratulations, my dude, you're canonically Armenian now. Roman Nose was

not a dog soldier. More on that in a second. He's a member of the Northern Cheyenne. He was born sometime in the 1830s, an inducted into the Crooked Lance Warrior Society. There's multiple different names for literally every society. I'm going with the most

well-known ones. He quickly became probably one of the most well-known Cheyenne warriors on the planes, not only just amongst his own people, but within the white society as well. He was hot-tempered. He was fucking

mean and he was aggressive. He only wanted war because he saw it as the only way for his people to survive. And he actually became so well known amongst the whites, along with the growing fear of the dog soldiers, the dog soldiers being like the framework idea of a native warrior in the white consciousness at the time. So they had a tendency to call just any warrior

of the Cheyanna dog soldier or dogman, but he wasn't. probably the reason that they are remembered the most is the battle dress of the dogmen is legitimately sick as fuck. Okay. It sticks out and it is meant to do exactly what it looks like. Strike fear into the heart of the people that they're fighting. And eventually to be worn by Daniel Day Lewis, although I feel like that's a different tribe. It was.

That was the Mohicans. Yeah, still, still incredibly culturally insensitive movie. Yep. It was the 90s. You had Las of the Mohicans, dances with wolves. There's probably another one.

The Last Samurai. And dances with Wolf's sequel, Avatar, because it's the same movie. It's the same fucking movie, Tom. James Cameron spent a billion dollars and went to the Marianas Trench to bring you blue dances with wolves. Doesn't even have Kevin Costner in it.

No, he made, they made a different movie. It was called Waterworld with Kevin Costner. Arguably a better movie than dances with wolves. Which way native man. Hey, at that one, he's just a fish guy. Yeah, true. I mean, I haven't interviewed any fish to see how they feel about that. Probably not good. Waterworld is not good for the disciples of Dagon.

Eventually, after Sand Creek, he becomes one of the most powerful leaders of his people. But most importantly, he's not a chief. In fact, in some tellings, he kind of is going to become one and turns it down. He doesn't want to be a politician. He wants to fight. So rather than having the actual title of chief, people follow him because they want to. He is known to be fierce and it's successful. So before long, he has a lot of fucking supporters.

so even though he's not a chief, he is the loudest voice in every room and people have to listen to him. So after San Creek, in the aftermath of the massacre, the Cheyenne, the Lakota, the Arapaho, and others want revenge and rightfully so.

And Romanose was more than willing to give it to them. There were other reasons for this growth and power and the separation to the different bands and military societies, and in particular the dog soldiers. Warriors, especially young men,

are upset at their leadership. And many of them left their traditional bands to join the dogmen because the dogmen and other societies promised the revenge that they craved. The dogmen fractured society in other ways as well, as at other military societies. For example, the Cheyenne had worked generationally

at this point in a matrilineal clan system, which means men would marry into other families and then move away. This meant there was always kind of different generations of men never really staying in one place to include warriors. That sort of system helps with kind of societal cohesion between different groups because you're constantly kind of sending people back and forth to go and live. It requires an exchange. And the dog soldiers decided that they weren't going to do that anymore.

So did other warrior societies. They decided, no, we're going to take wives and then you're moving into us. And you're going to be dog soldiers or dog men because women oftentimes fought along with them. This is a hotly debated topic, let's say. of the cultural norms of what would lead a woman warrior into becoming a dog soldier. In some tellings, it requires their husband to be killed in combat, and then they take up the mantle of revenge, but other times that was not the case, and husband and a wife would fight side by side.

Some people call that family therapy, but very much band dependent, and not only just band dependent, like husband and wife dependent, there was no strict cultural norm for that. But it also doesn't seem that there was a restriction either. Other clans, bands, and villages also happen to suffer horribly from a cholera outbreak. This killed leadership because cholera, any disease is going to strike the very young and the very old first, which happens to be obviously the infants, but also their leadership. I don't feel so good, Dutch.

I think I got cholera as well as TB. Once you get typhus, that's what you call a grand slam. And, you know, that weakens the societal fabric even more. those bands with weakened leadership, now the core surviving group being younger warrior-aged males, move in with the warrior society and away from traditional family life, taking their family with them, completely changing power dynamics. So within a few decades, the dogmen and other societies went from being loyal soldiers to normal society, to their own society, with their own customs and enough cohesive leadership

to become the most dominant force in Cheyenne society and politics. And most importantly for the context of this episode, the most powerful faction when it came to dealing with those whites. Kill the white people. Death to the whites. I mean, if you could give Roman Nose's grave an inscription, that's pretty much what it boiled down to.

And we'll talk a little bit more on that in a second. and how we treat this topic on the show. In the immediate aftermath, elements of these three peoples met near Cherry Creek, which is today roughly St. Francis, Kansas. Not where Francis of the show lives. Roman Nose was there and kind of took control of the Cheyenne delegation, again, despite the fact he is not a chief.

But this does make sense. People want war. He's successful at it. He also works along with chiefs that were pro-war, like Spotted Tail, and the wonderfully named Pawnee Killer. I assume there were no Pawnees present for this video. Hell yeah.

Before long, once word of what happened at Sand Creek began to spread, more and more bands and more and more tribes heard about what was happening. So they sent warriors to meet with everybody as well. And eventually their numbers broke a thousand. In some tellings of the story, Roman knows quickly becomes the loudest voice in that room, wanting to use the largest body of warriors that he had ever seen, in his life to carry out

something that the whites would never forget. Before long, their sights fell in the town of Julesburg, hometown of the Jewel. Not really. Okay, fair. American place names are like so weird, like calling places like Lebanon

and Jerusalem and like... Yep, yep. New Orleans. That's New Orleans, or Detroit instead of detois. Or almost any other city name in Michigan is just mispronounced friend. It's called d'etois because there's two parts to Michigan.

Fuck off. Hey, we fought a war to get that second part against Ohio. Imagine if you could go back in time to the frontier days and give them a jewel and just see what happens. Imagine going back to the war with Ohio for the Upper Peninsula and just like,

that could have been diffused with a few spools of copper wire. I want to go back in time to the Toledo war and give every Michigander an AK and Ohio would not exist anymore. No, give everyone involved, you know, those the synthetic opioid shots that

you can buy in petrol stations in American now. I'll have you know that's just what happened in the early 2000s. My graduating class will never be the same. The war in Iraq could have been avoided if they had of introduced Khratom. Are you trying to say Kratom?

I don't fucking know. I've heard of pronounce both names. It's illegal now. Chalk 1 in the rare call of Joe correcting someone's pronunciation. I shut up, Bishop, Rick. Fucking Bishop Dick right now. Now, Julesburg was more than just

another frontier dot on a map. It was a way station along the Overland Trail. One most important highways, if you want to call it that in the 1860s, taking settlers west to Oregon and California and of course Mormons to Utah. And Julesburg

was suitably large enough. And Julesberg was suitably large enough. too over its importance, right? Like, it's quite wealthy for a frontier town. It's got stock houses. It's got storehouses. It's got horse stables. More than a couple brothels and bars.

Like, there's a fair amount of frontier wealth there. We gotta stop the wagon trade in Julesburg. I gotta get mango pods for all my 16-year-old wives. That's why the Mormons had to keep going. People were having too much fun blowing fat clouds. And they're like, no, we have to keep traveling west. There's too much sin. here. The gold tablets that Joseph

Smith found were actually two giant mango jewel pods. That's why they're not allowed any stimulants. It must suck being Mormon and having ADHD. I think it sucks to be Mormon and have a lot of issues. Or just sucks to be

Mormon. The town itself was built with frontier violence in mind. It was built with a U.S. Army fort, just a mile away for Rankin. And interestingly, we only know about the details of this battle thanks to

George Bent, who you might remember is our mixed-race Confederate war veteran turned deserter. Now, for a quick refresher, he was mixed-race, Cheyenne, and White, and he joined the Confederate side of the Civil War before running away. No shame on that.

