Whites
With few exceptions, every white person he encountered at the outpost was a bloodthirsty, conniving lowlife. Was this true to the book?
shareAside from Lieutenant Elgin, yes. War made them desperate.
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I imagine you grew up with the benefits of civilization, such as it may be. So did I. Try not to judge our ancestors too harshly. It does no good. There were saints and devils among both the whites and the various peoples they displaced. If anything, it was nature that destroyed the American Indian. They simply were not biologically suited to withstand the introduction of diseases from a denser human population. The native peoples of North and South America derived from a VERY small number of predecessors that crossed from Asia long ago. Their gene pool was simply not robust enough for them to survive when the European colonists arrived, without the benefit of much more advanced medicinal knowledge. Whether or not the Whites were aggressive in their conquests (which they often were), the American Indian was simply not capable of surviving the impending globalization. Nobody's fault. That's just life.
In a setting like the Civil War, high-quality, effective troops were needed in the East to fight the battles that preserved the Union. Troops sent to Frontier stations during the war were indeed likely to be the stupid, the cowardly, the second or third rate trouble-makers, the malingerers and "stockade rats" and other ineffective or inefficient dregs. No surprise to see this depicted in the film.
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
What you say makes sense. But to the OP's original statement, it was sort of necessary to the plot line of having Dunbar go 100% "injun" by having vacuous whites lacking in ethics or compassion get systematically butchered. Because of the contrast in the character of the soldiers vs the Sioux, you feel no remorse over their deaths, brutal though they were.
Put another way, if they were all upstanding men of virtue, it wouldn't have been necessary for the Sioux to rescue Dunbar, and a plot device would be lost.
Still, it seems to be the Hollywood norm these days that only white men can be completely evil without hope of redemption.
Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. H.L. Mencken
Dunbar had his fill of war, and upon getting his choice of assignment, seemed to choose the area furthest away from conflict. While he stood a very good chance of being attacked and killed by Indians, he stood an even greater chance of being killed by whites. Either way, it seems he desired peace, and was in love with the idea of seeing the frontier, and did an outstanding job cleaning up Fort Sedgewick upon seeing the land trashed by those before him. When loneliness set in, as he grew to love his new friends, and with no clear sign of/when he would be relieved, he moved on.
shareWe were told in history that Native Americans are from those that crossed the Bering Strait over to Alaska on down thousands of years ago. If that's the case, then why do most Native coastal Alaskans today look Asian as do most of the ones from the interior, but Native Americans on the mainland don't? I think the good ole US of A was inhabited by these people from the beginning.
And yes, nasty-ass, unhygienic, hairy white people spread their filth to them. Indians were all type O blood unless they were Alaska Native or Blackfeet. Type O's had the worst immunity for killer diseases,
but type A's, which was mostly a white person's blood type, had much better immunity for living in dense populations.
WHAT white folks did he meet once he got there??? There is no timeline BUT I figure he was at his POST 4-6 months before the other soldiers showed up because they had NOT heard from the outpost for so long
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