Centuries of conflict as settlement pushed west
For almost three centuries, from the first 17th-century colonies to the end of the 1800s, European empires and then the United States fought Native American nations over land. Tribes often won battles, and many allied with one colonial power against another, but they could rarely outlast an expanding country with far more people and supplies.
The fighting began with the earliest colonies, and English, Spanish, French, Russian and Dutch settlement was resisted by some tribes and helped by others. The Beaver Wars from 1609 to 1701 set the Iroquois against the French and their Algonquian allies; the Anglo-Powhatan Wars shook colonial Virginia between 1610 and 1646; the Pequot War of 1636–38 involved Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut colonists; and King Philip’s War of 1675–78 engulfed New England. Many conflicts mirrored European rivalries, with tribes generally siding with their trading partners in wars such as King William’s War and the French and Indian War.
After the Revolution, British officials in Canada kept arming Native nations in the Old Northwest, and during the War of 1812 confederacies there and in the South fought alongside Britain. Britain even considered a Native buffer state around the Great Lakes. When Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 and commanders like William Henry Harrison won further victories, resistance in the region was badly weakened, and relations shifted towards treaties that handed over vast areas.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 let the president negotiate swaps of land east of the Mississippi for territory in the west. In practice treaties, political pressure and coercion drove many southeastern nations to Indian Territory, in removals that included the Trail of Tears and transferred millions of acres. As settlers moved across the Great Plains and further west, treaties, military campaigns and acts of Congress confined Native peoples to reservations.
Historians disagree over how to label this history. Some describe removal, warfare and reservation policy as genocide, while others argue the conflicts varied too much across time and place for one term to fit the whole.
Source: American Indian Wars