After surviving the massacre at San Creek and being detained by the U.S. Army, he's freed from American custody, and not only goes back to his people, but joins a warrior society, the Crooked Lance. Hell yeah.

And decides his path forward is going to be war against the Americans. Brackett's good this time. Kill all the white people. I really hate that we found a Confederate veteran that I respect. Still one good one. And George Bent is going to have

a really interesting life. We're going to talk about it more at the end of this episode. I mean, it's quite tragic given how we know how the story generally ends. I'm going to guess it involves rampant alcoholism and then dying

violently? 50% correct. Okay. According to Bent, the plan was to attack Julesburg, but they knew they'd have to take out Fort Rankin first. They've had enough run-ins with U.S. soldiers to know that laying siege to a fortified position that has cannons and a decent supply stock

is not the best idea. Instead, they're going to use the soldiers low opinions of native warriors against them. They knew if they simply rode up to the fort and got their attention and rode away, soldiers would chase them. Yeah, the soldiers are losing the perception check role

because they haven't put enough points into intelligence. Common soldier problem. I can attest to that. I rolled all tens on stamina and physical strength and twos on Intel until I was like 25. If you take this chewing tobacco, it will boost intelligence by point one. Actually, hold that thought on chewing tobacco,

a sentence I never thought I would say that will come up as a weapon in this episode. Yes, we're spitting acid like a reptile in Mortal Kombat 2. You're getting closer. Oh, fuck off. We got to move on. A warrior named

Big Crow selected 10 of his men to ride out to the fort and get their attention by firing a couple guns in the air. And then, as I said, take off running back to where they had a prepared ambush. The ambush was a bunch of warriors hiding behind, like a riverbank, and the plan was to lure them all the way in so they can be completely surrounded

and destroyed. However, Big Crow made a mistake. He took his most seasoned warriors with him as part of the bait force, leaving the youngest warriors back at the ambush point, many of whom had never seen close combat with American forces. So pretty much as soon as the dudes on a horseback ride up, the warriors just go, oh, fuck, and start shooting before the trap can be closed, allowing the soldiers just turn around and run away. Like, warriors have lower enlisted guys too. Universally dumb as shit. The soldiers turn and run back towards the fort.

The warriors not wanting to give up on their ambush chase on after them. Developing a running gun battle, at which point civilians get caught in the middle of it, which, again, warriors don't give a fuck. They give a fuck as much as U.S. soldiers do about the disposition of civilians on the battlefield, let's say. So there's about 14 soldiers killed in this whole thing. About as many civilians. That in turn scares the populace of Julesburg to just like pack their shit and run into the fort.

Because that's why the fort's there. Kind of leaves Julesburg wide open and the warriors turn around and loot the shit out of it. Of course, the U.S. Army needs to put together a revenge mission after this. But it's winter is closing in quickly. Not a great time for campaigning. And so they succeed only in marching around in circles. in the great planes until a bunch of dudes

get frostbite and then they go back home. It's very hard to march on stumps. Yeah, like the battle doesn't take place because the warriors like, why would I fight that many soldiers? That's dumb. I mean, listen,

if the soldiers get frostbite and lose all their toes, I know the Union Army didn't really have a great track record with procurement. So like in a macro logistic sense, if their toes fall off, you're going to save so much money on socks.

and boots. Yes. I mean, I guess you just kind of have to put some like rough leather wrap around the stumps. It's almost a boot, but it's got to save money. There's no soul. Much like the music that all of the white people are listening to in the fort. No soul. They're all just saying, Chubby coming around the mountain when she comes with no syncopation at all, no swing. Just straight down the line. Much like the road around the mountain. This kind of rating and revenge missions make up the frontier. life thanks to the never-ending encroachment of white settlements and the violence that comes with them. The military society's intern react. And I know how this is portrayed in the American study of history. I am one of you, after all. I got my undergrad from an American university. So I know how this is taught. The brutal Native raiders were slaughtering civilians, right? They're savages, etc., etc.

And I'm not here to say that this was not happening. What I am trying to explain is it's important to remember that this would not have happened if they were not invaded. You cannot invade and destroy a people and settle their land with the explicit goal of wiping them out, and then hide behind the people there are brought with them to complete the mission and cry about it. And this is not saying that the wholesale slaughter of civilians is permissible. I'm just saying that in the context of the war and the genocide of the native people, you have to understand why they're doing it. Yeah. Sometimes it's fuck around, find out, and the finding out

is civilians getting shot. Yeah, and the native peoples are smart enough to understand what is happening. The constant portrayal of them as being weird spirit worshippers who do not understand the U.S. government is not correct. They know

what white settlement means, and they especially know what the encroachment of railroads mean. They know when you start popping up houses in Colorado that you're not going to fucking leave, right? Like, this is not hard understand. And this goes into the common misconceptions of modern day violence towards civilians in the context of irregular warfare or sometimes called terrorism. I'm not saying you have to

agree with or sympathize with the people who are doing it. But you need to understand how they got there. If there had been any historical justice for the, you know, the Arapaho, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, we could have prevented the rise to fame of a, at Trey Parker and Mottstone. That's certainly one way of looking at it, Tom. I would go with the Colorado Avalanche, but that's just me. Yeah. And this isn't some ancient protracted, quote unquote, complicated issue here that I've said multiple times is a fucking bullshit dishonest use of that word to hide away from explaining what is happening.

When it comes to the Great Plains specifically, this has only been happening for a, couple decades at best at this point. The true destructive genocidal power of the U.S. military and the administrative structure that make it possible and permanent white settlements at a large scale really do not come into play until the end of the Civil War. We're talking at this point, this is the 1860s, this is brand new to the Great Plainspeople. They've been dealing with white people for a while, but not like this. This is different.

This is why I never really fully. understood why the band AJJ changed their name because the name Andrew Jackson Jihad is like the most like evocative thing ever. I learned something new about a band today

and I'm perfectly happy with it for the first time in a long time. And as the years go by, things only get worse thanks to the construction of the transcontinental railroad. With this westward movement of the railroad came more and more people. Permanent

large-scale settlements, and especially after the end of the American Civil War, the full weight of the American military. This brought more pressure than ever before to the people of the Great Plains. And when I say people of the Great Plains, I don't mean the people who just moved there. This also led to more and more fracture within Cheyenne society. It had hardly recovered what amounted to a decapitation strike massacre of its peace-favoring leadership at Sand Creek. And in the years since then, the weakening of the pro-peace chiefs within Cheyenne life,

had already allowed the warrior societies to largely take charge and do whatever they wanted. The Council of 44, as much control as it still had, was just unable to rein them in, who in turn gained support because they could point to the U.S., constantly fucking them over and breaking every treaty they ever signed and say they cannot be trusted. We have to fight, or at the very, very fucking minimum, we have to be able to hunt or we're all going to die. And that brings in another part of this. considered aggression to white settlement. It's something as simple as going hunting in areas

that white people had settled on. Areas that these people have been hunting since the United States was a wink in Britain's eye. Yeah. Creating areas of denial is one of the key things in genocide, essentially by proxy, is that like creating, oh. Someone's a environment where human life cannot be sustained. Yeah, it's creating like a legal framework or a legal justification for the disenfranchisement of people through making their

traditional practices illegal and framing them as like acts of aggression like, you know, I don't know, Palestinians fishing off the shore of Gaza. Yeah. I mean, it's the constant, I really don't want to take this into another one of

my very long wind of diatribes on this topic, but if any episode is good for it, it's this one. It's a constant thing you see across all genocides. It's one of the key markers that makes a genocide is creating an environment where human life cannot thrive. That is, withdrawing health care, or destroying health care, withdrawing food, or destroying food.

