Their Wars: The Conflicts Between the Peoples

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented fact = archaeological record, dated treaty or documentary record, or published scholarship (Sources). Tradition — the people's own account = a people's oral history, winter count, or community history, labelled as such and never merged into the documentary record. Debated / Claim = a disputed point — who began a war, who committed a particular act, or what caused a conflict. Warfare is described only at the published-record level. Scope note: this entry is a history of war between Indigenous peoples (intertribal war). Wars against European, US, or Canadian powers are colonial wars — a different class, appearing only as brief, labelled cross-references. Casualty and population figures are given as sourced ranges.

Causes, as the Record and the Traditions Give Them

• No single cause. Syntheses list, recurring across regions: revenge, territory and hunting grounds, control of trade routes and goods, prestige, and captive-taking — for adoption, labour, or exchange (Milner, 1999; Dye, 2009, War Paths, Peace Paths).
• Revenge cycles. A killing could create an obligation to answer it, so one raid generated the next; peacemaking required ceremony, gifts, and compensation to close the account (Richter, 1992; Dye, 2009).
• Captives and mourning. In the Eastern Woodlands, a death — by war or, after contact, by epidemic — could be answered by a raid to take a captive for adoption in the dead person's place (see Mourning-War below) (Richter, 1992).
• Accelerants, not origins. Horses and firearms did not invent these wars — the deep record predates both — but arriving unevenly they increased range, speed, and lethality, giving an early-mounted or early-armed people a temporary advantage (Secoy, 1953).

The Deep Record: Mississippian Warfare

• Palisaded towns. Documented fact: across the Mississippian world (c. 1000–1600 CE), many mound centres and large towns were enclosed by wooden palisades, often with bastions and ditches — defences that make sense only against a real, repeated threat (Milner, 1999; Buchanan, 2022, Life in a Mississippian Warscape).
• Cahokia's palisade. Documented fact: at Cahokia (present-day Illinois), a palisade about two miles (c. 3.2 km) long, of an estimated 15,000–20,000 logs, with bastions, was raised around the central precinct from c. 1175 CE and rebuilt several times (Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, n.d.; Iseminger, 2010, Cahokia Mounds: America's First City). Debated / Claim: whether it was primarily external defence, a barrier between the elite centre and the wider city, or both is argued; no single attack on it is documented (Iseminger, 2010; Buchanan, 2022).
• The iconography. Documented fact: art grouped as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex repeatedly shows a falcon or "Birdman" warrior holding a mace and a severed head — most famously on the 13th-century Rogan copper plates from Etowah, believed made at Cahokia (Townsend, in Reilly & Garber, eds., 2007; Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Rogan Plates records).
• Life in a warscape. At Common Field, a palisaded centre founded c. 1250 and burned shortly before Cahokia's abandonment, residents adopted risk-averse daily practices and warfare-imagery vessels — ordinary life reorganised around chronic war (Buchanan, 2022).
• Crow Creek — the record. Documented fact: at Crow Creek, a large Initial Coalescent village on the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota, excavations in 1978 in the fortification ditch recovered at least 486 individuals, dated to c. 1325 CE (published radiocarbon ranges roughly ±55–62 years). Men, women, and children were present; many showed scalping, decapitation, and other perimortem injuries, and scavenger chewing showed the bodies lay exposed before burial in the ditch (Willey & Emerson, 1993, "The Osteology and Archaeology of the Crow Creek Massacre," Plains Anthropologist; Zimmerman et al., 1981).
• Crow Creek — scale, ranged. House-count estimates put the village at roughly 800 people, so the recovered dead are often read as a majority of it; summaries give "nearly 500" to "more than 500" depending on how fragmentary remains are counted — the disagreement is printed, not resolved (Willey, 1990, Prehistoric Warfare on the Great Plains; Willey & Emerson, 1993).
• Crow Creek — interpretation, labelled. Debated / Claim: the attackers are not identified by the excavation. Published interpretations propose competition for Missouri River farmland in a period of drought and nutritional stress visible in the skeletons; affinities have been compared to early Arikara samples. The under-representation of young women has been read — inference, not fact — as suggesting some were taken captive (Willey & Emerson, 1993; Zimmerman et al., 1981). No oral tradition naming this event was published with the excavation.

