Not because it produced a happy ending — it did not.

But because it demonstrates, with unusual clarity, what was possible when a determined and capable Indigenous coalition was led by effective leaders, pursued a coherent strategy, and faced an opponent whose commitment to the specific objective at stake was limited.

The war that most Americans have never been taught reveals something important about the nature of American expansion and Indigenous resistance: it was not the inevitable victory of a superior civilization over a primitive one.

It was a contest between real peoples with real interests, pursued with skill and ferocity on both sides, whose outcome was determined by the specific military, political, and economic factors at stake in each specific conflict.