You make a place where people simply cannot survive. And obviously, in the context of the Great Plains, the true capstone of that is the reservation system. But before that takes place, and the reservations are creeping in at this point, but they're not at their peak quite yet. but you see them being driven off traditional hunting grounds, driven away from the buffalo that they live off of.

And then when that doesn't work, this is after the Battle of Beecher's Island, which we're talking about today, I promise we'll get there eventually, the wholesale destruction of Buffalo. So they can starve in the winter. Thanks to General Sheridan, who we are going to talk about.

And a guy that we've talked about before, General Armstrong Custer, who gets what's coming to him. But this is why Butcher's Crossing is a better, book about the American Western Blood Meridian. I'll take your word for it. I read Blood Meridian, didn't care for it. Moving on. I'm going to move on before I catch too much hate for that one. And you know, coming from me has nothing to do with the brutality that's in that book.

Nothing can off-put-me from that. Read Butcher's Crossing. It's an incredible book. Add it to my list. So you have, like, things that are considered acts of aggression, which are just things at the Cheyenne, the Arapho, the Sioux, the Lakota. They're just doing to survive. This isn't even talking about the rating, and most of this rating is for supplies to be clear here. Yes, they are killing civilians. Yes, they are killing soldiers and frontiersmen, whatever. But most of what they're doing is trying to steal your shit because they don't have anything because it's been taken from them.

But even if they're not doing that, the simple act of killing a buffalo to sustain their band is considered an act of aggression, which will invite military force. And when I say military force, I'm not talking about a couple warriors getting shot in a normal, firefight between militaries. I'm talking about villages being wiped out. I'm talking about water being taken from them. I'm talking about them being driven into places in the middle of winter where they'll freeze to death.

Also as well, it's really worth saying, because we haven't kind of pointed out in this episode or the previous episode, like, this was, you know, the American government's genocidal war on the Native Americans, but it was also like Union soldiers and the American government acting almost as like a proxy army for

capitalists as well. So that, you know, you can build the Transcontinental Railway to ship, you know, raw materials from the west coast to the east for, you know, sail or export or manufacturing. And all of this is to say is that all of this was done to, you know, for the financial benefit of the American government in an expansionary effort,

but also like oil companies owned by a guy called like Martian Bigglesbaum and like a gold company owned by a guy called John Klump. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, again, circling back around. Another key part of any genocide is profit margin. Every single one. And it might not be the thing that's on the top of the list, but someone's being enriched from it. And in this case, obviously, the railroads, large-scale settlement, the ease of transportation, exploitation of resources.

Like, these things are all there. Yeah. The Martian Biggled Baum and John Klump need their money. That's right. They need to build another fucking weird house. in New York City or whatever, bigger top hats. These are the tools of genocide in the hands of the U.S. government in the late 1860s. And again, I know we already talked about for quite some time now, but I'm going to cover this better in a later series where we can really expand upon this and the reservation system, the concept of shatter zones like we've talked about before. Promise, we'll have that at some point.

And for this Cheyenne, like we've said a million times now, they're left with simply no choices. There were still pro-peace chiefs like Black Kettle, and they did their best to talk to the United States, but the warrior societies were just not having it. And I'm not putting any amount of blame on them at all. You can understand where they're coming from. They believe that the only way forward was war because these fucking white people refused to leave them alone. And they're not wrong. There was no peace. There was no treaty they could have signed that would have mattered. That is the most important aspect here. There was never this one part, this one possible treaty that if they just sat down and signed that this would have ended.

So while some chiefs talked to the government, the warriors kept hunting and they kept raiding, and as a result, there were more U.S. soldier revenge missions, but those would have happened regardless. One of these missions in 1867 led to a lot of Cheyenne villages being burned to the ground by soldiers under the command of Winfield Scott, a future presidential candidate. This also led to force talks between the two sides

and an interesting and, in my opinion, captivating description of Roman notes. Quote, of all the chiefs, he is the finest specimen physically of his race. He is six feet tall in height, finely formed with large body and muscular limbs. His appearance was decidedly military, and on this occasion, particularly so. He wore the uniform of a general in the army. A seven-shooting Spencer carbine hung at his side of the saddle. Four large Navy revolvers were stuck in his belt.

A bow already strung with an arrow was grasping his left hand. thus armed and mounted on a fine horse. He was a good representative of the god of war and his manner showed plainly that he did not care if we talked or fought. Fucking, this guy fucking rules. Four revolvers. Fucking sick. So he's got four six shooters.

He's got a seven shot repeating carbine, a bow and arrow. He's got 31 bullets off rip plus arrows. Yeah. And he almost certainly had a lance. as well on his horse. Eventually, the pro-peace camp of the Cheyenne packed their bags and moved south, leaving Romanos

and the other military societies who continued their war, leading to the governor of Colorado to ask the military for support, because settler corpses were really beginning to pile up here. Command was given to General Philip Sheridan, a Civil War general who would eventually get just about

the worst tank in U.S. military history named after him, and to that I say he deserves it. Sheridan was given command of a massive piece of territory called the Department of Missouri, which despite its name covered virtually the entire Great Plains region. Sheridan was never going to be given enough soldiers to patrol this vast swath of America, not to mention the warrior societies didn't fight with armies. They fought with small.

What we would know today is guerrilla bands, and they would spread the fuck out. You can't really track them down. They'd only occasionally come together in a force of more than a hundred. It's hard to fight them. And Sheridan knew that. So he thought countering these warriors with traditional means was not working. It wasn't, to be fair. Instead, he charged his aide, major Alexander Forsyth, to run a recruitment program for frontiersmen.

Who would fight like warriors? Because they, these frontiersmen, and I'm not saying this as a compliment, because remember what this entails, had learned to fight the warriors in the way that the warriors did, meaning they created a white boy death squad out on the planes. Yep. Though, they would not be formally inducted into the army. Rather, they'd be civilian contractors. He ran recruiting drives over several forts, promising the mid new guns and some money.

As long as they signed a document that the frontiersmen promised to follow orders by a U.S. Army officer under that would be over command of the mall. Like I said, legally, they were still civilians, but they were contractors to the quartermaster department. for the princely sum of 50 bucks a month, which is honestly quite good for back then. And for their $18 if they supplied their own horses and equipment, if they didn't, they would still be given that $18, so they would have to pay it right back to the government.

I mean, fair. And the guns that they were being given was like a really important part of this because they were game changing. The Spencer repeating rifle. It's a lever action repeating rifle that fed from a magazine. In between shots, the only thing you'd have to do was work the lever and cocked the hammerback and you could fire again. This was hardly something new, though, actually. The Spencer rifle was first manufactured back in 1860 and was presented to the U.S. Army for adoption as its standard rifle for the Civil War,

which probably would have made the war a whole lot shorter, if I'm going to be honest with you. But it was shot down because of its repeating action. Army procurement officers believe that this fast-firing rifle would lead to soldiers. wasting ammo and not aiming, as a Spencer could fire 20 times per minute, which is revolutionary for a rifle back then. The average muzzle-loading soldier, the best of the best, could fire three times in the same time period. Yep, this is the same thing, kind of the same thing that happened with Richard Gatling when he tried to originally sell to Catling gun. They were like, well, we don't really need this because soldiers can fire pretty quick already. Yeah, three times a minute

is very fast. No, I prefer the small ones. And as dumb as this sounds, like, we would hear something about this during the adoption of assault rifles and the concept of burst and fully automatic. We didn't episode of the M16 back in the day. A lot of the same complaints about giving soldiers a weapon like this. But there was a practical worry that the U.S. Army had at the time, too. We've talked about the union procurement process on this show before.

