True Left

The bloody, brutal reality of The English’s frontier: ‘There were spasms of extraordinary violence’
...
In the show, “the English” doesn’t just mean the English. Rather, it’s a catch-all term for Europeans settling in the West (defined as anywhere west of the Mississippi River). Though the posho English settlers do play cricket at one point. “I’ve never seen anyone play cricket in a Western!” laughs Garrett-Davis.

It’s true that English aristocracy journeyed to the West as part of a Victorian fascination with Frontier America. In the series, Tom Hughes plays Thomas Trafford, a naïve, terrible-with-money milksop who’s shipped off to Wyoming to oversee business in the open range cattle industry. Trafford represents a point of historical fact: English aristocrats buying into the booming cattle business and sending younger sons to the West to keep them occupied (though the beef boom soon bottomed out). Like the cricketers in The English, they also brought Englishmen’s games to the prairies: they played tennis and set up a steeplechase course.
...
The English is a reckoning with the destruction, dispossession, and displacement of the Native peoples. In the series, one Wyoming town – one of those half-finished towns you see in most Westerns – is quite literally built on dead Native Americans.

The 1890 setting is also significant for being the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre. At Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890, members of the 7th Cavalry Regiment killed 300 men, women, and children from the Lakota people.
...
It was also ultimately a massacre of a religious movement, the Ghost Dance, which had swept through the Native peoples. The Ghost Dance was a circular, ceremonial dance that arose in response to the Natives’ treatment at the hands of whites – a spiritual call to return dead Indians, oust the white man, and restore their lands. White Americans were alarmed – some said the Ghost Dance was a prelude to attack. The “Ghost Dancers” are referenced in The English. “Dancing Indians? That’s something to be afraid of?” says Emily Blunt’s Cornelia. “It is when they stop,” responds Ciarán Hinds’ oddball baddie.
...
Native people are forced to the edges of the white man’s world: hunted down or beaten for wandering into the wrong territory; or forced into servitude. “You wanna survive in a white man’s world, you have to become one,” says one character. “Simple as that.”

“The army’s stated goal by the late 19th Century is to get Native people on reservations – to clear land for white Americans for the range cattle industry,” says Graybill. “Ultimately, this job was left more to missionaries than the federal government, to ‘missionize’ and ‘civilise’ Native peoples – to force them to assimilate. That’s the real goal.”
...
the influx of white Americans looking to displace Native peoples from their land, also opening up territory for ranching and mining, does cause a lot of violence between US Federal troops and Native peoples. The high watermark of that is the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 [in which 230 from Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples were slaughtered]. There were spasms of extraordinary violence against Native peoples up until 1890.
...
Violence between Frontier Americans has been mythologised in sheriff vs outlaw quick-fire shootouts.
...
Graybill references the historian Robert R Dykstra. “He spent a lot of time convincingly debunking the idea that these towns were just infused with violence,” says Graybill. “Maybe because of the relatively thin populations, these murder rates per capita seemed high. But in terms of gross overall numbers, really not so much.”

The real violence, says Graybill, was between federal troops or settlers and Native peoples.