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Indian wars between the European settlers and the North American Indians took place between 1607 and 1890. The most important ones took place before 1700,

Colonial era[edit]

Indian methods of warfare[edit]

Weapons: Bow and Arrow vs Musket[edit]

The Indian bow and arrow and tomahawk represented stone age technology, and were inferior to the European musket and sword, not to mention the cannon. True, arrows worked in wet weather when muskets did not, but they were designed to kill game, not humans (who learned to duck). Arrows lacked range and killing power, especially in the dense forest, or when the colonials wore thick leather jackets. (Armor was even better protection, but it was much too cumbersome.) In the frequent wars between Indian tribes, the primary killing devices were tomahawks and war clubs, but given the long-range of the firearms wielded by the whites, the Indians were forced to use their arrows. The various tribes differed greatly in the effectiveness of their bow and arrow equipment and tactics. The northeastern Indians tended to fire at long distance, which made their arrows easy to dodge and of little striking power when they landed. The Europeans had long before abandoned arrows, finding it was much easier to teach men to shoot muskets, and much easier to fire devastating volleys. Benjamin Franklin's suggestion, made during the American Revolution when gunpowder was in short supply, that bows and arrows be tried was politely ignored. The Indians quickly recognized muskets were a superior weapon, but were never able to make their own. The colonists imported their muskets and gunpowder from Europe, and cast their own lead bullets. The colonists traded muskets, powder and bullets to selected tribes, but never artillery. The Indians never used bayonets, were careless with their equipment, and rarely were able to repair their muskets by themselves. Colonists tried to keep Indians from learning gun-smithing and usually succeeded

There is debate whether the Indians would have been more formidable had they stuck with their traditional weapons—but the Indians themselves had made the transition to the new weaponry by about 1730. By 1740 some tribes had acquired horses, but mounted warfare was not common until the trans-Mississippi Indian wars of the mid-19th century. The Indians retained their traditional military organization because it was congruent with their social system. They never drilled or marched, had at most a rudimentary hierarchy of rank, and in battle usually fought as individuals rather than as teams.

Indian Tactics[edit]

The Indians partly overcame their weapon problem with tactics well suited to the environment. They moved in small scattered groups, not neat geometric formations. They tried to surprise and surround their foe. When hard pressed they quickly retreated, ready to return later. Their superior woodcraft skills allowed them to stalk, ambush and envelop. They traveled light and fast. "They approach like foxes, fight like lions and disappear like birds," marveled one Frenchman. Surprise was a necessary tactic, for their loose social organization undercut their ability to handle group maneuvers or frontal assaults. The usual targets were small traveling parties, isolated homesteads, small settlements, or encampments of enemy tribes.

Colonial Defense[edit]

By the 1760s, after gaining a vast numerical superiority, the colonies finally set up a network of frontier forts from Maine to Virginia manned by militia. Throughout the 18th century whites beyond the forts built blockhouses to which nearby families could flee and defend themselves for days at a time. In 1774-1784, the "bluegrass" region of Kentucky was settled around nuclei of powerfully built blockhouses. Abraham Lincoln's grandfather was ambushed and scalped near the one at Louisville.

Braddock’s Defeat in 1755[edit]

With luck, the Indians could ambush and destroy an entire European army. In 1755, early in the Seven Years' War, Major General Edward Braddock (and his aide young Lt. Colonel George Washington) led 1,400 British regulars and 450 American volunteers into the forest. Braddock's mission was to capture the strategic French stronghold of Fort Duquesne (modern Pittsburgh). Lacking Indian allies, he marched blindly into 250 French regulars and militia, and 650 Indians. The Indians seized the high ground; shooting muskets from behind trees, they surrounded the panicky British regulars. Braddock's artillery was captured; he was killed. Three fourths of his 86 officers were casualties, together with two-thirds of the 1,373 27 enlisted men in action. (The enemy lost only 23 dead and 16 wounded.)

