An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

US Triumphalism and Peacetime Colonialism 165

and wanted one of our young men to drink, but he would

not, and turned to go away, and the soldier shot at him. Be­

fore the soldiers came along we had good health; but once the

soldiers come along they go to my squaws and want to sleep

with them, and the squaws being hungry will sleep with them

in order to get something to eat, and will get a bad disease,

and then the squaws turn to their husbands and give them the

bad disease. 5

As related in chapter 8, Miles had also led the army's pursuit of
Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce as they sought to escape to Canada,
and in 1886 Miles took charge of the War Department's efforts to
capture Geronimo, commanding five thousand soldiers, a third of the
army's combat force, along with five hundred Apache scouts forced
into service and thousands of volunteer settler militiamen. In 1898,
now general in chief of the army, Miles personally commanded the
army forces that seized Puerto Rico. Miles's second in command,
General Wesley E. Merritt, was assigned to head the military inva­
sion of the Philippines. He had served under Custer, fighting Sioux
and Cheyenne resistance. Commanding the army occupation of the
Philippines was General Henry W. Lawton, to whom Geronimo had
turned himself in, making Lawton an instant hero for "capturing"
Geronimo. Lawton had led troops in Cuba before going to the Phil­
ippines. Ironically, Filipino insurgents under the leadership of a man
named Geronimo killed Lawton in an attack. What these US officers
had learned in counterinsurgency warfare in North America they
applied against the Filipinos. Yo unger officers would apply lessons
learned in the Philippines to future imperial ventures, or in at least
one case, pass them to a son. General Arthur MacArthur, father of
World War II general Douglas MacArthur, chased Filipino guerrilla
leader Emilio Aguinaldo, finally capturing him. 6
By this time, Theodore Roosevelt was president. His corporate­
friendly militarism, particularly his rapid development of the navy
and his carefully staged performance as leader of the Rough Riders
militia in Cuba, brought him to the presidency. He was popular with
both settlers and big business. Roosevelt referred to Aguinaldo as
a "renegade Pawnee" and observed that Filipinos did not have the