I. Introduction

Indian Wars, armed conflicts fought between native inhabitants of North America and white Europeans, often represented by government forces, during the period of exploration and settlement.

For historical and cultural background, see Native Americans, particularly the section European Contact and Impact. The wars were episodic and localized. In virtually every Indian war, some people fought against their traditional Native American enemies.

The Native Americans proved vulnerable to diseases previously unknown in the Americas, particularly smallpox, which decimated their population.

Their traditional weapons were no match for European firearms, and they had difficulty obtaining effective weapons.

The Plains tribes used horses skillfully in battle; these they captured-either from other Native Americans or from the wild herds that roamed the region after the introduction of the horse into the western hemisphere by the Spanish conquistadors.

II. Colonial Period

The earliest contacts between the European settlers and the Native Americans were, for the most part, peaceful. Trade was the principal interaction. Tension and disputes sometimes were resolved by force but more often by negotiation or treaties, such as that made between Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag, and England's Plymouth Colony in 1621.

War with the Native Americans of New England was avoided until 1637, when the Pequot War resulted in the virtual extermination of the Pequot. The causes of this war, and of the English-Narragansett conflict of 1643-1645 and King Philip's War of 1675-1676, were complicated and disputed, with both sides alleging violations of understandings with the other.

Native Americans in New England never regained the power they possessed in the 17th century, but they played significant roles in King William's War (1689-1697), Queen Anne's War (1702-1713), and the French and Indian War (1754-1763).

While Spain and France maintained a presence in North America, individual native peoples could ally themselves with one of these European nations against British incursions into their territory. With the defeat of the French, however, the native peoples allied with them were more exposed to British power.

In 1763 Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa, led a confederation of peoples of the Ohio-Great Lakes region in an effort to drive the British out of the area. Pontiac's strategy failed after a peace treaty was signed between France and Britain, making French aid unavailable to the Native Americans.

In the south, when the early European settlers arrived in what is now Jamestown, Virginia, local Native Americans, loosely confederated under the chief Powhatan, were initially cooperative; however, the Europeans quickly made it clear that they planned to extend their settlements onto Native American land.

On March 22, 1622, the Native Americans, under Opechancanough, Powhatan's successor, attacked the English settlements, and 350 colonists (of about 2000) died. The colony survived, however, and retaliated in force.

The following decade saw continued warfare, followed by a tenuous peace. On April 18, 1644, another attack by Opechancanough almost destroyed the growing colony. Nearly 500 settlers were killed. The war ended in 1646 when the governor, Sir William Berkeley, captured Opechancanough.

English expansion up Virginia's rivers continued until 1675-1676, when the war with Native Americans that is associated with Bacon's Rebellion erupted. This war was caused by a series of misunderstandings and acts of local aggression. In the end, the Native Americans were defeated.

Native peoples in the Tidewater area never regained their earlier power, but in the interior and farther south, periodic wars broke out, for instance, between British settlers and the Tuscarora in North Carolina (1711-1713).

The French in Canada and in the Mississippi Valley also engaged in wars with their Native American neighbors. The Natchez in the Mississippi delta were among their victims.

In the Dutch colony of New Netherland (now the states of New York and New Jersey) the policy of Governor Willem Kieft led to the death of nearly 1000 Native Americans in sporadic warfare between 1640 and 1645, when Kieft was recalled. In 1655 Native Americans attacked New Amsterdam (renamed New York in 1664) on the present-day island of Manhattan, beginning a conflict that lasted until 1664. During that time the Dutch gained control over most of the Algonquian peoples of the lower Hudson Valley.

III. Revolutionary Period

When the American Revolution began, the British government and the revolutionaries sought to keep the Native American population neutral. Each side, however, soon began to recruit allies from among the Native American nations. Even the Iroquois confederacy was split, with four of the six nations siding with the British, who emphasized that a British defeat would put the Native Americans at the mercy of the settlers.

In the south, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek support for the British was overcome by the Americans and their new allies, the Spanish. The ports of Mobile (now in Alabama) and Pensacola (now in Florida), which had been under British control from 1763, were seized by a Spanish fleet in 1780 and 1781 after British and Native American resistance. When the British evacuated Saint Augustine in 1783, many Native American allies sought to join them in exile.

The Treaty of Paris (1783) ending the American Revolution made no mention of the Native Americans, who complained bitterly that the British had sold out their interests. When the United States attempted to treat Native Americans in the new territories west of the Appalachian Mountains as conquered enemies, the Native Americans resisted. In 1791 the army of Major General Arthur St. Clair was decisively defeated by the Native Americans near Fort Wayne (in what is now Indiana).

General Anthony Wayne's forces finally overcame the Miami people of the Old Northwest (today called the Midwest) at the Battle of Fallen Timbers (near what is now Toledo, Ohio) in August 1794, resulting in the Treaty of Greenville (1795) and the opening of the Ohio Valley to American settlement.