It was called like the days of shoddy where everything was corrupt and, made like shit and there wasn't enough for anything going on because everybody was stealing it, ripping off the government. Not to mention the massive amount of destabilization that happened the U.S. Army after secession. They were worried that they gave hundreds of thousands of dudes Spencer rifles

that the logistics system would just collapse under the weight of giving them all the ammo they would need. There was probably a worry as well as like, oh, when the war is over, we do need to take these rifles back off everyone. Well, I mean, that wasn't really much of a worry in the U.S. at the time, or

even now, honestly. Soldiers ended up getting their hands on the Spencer during the war. Anyway, there was programs or like the U.S. military did buy some like for the Navy. Some units at the state level pooled their funds and got some. Sometimes people just

bought them with their own money, which was also allowed. And everybody who used it loved it. It was incredibly fast for anything for its day and incredibly reliable. Most importantly, it used sealed cartridges. So that meant the ammunition was waterproof.

Yep. That's a very big innovation at the time. Yes. It's quite literally game-changing. Really the only thing that kept the Spencer out of more people's hands, at least for a time, was its comparatively high costs in specialized ammunition, which would cost more because you're inherently using more of it. So for these frontiersmen, this is a sweet deal. If I do some death squad stuff, I get 50 bucks a month at a sweet new rifle that I get to keep afterwards. Yeah, they did the same thing to you, except they said they'd send you to college. Yeah, I didn't get to keep my rifle. It's important.

They did send you to college, though. She'll let me keep my tank. It would be cheaper than a common American university education. The interest rate payment on the tank is definitely less than the challenger. That is true. And it's much harder to wrap a tank around a tree driving it home from the bar. Now with that attitude. Forsyth was joined in commanding his new unit by Lieutenant Frederick Beecher, who walked with a pronounced limp thanks to a wound he got during the Battle of Gettysburg. His limp was bad enough that he was actually supposed to be transferred to the Signal Corps and away from frontline duty, but he managed to stall it long enough to take part in this mission, something he will not live to regret. But Beecher came

from a very interesting family, hardcore abolitionists. His uncle was a very famous minister that preached abolitionism, but most importantly, his aunt was Harriet Beatrice Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, despite what that word ended up meaning, was a very important

abolitionist text. It's kind of ironic that like all of these kind of John Brown adjacent people show up and is like, yeah, I don't think we should like own people, but why do we kill all the people who lived here before we arrived?

Yeah, say what you will about Beecher. He would not enslave the native people. He is much more comfortable killing them, though. Yeah. Yeah. Real ideological blind spots like we talked about in our last episode. The ultimate evil version of equal rights for equal fights. Yes.

And Beecher wasn't the only interesting dude in this attachment. The other was Sergeant William McCall, who despite me just calling him a sergeant, had actually been a general during the Civil War. Okay. I need to ask, how did he? get busted down from general to sergeant? So he wasn't a regular army general. He was a general in a Pennsylvania unit.

So it was technically a militia unit. So while he was an officer in the militia, eventually getting promoted at the brevet level to general, and for people to remember, a brevet promotion is temporary. But he was still an officer. And to get promoted like that, it was because he was good at his job.

And by the end of the Civil War, he was commanding entire regiments of soldiers. He had hit like Call a Judy prestige level one. So he like went past general. Now he's that sergeant again. What happened was he was discharged at the end of war like so many people were. And like a lot of people, he decided to pack his bags and try to move out west to strike a rich.

And like so many other people, went piss broke in the process. So by the time Forsyth came around saying, Hey, you want 50 bucks a month? He was like, sure. And Forsyth found out his background so I can't make you an officer. But I can make you a general to make sure all these frontiersmen listen to me. And he was like, yeah, fuck it.

Why not? Making him just about the most overqualified sergeant in military history. And as you can imagine, Forsyte's plan was to use his gang of frontiersmen and his general sergeant to catch these bands of warriors where they're outrating. This mostly boiled down to doing the frontier version of what I did when I was in the army, simply wandering around from place to place until someone tried to kill them. They began their expedition on August 17th, 1868, bouncing their way across the frontier till they got to Fort Hayes on the 26th. Once there, they were given orders to go to Fort Wallace

and scout the Solomon River. During the March on September 5th, someone swore they saw some native warriors watching them in a nearby bluff. Forsyth immediately ordered his men, all on horseback, of course, into formation and charged directly at the enemy. As they charged, Forsyce saw a man next to him go down, assuming he'd been shot. But as they crested the top of the bluff, they had actually just kind of spotted a hay wagon being driven into town. There was no natives at all. And you're probably wondering what brought down the horseman? Prairie dog hole. The horse was taken out, throwing the man to the ground, and breaking his leg. So, uh, prairie dog won. U.S. Army zero. A prairie dog. A prairie dog.

hole is the Great Plains version of an IUD. I'm to bring it back to a older episode. This is the American version of the Canadian beavers reading Lenin. Yeah, exactly. The prairie dogs aren't entirely sure what's going on, but they know they're against it. Prairie dogs sit in his whole reading liberation theology, you know? He's reading a biography of John Brown. Hey, that'll be recent history for those prairie dogs, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, this is the point where I'm pulpit. pamphlets are proliferating. So, you know, people are, people are reading. So you're, you're speculating in the concept of a prairie dog zine. Yeah. Okay. I can support that. From there, Forsyth and his men went to Fort Wallace, a little embarrassed and chilled until word of a warrior attack on a railroad terminus reached them, which is only about 21 kilometers away, 13 miles, give or take. They left the guy with the busted leg and raced off towards the scene of the attack. Once there, it didn't take long for the frontiersmen to pick up a trail,

because that is something that the frontiersman would be good at, and they picked it up at the Republican River. Do with that what you will. They kept following the trail for days, even as their food began to run low. And that's when McCall warned Forsyth like, hey, we should probably turn around, run a little low on food.

Do I need to point to the giant logistics sign? Remember, I was a general once. I fucking outranked you like a month ago. Yeah, we can't force the men to eat their boots again. Yeah, but they already lost their feet. Forsyth ignored him and pushed them in on. And on September 16th, they crossed into Colorado territory in the Aerokee River Valley, though the river at the time was dried up to the point as little more than a stream.

In the middle of that stream, there was a tiny little sandbar with grass growing out of it. And since the horses had been pretty much ridden into the ground, it was aside to pause there and let them graze for a bit and rest. But what they didn't know is only a short way away, were the exact warriors they were trying to track. But the warriors also had no idea that four Scyth and his men were there either. That was until the returning hunting party accidentally stumbled upon them. The soldiers didn't see the warriors, and those warriors quickly ran to one than two nearby

native camps, one that happened to be made up almost entirely of the military society men and their families. From there, word quickly spread to other camps, Cheyenne or otherwise, and before long, 600 warriors from the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho were gathering, led by Roman nose, starving elk, and Little Hawk. The plan was to attack immediately that night and overwhelm them. However, small problem. Mistakes are not the domain of the U.S. military itself.

Remember, they had just kind of been stumbled upon by a hunting party. No one was like jot in this down on a map anywhere. So the guy who found them tried to lead this whole army back to where he thought they were. And they all got lost. Oh, this is absolutely me. like in a cab drunk on the way home from somewhere spotting something and then it's like, oh, that restaurant looks really cooler. Like that place, so I should definitely go there to like get a sandwich or something someday. And then six months down the line, I'm in that vague same area.