Tactical responses[edit]

Slowly the whites learned to stalk in the woods, though never as well as the Indians. They also discovered weak points in the Indians tactics, such as an unwillingness to campaign in winter, or fight at night, or sustain a long siege. The Indians lacked wagons, sailing ships, arsenals, forges, factories, warehouses, and money. On the other hand, tribes could put all their men in the field. The Iroquois of New York (allied to the British) had only 1,000 to 2,000 braves, but that was as many fighters as Massachusetts managed to turn out when it had a total population of 200,000 during the 1760s. The various Indian tribes were always comprised of independent bands; it was hard to unite an entire tribe, let alone form a durable alliance with other tribes. There were always Indians willing to switch to the other side. By contrast, the colonists had a formal system of government that worked well: the command structure was reasonably clear-cut, with treason rare and insubordination uncommon.

French support and leadership of Indians[edit]

The French had an even better command system, for they had militarized Canada and most of the settlers were well-trained, experienced retired regulars. However, the British colonialists outnumbered the French Canadians by a factor of 10 to 1 by 1689, when the international wars began. The French therefore had to depend more heavily on their Indian allies than the British did. Since the French were less racist, more willing to intermarry, and more eager to Christianize the Indians, they normally had better relations. The French successfully incorporated Indians into their war parties. The British complained about Indians' unreliability and lack of battle discipline, and used them primarily as scouts.

Any Indian tribe wishing to maintain a military capability had to ally itself to a European power. Such an alliance meant political subservience—independence was quite impossible for the Indians. Spain did not provide guns to the Indians on their Florida missions. As a result, nearly all of them (perhaps 12,000) were killed or enslaved by expeditions between 1700 and 1708 of Carolinians and their Creek allies.^[1]

From the white perspective, alliances were needed to neutralize the Indian advantage in forest fighting. The colonists outnumbered the nearby Indian tribes by the 1650s, but the farming settlements were not nearly as well mobilized as warrior tribes. Hence colonists formed alliances with friendly Indian tribes, giving them gifts (blankets, baubles and tools), muskets and ammunition, and liquor. In return Indians would alert the whites to threatened dangers, provide scouts in military expeditions, and, occasionally, fight side by side with the whites. The colonists felt the Indians were fickle allies, switching sides from time to time or melting away when the action became hot.

Food as a Weapon of War[edit]

In Europe wars were won by defeating the enemy army and leaving enemy civilians alone; it was well known that an army that started to destroy or loot property had lost its discipline. The Indians, short of manpower, refused to fight pitched battles. To break the Indians' will to fight the colonists attacked their villages. A typical village was surrounded by a palisade or fence of pointed logs, and contained rows of wigwams or longhouses. Burning it down had little effect, since it was easy to rebuild. Surprising it full of people was difficult after the Indians learned what happened to the Pequots at Mystic. The sure way to defeat the Indians was to destroy their winter food. The economy of the northeastern Indians involved a mix of hunting and farming. In spring a band would plant corn, beans and squash; during the summer, it would fish and hunt. The crops were harvested in the fall, and stored for the winter when hunting was less productive. Burning the growing crops would threaten the very survival of the band. Its only chances were to seek aid from other Indians, raid white settlements, or flee back to Canada where the French might help.

Quest for American Supremacy: Destroying the Pequots, 1637[edit]

see Pequot War

The elaborate European rituals of capitulation, parole and ransom were followed when white fought white, but not when Indians were involved. Both sides used systematic massacre as a standard tactic, even after surrenders. There were no "innocent civilians" on the frontier. The reason was that peoples were fighting each other for survival, not to help some governments gain some diplomatic leverage. More important than particular massacres was the determination to win a total victory over the enemy. The Indians sometimes achieved this, as when the Iroquois, armed with Dutch firearms, virtually exterminated 20,000 Huron Indians in Canada and New York in the 1640s and 1650s. Of more direct relevance to the American way of warfare was the Puritan experience in New England. In 1637 Puritans were enraged when the Pequot Indians refused to acknowledge British sovereignty, and then scalped thirty settlers. Captain John Mason with 40 militia (and some Narragansett allies) surprised the Pequots at Mystic River in Connecticut. They burned the town and killed nearly every inhabitant. The remaining Pequots were hunted down and given as slaves to the Indian allies, or sold into brutal slavery in the West Indies. The Pequots thought of warfare as a small-scale calculus of feuds and revenge. They never realized that the Europeans used warfare to control the whole destinies of peoples and continents Once aroused, the Puritans mobilized all their resources and made sure they struck first. The first principles of sovereignty to the European mind were that only the state was allowed to use violence, and that all groups living in a specified territory had to acknowledge the authority of the government. Anyone who could not abide these rules had to be destroyed. Puritans were grim soldiers who believed fervently that God was behind them. They saw the "savages" as heathens outside God's protection—their warpaint, stone age culture, and casual use of torture indicated they were at best tools of the devil, and at worst wild animals. "They act like wolves and are to be dealt withall as wolves," pronounced the Rev. Solomon Stoddard.

