For Indians, defeat in the face of American Progress and Manifest Destiny was supposed to be a foregone conclusion.

In John Gast’s iconic 1872 painting “American Progress,” a youthful blonde woman clutching a schoolbook in her right hand and laying down telegraph wire with her left shepherds prospectors, farmers, and settlers westward as tribes and wildlife flee before her advance.

In the more familiar Spaghetti Western version of the same tale, Indians rise up out of the wilderness, put up a fierce but ultimately tragic fight, and then succumb to the inevitability of Cowboy Progress.