An Overview of the Indian Wars

 

Like Hebrew and Arabic the continent was overwritten from right to left, with the First Nations its palimpsest. This process is glossed over in many schoolbooks. You might learn about the Native American genocide in a general way, and perhaps something about the local tribes of your region, but the painful, bloody step by step process of hacking their way across the continent gets short shrift.  A recitation of the phases follows – if it’s boring and repetitious to you, good – if it’s torture to hear about, think about what it WAS.

All that followed was made possible by the so-called French and Indian War in the mid 18th century which vanquished our French colonial competitors, who had kept the English hemmed in along the Eastern seaboard for a century. With that barrier out of the way, American settlers could venture past the Appalachians. The Cherokee Wars started with the American Revolution in the upper south and lasted until 1795, roughly concurrent with the Northwest Wars in Ohio against the tribes of the western Indian confederacy. In 1811 the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his Confederacy led a war against the English in the Great Lakes region and were defeated. The Creek were finished by the Red Stick War in 1813 and 1814, waged largely under the leadership of Andrew Jackson, also at the head of American troops in the first of the Seminole Wars in the swamps of Florida five years later. Many of my ancestors fought under him in those actions.

Texas was the site of fighting for over half a century from 1820 to 1875 resulting in the defeat of the Comanche and other tribes. American troops fought the Arikara in the Dakotas in 1823 and the Winnebago or Ho-chunk of the Midwest in 1827. 1830 saw the implementation of the coldly titled Indian Removal Policy and the Trail of Tears, in which Southeastern bands were moved west to reservations in what is now Oklahoma, resulting in the deaths of thousands. There was the Black Hawk War in Illinois and Michigan in 1832, the 2nd Seminole War in 1835, lasting over a decade, the Cayuse War in Oregon in 1847 lasting eight years, and actions against the Apache of the southwest starting in 1851 and lasting a half century. 1855 saw armed combat against the natives of Puget Sound, and the Rogue River region in Oregon, the Yakima people of the Northwest Plateau, and the Third Seminole War in 1858.

Fighting against the Navaho began in 1858 and lasted throughout the Civil War. When you learn of all the Indian campaigns that were fought by American troops during the war between the states, you’ll know precisely why a Union victory against the Confederacy seems a foregone conclusion. The resources didn’t compare. Even while the Union was waging this major conflagration in the east, in the west they were subduing the Paiutes, the Shoshone, the Yavapai, and other tribes. After Lee’s surrender, immediately came Red Cloud's War, in which the U.S. fought against the Lakota Sioux , Arapaho and Cheyenne.

In 1869 Grant became President and was succeeded as Commanding General of the Army by Sherman. A digressive word here about the Shermans. This family, which originated in Dedham, on the Southeast Coast of England, with several of them emigrating to Massachusetts in the early 17th century.. My great-great grandmother was of this family, descended from Philip Sherman, one of the founders of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Connecticut’s Roger Sherman was the only man to sign all four of America’s founding documents. In 1810 a lawyer from Norwalk CT named Charles Robert Sherman moved to Ohio, where his son William was born a decade later. William’s middle name, Tecumseh was in honor of the valiant Shawnee leader of the earlier troubles. Today William Tecumseh Sherman is mostly remembered for his role in defeating the south in the Civil War through his ethic of total warfare, a scorched earth policy that left a trail of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah, an event still spoken of in awe as Sherman’s March to the Sea. 

Sherman was now to bring these tactics to bear in the last phase of the so-called Indian Wars, adding a permanent tinge of irony to his middle name. Sherman’s philosophy was to bring wars to a quick end by being unstintingly brutal. He believed in destroying all targets both civilian and military, making no distinctions between men, women and children. In a little over a decade he essentially ended the armed resistance by native tribes that had been a fact of American life for over 250 years, subduing the Modocs, the Comanche, the Sioux, the Nez Perce, the Bannock, the Cheyenne, the Utes, and Apache. By the time he retired in 1883 it was mostly all over. The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 is usually thought of as the last of the Indian Wars, although there were still various smaller actions and skirmishes as late as the 1920s, and, if you follow the news, right down to the present day. And Sherman remains an honored figure. P.S. 87 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which my son attended for three years, is known to this day as the William T. Sherman School.