It's like, oh, there's that sandwich place. And then just wandering around for half an hour and not finding it. Yeah, you and a stagged do of 600 guys with guns all looking for the sandwich shop. Like, you fucking said it was right here. So they can, kind of just wandered around a bit until the sun started coming out. And that allowed them to find this tiny little sandbar where they're camped out. Once they located the sandbar, they immediately charged. But not for the soldiers. Instead, they charged where the horses were penned in, making as much noise as they could

and waving blankets in the air. And for people who are listening, since this is an audio medium, for some reason, in the camera, I just did the hand emotion of waving a blanket for some reason. So obviously the goal here was to scare the shit out of the horses and cause them to run off at which point they could be stolen because that robs the frontiersmen of their mode of transportation and strands them there. Yeah. And also absolutely obliterates any sort of like cavalry capacity. Yeah. And not to mention morale because like once those horses run off, the frontiersmen know like we are so fucked.

They're like, damn, I had one payment left on that horse. of my 25% interest rate. I put fresh rims on that horse. It called fresh who, fresh horseshoes. I'm going to get excommunicated from Eastern Horsodoxy for this. Greg.

Frontines Tearsman, who moved to the U.S. like two years ago named Gregor Horsovic. Though these Frontiersman had been dealing with Native Warriors for quite some time and they were used to this tactic. So rather than just having them penned in, they also tied

them up. So while the horses were scared as hell, only a couple of them broke away and ran and were promptly stolen. It also had the drawback of getting rid of any element of surprise. Though when Forsythe Order has been into defensive positions, they just about shit their pants where they saw how many warriors there were. He only has 50 guys. You're looking at the perspective of watching the music video for a D-12's fight music. Fuck fight music. This is losing your life music. Nate's not here. I gotta pick up the slack. Yes, Joe knows all the words to fight music, even the ones I won't say on a record. Bazaar is on an extremely strong horse.

The horse is on heroin too. Bazaar is also on horse. And like, I say 50 people, but it's more like 49 because one of them is a civilian contractor, surgeon, who is riding with them. he also has a gun, but he's been quite busy very soon to the point he's not going to really be at his rifle anymore, you know? So the best shots in the group run out to the bushes that give covering fire while everyone else tries to dig into the sandbar with their like bare hands, like metal coffee cups, anything that they have. Within seconds of the battle starting, one, the men got shot right in the fucking head by an arrow. And I should point out here, it's sticking out like a cartoon right above. above his eye, but he's either shot at just the right angle or too far away and the head of

the arrow doesn't go through his skull, but it is stuck in his skull. That still fucking sucks. It gets worse because after that, a guy with a revolver rides up to him and point blanks him in the head. Oh. But the bullet hits the arrowhead and stops the bullet. Surely you would aim on anywhere else on the head? guy's riding by a full bore on horseback. I think he was just aiming at guy in general. Yeah.

Center mass. Aim center mass. No one taught the Cheyenne Warriors a failure drill. And the arrowhead deflects the bullet and saves his life. He survives the whole battle. He's like, bro, I got shot that fucking twice. Uh, so he's bleeding profusely from his head. Uh, because, you know, it's a scalp laceration. And anybody who's cut their head open, bleeds like a motherfucker. And I assumed just a little bit dumber than he was a few seconds before due to all the brain damage. A warrior charge is also different

than other cavalry charges that we've talked about in the past. You know, we've talked about night charges and Roman charges and all kinds of cavalry charges over the year. But a Cheyenne warrior charge is not, you know, swords and lances down, charging right up the gut to break your formation and scatter you. It's more like a light cavalry attack where they get really close,

and start circling around you, firing the guns into your formation. It could be guns, lances, bone arrows, most time all of them at once, all into that one guy's head, obviously. I'm doing trick shots off the side of the horse while I flank your formation. Also, important, remember going back to our Comanche Raid episode, Cheyenne warriors did a lot of the same things where they would hide over one side of the horse using the horse's mobile cover and fire over the top. Which is sick as fuck. No, I'm shooting underneath the horse. I'm shooting your knees and shit.

Yeah, exactly. Warriors are charging and shooting and Forsythe McCall. We're sure their men were about to run for it. But they threatened to shoot anybody who left the gun line. With McCall pointing a gun at a man's head and told him to get back in line with his rifle. This seemed to work. The foxholes that were dug were very small,

barely enough to protect them from incoming fire, pistol, rifle, arrow, lances, whichever. So in order to reinforce them, the men grab their horses, shot them in the head, and then piled them up in front of them. I call that a good start. We've gotten a new type of a corpse infrastructure, new corpse infrastructure drop. That's right. Just like the horses dropped real fast. Horse infrastructure.

Horse battlements. That's right. As Forsyth marched around giving orders, Forsyth isn't taking cover. He's running around getting men in line. I mean, it's a small unit. This is something he has to do. He immediately gets shot in the leg. This breaks his leg because he takes a musket ball.

The civilian contractor, doctor, the team ran over a grader and was dragging him back to his foxhole to treat him. And at that point, Forsythe shot in his other leg, it breaks that one too. It's the SpongeBob, my leg guy. It's the scene from Ace Ventura when he gets the spears in the leg. It's like, ah, ah, ah! I used to be a union war band until I took a spear to the knee. Despite the massive number of differences, the Spencer rifle was saving their asses. The Spencer was new to the frontiers and hadn't quite flooded the planes like other kinds

of firearms. And the warriors are always adaptive. They're very intelligent. And they're good with whatever weapons they get their hands on. That cannot be stressed enough. but they hadn't really had enough time to figure out how to counter the Spencer yet. The old tactics weren't going to work because they're just getting overwhelmed with the frontier version of a wall of lead.

So it was the side that an all-out charge was in order, enough bodies to simply overwhelm them at close range. This brings us to a problem that the warriors were having. Sometimes even in the realm of the universal theory of fuck that guy we often talk about, divisions still remain. Because so far, Roman knows and his men had refused. used to go into combat. Mostly due to a personal beef he had a starving elk, though we're not entirely sure what it was. So now Romanos decided to bring his men forward. It was a way of showing off to

starving elk. Like, you couldn't finish the job. Let me show you how it's done. So finally, the full weight of the warriors were going to be brought to bear. And they're armed with everything. They got revolvers. They got muskets. They got lances, bows and arrows, knives, hatchets. And even a couple Spencer rifles are kicking around that they managed to capture. Though like always, logistics is a massive problem for warriors because they can't make their own bullets, especially not for the Spencer,

right? A musket, easy enough, as long as it's not a minet ball. Like, a musket ball is easy to make. But they don't have gunpowder. They have to steal it, things like that. And the Spencer quite new, not a lot of them floating around the frontiers, which means they haven't been able to steal a lot of ammo yet for it. And not to mention, you're going to have to steal

more ammo for the Spencer than usual because you go through it quite fast. but hey, when you run out of an ammo, a rifle's a pretty useful club too, because a rifle's kind of like an escalator, never truly breaks. Fuck you. That is such a

shit joke. Just become stairs. I fucking hate you. I wish Nate was here. The Warriors' mass on one side of the island in charge. As the charge approaches the island, the charge splits in two. Sometimes this is written because the force of the

Spencer rifles. Sometimes it's just their tactic. Running lengthwise on both sides of the sandbar firing into the soldiers. Though several warriors, most famously a man named Badhart, didn't split off. He just rushes straight down the length of the island right through the middle of the soldiers' dugouts and shit and spears a guy with his lance and comes out the other side completely unharmed. Oh, hell yeah. However, Roman knows as the telling goes, charge into battle, fully accepting and knowing he was going to die. The reason for this is the night before the battle, he had a really bad dream where he dreamt about dying, and that carries a lot of weight in the warrior society.

