Respond to these 2 classmates post

I need an explanation for this History question to help me study.

Respond to these 2 classmates posts it is not a critique of their post however putting your input and more knowledge

post 1 Skylar Pogue posted Jul 30, 2020 6:48 PM

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Deduce what is meant by the sentence, “The willingness of the federal and territorial officials to commit themselves to such an expense, not to mention the cost in lives and property, demonstrated clearly their preferred solution to the ‘Indian problem.’”

To me this clearly means that no matter the amount of lives that were lost, the government would obtain more land and solve their “Indian problem” by killing or removing Indians from their lands. We saw that cost was no issue when President Lincoln promised 2 million dollars to move all Indians from Minnesota. This is not the first nor only time millions have been spent to kill or remove natives, if we look back at the beginning of this module, the State of California paid roughly 1.7 million for the scalps of murdered natives. Money wasn’t only paid to those who killed or removed the Indians but it was also paid to those who went out killing Indians main food source, the bison, saying “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

Blakemore, Erin. “California’s Little-Known Genocide.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 16 Nov. 2017, www.history.com/news/californias-little-known-genocide.

Post 2

Tatiana D’Angelo posted Jul 30, 2020 9:22 PM

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Deduce what is meant by the sentence, “The willingness of the federal and territorial officials to commit themselves to such an expense, not to mention the cost in lives and property, demonstrated clearly their preferred solution to the ‘Indian problem.’”

When I read this sentence I picture an educated, rational minded person but most likely man at the time trying to possibly lay out some ideas how to handle the Indian situation. But looking through some of the reports and descriptions of what had transpired between the Indians and the local government “state” and the federal representation “Washington” was very obvious on where there option actually stood. So the not so mildly sarcastic statement that I see was there to basically say that those people made there decision on how they were going to handle the “Indian problem”.

Phippen, J. Weston. ‘Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone’. 18 Nov. 2019, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/.

Townsend, Kenneth William. First Americans: a History of Native Peoples. Second ed., Routledge, 2019.