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American Indian Wars

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For wars involving India, see Military history of India
Indian Wars

An 1899 chromolithograph of U.S. cavalry pursuing American Indians, artist unknown
Date1622–1890
1898
Location
United States
Result various; see text
Belligerents
Native Americans USA

Indian Wars is the name used by historians in the United States to describe a series of conflicts between the United States and Native American peoples ("Indians") of North America. Also generally included in this term are those Colonial American wars with Native Americans that preceded the creation of the United States. Native American wars that did not involve areas included in the modern United States are covered in the article Native American wars.

The Wars, which ranged from colonial times to the Wounded Knee massacre and "closing" of the American frontier in 1890, collectively resulted in the conquest of American Indian peoples and their decimation, assimilation, or forced relocation to Indian reservations. Citing figures from a 1894 estimate by the United States Census Bureau, one scholar has noted that the more than 40 Indian wars from 1775 to 1890 reportedly claimed the lives of some 45,000 Indians and 19,000 whites. This rough estimate includes women and children, since noncombatants were often killed in frontier warfare.[1] (See also Indian massacre)

Although the term Indian Wars groups Indians under a single heading, American Indians were (and remain) diverse peoples with their own histories; throughout the wars, they were not a single people any more than Europeans were. Living in societies organized in a variety of ways, American Indians usually made decisions about war and peace at the local level, though they sometimes fought as part of complex formal alliances, such as the Iroquois Confederation, or in temporary confederacies inspired by leaders such as Tecumseh.

Some historians now emphasize that to see the Indian wars as a racial war between Indians and "whites" simplifies the complex historical reality of the struggle. Indians and whites often fought alongside each other; Indians often fought against Indians. For example, although the Battle of Horseshoe Bend is often described as an "American victory" over the Creek Indians, the victors were a combined force of Cherokees, Creeks, and Tennessee militia led by Andrew Jackson. From a broad perspective, the Indian wars were about the conquest of Native American peoples by the United States; up close it was rarely quite as simple as that.

Colonial era (1622–1774)

These are wars fought by Native Americans with colonizing powers in the future territory of the United States before the Declaration of Independence.

See also: European colonization of the Americas

East of the Mississippi (1775–1842)

These are wars fought by Native Americans primarily against the newly established United States until shortly before the Mexican-American War.

Indian Wars
East of the Mississippi

American Revolutionary War

Main article: Western theater of the American Revolutionary War

The American Revolutionary War was essentially two parallel wars: while the war in the East was a struggle against British rule, the war in the West was an "Indian War". The newly proclaimed United States competed with the British for the allegiance of Native American nations east of the Mississippi River. The colonial interest in westward settlement, as opposed to the British policy of maintaining peace, was one of the minor causes of the war. Most Native Americans who joined the struggle sided with the British, hoping to use the war to halt colonial expansion onto American Indian land. The Revolutionary War was "the most extensive and destructive" Indian war in United States history.[2]

Many native communities were divided over which side to support in the war. For the Iroquois Confederacy, the American Revolution resulted in civil war. Cherokees split into a neutral (or pro-U.S.) faction and the anti-U.S. Chickamaugas, led by Dragging Canoe. Many other communities were similarly divided.

Frontier warfare was particularly brutal, and numerous atrocities were committed on both sides. Noncombatants of both races suffered greatly during the war, and villages and food supplies were frequently destroyed during military expeditions. The largest of these expeditions was the Sullivan Expedition of 1779, which destroyed more than 40 Iroquois villages in order to neutralize Iroquois raids in upstate New York. The expedition failed to have the desired effect: American Indian activity became even more determined.

Native Americans were stunned to learn that, when the British made peace with the Americans in the Treaty of Paris (1783), they had ceded a vast amount of American Indian territory to the United States without informing their Indian allies. The United States initially treated the American Indians who had fought with the British as a conquered people who had lost their land. When this proved impossible to enforce (the Indians had lost the war on paper, not on the battlefield), the policy was abandoned. The United States was eager to expand, and the national government initially sought to do so only by purchasing Native American land in treaties. The states and settlers were frequently at odds with this policy, and more warfare followed.

Northwest Indian War

The Battle of Fallen Timbers

In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance officially organized the Northwest Territory for white settlement. American settlers began pouring into the region. Violence erupted as Indians resisted this encroachment, and so the administration of President George Washington sent armed expeditions into the area to put down native resistance. However, in the Northwest Indian War, a pan-tribal confederacy led by Blue Jacket (Shawnee), Little Turtle (Miami), Buckongahelas (Lenape), and Egushawa (Ottawa) crushed armies led by Generals Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair. General St. Clair's defeat was the severest loss that would ever be inflicted upon an American army by Native Americans. The Americans attempted to negotiate a settlement, but Blue Jacket and the Shawnee-led confederacy insisted on a boundary line the Americans found unacceptable, and so a new expedition led by General Anthony Wayne was dispatched. Wayne's army defeated the Indian confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. The Indians had hoped for British assistance; when that was not forthcoming, the Indians were compelled to sign the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which ceded modern-day Ohio and part of Indiana to the United States.

Tecumseh, the Creek War, and the War of 1812

Tecumseh

The United States continued to gain title to Native American land after the Treaty of Greenville, at a rate that created alarm in Indian communities. In 1800, William Henry Harrison became governor of the Indiana Territory and, under the direction of President Thomas Jefferson, pursued an aggressive policy of obtaining titles to Indian lands. Two Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, organized another pan-tribal resistance to American expansion. Tecumseh's goal was to get Native American leaders to stop selling land to the United States.

While Tecumseh was in the south attempting to recruit allies among the Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws, Harrison marched against the Indian confederacy, defeating Tenskwatawa and his followers at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. The Americans hoped that the victory would end the militant resistance, but Tecumseh instead chose to openly ally with the British, who were soon at war with the Americans in the War of 1812.

