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Showing posts from December, 2013

Red Stick Creek War of 1813-1814 & the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, March 1814

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The Second Anglo-American War, more commonly known as the War of 1812, (1812-1815), was fought throughout North America between Great Britain and her Native American Indian allies and the United States of America and its Native American allies. Even though the War of 1812 was predominantly a war between Great Britain and the United States in the context of the greater Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), it was also one of the first great “Indian Wars” of post-Revolutionary American history. Through a military allegiance with the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh (b.1768-1813) a large struggle between the native peoples of North America (Great Britain’s 1812 Allies) and the young American inhabitants (settlers and military men) who now controlled the territorial destiny of the expanding United States of America began in 1811. By the conclusion of the War of 1812 with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814-1815, US army and state militias had engaged Native American warriors from Canada to Ohio, Tennessee, and

Battle of the Paper Bridge 1883: The Tonkin Campaign and Black Flag Army of Vietnam

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On 19 May 1883, the Battle of the Paper Bridge (Cầu Giấy, Hanoi) was fought between a French column led by Commandant Henri Rivière (b.1827-1883) and the Black Flag Army led by Liu Yongfu (b.1837-1917), a southern Han Chinese bandit, mercenary-soldier, and revolutionary. The Black Flag army ended Rivière’s expedition into the Tonkin (North Vietnam), then a tributary state of the Qing Empire (China and it Imperial provinces, 1644-1912) with a stunning ambush near what was called the Paper Bridge (Pont du Papier) outside modern day Hanoi in Vietnam. Background France’s early campaigns fought in Northern Vietnam from 1881-1889 form just the tail-end of a greater narrative of Franco-Vietnamese and Franco-Sino (Chinese) conflict for control over the Tonkin (Tonquin or Tongkin) province of North Vietnam. The Battle of the Paper Bridge (Cầu Giấy) in 1883 was arguably the first major conflict in France’s commitment to conquer and pacify what became Vietnam and French Indochina (1896-1954). The