War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. your host, James Early. Hello and welcome to another special episode of Key Battles of American History.

This is your host, James Early.

As always, this is yet another episode in our series of episodes that have been commissioned by

members of Early's Raiders, my Patreon group that supports the podcast. This particular episode

was requested by Major Alex Calabrese, longtime support of the podcast, and it is on the Sioux Wars,

meaning the Indian tribe, the Sioux.

So again, this is a very high level, 10,000 foot level flyover, like I always do.

It won't be a very long episode.

This is like anything I do, you could do a whole series on this, but just going to give you the high points. Hopefully that'll

wet your appetite enough to do some more research and reading on your own. Now, I want to make one

thing clear up front. You always have to say this when you talk about Native Americans. I'm going to

use the terms Indians, Native Americans, indigenous peoples, maybe natives from time to time interchangeably.

I'm not placing any value on any of these terms. I'm not using any of these in a judgmental sense.

Just for variety's sake. All of them are used in scholarly literature even today. So just wanted to get that

away out of the way in advance. Okay, so let's talk

about this now. We're going to give a little bit of a background to general conflict between

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