| Indian Wars is the name used in the United States
to describe a series of conflicts between the colonial or
federal government and the native people of North America.
The earliest English settlers in what would become the
United States often enjoyed peaceful relations with nearby
tribes. However, as early as the Pequot War of 1637, the
colonists were taking sides in military rivalries between
native nations in order to assure colonial security and
open further land for settlement. The wars, which ranged
from the seventeenth-century (King Philip's War, King William's
War, and Queen Anne's War at the opening of the eighteenth
century) to the Wounded Knee massacre and "closing"
of the American frontier in 1890, generally resulted in
the opening of Native American lands to further colonization,
the conquest of Native Americans and their assimilation,
or forced relocation to Indian reservations.
A controversy continues on the question of whether the
American Indian Wars were part of a genocide of Native Americans.
Scholars take different positions in the ongoing genocide
debate. Various statistics have been developed concerning
the devastation of these wars on the peoples involved. The
best-documented figures are derived from collated records
of strictly military engagements such as by Gregory Michno
which reveal 21,586 dead, wounded, and captured civilians
and soldiers for the period of 1850–90. Other figures
are derived from extrapolations of rather cursory and unrelated
government accounts such as that by Russell Thornton who
calculated that some 45,000 Native Americans and 19,000
whites were killed in battle. This later rough estimate
includes women and children on both sides, since noncombatants
were often killed in frontier massacres.Whether non-combat
deaths resulting indirectly from war (for instance the 4,000
Cherokees who died on the Trail of Tears) should be reckoned
part of the legacy of the Indian Wars is a matter of fierce
debate. Then, as today, many deaths involved hunger, disease,
and intertribal violence set in motion by the disruptions
of war, but not direct violence. When these deaths are counted,
the number of Native Americans who died from the results
of wars is generally accepted to be orders of magnitude
higher than those killed outright. Academic estimates of
deaths resulting from war and the results of war range from
historian David Stannard's total of 100 million (for all
of the Americas) to political scientist R. J. Rummel's estimate
of 2 million to 15 million, with a common figure cited being
10 million people.
What is not disputed is that the savagery from both sides
was such as to be noted in newspapers, historical archives,
diplomatic reports, and the United States Declaration of
Independence. ("…[He] has endeavoured to bring
on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished
destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.")
The Indian Wars comprised a series of smaller wars. Native
Americans, diverse peoples with their own distinct tribal
histories, were no more a single people than the Europeans.
Living in societies organized in a variety of ways, Native
Americans usually made decisions about war and peace at
the local level, though they sometimes fought as part of
formal alliances, such as the Iroquois Confederation, or
in temporary confederacies inspired by leaders such as Tecumseh.
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