"Beginning with the 1778 Treaty with the Delawares, the United States engaged in some 375 treaties with Native Americans. While many were concluded hopefully, even earnestly, none ended well for Indian tribes. From George Washington forward, American presidents were confronted with the problem of Americans coveting and taking Indian land. Moreover, from the time of the French and Indian War in 1754, what would become the American army was fighting Indians.
Subjugating those Indians was a challenge of enormous magnitude: Only 5,000 soldiers patrolled a million square miles that was home to 200,000 to 300,000 Indians. And the Indians were generally more proficient at warfare. Soldiers fighting successive tribes of Indians as white settlers moved south and west to occupy the continent were mostly militia, with little prior experience of warfare. By contrast, most Indian tribes fought as their profession. As S. C. Gwynne emphasizes in Empire of the Summer Moon, "American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them."
Yet the United States had innumerable advantages it could bring to bear against the Indians: wealth, numbers, technology, industrial organization. Why did it take so long — over a hundred years — to do so? The answer is a complicated story, interweaving policy and military failures, failures of understanding and execution, and throughout it all an obdurate unwillingness of Americans on the frontier to uphold their government's policy. The Indian Wars were finally won with the combination of simplified objectives, ruthless prosecution by both military and economic means, and international cooperation to preclude sanctuaries from which tribes could operate. But the lessons, and especially the military lessons, were there from the star…"
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