An entertaining post—but weak in analogy to today. You write as if your audience is uninformed as to events in the west. Sandy Creek? Where did the war council take place subsequent? What was the result?
Sure natives were abused, murdered, and treaty after treaty violated. They were also savages, scalping their own at regular intervals, not just whitey. Taking the lives of innocent on both sides.
World opinion is only a secondary issue—we must act in the best interest of our nation and for our survival. Making nice is sweet, but often unattainable—often just an appeasement and is crafted as part of the careful workings of our enemies.
The point I was trying to make was that what those irregulars did was miniscule in comparison to what the Indians were doing and lesser yet in comparison to the carnage in the East. You could even half-way justify it.
It was abnormal but it is what most in the world and probably most in the United States believe our Indian Policy was. In the roughly 100 years of our Indian wars the military killed somewhere between a low estimate of 5,000 Indians and a high estimate of 20,000. 50 per year up to 200 per year. And most of those were from punative missions.
We did not slaughter Indians as a matter of policy and we did not defile the corpses yet that is the image that the world has, largely because of this one incident.