[MacGyverGod]

Since I don't have permission to open up a topic in the characters subforum, I'll do it here.

I just read something about Indians in one of my history books that pinpoints something about Trail of Tears. Not sure if it's fully explained in the episode though but here it is below.

We all know that Standing Wolf gave Whitecloud the advice not to use violence but to count coups instead. Now in the history book it is said that heroic and brave deeds are registered on a coupstick of a warrior. In the book there's also an illustration of such a stick with a feathers on top.

Than there's a little text next to the illustration which reads:

"Honor by warfare

Though there were never any real wars between the tribes on the Great Plains, heroic deeds and expressions of bravery were very common. Honor was received by heroic deeds which was called counting coups (the word coups comes from the French word, hitting) and bravery was more appreciated than killing."

At the corner of the page there is a small map explaining where the Great Plains is located in the United States. Apparently the Great Plains is also known as the Great American Desert stretches from the Rio Grande in the south till the Saskatchewan-river in the north. The Rocky Mountains are the western border and another long mountain area is on the eastbound. The Great Plains is a giant plateau of semi-arid graslands. The Great Basin lays between the Sierra Nevada mountains and Wasatch Mountains just in the north of the Mojave Desert. The area exists of valleys in a desert-like land.

With this I dare to the conclude that Whitecloud's origins lays in the Rocky Mountains. The article itself clearly says counting coups happened on the Great Plains which are the Rocky Mountains. His tribe lived there, so I assume his family too, Standing Wolf and he himself as well maybe at one time. We'll never know for sure, there's very little known of Whitecloud.

Though this might be interesting to share and to have a little background info on Whitecloud and where 'counting coups' come from.

[KiwiTek]

Interesting.

[MacBeth]

It's actually 'counting coup', not coups. It has been and still is highly romanticized and exaggerated, like most of Native American culture. There was war, real war, between tribes: every tribal history includes information on which tribes were traditional enemies.

In particular, the various groups that make up the tribes who occupied the Great Plains at the time of white incursion had been pushed there, out of the wooded regions to the east, because they had lost wars with other tribes.

Although most Native mythologies declare that a given tribe had always been in its current location ('since the world began'), every tribe had, in fact, moved around at some point. And, of course, they are all descendants of tribal groups that migrated in 10 or 12 thousand years ago -- well before anyone else, but still first in line on the continent.

(Also, your textbook's description of the geography is, um, very bad. Speaking as someone who grew up in those parts and has traveled around them a fair amount. Plains aren't mountains; the Great Plains end, quite spectacularly, at the Rockies, when you suddenly start climbing uphill at a really sharp angle. The tribes that had mountain territory didn't migrate to the plains; the plains were settled from the east.)

However, there are multiple reliable sources that agree that counting coup did happen. It was not in place of war, but something that happened during war. If you could strike your enemy in a battle -- in other words, when people were fighting to the death -- and not kill him, that was a higher achievement than killing. It also told the enemy "You're not that tough; I won't even bother to kill you, because you're not enough of a threat. I'll let you live." If you did the same thing to the same person in subsequent battles, the prestige was even higher.