American Indian wars (1587-1890). North American Indian population densities never approached those of Mexico and Peru, but their greatest concentrations were around the Chesapeake Bay area, in the south-east, the Pueblo/Navajo in the south-west, and along the Pacific coast. Their fate reflects how early they were exposed to Anglo-American contact. Today California has the largest population, followed by Oklahoma (the old ‘Indian Territory’ dumping ground) and the south-west.

The 300-year intermittent war began with the extermination of Drake's Virginia colony by the Croatan, while only the influence of Chief Wahunsenacock of the Powhatan confederation saved the Jamestown settlement from a similar fate. Modern perception is conditioned by Hollywood's emphasis on the Plains Indians wars, but by the time the whites crossed the Allegheny mountains most serious resistance was over, with eight or nine named ‘wars’ leading up to the French and Indian war and Pontiac's rebellion. Once the Anglo-American population achieved critical mass and their use as allies against the French ended, Indians were regarded either as an inconvenience to be ‘concentrated’ on marginal lands or as vermin to be exterminated.

Combat was far less significant than the near-genocidal effect of introduced bacteria and distilled liquor. A decimated population resistant to European diseases eventually emerged, but over time the abiding Indian predisposition to alcoholism has been even more devastating. Once defeated, North American Indians became the objects of the world's longest-running social engineering programme, successfully designed to reduce the target population to a state of hopeless dependency. When one considers the arbitrary expropriation of the ‘civilized’ tribes of the south-east, the way the tenuous authority of accommodationist Indian leaders was invariably undermined by Anglo-American bad faith, and the fact that the Indian government's agents were usually either profiteers or else missionaries hostile to Indian culture, it is impossible not to sympathize with the braves who preferred honourable death in battle.

The American Indian wars
(Click to enlarge)

This said, ‘noble savage’ romanticism cannot survive clear-eyed examination. Warrior tribes, who required no lessons in the arts of treachery and massacre, predominated. White rapacity, hypocrisy, and cant are hard to stomach, but so are cannibalism, headhunting (and its symbolic extension, scalping), and the refined torture of captives. Nor was there any solidarity among the Indians. With a few fleeting exceptions such as Tecumseh's confederation of 1805-13, they never united against the whites in significant numbers. By contrast, their willingness to ally with them against rival tribes was a permanent feature of the conflict.

From a pre-contact population in the millions, by 1900 they were reduced to a culturally destroyed remnant of 250, 000. No less brutal than the Anglo-Americans, to the south the Spanish conquistadores placed a market value on Indians to work the lands they conquered. No such consideration palliated the treatment they received in the north. Regardless of its inevitability, the dispossession of the American Indians makes melancholy reading, and illustrates the grim truth that when two peoples compete for the same land, the stronger will prevail and the weaker must accept whatever terms it can get.

— Hugh Bicheno