In the immediate post-Revolutionary War period, the Creek and other southeastern nations sought, by both negotiation and war, to maintain their autonomy, sometimes asking Spain for assistance against the encroaching frontier settlers. Spain, however, was reluctant to support the Native Americans against the growing power of the United States, and the Spanish-American Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795) took no account of Native American interests.

IV. The War of 1812

Native Americans in the north and south were involved in the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. In the Old Northwest, Tecumseh, a Shawnee leader, and his brother Tenskwatawa, known as The Prophet, urged Native Americans to return to past traditions and to repudiate the white-imposed concept that individual factions or tribes could sell the land that was a common heritage of all peoples.

William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, who had been warned by Tecumseh in 1810 not to allow white settlement to proceed further, moved in 1811 to break up the Native American settlement at Prophetstown, Tecumseh's headquarters. In the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison suffered heavy casualties but forced the Native Americans to abandon the village.

This conflict became part of the larger British-American war, and the Native Americans soon gravitated to the British side. Tecumseh was killed when Harrison's men crushed a British and Native American force at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813; his goal of unity died with him. After his death the Delaware, Miami, Ojibwa, and Wyandot made peace with the Americans.

In its southern phase, the war began with a Creek uprising at Fort Mims in Alabama. The Native Americans killed a large number of the settlers and others within the fort (Fort Mims, Massacre of); however, the Creeks were hopelessly divided into war and peace factions. Andrew Jackson, commanding the Tennessee militia, took advantage of this and drove into the heart of Creek territory. On March 27, 1814, his forces won an overwhelming victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814) signaled the end of Native American power in the lower Mississippi.

V. Native American Removal Policy

The second major period of warfare between whites and Native Americans took place in the quarter century following the War of 1812; this was a transitional period dominated by the imposition and consequences of a new policy: the removal of Native American peoples to lands west of the Mississippi, referred to as Indian Territory.

Although removal had been going on to some degree since the early 1800s, it was given new impetus by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, largely implemented during Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829-1837). This act resulted in the uprooting of entire tribes from their homelands and their forced resettlement beyond the Mississippi.

Several wars stemmed from the refusal of some Native Americans to accept resettlement. The effort of the Sac (Sauk) and Fox to return to their homeland in early 1832 resulted in the Black Hawk War in Illinois and Wisconsin, which ended on August 3, 1832, with the Bad Axe Massacre, in which most of the remaining Native Americans were killed as they tried to cross the Mississippi River into Iowa.

Concurrently, the Cherokee were removed from Georgia, and in Mississippi and Alabama the remaining Creek were also expelled.

The Second Seminole War (Seminole Wars) in Florida (1835-1842) was distinguished by the evasive tactics of the Seminole, who for a long time escaped attempts of the U.S. Army to round them up.

When this period came to an end in the 1850s, only scattered groups of Native Americans remained in the eastern half of the United States.

VI. Wars West of the Mississippi

From the 1840s to the 1880s U.S. forces fought numerous battles (usually small skirmishes) in an effort to clear routes west for white emigrants and to establish government control over the vast territory. Ultimately the federal government organized a reservation system as a way of separating the Native Americans from white settlers.

The gold rush of 1849 brought devastation to the Native Americans of the Far West. The Bannock and Shoshone of Oregon and Idaho, the Ute of Nevada and Utah, and the Apache and Navajo of the Southwest mounted a more organized resistance against white encroachment, but were ultimately defeated and confined to reservations.

The central conflict took place on the Great Plains, where the Native Americans had been promised sanctuary. Into this land were crowded remnants of many native peoples displaced from the east. They had great difficulty in adapting their ways of life to a very different environment, and the Plains Native Americans resented the presence of the newcomers.

White settlers were also moving into the territory, causing further hostilities. The Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux fought white encroachment on their territory in the 1860s and 1870s; the fighting was ferocious on both sides.

Among all the battles, only the Battle of the Little Bighorn is well known: On June 25, 1876, much of the 7th Cavalry Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was wiped out by a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne under Sioux chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Within a year, however, most of the Sioux and Cheyenne surrendered, and some were relocated to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

The Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought on June 25, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in Montana. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and about 260 soldiers were cut off from two other columns of cavalry and surrounded by more than 2500 warriors of the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne nations. Custer and his troops were wiped out in about an hour. Hulton Deutsch

Other Native Americans fought on-Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce in the late 1870s, Geronimo and the Apaches as late as the 1880s.

The warfare largely ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890, when Sioux warriors, women, and children were slaughtered by the U.S. cavalry.

In December 1890 troops under the command of U.S. Army General Nelson A. Miles took a band of captive Sioux to a cavalry camp along Wounded Knee Creek. When the soldiers attempted to disarm the band, shots were fired, and within a short time the federal troops had killed between 150 and 370 Sioux men, women, and children. UPI/THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Contributed By: Wilcomb E. Washburn, Ph.D. Director, Office of American Studies, Smithsonian Institution. Author of The Indian in America and other books. John Dizikes, Ph.D. Professor of American Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz. Author of Britain, Roosevelt, and the New Deal, 1932-1938 and Sportsmen and Gamesmen.

"Indian Wars," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.