"indian wars question" Topic

I was wondering that during the Plains Indian Wars, which tribe killed the most whites? Some body mentioned to me it was the Navajo but I think it might have been the Sioux. Thank you for your help.

Civilians or Soldiers?

Greg Michno in his "Encylopedia of Indian Wars 1850 – 1890" crunched the data on fights where specific tribes are mentioned. The Sioux came first, inflicting 1250 casualties in 98 fights or 12.7 casualties per fight. Cheyenne followed with 642 casualties in 72 fights, and then Apache who inflicted 566 casualties in 214 fights. The Navajo were down on the list. There is lots of good info in the Michno book.

No one will ever know. You're talking 50+ years of raids and skirmishes that stretched across a huge are. Are you including people living in Mexico? To complicate it more, raiding parties often combined tribes, so it is not unusual to see Sioux-Cheyenne or Comanche-Kiowa.

And the Navajo are not Plains Indians.

Good question. As a follow up to Michno, I would ask what is a fight? Is it only Army vs. Indian or does it include Indian raids on homesteaders?

In the Cheyenne war of 1864 there were 100 civilian killed by the Sioux alone the Upper Blue River in Nebraska.

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Re Indian Raids of 1860-1869

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"The Indians attacked the isolated settlers, cut the telegraph lines, robbed the wagon trains, and stage coaches, killed people wherever found, attacked the military posts, and stampeded the horses and cattle wherever they found a chance. During these eight years fully 1,000 people lost their lives and perhaps twice as many Indians were killed".

I'd also check to be sure the estimates are based on the same date range as well as geography. There's a lot of trouble between Navajo and Pueblo and Mexican and Spanish authorities an American might not count as plains wars, but the Mexicans--or the Apache--might have a different perspective.
Worth remembering that not all tribes were the same size so "most casualties inflicted" does not necessarily mean "people you'd least want to fight twenty of" and that they spent a lot of time and energy fighting other Indians. The story goes that when some Commanches who fought in WWI wanted into the warrior societies, they weren't admitted. They'd only fought Germans, after all. It wasn't as though they'd fought Utes or Apache.
You have to draw the line somewhere.

I do not have any numbers for the whites killed, but I have a book that lists the numbers of actions fought by the U.S. Army against various tribes, and the number for the Comanches nearly equaled all other tribes combined. On top of that, the Comanches raided or made war on the Mexicans and just about every other tribe within reach (they eventually allied with the Kiowa)for well over a century.

I would say then that the Comanches must be the tribe. I thank you for your help.

Comanches BAD