Desperate to find the gold Columbus had assumed was hidden on the island to pay back his investors, he ordered all Indians to produce a certain amount of gold every three months in return for a copper token they were forced to hang from their necks. Any Indian subsequently found without such a token would have his hands cut off and be left to bleed to death. Unfortunately for the Indians, Columbus was wrong about the gold deposits he expected to find; as a result, most of the Indians were simply hunted down with dogs and murdered after failing to meet their gold quotas.
In the American West, the situation was just as bad and equally obscured in modern-day historical references. Generally, American history of the settlement of the Western Territories focuses on the hardships encountered by the Settlers and of their skirmishes with American Indians. Moreover, most of those encounters are portrayed as unprovoked attacks by savage Indian marauders who killed innocent white families. I truth, such encounters did...
Most importantly, while we recognize individuals like Adolph Hitler (for example) as modern-day criminals of monstrous proportions, we still regard Columbus as a hero commemorated by parades every year with virtually no awareness of the magnitude of the atrocities that he and his contemporaries perpetrated on innocent peoples.