He told someone about his dream, and to further reinforce that he was accepting it, he had eaten his pre-battle meal with a metal fork. This is considered something of a taboo in some warrior societies. This isn't a completely widespread belief, but specifically in the crooked lance and a few others. It was thought that if you ate your pre-battle meal with a metal fork, the metal fork carried a certain energy with it that would attract the metal bullets to you. Ah, interesting. And there was a way to get rid of this bad fork energy by going to a holy man doing a ritual cleansing that would restore his protective barrier that he believed

that he had. Most warriors believed that they were enchanted with kind of magic that would keep them safe. But there's ways you could fuck that magic up and there's ways you could restore it. And the one way to restore is doing this cleansing ritual. But he refused. It's kind of his way of saying, you know, I accept the fate that I was given due to my dream. Other times

it's told us he just didn't have enough time to go through the full cleansing ritual and to miss the battle and he wasn't going to do that. And it turned out his dream would be accurate. While leading his men into the charge, he cut a bullet straight to the chest and was thrown from his horse. His men quickly grabbed him and dragged him off the field of battle, but he would die a short time.

later. As the charges continued, with each pass of the Warriors firing everything that they had, more and more soldiers got taken out. The doctor got shot in the fucking head. Beecher caught around to the back and died. And this charging went on and on until the Warriors began to back off as the Sun went down. So this is going on for hours. So far the soldiers had four dead, another 13 wounded, some of them very badly. The doctor, despite his gunshot wound to the head, was not dead. However, half blind from brain damage and certain the fact he was definitely

going to die, he kept crawling around and giving aid to the wounded. Over the course of the night, warriors came down from their positions to try to find bodies of their fallen chiefs and pull them to safety away from the battlefield because it was considered bad decor, bad vibes,

bad energy to leave your chief fallen on the battlefield. The frontiersmen sniped them as they did that. Ooh. And, you know, if they've rules reversed. I'm sure the same thing would have happened. Yeah, this is just the situation that everyone's it. They have no gentleman's agreement and I'm not here to say, how dare you? Though they eventually worked at a system where a man would tie a rope around his leg, kind of like low crawl to a chief's body, tie a rope around the body and then they just kind of pull it back

without getting shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they did manage to save a lot of their wounded that way too because it's important. Remember guns back then weren't as powerful. It's, yeah. Like, you got multiple dudes getting shot in the head and just kind of walking it off. A lot of dudes are blasted open and have some pretty awful injuries, but altogether survivable if you get the medical care fast enough. In most cases, that just falls hacking off a limb. In the darkness, the soldiers dug in further. There's no way for them to escape, and their only option was a double down.

They had almost no food and no water, and their ammunition was running very low. But they were surrounded by dead horses. So at least one of those problems could be solved. they began cutting strips of horse meat off. I mean, look, horse meat's okay. But they couldn't light a fire because it illuminate their whole camp. So they just had to gut down raw horse meat

while huddled at their frozen trenches. Okay, yeah, raw horse meat. I'm not getting behind that. Go to absolute sycamode on secretary. There's also other good news. They had dug deep enough into the sandbar that water was coming in, meaning they had a source of fresh water.

Of course, that came with a drawback of all of their trenches now being flooded with ice-cold water, meaning that they had accidentally created World War I conditions on the Great Plains. Forsyte saw the writing on the wall, though. He knew they needed help or they're all going to die real, real bad. So he wrote a letter, handed to a team of two scouts, what who's only 19 and the other who's 60, and told them to get the fuck out of there and run their asses off towards Fort Wallace. Fort Wallace is over a hundred miles away.

Fuck. Don't worry that 60-year-old frontiersman will handle it just good. Thankfully for Forsyth and his men, though, it seems that the Warriors had given up on the attack. They were playing the long game. They gave up on trying to charge. Their losses from the repeating rifles are beginning to pile up. But they also had fought soldiers before.

They knew these dudes didn't bring that much food with them or water or ammunition. They could just kind of park it. out back and wait. You're either going to try to make a breakout and then we'll kill you or you're going to stay in there and slowly kill yourselves. Either way, we're going to win. They kind of get in a sniper battle, but there's no recorded casualties happening from this point on. At this point, Forsyth was sure the two scouts that he sent out were dead or captured or something, but they weren't. They were, however, very, very lost and sick, dude, eating raw horse meat that they had stuffed into their pockets. Yeah, it's hard to

snipe, you know, someone who's encircling you on horseback when your bowels are falling around your knees? I got a pocket full of pocket full of horse meat. Front pockets full of horse meat, back pockets, full of shit. The scouts were stumbling through the darkness and they accidentally ended up right next to a Cheyenne village. Panicking and looking for cover, they saw a dead running buffalo corpse that the Cheyenne had shot and previously gutted. With no other options, they crawled inside of the corpse to hide. Then if that wasn't bad enough, a fucking rattlesnake came into the corpse husk.

And they hadn't brought a knife like they forgot it. And if they shot the rattlesnake, obviously the Cheyenne would hear the gunshot. So they did the only thing they could. Spit tobacco juice into the snake's face. Oh, fuck all. That's where that could. The snake didn't want any of that juice and slithered away.

y'all, your motherfuckers are disgusting. I was just over here rattling and shit. Like, yeah, the snake was just chilling. Like, surely some tobacco company used this story as marketing. I know I would have. Yeah. Don Draper of the frontiers like tobacco juice. Rattlesnakes hate it.

Gentlemen, Lucky Strikes has a unique opportunity. We're inventing or we're introducing new chewing tobacco. Soldiers are returning from war. They're sick of smoking cigarettes. They want to chew tobacco. said. So we need to appeal to their sensibilities. Lucky strikes. Spitting the eyes of your enemy. That's right. Meanwhile, the men had been trapped at the sandbar for four days. The doctor finally died from his open head wound. This left foresight to do surgery on his own leg with a shaving razor

while two men pinned him down with no anesthetic. Fucking hell. I am so happy that I exist at the same time as, you know, ibuprofen. Yeah. Or I simply don't have open leg. wounds because I don't get shot in my legs. My doctor says I shouldn't do that. Nine out of ten doctors agree getting shot in the legs is bad for you. That one doctor though. Yeah, he's a wild card. He also works for the NHS. Then his two men picked him up so he could get a better look at like the Cheyenne siege lines. But then a sniper took a shot at him. The two men panicked and dropped Forsyth causing what of his broken legs to shift and the bone stabbed through his skin.

At this point for this is like, why aren't I dead yet? Fuck. You're surrounded by fucking like desiccated horse corpses. Oh,

they're still eating them too. Your leg is now you've been defenestrated. It's now been almost a week and the horse meat was rotting. So the men attempted to fix

this by sprinkling gunpowder on it because they thought that would fix the rot or at least cover it up. This doesn't work. because that isn't how anything works, but it does sound like something that RFK Jr. would recommend.

Yep, yeah. You gotta put the gunpowder on the horse meat. They did boil the horse bones, though, to make some horrible, miserable stew, which doesn't sicken them but doesn't give them enough calories either. Back with the scouts, they emerge from their corpse hiding spot

and are virtually dead on their feet. They're desperately sick and sleeping in the middle of a rotting buffalo really didn't help things. Sometimes you're sent in some. that come out of my mouth on this show. I could never see myself saying. Once again, that 10th doctor recommends a good night's sleep at a rotting corpse. They're eventually found by a patrol from the 10th cavalry, carried back to Fort Wallace.

