Facts from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Part 2

Regular readers are watching me attempt to synthesize two books in real time, while having a life. I apologize.  

In the meantime, here are some more interesting facts from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States that are somewhat tangential to the main points of the book. (Following from Facts, Part 1.)

• St. Louis really was considered the gateway to the west for quite a while. It was effectively the last city before the frontier in the early part of the 1800s, and therefore a center for trading and commerce, as well as shipping, given its location on the Mississippi near the Missouri River. The Gateway Arch National Park (formerly called the Jefferson National Expansion Park) was renamed in 2018. It contains a museum that formerly played up Westward Expansion, but which now interrogates Manifest Destiny.
  
• At the beginning of the Civil War, 23 million people lived in the North, and only 9 million in the South. Of those 9 million, more than 3 million were enslaved. (Assuming about half of the 6 million remainder were women, the Confederacy was at an extreme disadvantage when it came to potential soldiers.) Despite that, 286 of the 1000+ Army officer corps left the Army for the Confederacy, including 3 of the 7 department commanders. (p. 133)
• Dunbar-Ortiz made me think about the U.S. territories where we didn't wipe out the existing populations, and therefore have not admitted them as states, keeping them from having full rights. I've written about this before in reference to the Supreme Court and The Insular Cases. We have a divine responsibility to control the world, essentially (p. 163). 
• During the Spanish American War, "20 percent of the Philippine population died, mostly civilians, as a result of the US Army's scorched-earth strategy (food deprivation, targeting civilians for killing, and so on) and displacement" (p. 166). What a splendid little war.
  
• The 1973 siege of Wounded Knee took place on the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre. Newspaper coverage of Wounded Knee, with reference to the 1890 slaughter at Wounded Knee, was right next to photos of My Lai. At that time, William Calley was under house arrest at Fort Benning* in officers' quarters. He was pardoned by Richard Nixon the next year. 

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*Fort Benning, I was not surprised to learn, was named for a Confederate general, one who ardently believed in enslavement and that state supreme courts were able to decide legality separate from the U.S. Supreme Court — well before the Civil War. Benning was an active secessionist, not just a member of the military who felt he needed to defend his state, as is sometimes the excuse for other Southern military leaders. In 2020, Fort Benning was renamed for the 20th century General Hal Moore and Julia Compton Moore, the first U.S. military installation to be named for a couple.