Thank you. Welcome back to 1001 Heroes, Legends, Histories, and Mysteries Podcast.

This is your host, John Haggardorn.

The real story of the taming of the American frontier,

from New England to California, is often hidden these days,

while much is being taught and written about the plight of America's indigenous peoples

and the shame of slavery.

Students of history are much more likely to know about the Trail of Tears, or the Battle of Wounded

Knee, and the massacre of innocent Indians, than they are to know the details of the Battle of Saratoga,

where the hundreds of stories of American frontiersmen and their families trying to survive in a very

hostile wilderness. A wilderness often made more hostile by British and French armies intent upon taking

the land for their own, and using Indians to do the dirty work, which they were only too glad

to do for guns, weapons, captives to torture and scalp, and whiskey. White British sympathizers

called loyalists did it for a chance at looting their colonial rebel neighbors, and the desire to come out

on what they felt was the winning side during the bloody American Revolution, which lasted

eight years in the more populated areas and longer in the wilderness. Indians did it because war was

all they knew. War made men out of boys, and that was their culture, and until the white man came,

war with each other was constant. They, both the Indians and the British and French, were to find

their match in the frontiersmen who came to build farms and towns in the wilderness, many of them

Scots, Irish, others mostly English at first, until the floodgates opened to Europeans.

These men and their families were independent thinkers, frontiersmen, and natural-born fighters.

None of them wanted a king, and none wanted to lose their scalps.

All they wanted was land the farm on and to raise families.

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