The Thanksgiving Day Informative Essay: The Thanksgiving Day Massacre

On the day of September 11, 1857, an emigrant party camped at Mountain Meadows was brutally killed by the Mormon militia aided by Indians. This essay examines two viewpoints regarding the massacre found in Sally Denton’s “American Massacre” and in “Massacre at Mountain Meadows” by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Turley.

President Harrison’s intended message in his “Report on Wounded Knee Massacre and the Decrease in Indian Land Acreage” is to ensure the people that the massacre was a self-defense act by the soldiers. He said that the natives were “naturally warlike and turbulent” which puts the blame on the massacre on the Natives. Modern American’s can learn a lot from the Wounded Knee Massacre. To Americans, the massacre represents the end of the Indian resistance. Although this massacre is usually not mentioned in history classes today is it defiantly something that should be remembered. American soldiers were violent towards the Indians. While men were trying to flee the American soldiers would shoot them in the back and let their bodies there to freeze.

This chapter provided information from the trial of Captain Thomas Preston. The chapter asked the question, “What really happened in the Boston Massacre”. Chapter four focused on the overall event of the Massacre and trying to determine if Captain Preston had given the order to fire at Boston citizens. The chapter provides background information and evidence from Preston’s trial to leave the reader answering the question the chapter presents. Although, after looking through all the witnesses’ testimonies some might sway in Captain Preston’s favor, just the way the grand jury did.

Intro: In 1789, President George Washington offered the first Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamation for the newly formed United States of America. His proclamation began "Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor - and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Americans celebrate false information about the spreading of culture, exploration by Europeans, and people who previously lived in the region. We have a holiday for a man who was very cruel because he started slavery, a period of genocide, and was racist. Finally we celebrate a man who used punishments like cutting of natives hands and noses, rape, and hunting dogs which eventually destroyed generations.

We as a people enjoy having our holidays off and it has been a recognized holiday since enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was celebrated in some aspect or another hundreds of years before then. We are celebrating a figure that has been romanticized about for so long even though the truth of the man is a very different story. If we dig further into the truth we will discover that it really makes no sense to why we have a day to celebrate this man. As a nation we may want to reconsider either a different celebration of this day or removing the holiday completely.

Many people think of the Civil War and America’s Indian wars as distinct subjects, one following the other. But those who study the Sand Creek Massacre know different. On Nov. 29, 1864, as Union armies fought through Virginia and Georgia, Col. John Chivington led some 700 cavalry troops in an unprovoked attack on peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers at Sand Creek in Colorado. They murdered nearly 200 women, children and older men. Sand Creek was one of many assaults on American Indians during the war, from Patrick Edward Connor’s massacre of Shoshone villagers along the Idaho-Utah border at Bear River on Jan. 29, 1863, to the forced removal and incarceration of thousands of Navajo people in 1864 known as the Long Walk. In terms of sheer

Although The Sand Creek Massacre is known for occurring on November 29, 1864 there are specific reasons this incident happened and they all take place before 1864. It all started during the 1850’s, where the the gold and silver rush brought many white settlers near the Rocky Mountains and the surrounding foothills. This event is known as the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush of 1658 which angered many people known as the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. They soon began attacking the white men which caused the number of soldier to decrease this then led to the Colorado War of 1863-1865.The battle began to get out of hand that territorial governor John Evans sent a Militia Commander known as John M. Chivington. Now this man was very well known for his passion of extinguishing all of the Indians once he was let in the clergy. The Civil War raged in the east in the spring of 1864 where Chivington launched a violent campaign against the Cheyenne and their allies. The troops attacked any and all Indians and their villages, but the Cheyenne were joined by Arapaho, Sioux, Comanche, and Kiowa in Colorado and Kansas, went on a defensive warpath. Evans and Chivington then raised the Third Colorado Cavalry which was a reinforced militia of short term volunteers who went by the name of “hundred Dazers.” It was a summer of scattered clashes and small raids, but the Cheyenne and Arapaho were finally ready for peace. The Indian representatives then met with Evans and Chevington on September 28, 1864 at

The Unredeemed Captain is the factual telling of the Deerfield Massacre and the ways it effected the Williams family who lost their daughter as a captive to the Bear tribe of the Mohawk Native Americans. The book deeply explores religion and how it relates to the ideas of savagery and family through comparison of experiences in the lives of the Puritans and the lives of the Native American captors.

Wilson reports that one of the most exceedingly awful abominations professedly committed against the African American soldiers happened at Fort Pillow, Tennessee on April 12, 1864, when the Confederate Army unpredictably murdered approximately three hundred black fighters. The fort, stormed by General Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops, had surrendered. General Nathan Bedford Forrest would later become an organizer of the Ku Klux Klan The Union Army claimed that the killing of the black soldiers was a massacre; yet, the Confederacy denied this claim, stating that the soldiers died in the fighting before the surrender. This massacre failed to weaken the courage of the black soldiers, but rather raised their determination and many black soldiers

The 1870’s and 1880’s in America was marked with growing nativism towards the Chinese, accumulating to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Yung 54). Competing immigrant laborers effected the entire country, including the Midwest, where people sought employment in coal mines. Animosity towards the Chinese was also largely uncontroversial in the territories, with the Wyoming Republican party declaring that the Chinese were an undesired group (Storti 98). There is no definitive date that hints at the beginning of the Rock Springs Massacre in 1885, where many Chinese miners were killed by white miners. However, origins of this conflict can be traced back to when the Chinese were first brought in as strikebreakers in 1875 unde the Union Pacific Coal

With that being said every American commemorates this holiday differently based on class, gender, and race. After the Decoration of Independence was signed America had its fair share of problems. These problems consisted of black equality, bankruptcies in the railroad and banking industries, and unemployment which led to a streaming line

On August 24th, 1572 approximately 7,000 protestants were murdered in France. This horrific event was named the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Marguerite de Valois, Queen Catherine de Medicis daughter was arranged to marry Henry of Navarre on August 18th. Marguerite and the rest of the Valois family were extremely Catholic while Henry was a Huguenot (Calvinist Protestants). This marriage was an attempt the break the religious tension and join together the religions in peace, or so they thought. The wedding was held in Paris, France and many Huguenot nobility attended. However, what seemed to be a happy and memorable occasion quickly resulted in a gruesome, and barbaric massacre that would be remembered forever.

Valentine’s Day, a day of expressing your love to others by chocolates and roses or a day to express your hate to someone by planning a massacre to scare your rival? On February 14 1929, gangs rivals Al Capone and Bugs Moran ended theirs with blood. It happened when Al Capone men went into Bugs Moran headquarters where they entered dressed in police officers uniforms and demanded for the place to be raid where as Bugs Moran’s men were then lined up in a white wall where the police officers would see their lifeless bodies full of bullets in the morning (This Day in History: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre). This will be cause of a rivalry against the two gangs.

On November 18, 1978, followers of Jim Jones shot and killed United States Congressman Leo J. Ryan and four others traveling with him on a fact finding trip to Guyana. Ryan was there to investigate complaints about the community called "Jonestown," which was largely inhabited by his former California constituents.