Alliances and counterattacks[edit]

After a decade or two of dependence on white gifts, guns alcohol and trade, the Indians discovered they could not easily break away or return to their old ways. From time to time an Indian leader would launch a religious crusade against the corruption of traditional ways that white contact involved. The crusade, or "revitalization" movement, led to calls for a pan- Indian revolt against the white threat. King Philip's' War (1675–77) in New England was an early example. In the South revitalization motivated the Tuscaroras to attack the Carolina frontier in 1711. The whites, with the assistance of the Yamasee Indians, crushed the Tuscaroras, who then fled north to New York.^[2]

The French occasionally engaged in wars of annihilation with Indians. In Wisconsin, the Fox Indians tried to eliminate the French, but were themselves wiped out in 1730. In 1729 the Natchez Indians killed 200 French colonists on the lower Mississippi. With Choctaw help, the French systematically hunted the Natchez down, selling the captives to slave traders in the West Indies. The Indians most often allied themselves with the French, but sometimes acted independently. In 1759-61 Cherokees attacked Carolina settlements, pushing the frontier back a hundred miles. The British sent 1,300 regulars, but the Cherokees forced the surrender of Fort Loudon (in Tennessee), and killed the captives. The British then sent 2,500 men who burned 15 villages but could not provoke a pitched battle. A treaty finally restored an uneasy peace.

King Philip's War[edit]

See King Philip's War

King Philip's War (1675-6) was a bloody war in eastern New England in which Native Americans resisted European sovereignty. The Indians were led by Metacom, King Philip, a chief of the Wampanoags, who tried to build an intertribal coalition. The war was fought by a coalition of Algonquian Indians, especially the Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes, against the English colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Rhode Island and Connecticut. It was the most devastating war, for both sides, in the history of the Northeast, and resulted in a decisive victory for the settlers.

Pontiac’s rebellion, 1763[edit]

The greatest of the pan-Indian uprisings was Pontiac's Rebellion of 1763-66. After the British defeated the French in 1760 they assumed sovereignty over all the Indians of the Great Lakes region The British installed small detachments of regulars in a series of forts, but cut back on the gifts the French had regularly provided. The Indians felt threatened by the advance of white settlers over the mountains. Of critical importance was the mystical advocacy of pan-Indian resistance by Delaware Prophet, and the brilliant diplomacy of Pontiac in forming an alliance among the Ottawa, Wyandotte, Pottawatomie, Ojibwa, Delaware, Seneca and Shawnee tribes, Delaware Prophet denounced intertribal wars and liquor. Greatness could be restored if the Indians would purify themselves, gave up white ways (including firearms), and "Drive off your land those dogs clothed in red who will do you nothing but harm." In May, 1763, the alliance simultaneously attacked all the British forts. Those that did not fall immediately were put under siege, but the Indians lacked the artillery necessary to batter down thick wooden walls. Two thousand white settlers who could not reach blockhouses were scalped. Eventually British regulars reinforced or recaptured the forts. In 1766 a treaty ended the rebellion, with no one punished. With the French gone, there was no way the Indians could sustain a war against the British. The rebellion taught the British to be prompt in their scheduled payments to the tribes.

To minimize conflict, London proposed (in the Proclamation of 1763) to keep the Americans on eastern side of the mountains. The Americans, however, refused to be bottled up and insisted that the only defense against Indian attacks was an aggressive offense. Since Britain refused to take the offensive, white frontiersmen increasingly came to the conclusion that they needed a government that would.