Word is then rushed out to Captain Louis Henry Carpenter, who already has men in the field, to head for Forsyth and save him from being turned into a skin-based Great Plains decoration. And while that is happening, the men on the sandbar don't know this, but the warriors that surrounded them, they left like two days ago. Yes, this is so fun. But they also couldn't confirm that either. They had lost any ability to move from that sandbar whatsoever. Everybody is sick for me to rot, horse meat, gunpowder.

There's so many wounded who are now, like, infected and weak from blood loss. Even if you manage to dodge an arrow and gunshot to the head, You are starving, sick, freezing cold. Everybody's just waiting around to die at this point. The one guy with really good eyesight called binocular bob is like head first in like a horse's corpse, puking his guts out. Yeah. Puking into the horse, eating the horse, eating his own puke like a sick dog.

So they start to see horses in the distance and they're like, oh God, like the direct quote that Forsy says is Indians are coming, Indians are coming, right? They grab their weapons and again, according to Forsyth, just prepare to die. Like, they have no hope of surviving this so they know it. Like McCall tells him like, it's been good, sir. I contend, no, it hasn't. Sergeant General McCall. No, it hasn't. It's been awful, actually. Yeah, everything about this experience has been awful. But within seconds, it's clear that the men were American and the rescue had finally come. It was a pretty funny story about this scene in the rescue, though. The man leading was Carpenter, who happened to be an old war buddy of Forsythe.

And Forsyth, for a lack of a better term, didn't want to look like a bitch while he was dying in a hole with his two broken legs and DIY surgery wounds. So he went over to his pack, grabbed his book, and just like reclined back and acted like he was reading when Carpenter rolled up. Don't mind me. I'm not bleeding or dying over here. No, no, no, no. I'm fine. She'll be coming around the mountain wenchie. Ah, I moved. Oh, I just shit blood. That one's new.

My knees are supposed to go backwards. My father's actually an ostrich. Walking around like the, remember the aliens at the start of men and black too? Yep. The men were given food and water and they built a camp like a half mile away from the sandbar so everybody could get away from the smell of rotten horse meat. There's the wall. one guy who just actually got used to it and he's like, oh.

I miss that particular bouquet. And despite having two broken legs, two bullet holes and DIY surgery wounds, Forsythe did not lose his legs. This is a fucking miracle. Because remember, this is 1860s medicine. We're talking here. The first line of medicine is to cut them shits off. Fuck of hell.

He does take years to recover. I'm not saying like, oh, poor boy or whatever, but it is still impressive. He did always walk with a very complicated limp, though. The five soldiers who died in combat were buried on the sandbar, which is renamed Beecher's Island after him dying there. However, those bodies were later moved. Some of them were missing, though, when they showed back up with the best idea like, well, the Cheyenne must have taken them somewhere or wild animals got them.

More than likely wild animals. Almost certainly. They felt like they could bury them very deep. And then the island was later washed away in a flood of 1935, because this isn't really an island. It is a sandbar with some grass on it. A sixth man later died of his wounds. And the warrior losses are pretty much impossible to know as they weren't exactly publishing their numbers. Things tend to get past through oral tradition. Oral tradition tends to change over time with tellings and retellings. According to

George Bird Grenell, who worked with George Bent, compiled histories and studies of the Plains tribes, only nine warriors were killed, but no number was taken for wounded. Another warrior who claimed he was at the battle told Forsyth years later that actually 75 warriors were killed, but they hid their losses by taking them from the battlefield. No idea which one of those is true. Because George Bent also was not at the battle, so hard to say. In the time since, American sources have claimed that hundreds were killed. There's no evidence for this.

There's actually no evidence for any of this other than the oral tellings from one person or the other. In the grand scheme of things, the Battle of Beecher's Island as it came to be known, was of no real importance to the United States. For the Warriors, though, it's kind of an undeniable victory. Sure, they didn't wipe Forsyth out. That would have been a big victory for them, but they did check his advance and show that these small expeditions

were probably not going to work to defeat them. The war would continue, but the American tactics would change for the worse. Hard winter campaigning. Remember in our last episode when the governor of the Colorado Territory said, we can fight in the winter and you can't, that ended up becoming Philip Sheridan's tactics, hard winter campaigning, and they would target everything.

This would be the main tool of genocide for the Great Plains people. They wouldn't just target the Warriors. They would target the Buffalo. They would target anything that the natives used to survive. They would target their crops, their shelters, and drive them across the Great Plains in the middle of winter, killing them from exposure. He would also unleash a guy named George Armstrong Custer onto them. But, you know, small bright spot here. We know what happens to him at least.

Yep. We'll eventually do, like I said, a series focusing more on that Great Plains winter campaign because we do need to cover it at some point. As an ending here, we should circle back to those frontiersmen that Forsyth recruited. Because wouldn't you know it, the government absolutely tried to fuck them over on pay and refuse to pay out pensions to surviving relatives of the debt. Some things never change. Maybe don't be a civilian contractor and a death squad.

That's a life hack you don't get to use very often. Yeah, don't be a murder scab. Yeah. They argued that, hey, those guys weren't soldiers. They were just buckskin blackwater. We don't need to pay for them dying. It wasn't until 1914 that the government caved and decided to pay up. Now, like I said, George Bent didn't take part in this battle that day.

But after fighting as a warrior in other battles, he eventually put his weapons down and became a voice for peace within the Cheyenne. and he was good for it. He straddled both worlds, and he became something of an ambassador between the United States and the Cheyenne. He worked as an interpreter and a mediator for meetings, but quickly discovered that because he straddled both worlds,

neither people really trusted him. The Americans in Cheyenne equally did not like him because of where he stood in the world. And that can be a tricky place to be, I can imagine. This is only made worse because he was good at his job, and he was very good at bringing pro-peace Cheyenne chiefs to the table. Unfortunately, he got the blame for a lot of the incredibly unequal and terribly destructive treaties that they end up signing. And that is unfair.

Now, these treaties obviously lead to land being taken away, people being forced on reservations, all the things we've already talked about. These treaties are not George Ben's fault. Those treaties were going to be forced on them regardless, or we know the alternative. But Bent did take that internally. He got depressed. He crawled into a bottle for a number of years. And he eventually goes back to the Cheyenne. And with the help of his band, he gets sober and uses his knowledge and language skills to work with historians to begin writing the first English language histories of the Cheyenne.

Eventually, but not at first, Bent was given full credit that he deserves for the works that he put into the books that I used as a source for this episode and our last one. the fighting Cheyans and the Cheyenne Indians, their history and lifeways. They are certainly old-timey. They show their age, but they are great resources due to the hard work that George Bent put into to make sure his people's story was told accurately. He died in 1918 during the Great Flu pandemic. Unfortunately, he died before the second book was published, so he didn't get to live to see the true history of his people published.

But his work does survive to this day, and it's great. I have no other good way to end this episode. So that's it. The end. Yeah. Unfortunately, episodes like this, you can't really countenance with,

you know, oh, maybe the good would guys won because unfortunately, the people who deserve to win don't win in the long room. Yeah, it's horrible is what it is.

I don't know how this is taught and the Great Plain States histories. I can assume badly. Maybe it isn't. People from the. Great Plains region, let me know. Native people who are listening, let me know how it's thought. Let me know how that perception exists in that region. It's a part of the country I've really

never even been to. I'm from Michigan. We have our own horrible history with our native people and I graduated high school in early 2000s and they never even talked about it. I can hope that that has changed, but I am not so hopeful. You know what I mean? I don't, I don't, not optimistic on that one. But yeah, the end. The end. Tom, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion just so everybody can get a bit of whiplash here. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, support the show on Patreon.

