American Indian Wars
The American Indian Wars, also known as the American Frontier Wars, and the Indian Wars, were initially fought by the British, French, Spanish, Russian, Mexican, Texas, and later, the United States and Confederacy against various Indian tribes in North America. These conflicts occurred from the time of the earliest colonial settlements in the 17th century until the end of the 19th century. The various wars resulted from a wide variety of factors, the most common being the desire of settlers and governments for Indian tribes' lands. The European powers and their colonies enlisted allied Indian tribes to help them conduct warfare against each other's colonial settlements. After the American Revolution, many conflicts were local to specific states or regions and frequently involved disputes over land use; some entailed cycles of violent reprisal.
| American Indian Wars | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
An 1899 chromolithograph of U.S. Cavalrymen pursuing American Indians | |||||||
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
|
Amerindians: American Indians, including the tribes: Cherokee, Creek (Muscogee), Lakota, Miami, Shawnee, Seminole, Wampanoag, Northwestern Confederacy and Tecumseh's Confederacy Comanche Alaska Natives |
Colonists, Viceroyalty and Europeans: British Empire: Kingdom of England Kingdom of Great Britain British America United Kingdom British North America Dominion of Canada First French Empire: Kingdom of France New France Spanish Empire: Kingdom of Spain Council of the Indies Viceroyalty of New Spain Dutch Empire: New Netherland Russia Russian America United States Mexico Republic of Texas Confederate States | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| United States - at least 10,476 soldiers killed or died of wounds | |||||||
As settlers spread westward across the United States after 1780, armed conflicts increased in size, duration, and intensity between settlers and various Indian tribes. The climax came in the War of 1812, when major Indian coalitions in the Midwestern United States and the South fought against the United States and lost. Conflict with settlers became less common and was usually resolved by treaties between the federal government and specific tribes, which often required the tribes to sell or surrender land to the United States. These treaties were frequently broken by the U.S. government.
The Indian Removal Act passed by Congress in 1830 neither authorized the unilateral abrogation of treaties guaranteeing Native American land rights within the states, nor the forced relocation of the eastern Indians. Yet both occurred and on a massive scale, it forced Indian tribes to move from east of the Mississippi River to the west on the American frontier, especially to Indian Territory which became Oklahoma. As settlers expanded onto the Great Plains and the Western United States, the nomadic and semi-nomadic Indian tribes of those regions were forced to relocate to Indian reservations.
Indian tribes and coalitions often won battles with the encroaching settlers and soldiers, but their numbers were too few and their resources too limited to win more than temporary victories and concessions from the U.S. and other countries that colonized areas that had composed the modern-day borders of the United States of America.