The West (film) Quotes

“Wikipedia: The West (film)”

“When I was a boy, the Lakota owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land. They sent 10,000 men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?”

“Then, Lee shook hands with his executioners, handed his hat and overcoat to a friend. His last words were to the firing squad: "Center my heart boys," he said. "Don't mangle my body."”

“Fearful that Sitting Bull would elude him, Custer pushed his column hard -- 12 miles the first day, 33 the second, 28 the third. The exhausted troopers began to grumble about the man they privately called "Hard Ass."”

“Listen to me carefully and truthfully follow up my instructions. You chiefs are peacemakers. Though your son might be killed in front of your tepee, you should take a peace pipe and smoke. Then you would be an honest chief.”

“He [Custer] knew nothing of the terrain, could not tell how many Indians awaited him. But it had been a surprise attack that had allowed him to destroy Black Kettle's Cheyenne on the Washita eight years earlier. A victory here seemed just as likely.”

“The shots quit coming from the soldiers. Warriors who had crept close to them began to call out that all of the white men were dead...All of the Indians were saying these soldiers also went crazy and killed themselves. I do not know. I could not see them. But I believe they did so.”

“May 14, 1876. General George A. Custer, dressed in a dashing suit of buckskin, is prominent everywhere...The General is full of perfect readiness for a fray with the hostile red devils, and woe to the body of scalp-lifters that comes within reach of himself and his brave companions in arms.”

“Do not misunderstand me, but understand me fully and my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I choose. The one who has a right to dispose of it is the one who has created it. I claim a right to live on my land and accord you the privilege to live on yours.”

“It is a dream. It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have dreamed. It's a dream landscape. To the Native American, it's full of sacred realities: powerful things. It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.”

“Americans aren't wrong in seeing the West as a land of the future, a land in which astonishing things are possible. What they often are wrong about is that there's no price to be paid for that, that everybody can succeed, or that even what succeeds is necessarily the best for all concerned. The West is much more complicated than that.”

“For the first time in the history of the United States, the government decided to exclude a group of immigrants on the basis of race. And it set a precedent, because for the first time you have this new thinking introduced. We can not only determine who could become citizens in this country, but we could determine who could come to this country.”

“The American realizes that progress is God...[the] destiny of the American people, is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean...to change darkness into light...[and] confirm the destiny of the human race...Divine task! Immortal mission! The pioneer army perpetually strikes to the front. Empire plants itself upon the trails.”

“In California, Chung Sun set sail for home: "I hope you will pardon my expressing a painful disappointment. The ill treatment of my... [my] countrymen may perhaps be excused on the grounds of race, color, language and religion, but such prejudice can only prevail among the ignorant. In civility... [Americans] are very properly styled barbarians. -Chung Sun"”

“The first white men of your people who came to our country were named Lewis and Clark. All the Nez Perce made friends with Lewis and Clark, and agreed to let them pass through their country, and never to make war on white men. This promise, the Nez Perce have never broken. It has always been the pride of the Nez Perce that they were the friends of the white man.”

“It is told around for a fact that I could tell great confessions and bring in Brigham Young and the heads of the church...[But] I will not be the means of bringing troubles on my people, for...this people is a misrepresented and cried-down community. [Yes, a people scattered and peeled...] and if at last they did rise up and shed the blood of their enemies, I won’t consent to give'em up.”

“June 21, 1876. I now have some Crow scouts with me. They are magnificent-looking men, so much handsomer and more Indian-like than any we have ever seen, and jolly and sportive; nothing of the gloomy, silent red-man about them....they said they [had] heard that I never abandoned a trail; that when my food gave out I ate mule. That was the kind of man they wanted to fight under; they were willing to eat mule, too.”

“As they followed the Indians' trail, they did not grasp the full meaning of the fresh pony tracks that seemed to cross and re-cross it. In the last few days, 3,000 more Indians -- Lakotas, Arapahoes and Cheyennes -- had left the reservations to join Sitting Bull. His encampment now stretched out for three miles along the Greasy Grass, a gathering of more than six thousand Indians: eighteen hundred of them warriors.”

“And I think a decision was made, Well, if we sacrifice Lee, maybe the pressures will go away, because at the second trial, the word was sent down to the Mormons that this had to be completed, and that they should vote for conviction. He [Lee] was singled out as the perpetrator, and the Mormons even put it in their Sunday school lessons -- which bothered my family for a long time -- and he was in effect the scapegoat.”

“Custer had never yet encountered an Indian band that wouldn't run when the cavalry attacked. So he pushed to an attack as quickly as it could be mounted -- a dreadful mistake on his part because his men were exhausted. He should have bivouacked, given them a night's sleep, sent out some scouts to find out how far that village extends in this direction and that, because much of it was hidden by woods along the Little Bighorn.”