Fortification Traditions

• Iroquoian towns. Documented fact: Wendat (Huron), Haudenosaunee, and other Iroquoian peoples lived in palisaded towns — larger ones with multiple rows of posts and platforms — relocated as soil, firewood, and defence required (Trigger, 1976, The Children of Aataentsic; Trigger, 1985, Natives and Newcomers).
• Pueblo towns. Documented fact: in the Southwest, settlement repeatedly drew into large, aggregated, defensible pueblos, including cliff and mesa-top sites, in periods of conflict, notably in the late 1200s; how much was defence versus drought is argued (LeBlanc, 1999, Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest; Haas & Creamer, 1993 — their Kayenta warfare reading is Debated).
• Plains villages. Documented fact: Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara earthlodge villages on the Missouri were fortified with ditches and palisades, and Pawnee earthlodge villages were likewise defensible farming settlements within raiding range of mounted neighbours (Lehmer, 2001, in DeMallie, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 13).

How War Was Practised — at the Published-Record Level

• Counting coup (Plains). Documented fact: in the Plains honours system, the highest prestige could go not to a kill but to counting coup — striking a living, armed enemy by hand, weapon, or coup stick and escaping. Coups were graded by danger, publicly recited and witnessed, and marked by eagle feathers; stealing a horse or weapon and rescuing a comrade also counted (Mishkin, 1940, Rank and Warfare Among the Plains Indians).
• Limits of that framing. Many Plains engagements were thus small-party raids rather than battles of annihilation — and some were not: the Lakota–Pawnee record below includes village attacks and Massacre Canyon (Mishkin, 1940; van de Logt, 2010).
• Captives and adoption. Documented fact: across the Woodlands, Plains, and Southwest, captives — disproportionately women and children — might be adopted, exchanged or ransomed, held in servitude, or, in some times and places, killed; proportions differed sharply by people and period (Richter, 1992; Brooks, 2002).
• Mourning-war (Haudenosaunee). Documented fact of the scholarship: grieving families and clans could call for a raid to take a captive to "requicken" the dead — adopted, taking the dead person's name and place — restoring family and national numbers; after the 1630s epidemics, the scale grew with the loss (Richter, 1992). Tradition — the people's own account: the condolence and requickening framework is Haudenosaunee teaching, carried in the Confederacy's own oral and ceremonial record (Richter, 1992).

Horses and Guns as Accelerants

• The two frontiers. Documented fact of the standard framing: Secoy (1953) mapped a gun frontier advancing west from the Atlantic colonies, where Dutch, French, and English traders sold firearms, and a horse frontier advancing north from the Spanish Southwest; peoples first standing where the two met — mounted and armed — held a marked advantage (Secoy, 1953).
• The horse's dispersal. Horses spread widely northward after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 scattered Spanish herds in New Mexico (cross-reference below) — a major route, not the only one; they also moved by trade and raiding before 1680 (Hämäläinen, 2008; 2019).
• Guns created dependence. A gun-armed people needed powder, shot, and repair from European traders, binding war-making to trade alliances — central below (Hunt, 1940; White, 1983; Ethridge, 2010). Disease ran ahead of both frontiers, repeatedly deciding campaigns by emptying one side's towns (Richter, 1992; Hämäläinen, 2019).

The Beaver Wars, 1640s–1701 (Intertribal, Entangled with Colonial Trade)

• Setting. By c. 1640 beaver in Haudenosaunee territory were largely hunted out, Dutch traders at Fort Orange supplied firearms in growing numbers, and 1630s epidemics had cut populations severely (Trigger, 1985; Richter, 1992).
• Huronia, 1649. Documented fact: in March 1649 Haudenosaunee parties destroyed the Wendat towns of St. Ignace and St. Louis, and over that year the Wendat (Huron) Confederacy dispersed in its homeland — survivors fleeing to the Petun, to French protection near Quebec, west toward Michilimackinac (becoming part of the Wyandot peoples), or into Haudenosaunee towns by adoption (Trigger, 1976; 1985). Casualty figures vary widely and are not asserted singly here.
• The campaigns that followed, in sequence. The Petun were dispersed in 1649–50; the Neutral (Attiwandaron) Confederacy was destroyed as a separate polity in 1650–51, many adopted into Seneca and other towns; the Erie war ran to c. 1654–57, ending in dispersal and adoption; and war with the Susquehannock continued intermittently until their dispersal in the mid-1670s–c. 1680, under combined Haudenosaunee and colonial pressure (Trigger, 1985; Richter, 1992; Havard, 2001).
• Causes — Debated. Three explanations stand, not merged: (1) trade — Hunt (1940): control of beaver grounds and middleman access; (2) mourning-war and captives — Richter (1992): epidemic loss and requickening drove expansion, whole towns adopted; (3) extending the Great Law — Jennings (1984): bringing kindred peoples under the Confederacy's peace by force. Brandão (1997) disputes how far fur-trade motives drove policy at all.
• The close, 1701. Documented fact: on 4 August 1701, New France and roughly 1,300 representatives of 39 Indigenous nations, including the Haudenosaunee, concluded the Great Peace of Montreal, ending this cycle in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence country and establishing French mediation between signatories; the Haudenosaunee pursued neutrality between France and England in parallel (Havard, 2001, The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701).

