"Lessons from the Indian Wars" Topic

"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 start…"

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Armand

As usual, ignores Amerind culture, which led to warriors who had not personally signed the treaties feeling that they were not bound by them. Oddly, the same dynamic was at work on the American side.

Hard to do "treaties" with people who have no government, no one authorized to speak and deal for all. Quite apart form other factors like disease and technology and population density, the political incapacity of the natives made the conquest of North America by the whites a tragic inevitability. Any US government that stood in its way would soon be voted out and another put in. (The Iroquois are the exemption that proves the rule.)

Thanks

Armand