Happy Birthday, Buffalo Bill. Born February 26, 1846, he’d be 159 years old today. He has been an iconic figure of the expansion west in the United States. Politicians and historians needed a rationalization for the genocide of native Americans and the ecocide of the wildlife in which he took part. They called it Manifest Destiny.
Manifest Destiny – The 19th-century doctrine that the United States had the right and duty to expand throughout the North American continent.