Like the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 was also a massive Indian war on the western front. Encouraged by Tecumseh, the Creek War (1813-1814), which began as a civil war within the Creek (Muscogee) nation, became part of the larger struggle against American expansion. Although the war with the British was a stalemate, the United States was more successful on the western front. Tecumseh was killed by Harrison's army at the Battle of the Thames, ending the resistance in the Old Northwest. The Creeks who fought against the United States were defeated. The First Seminole War, in 1818, was in some ways a continuation of the Creek War, and resulted in the transfer of Florida to the United States in 1819.

File:Andrew Jackson.jpeg
Andrew Jackson, general of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend at the end of the Creek War, was a major figure in Indian removal.

As in the Revolution and the Northwest Indian War, after the War of 1812, the British abandoned their Indian allies to the Americans. This proved to be a major turning point in the Indian Wars, marking the last time that Native Americans would turn to a foreign power for assistance against the United States.

Removal era wars

One of the results of these wars was passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which President Andrew Jackson signed into law in 1830. The Removal Act did not order the removal of any American Indians, but it authorized the president to negotiate treaties that would exchange tribal land in the east for western lands that had been acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. According to historian Robert V. Remini, Jackson promoted this policy primarily for reasons of national security, seeing that Great Britain and Spain had recruited and armed Native Americans within U.S. borders in wars with the United States.[3]

A number of Indian Removal treaties were signed. Most American Indians reluctantly but peacefully complied with the terms of the removal treaties, often with bitter resignation. Some groups, however, went to war to resist the implementation of these treaties. This resulted in two short wars (the Black Hawk War of 1832 and the Creek War of 1836), as well as the long and costly Second Seminole War (1835–1842).

West of the Mississippi (1823–1890)

As in the East, expansion into the plains and mountains by miners, ranchers and settlers led to increasing conflicts with the indigenous population of the West. Many tribes — from the Utes of the Great Basin to the Nez Perces of Idaho — fought the whites at one time or another. But the Sioux of the Northern Plains and the Apache of the Southwest provided the most significant opposition to encroachment on tribal lands. Led by resolute, militant leaders, such as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, the Sioux were skilled at high-speed mounted warfare. The Sioux were new arrivals on the Plains--previously they had been sedate farmers in the Great Lakes region. Once they learned to capture and ride horses, they moved west, destroyed other Indian tribes in their way, and became feared warriors. The Apaches built their economy on attacking, looting and kidnapping Hispanic farmers and other Indian tribes. They were equally adept, and highly elusive, at fighting in their environs of desert and canyons.

White conflict with the Plains Indians continued through the Civil War.

In 1864, one of the more infamous battles took place, the Sand Creek Massacre. A locally raised militia attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in southeast Colorado and killed and mutilated an estimated 150 men, women, and children.

The Indians at Sand Creek had been assured, by the U.S. Government, that they would be safe in the territory they were occupying, but anti-Indian sentiments by white settlers were running high. Later congressional investigations resulted in short-lived U.S. public outcry against the slaughter of the native Americans.

George Armstrong Custer, the United States Army cavalry commander at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Sitting Bull, the Native American leader.

In 1876, the last serious Sioux war erupted, when the Dakota gold rush penetrated the Black Hills. The US Army did not keep miners off Sioux (Lakota) hunting grounds; yet, when ordered to take action against bands of Sioux hunting on the range, according to their treaty rights, the Army moved vigorously. See the Black Hills War.

In 1876, after several indecisive encounters, General George Custer found the main encampment of the Lakota and their allies at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Custer and his men — who were separated from their main body of troops — were all killed by the far more numerous and heavily armed Indians, led by Sitting Bull.

Later, in 1890, a Ghost Dance ritual on the Northern Lakota reservation at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, led to the Army's attempt to disarm the Lakota. During this attempt, gunfire erupted and soldiers, who were armed with deadly and powerful ammunition, killed approximately 100 Indians. The approximately 25 solders who died may have been killed by friendly fire during the battle.

Long before this, the means of subsistence and the societies of the indigenous population of the Great Plains had been destroyed by the slaughter of the buffalo, driven almost to extinction in the decade after 1870 by indiscriminate hunting. Meanwhile, the Apaches' raids against villages in the Southwest continued until Geronimo, the last important chief, was captured in 1885.

Wars of the West timeline

Last Battle

US Cavalry/Infantry/Artillery Units in Indian Wars

US Cavalry

US Infantry

US Artillery

Historiography

In American history books, the Indian Wars have often been treated as a relatively minor part of the military history of the United States. Only in last few decades of the 20th century did a significant number of historians begin to include the American Indian point of view in their writings about the wars, emphasizing the impact of the wars on native peoples and their cultures.

A well-known and influential book in popular history was Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). In academic history, Francis Jennings's The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1975) was notable for its reversal of the traditional portrayal of Indian-European relations.

Notes

  1. ^ Thornton, pp. 48–49.
  2. ^ Raphael, p. 244.
  3. ^ Remini, p. 113.
  4. ^ "Named Campaigns — Indian Wars."

References

  • "Named Campaigns — Indian Wars". United States Army Center for Military History. Retrieved December 13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  • Raphael, Ray. A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence. New York: The New Press, 2001. ISBN 0-06-000440-1.
  • Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars. New York: Viking, 2001. ISBN 0-670-91025-2.
  • Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Massachusettes: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-674-00638-0.
  • Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. ISBN 0-8061-2220-X.
  • Yenne, Bill. Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West. Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2005. ISBN 1-59416-016-3.

Bibliography

  • John D. McDermott, A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West (University of Nebraska Press, 1998) ISBN 0-8032-8246-X

See also

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