American revolution: 1775-1783[edit]

The Americans demanded that the Indians remain neutral, and some did so. A few supported the Patriot cause. The majority of Indians worked for a British victory, and used British weapons and supplies to attack American outposts. George Washington sent an army in 1777 that drove the hostile Indians out of New York permanently; they resettled in Canada.

19th century[edit]

War of 1812[edit]

The Indian attacks on western settlements were encouraged by the British government, and were a major reason for the U.S. declaration of war against Britain in the War of 1812. General William Henry Harrison destroyed the Canadian Indians in 1813, killing the leader Tecumseh. This ended the threat of Indian raids that had been one of the main causes of the war, and also ended long-standing British plans to create an Indian Confederacy in the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota) that would be a "buffer state" between the U.S. and Canada. After the war the British no longer supported Indian raids, and the U.S. bought up the Indian lands.

In the Creek War, General Andrew Jackson

Jackson's campaigns

led American militias, regulars and Indian allies against the "Red Sticks" Creeks who had raided, raped and killed American settlers in what is now Alabama. The Creeks were collaborating with Tecumseh and had been supplied by the Spanish. Indians seldom fought pitched battles; they preferred the ambush. Jackson trapped the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama in March 1814, and killed over 800 enemy; the rest fled to Spanish Florida.

Seminole wars[edit]

The Seminole Indians in Florida fought three long, grueling wars against the U.S. Army. They finally lost and were resettled in Oklahoma.

In 1817 General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida—then controlled by Spain—to stop Seminoles from aiding and providing refuge for the Creeks who were raiding American settlers of Georgia. In this First Seminole War many Seminole settlements were burned and the raids ended. Spain ceded Florida to the United States in 1819, and the Seminoles agreed to stay on new reservations.

In 1832 the Seminoles agreed to be removed to "Indian territory" (now Oklahoma), but before the move was completed a group led by a warrior named Osceola revolted in 1835. Osceola was captured, but the Second Seminole War continued until 1842.

The usual techniques for defeating the Indians worked poorly in Florida. The U.S. Army could not find Indian allies because the Seminoles had killed off the other tribes. Waiting for winter to attack food stores did not work in Florida's not climate. Progressively narrowing the hostile territory by building forts was futile since Florida was so large and had so many swamps.

At the end, 3000 Seminoles went to Oklahoma, but a thousand or so held out against the Army in the Everglades for years during the smaller-scale Third Seminole War.

John Cavallo (b. 1812?), son of a Seminole chief and an African mother, was a Seminole, 1835-42. Cavallo's charismatic leadership led to his reputation among white leaders as a primary source of Indian and black resistance. After his surrender, Cavallo, also known as Gopher John and later as John Horse, served the U.S. Army as an interpreter during efforts to gather over five hundred Indians for exile. John Horse later drew from his experiences with the army in Florida to help establish the African-American US Cavalry regiments known as the "Buffalo Soldiers". They were used in western outposts to keep Indians on reservations.^[3]

Civil War[edit]

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, federal agents abandoned Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and the Confederacy moved in and negotiated treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes. The tribes owned black slaves, which they fought to keep. The Confederacy paid the subsidies the U.S. government had paid, permanently guaranteed lands and rights to tribal self-government, and provided military protection and guns.^[4]

As the Confederacy secured alliances with most of the tribes, some tried to remain neutral or pro-U.S., which led to violent conflict with the Confederate Indians. The first battle in occurred at Round Mountain, where Confederates defeated Unionist Creek and Seminoles led by Opothleyahola. The Confederates dominated the territory until early 1862, as Union forces returned and won battles at Pea Ridge, Fort Gibson, and Honey Springs. The Confederate Indians were the last to surrender, three months after Robert E. Lee surrendered.^[5]

Western wars[edit]

The most famous wars—in literature and film—came in the western states after 1840. The most famous opponents were the Sioux on the northern plains,. The most famous battle was Custer's Last Stand in 1876. The wars ended in 1890 with the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Sioux wars[edit]

