What were some of the major conflicts between the United States and American Indian tribes as white society moved westward from 1876 to 1890?

Despite the diversity of Euro‐American and American Indian societies, wars between the two have shared certain features. In most eras of conflict, Euro‐Americans had Indian allies; Euro‐American citizen soldiers tended toward greater brutality and less military discipline than professional soldiers; nomadic groups of Indians usually waged war more tenaciously than the more sedentary ones; and the eruption and expansion of war usually stemmed from a Euro‐American drive to acquire Indian land.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European powers established military presences in North America from which they could make and defend claims—by right of discovery, settlement, or conquest—to vast portions of a continent already inhabited by Indians. In response, many Native Americans waged wars to resist European colonial domination. In the seventeenth century, the Powhatan Confederacy threatened the existence of the Virginia Colony with attacks in 1622 and 1644. Four decades after their devastation of the Pequots in the Pequot War (1636–37); New England colonists faced a massive uprising among the Algonquians living within their borders in King Philip's War (1675–76). The Pueblo Revolt (1680) drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for thirteen years. In the eighteenth century, colonists in Virginia and the Carolinas forcibly acquired land from Tuscaroras, Yamasees, and Cherokees, while the French put down the armed resistance of the Natchez, Chickasaw, and Fox.

In these wars and others, many groups of Indians flirted with a united pan‐Indian alliance against colonists, but such alliances usually failed to reach fruition. With the French defeat in the French and Indian War (1754–63), Indians west of the Appalachians found their survival threatened because they could no longer play off the French against the English. Aware that the presence of only one European power in their vicinity meant that the old trade system had broken down, in 1763 the Ottawa Chief Pontiac rallied many groups formerly allied with the French in an effort to oust the English from the Ohio Valley. Pontiac's Rebellion (1763–66), although relatively successful in cementing a pan‐Indian alliance, ultimately failed. The English government tried to achieve peace in 1763 by a royal proclamation separating Indians and English settlers at the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. While the proclamation's promise that all land west of he Appalachians would be reserved for the Indians weakened Pontiac's alliance, it did nothing to lessen Euro‐American pressures on Indian land, as American traders, squatters, and speculators flowed unchecked into the Ohio Valley.

Throughout the colonial era, European imperial rivalries overlaid warfare between Europeans and Native Americans. For example, during King William's (1689–97), Queen Anne's (1702–13), and King George's (1744–48) Wars, the French supported Algonquian raids against the English colonies, while New England's domesticated Indians and certain Iroquoian allies aided the English. In the French and Indian War, the French and their mostly Algonquian allies initially made impressive strides toward controlling the Ohio Valley, beginning with Braddock's Defeat (1755), only to be overcome by the more numerous English and their Iroquoian supporters. Indians fought as European allies in these wars to advance their own perceived interests in acquiring weapons and other trade goods and captives for adoption, status, or revenge. Until the end of the French and Indian War, Indians succeeded in using these imperial contests to preserve their freedom of action.

The Revolutionary War, however, forced the Indians of the Eastern Woodlands to deal with a United States that by the Treaty of Paris (1783) had acquired all British claims south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi. The United States encouraged settlement in its newly acquired lands, and the resulting Euro‐American pressures for Indian land generated sporadic fighting in the Old Northwest. In the late 1780s, Shawnees and other Indians launched attacks that swept across Indiana, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, and soundly defeated contingents of the U.S. Army in 1790 (“Harmar's Defeat”) and 1791 (“St. Clair's Defeat,” which inflicted 900 casualties on the 1,400 Americans under Arthur St. Clair). It took until 1794 for U.S. troops to quell the Indian warriors in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, in which Gen. Anthony Wayne decisively defeated the Indians, securing the Old Northwest—for the time being—to Euro‐American control.

Following their defeat in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville (1795), the Indian land base continued to shrink until 1809, when the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa fostered a message of Indian unity and nativism among the tribes of the Old Northwest. Tensions in the region climaxed when Indians capitalized on the War of 1812 between the United States and England to wage their own war. Despite several initial battlefield victories, these Indian efforts failed to do more than briefly delay the completion of American dominion in the Old Northwest. A final Indian attempt failed in the Black Hawk War (1832).

To the south, diverse Creek leaders united to challenge white encroachment. Although some Creeks advocated accommodation, their voices went unheard as whites from Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the last under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, sought land and retribution for alleged Creek atrocities. The resulting Creek War (1811–14) ended with the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, in Alabama, in which 800 Indians died, the greatest Indian battle loss in U.S. history. The Cherokees were driven west in the Trail of Tears (1838–39). Most of the Florida Indians were conquered and forced west in the Seminole Wars (1818; 1835–42; 1855–58). Like the Indians in the Old Northwest, the Indians of the South had succumbed to U.S. expansion.

Peace, interrupted by only periodic armed resistance to removal policies, lasted until the end of the Mexican War in 1848. After that conflict, the U.S. government and Indians west of the Mississipi River confronted a new burst of westward migration propelled by gold discoveries in California. The populous yet atomized Indians of California faced local posses and militias rather than federal troops. The result was devastating; if Euro‐Americans committed genocide anywhere on the continent against Native Americans, it was in California. Between 1850 and 1860, war, disease, and starvation reduced the population of California Indians from 150,000 to 35,000. When prospectors found gold in the Pacific Northwest, warfare erupted in that region. The U.S. Army engaged in the Rogue River (1855–56), Yakima (1855–56), and Spokane (1858) Wars to force a number of tribes onto reservations in the eastern portions of Oregon and Washington.