Just $1.00 gets you in. $5 gets you absolutely everything from years and years and years of bonus content to ebooks, audiobooks, first dibs and live show tickets and merch, get to vote on Patreon polls so you can help us choose next bonus series and things like that.

gets you access to every show early and, of course, access to our Discord where we pull the vast majority of all of our questions from the Legion. And today's question is, like I said it was going to be whiplash here. Favorite video game from the 1990s that is not Final Fantasy 7. That's an easy one for Tom because he hasn't played Final Fantasy 7. Also, I haven't played many video games from the 1990s. I was born in 1995. I was born in 88, but I didn't play a lot of video games in the 90s either because I was poor. Virtually everything that I played from the 90s, I played well into the 2000s when I had a tiny bit of disposable income and the ability to emulate things on my computer.

But, I mean, obviously, anybody who's been listening to this show long enough knows that the easiest answer here is Final Fantasy 8, much better than Final Fantasy 7, yelling at me in the comments. But no, if I'm going to go outside Final Fantasy, you got Zeno Gears. You got Zeno. I think Zeno Saga is 2000s. Yeah, Zeno Gears. You've got early tales of. You've got Lunar Series. I think Bouncers also 2000s.

But yeah, there's a lot of good shit in the 90s. A lot of it also did not age well. But like I like to emulate a lot of my games these days, which is a very fancy word for stealing them. It was on a bonus episode, but I've already talked about this. 3. In my opinion, when the best

RPG's ever made. And it kind of put a sour note towards other games. Whenever I pick up a game now,

new or otherwise, I just think like, oh, this is an Exhibition 33. This shit fucking sucks. So I've gone back to my

delightful little emulation machine that only costs but 100 euros and I can put anything on it. And I've been playing through old

Suikoden games because, um, Sueikoden 1 and Sue I Coen, two. Both good answers here. But because I've played them so many times, I don't even have to think about them.

I can't complain. It's just mindless to me at the point, but they're really good. I realize that all of these are RPGs, because that's pretty much all that I play. Are you trying to say the word Sweiko, then? So I couldn't. As in like the Chinese or Japanese basis of like a

mythology. Yeah. I mean, those games are based on water margin, which is what you're referencing. Yeah, so it's pronounced Sweenectaden. Whatever. Got you back. Those games had no audio, okay, it doesn't help. I'll also say for you, like early 2000s, you know, just to make things more fair.

If we're going strict 90s, I really liked, a Half-Life 1 is obviously a really good one. Fucking, I think Populus or Populus, the like God game. Oh, fuck, I think I played that one. It's by the same guy who made black and white, right? Yeah, Peter Molineau. So we had... God, I had a friend that fucking literally put thousands of hours in black and white. And I just, I never got it.

Like, this isn't fun. I feel like this is going to be such a, like, Proustian reverie for so many people. Like, my family had a gateway PC in the house. I was one of those. I think it was our first PC. And it was like in a room. room in the house that like, okay,

like my sister would like look at stuff on the internet and like my brothers would as well. And like, I didn't really know how to play it, but I just thought it was really fun. Half-Life one. I played a lot of counterstrike like when I was a teenager. Oh, I played a fuck load of

counterstrike. Which technically doesn't count because it's 2000. Is it? Okay. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. I played a lot of StarCraft too. Diablo 2 was never really my jam. Never really liked it. Oh, I had my old shitty gateway computer and it came with, I don't know if it came with it, but we had like a CD with some games on it. And one of them was this really terrible surgery simulator that I'm pretty sure is

impossible to actually finish. Me and my brother and sister played a fuckload of that. Oh, actually. Killing our patients left and right. I have the ultimate answer. And Nate is going to be so annoyed that he's not here to talk about it. Age of Empires too. Yep. Yep. I was more of a total war guy. I was never an age of Empires guy I'm sure some of them were pre 2000

I don't know again I played all of these after the 90s as well yeah like if we're talking like early 2000s Halo 1 hit man blood money

which I think came out in 2004 I did a mad amount of land parties for Halo 1 the original ratchet and clank played that a lot

kind of right at the perfect age for that medieval, which I think maybe came out on the PS1. I think that was a PS1 game, yeah. So there's another 90s game. Star Ocean. I forgot about Star Ocean. I can't believe. I forgot Star Ocean. Great. There was a fighting game from like back in the day that I used to play with my cousin all

the time that I have never been able to find the name of. And one thing I can remember is one of the characters. So it was like a 3D kind of arena fighting game. And one of the characters was like a guy in kind of like a spaceship thing that would have this kamikaze move where he would fly up into the air and then like drop straight down vertically. I don't remember that. If someone knows what it is, please

let me know because I've been thinking about this game for decades at this point. You've all been given a mission if you choose to accept. Also like I suppose like the early Tekans was really kind of my jam. I remember when I distinctly remember when the PS2 came out

and my brother had just gotten a job and stupidly spent all of his money on a PS2 and I think it was time crisis and he had the guns and I just remember I distinctly remember the sound of like being in the hall being in the hallway like going to the kitchen and like he was in the sitting room in front of the TV

and hearing the clicking. Yep, yep. I definitely played that one in arcades a lot because I am old enough to have gone to a lot of arcades. Still do. Anytime I see it in an arcade I always play it. I was ever a fighting game guy. I blame that on having older brother that when I was better at him in all video games. And then it becomes a real life fighting game.

Yes. Yeah. He's like, oh yeah. Call me an F slur and then punch me in the side of the head. Yeah. I mean, like I,

most of the games I played in the early 2000s because I was like under 10. There was a game called TAC as well, probably very insensitive for Pacific Island cultures right now. That game in retrospect, but most games to be fair. Probably made by Peter Malenew as well. But yeah, I only really started like playing games that I got myself on the 360. So I think my first real system that I bought for myself was a was a Nintendo DS.

And I bought it because I got a part time job and some extracurricular activities that allowed me enough cash to buy one. And that was before I joined the Army. So it was the really big DS. And then when I was in the Army, literally my first purchase was a PS2. That is such a, I joined the army in the early 2000s purchase. Yep. Yep. Like, I thought it was a lot of money and it wasn't.

Because I had never had more than like $150 at a time through activities. And, you know, I played a PlayStation 1 because my mom remarried and my new step sister had a PS1. And I stole that motherfucker. Like, she never played it. So like, and this was the air of like going and renting video games, right? So I would go and you could rent like I rented Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9. That's how I beat all of them for like $2 for like several days. Now just keep re-renting them until I beat them.

You were doing childhood Maoism. You're expropriating your stepsisters PS. Hey, she never used it. And he only had custody every other weekend and the PS1 was at our house. Or actually probably more accurately rather an expropriation, you're doing Maoist fenshen on your own family. Hey, if it makes anybody feel better, she ended up becoming an absolute racist psycho. So stealing her PS1, it turns out was the right thing for me to do when I was like 11 or whatever. There you go.

But Tom, I believe that's a podcast. You host other podcasts? Plug those podcasts. Yeah, I am the co-host and producer of Beneath Skin show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. And I am also the producer for Bloodworth. a show about the economy of violence and about posting guns online. This is the only thing I got. Thank you for listening to it.

I've already gave you my pitch. Also consider leaving us a review on wherever you listen to a podcast. It helps us immensely when we're plotting out our next live shows because the club promoters actually look at those things to see if we're even worth renting the space to. So the more of those we have,

good ones. If it's not a five-star rating, just keep it to yourself. It helps us a lot. And until next time, get shot in the head with an arrow and then save your life by getting shot in the exact same place again with a handgun. And we'll talk to you next time.