During the last few months of the Great Sioux War (1876–77) on the northern Plains, Crazy Horse worked hard to keep the coalition of western Sioux bands and Cheyenne together. His efforts were ably opposed by peaceful Sioux leaders based on Indian agencies and by General Nelson Miles, who planned to scatter and isolate the various bands. Although some in the coalition opted for escape into Canada, most did not. What they feared most was to have their arms and horses confiscated by the army if they returned to the reservations. As the coalition dissolved, Crazy Horse was unsure what strategy to follow and spent time seeking the 'vision of guidance.' Ultimately, he surrendered his leadership to Red Cloud and accepted the primacy of the agency Oglalas' tribal organization.^[6]

Indian scouts[edit]

Indians allies proved essential to the U.S. Army 1860-90, especially when fighting the Sioux. The auxiliaries were used reluctantly by American commanders, were treated cavalierly as a rule, and were often persuaded to serve with a combination of threats and promises. Despite shabby treatment, Indian scouts were acknowledged as crucial to the pacification of the Plains tribes by American commanders. Without Indian help, the "hostiles" would not have been subdued or even found by the American military. The Crow tribe provided most of the scouts, as they used the Army to fight their historic enemy the Sioux. The Crows were an embattled people who fought to defend their rich land against encroachment by other tribes, to maintain their powerful position in trade relations, and simply to survive as a people. Warfare with the Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Sioux and others, along with disease, took its toll on the Crows. They managed to survive through a strength based on long-held traditions and a skilled ability to forge alliances to their advantage.^[7]

Apaches[edit]

The Army systematically attempted to end Apache raiding parties in the Guadalupe Mountain region of West Texas and southern New Mexico from 1855 to 1883. Irish and German immigrants of the 3d Cavalry and 8th Infantry, along with black "Buffalo Soldiers" of the 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments, scouted the area's rough terrain in search of Apache raiding parties. The military anticipated forcing the hostiles onto a reservation at Fort Stanton, New Mexico, and away from American settlers attempting to establish permanent homesteads in the region. Although some Apaches agreed to live on the reservation, food shortages led many Indians to follow their leader Victorio back into the Guadalupe Mountains in 1879 and renew their raids on ranches and stagecoaches. District commander Colonel Benjamin Grierson of the 10th Cavalry established subposts from which he deployed troops to intercept Indian raiding parties. In October 1880, Colonel Joaquim Terrezas reported killing 79 Apaches including Victorio, after which Indian resistance to white occupation in the mountain region quickly faded.

Morality of the Indian Wars[edit]

The colonists typically hated and feared the Indians, but they also hated and feared the Spanish and the French. What made the Indians seem different was the British conviction that they represented an inferior civilization that did not deserve to control the land. The Indians were seen as savages—humans at a lower, inferior stage of moral and cultural development. Much was made of the Indian custom of scalping the living, cannibalizing the dead, and torturing the prisoners. Boasted one warrior:

"I make war for plunder, scalps, and prisoners. You [Europeans] are satisfied with a fort, and you let your enemy and mine live. I do not want to keep such bad meat for tomorrow. When I kill it, it can no longer attack me."^[8]

The Puritan twist was the sense of God-given mission to eliminate savagery. Perhaps this could be done through missionary work; more effective was the annihilation of obstinate tribes like the Pequot. Compliant tribes would be moved into controlled reservations. Virginia began the reservation system in 1646, forcing Indians to live in restricted all-Indian lands—and similar reservations still exist in the 1990s. Religious groups, especially the Quakers, were always disturbed about the violence and brutality of the wars against the Indians. Controlling the Pennsylvania government, the Quakers avoided warfare and tried to ensure fair treatment of the Indians. Nevertheless, the Delaware Indians went to war, and in 1756 the Quakers were forced to relinquish power to politicians who would actively defend the frontier settlements. A century later, in 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant, in collaboration with Quakers, adopted a "peace policy" toward the Indians. (If the Indians could be made into Quakers, quipped Grant, it would take the fight out of them.) Unfortunately, the policy failed—during its eight years, more lives were lost to Indian attack, more money was spent on campaigns, and soldiers fought more battles with Indians than ever. Subsequently, a series of radically different policies were tried, but none seemed to "work." The long-term goal of assimilating Indians into the mainstream of society was not successful, and the opposite goal of preserving the heritage of Native Americans likewise proved deeply flawed.