The Modocs and Nez Percé mounted the most determined resistance in the Pacific Northwest. The former, under the leadership of Keintpoos, holed up in a ten‐square‐mile area of lava deposits rife with caves and trenches. From this advantageous position, 60 Modoc warriors held off 1,000 federal troops for seven months in 1873. When the Modoc finally surrendered, the United States executed four of their leaders and sent the remainder to the Indian Territory. The Nez Percé, under the leadership of Chief Joseph, led the army through more than 1,500 miles of rugged territory in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, until most were captured shortly before attempting to cross the Canadian border in 1877.

Initially, the United States sought to protect the overland trails leading to the West Coast from possible Indian attacks. While these attacks were minimal in the 1840s, Indians felt the presence of the migrants early as they brought disease and depleted game along the routes. Such repercussions escalated tensions. The Treaty of Fort Laramie, sponsored by the United States in 1851, sought to preserve peace on the plains by restricting tribes to designated lands. Yet fighting erupted as the parties largely ignored the treaty's terms and American migration continued to have detrimental effects on the buffalo herds on which Plains Indians relied for subsistence. Although Americans' westward migration temporarily abated during the Civil War, tensions between Indians and settlers remained high. In Minnesota, groups of Eastern Sioux raided American settlements in 1862, only to face retaliation from American troops who pushed many of them onto the plains. These Sioux faced relatively disciplined American troops and fared much better than the Cheyennes and Arapahos did at the hands of a volunteer Colorado militia. Sporadic Indian raids on Santa Fe Trail travelers led to fears in Colorado of a widespread Indian war. Hoping to make a preemptive strike, John Chivington led volunteers from Denver in the slaughter of most of Black Kettle's Cheyenne band, together with some southern Arapahos near Sand Creek—a location in southeastern Colorado where the U.S. government had promised them safety. The Sand Creek Massacre (1864) precipitated Cheyenne and Arapaho revenge as they joined the Sioux in what would be a sporadic twenty‐year war against the United States. In the Plains Indians Wars (1854–90), U.S. soldiers waged war to open the plains to safe travel and settlement by confining Indians to reservations; Plains Indian warriors sought increased individual status through wartime acts of bravery and preservation of their way of life. Plains Indians now faced vast numbers of Euro‐Americans, because the development of the railroad provided white soldiers and settlers efficient and economical transportation to the contested territory. In the end, U.S. destruction of the Indians' main food source—the buffalo—combined with persistent attacks on Indian villages subdued the Indians on the plains.

Nevertheless, Plains Indians mounted a spirited resistance. In the north, the Oglala Chief Red Cloud's warriors stopped the building of the Bozeman Trail between Fort Laramie and western Montana (1866–67). In 1868, the Sioux received U.S. treaty guarantees to their territory, including the Black Hills of South Dakota. Yet in the northern plains, these victories proved short‐lived. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills in the 1870s led to new white pressures for Sioux land, as the United States failed to live up to the terms of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Crow and Shoshone warriors assisted American soldiers in their effort to conquer and pacify Sioux country. Determined to avenge the annihilation of George Armstrong Custer and much of the Seventh Cavalry in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the army persisted until the last of the northern Plains Indians surrendered. By 1877, Sioux armed resistance came to a virtual end when Chief Sitting Bull fled to Canada and Crazy Horse surrendered.

On the southern plains, Kiowas, Comanches, and southern Cheyennes faced a similar fate. Hemmed in by Texans to the south and settlers along the Platte River to the north, at the Treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867, these Indians agreed to live on reservations in exchange for the protection and supplies of the federal government. When the federal government failed to provide the promised supplies, Indian men left the reservations to hunt and conduct raids. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan and other officers retaliated with winter campaigns against Indian villages in the region beginning in 1868. Warfare lasted until 1875, by which time nearly all southern Plains Indians had submitted to life on reservations. The final denouement came in the tragedy known as the Battle of Wounded Knee (1890).

In the American Southwest, the last region of the United States to face intense Euro‐American pressure for land, various bands of Apaches under such prominent leaders as Cochise, Victorio, and Geronimo mounted perhaps the most protracted military resistance of Indians to Euro‐American expansion. Unlike the nearby Navajo, whose more sedentary existence had helped compel them to surrender in the 1860s, the prospect of surrender to American troops confronted the Apache with a catastrophic lifestyle change. Moreover, the Apache resided on more rugged territory than the Navajo, and their more nomadic existence facilitated their crossing and recrossing the Mexican border as they fled U.S. troops. Apache resistance came to an end in 1886 only after the army committed thousands of troop to the region and allowed them to cross the Mexican border in pursuit of the Apache.

Bibliography

Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846, 1969; repr. 1977.Find this resource:

Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890, 1973.Find this resource:

Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492, 1987.Find this resource:

David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 1992.Find this resource:

Stan Hoig, Tribal Wars of the Southern Plains, 1993.Find this resource:

Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America, 1994.Find this resource:

Colin G. Calloway, ed., Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost, 1996.Find this resource:

Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, 1998.Find this resource:

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Abrams, Creighton W. (1914–1974)

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