American Indian Victories

In , settlers and land speculators were eager to get their hands on the rich lands of Ohio but were meeting resistance from American Indians. Clair and some 2, men to the center of that resistance, a group of villages on the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio. Clair by Charles Wilson Peale, from life, The American army—poorly equipped, badly trained, delayed and demoralized by administrative mismanagement, contractor fraud, and bad weather, and its ranks thinned by sickness, desertion, and the expiration of enlistment terms—was out of its element.

At dawn on November 4, about 1, warriors from a coalition of Indian nations—Shawnees, Miamis, Delawares, Wyandots, Kickapoos, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Iroquois, and others—encircled and attacked the American encampment on the bank of the Wabash River. Moving rapidly from tree to tree and firing from cover, Indian marksmen systematically picked off the officers and the gun crews, depriving the raw American soldiers of leadership and artillery. American bayonet charges proved ineffective and discipline unraveled as casualties mounted.

Clair ordered a retreat, the survivors fled for their lives.

The Americans suffered killed and almost wounded; on the Indian side, there were about 25 killed and perhaps 50 wounded. Little Turtle, a Miami war chief, one of the leaders of the Indian coalition, lithograph reputedly based on a portrait by Gilbert Stuart. As Americans flooded across Ohio and beyond, they could ignore the Indian victory; but at the time the battle generated a deluge of correspondence, opinions, and debates in the press.

The Third Seminole War stamped out all but a handful of the remaining members of the tribe. In the United States, the removal policy met only sporadic armed resistance as whites pushed into the Mississippi River valley during the s and s.

The acquisition of Texas and the Southwest during the s, however, sparked a new series of Indian-white conflicts. On the Pacific Coast, attacks against the native peoples accompanied the flood of immigrants to gold-laden California. Disease, malnutrition, and warfare combined with the poor lands set aside as reservations to reduce the Indian population of that state from , in to 35, in The army took the lead role in Oregon and Washington, using the Rogue River , Yakima , and Spokane wars to force several tribes onto reservations.

Sporadic conflicts also plagued Arizona and New Mexico throughout the s as the army struggled to establish its presence. On the southern plains, mounted warriors posed an even more formidable challenge to white expansion. Strikes against the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Comanches, and Kiowas during the decade only hinted at the deadlier conflicts of years to come.

The Civil War saw the removal of the Regulars and an accompanying increase in the number and intensity of white-Indian conflicts. Disputes on the southern plains culminated in the Sand Creek massacre , during which John M.

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In Minnesota , attacks by the Eastern Sioux prompted counterattacks by the volunteer forces of Henry H. Sibley, after which the tribes were removed to the Dakotas. The conflict became general when John Pope mounted a series of unsuccessful expeditions onto the plains in Regular units, including four regiments of black troops, returned west following the Confederate collapse. Railroad expansion, new mining ventures, the destruction of the buffalo, and ever-increasing white demand for land exacerbated the centuries-old tensions.

The mounted warriors of the Great Plains posed an especially thorny problem for an army plagued by a chronic shortage of cavalry and a government policy that demanded Indian removal on the cheap. Using a series of converging columns, Philip Sheridan achieved more success in his winter campaigns of , but only with the Red River War of were the tribes broken.

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But arable lands and rumors of gold in the Dakotas continued to attract white migration; the government opened a major new war in A series of army columns took the field that fall and again the following spring. By campaigning through much of the winter, harassing Indian villages, and winning battles like that at Wolf Mountain , Nelson A. Miles proved particularly effective. Another outbreak among the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, precipitated by government corruption, shrinking reservations, and the spread of the Ghost Dance, culminated in a grisly encounter at Wounded Knee , in which casualties totaled over two hundred Indians and sixty-four soldiers.

Less spectacular but equally deadly were conflicts in the Pacific Northwest.

In a desperate effort to secure a new reservation on the tribal homelands, a Modoc chief assassinated Edward R. Canby during an abortive peace conference in Also unsuccessful was armed resistance among the Bannocks, Paiutes, Sheepeaters, and Utes in To the far southwest, Cochise , Victorio, and Geronimo led various Apache bands in resisting white and Hispanic encroachments, crossing and recrossing the border into Mexico with seeming impunity.

Only after lengthy campaigning, during which army columns frequently entered Mexico, were the Apaches forced to surrender in the mids. The army remained wary of potential trouble as incidental violence continued. Yet, with the exception of another clash in during which protesters temporarily seized control of Wounded Knee, the major Indian-white conflicts in the United States had ended.

Militarily, several trends had become apparent.

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Indian removal and the reservation system. From the earliest days of European colonization of the New World, relations between white Europeans and Native Americans were plagued by violent competition for land and natural resources. The Cherokee nation was subject to a brutal mass migration that came to be known as the Trail of Tears.

The American West

Some tribes fiercely resisted the forced relocations, and Native Americans and the US Army fought many battles in the East. The Indian Appropriations Act of established Indian reservations in the territory that would become the states of Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Kansas. The US federal government envisioned the reservation system as a method of keeping Native American tribes off of the lands that white Americans wished to settle.

The Indian Wars of the West. Inspired by the ideology of Manifest Destiny, which held that European Americans were divinely ordained to settle the whole of the North American continent, white settlers pushed ever further westward towards the Pacific. As they did so, they increasingly came into violent conflict with Native American Indians over land and natural resources, especially after the discovery of gold in western territories sparked the Gold Rush.

Prospective gold-diggers flooded into the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest, clashing—sometimes violently—with the Native Americans they encountered there.

Map courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The relentless pace of continental expansion inevitably heightened these conflicts. After the Mexican-American War, the territories comprising modern-day Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California became sites of competition and bloody skirmishing between white settlers and Native Americans.