144 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
goods over long stretches of water or sparsely populated lands to
their destinations. The merchants' sources of commodities in re
mote regions were the nearby small farmers, loggers, trappers, and
specialists such as woodworkers and metalsmiths. The commodities
were then sent to industrial centers for credit against which money
could be drawn. Thus, in the absence of a system of indirect credit,
merchants could acquire scarce currency for the purchase of for
eign goods. The merchant, thereby, became the dominant source of
credit for the small operator as well as for the local capitalist. Mer
cantile capitalism thrived in colonial areas, with many of the first
merchant houses originating in the Levant among Syrians (Leba
nese) and Jews. Even as mercantile capitalism waned in the twenti
eth century, it left its mark on Native reservations where the people
relied on trading posts for credit, a market for their products, and
commodities of all kinds-an opportunity for super-exploitation.
Merchants and traders, often by intermarrying Indigenous women,
also came to dominate Native governance on some reservations.23
As noted above, at the end of the Civil War the US Army hardly
missed a beat before the war "to win the West" began in full force.
As a far more advanced killing machine and with seasoned troops,
the army began the slaughter of people, buffalo, and the land itself,
destroying the natural tall grasses of the plains and planting short
grasses for cattle, eventually leading to the loss of the topsoil four
decades later. William Tecumseh Sherman came out of the Civil War
a major general and soon commanded the US Army, replacing war
hero Ulysses S. Grant when Grant became president in 1869. As
commanding general through 1883, Sherman was responsible for the
genocidal wars against the resistant Indigenous nations of the West.
Sherman's family was among the first generation of settlers who
rushed to the Ohio Valley region after the total war that drove the
people of the Shawnee Nation out of their homes, towns, and fa rms.
Sherman's father gave his son the trophy name Te cumseh after the
Shawnee leader who was killed by the US Army. The general had
been a successful lawyer and banker in San Francisco and New York
before he turned to a military career. During the Civil War, most fa
mously in the siege of Atlanta, he made his mark as a proponent and
practitioner of total war, scorched-earth campaigns against civil-