Misunderstandings[edit]

The question of the ethics of the Indian wars is fraught with misunderstandings. Some can be cleared up. The Indians were not "native" to North America; they migrated from the Old World like everyone else. (Waves of migrants traveled over the Siberia-Bering Straits-Alaska ice bridge between 30,000 B.C. and 8,000 B.C.) There were many vastly different Indian cultures in North America simultaneously, and over the centuries the inhabitants changed drastically. The "Eastern Woodlands" groups of tribes that lived east of the Mississippi in 1492 had an entirely different society and culture from the Mound Builders who lived there 500 years earlier. Historians and anthropologists debate how many Indians lived north of Mexico in 1492; in 1928 anthropologist James Mooney estimated 1.1 million; some recent estimates are ten times higher. However, all scholars do agree that contact with Europeans introduced diseases to which the Indians were not immune—like smallpox and measles. Vast numbers died in a few decades—perhaps 80 or 90 percent. In Cuba and other islands, all the Indians died out. In California, 99 percent were gone by 1880. The colonists did not enter virgin land; they entered widowed land. Indeed, if there had been no European immigration most of the Indians would still have died out anyway because only a few explorers were needed to bring over the diseases.

The tribes the settlers encountered were much reduced in size, and were desperately adjusting. Because of the population decline, they had a vast surplus of land—the one thing the Europeans wanted most. Land hunger on the part of colonists is often given as an explanation for the wars. Since there were so few Indians—and so few colonists—and so much land, the explanation is misleading. It is more accurate to say the colonists wanted full political control of territory, rather than occupation of it. The Indians were much more willing to give up acreage than they were political sovereignty. Title to land, or ownership, is a European concept that Indians did not quickly adopt. The notion that Indians deserved to own the land because they had "always" lived there is based on a fallacious assumption. Some of the major wars involved tribes that were themselves new to the area. By the mid 19th century, the Seminoles in Florida, and the Sioux, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne in the Great Plains had only recently seized—by warfare—lands occupied by different tribes. They claimed the land by right of conquest, and were expelled the same way.

Memory[edit]

As the frontier faded from memory, the harsh hatreds of the frontiersmen also disappeared. Millions of Americans proudly claimed Indian ancestors (8.5 million did so in the 1990 Census) and the popular image turned favorable. What happened to the Indians was seen as tragic; the Indian wars a product of misunderstandings and bad faith on both sides. But then a radical left ethical perspective appeared. For the counterculture of the 1960s, Indians seemed perfect: ecologically aware, attuned to nature, spiritually deep, anarchistic, drug-using, sexually free, hairy, footloose, untrammeled by materialistic possessions, communally oriented, non-modern, genuinely American—and terribly wronged by the same government and society that was destroying Vietnam in another imperialistic war. Best of all, in their day the Indians had fought hard against the American war machine. Historians wrote books about "The Invasion of America" (by Europeans), and testified in court cases that would let Indians recover vast tracks of land. Connecticut opened a "King Philip High School."

The literature and filmography of the west puts the Indian wars under a limelight.

Indian wars

Contents

Colonial era[edit]

Indian methods of warfare[edit]

Weapons: Bow and Arrow vs Musket[edit]

Indian Tactics[edit]

Colonial Defense[edit]

Braddock’s Defeat in 1755[edit]

Tactical responses[edit]

French support and leadership of Indians[edit]

Food as a Weapon of War[edit]

Quest for American Supremacy: Destroying the Pequots, 1637[edit]

Alliances and counterattacks[edit]

King Philip's War[edit]

Pontiac’s rebellion, 1763[edit]

American revolution: 1775-1783[edit]

19th century[edit]

War of 1812[edit]

Seminole wars[edit]

Civil War[edit]

Western wars[edit]

Sioux wars[edit]

Indian scouts[edit]

Apaches[edit]

Morality of the Indian Wars[edit]

Misunderstandings[edit]

Memory[edit]

See also[edit]

Further reading[edit]

American Revolution[edit]

War of 1812[edit]

The west[edit]

References[edit]