The Lakota Westward Movement and Its Wars, 18th–19th Centuries (Intertribal)

• Crossing the Missouri. Documented fact: Lakota bands moved west, crossed the Missouri in the mid-1700s, and contested the river country with the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa — a contest transformed when smallpox in c. 1775–1782 devastated the dense villages far more than the mobile Lakota, after which expansion accelerated (Hämäläinen, 2019; 2021).
• The Black Hills, c. 1776. Tradition — the people's own account, as the record also gives it: Lakota winter counts and oral histories, and syntheses built on them, date the Lakota taking of the Black Hills (Paha Sapa) from the Cheyenne to c. 1776, a Lakota party under Standing Bear having first reached the Hills c. 1765; the Cheyenne had earlier taken the Hills from the Kiowa (DeMallie, 2001; Hämäläinen, 2019). The year is a conventional winter-count date, printed as such, not as a dated document.
• Lakota–Crow. Documented fact: as Lakota territory expanded into Powder River country by the 1840s, the Lakota and their Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho allies (allied by the 1820s) fought the Crow for that hunting country for decades; the Crow at times allied with the US Army — a decision the Crow record explains by Lakota pressure itself (Calloway, 2003; Hämäläinen, 2019).
• Lakota–Pawnee. Documented fact: Lakota parties attacked Pawnee villages repeatedly from the later 1700s — including the 1843 attack on Chief Blue Coat's village on the Loup River, many killed and about half the lodges burned (figures vary) — culminating at Massacre Canyon, 5 August 1873, when a large Oglala, Brulé, and Sihasapa party attacked a Pawnee summer buffalo hunt in Nebraska (van de Logt, 2010). Casualties, ranged: accounts give Pawnee dead from about 50 to over 150 (the agent's figure was 156; later summaries c. 69–71 and c. 100–150) — the range is the record. Van de Logt characterises this warfare as approaching, in targeting whole communities, total war (van de Logt, 2010).
• Cross-reference — colonial class. Red Cloud's War (1866–68), in which Red Cloud's Oglala Lakota and allies fought the United States over the Bozeman Trail forts and won the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, was a colonial war, not intertribal; it is named here only so it is not misfiled (Ostler, 2004, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism).

Comanche–Apache Wars of the Southern Plains (Intertribal)

• The Comanche move south. Documented fact: in the early 1700s the Comanche, who had acquired horses, moved onto the southern Plains and, over roughly a half-century of war, drove the Apache peoples of the former Apachería — principally Lipan and Mescalero — south and west off the grasslands, establishing Comanchería (Hämäläinen, 2008).
• Why the Apache position failed, as scholarship gives it: Apache farming-and-hunting villages, tied to fields at fixed seasons, were exposed to mounted raiders who could concentrate against isolated settlements for crops and captives — an asymmetry of mobility, compounded by Comanche and Ute pressure (Hämäläinen, 2008). Apache peoples persisted in Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico, raiding and trading in their turn, into the 1800s (Hämäläinen, 2008; DeLay, 2008).

The Southeast: Chickasaw–Choctaw and the Shatter Zone Wars (Intertribal, inside a Colonial Trade System)

• The framing. Documented fact of the scholarship: Ethridge names the Southeast of 1540–1730 the Mississippian Shatter Zone — destabilised by disease, chiefdom collapse, and above all a commercial Indian slave trade centred on Charleston, in which armed peoples raided neighbours for captives to sell to colonists (Ethridge, 2010; Ethridge & Shuck-Hall, eds., 2009; Gallay, 2002). Her synthesis estimates population falling from roughly 500,000 in 1540 to roughly 90,000 in 1730 — estimates, not a census.
• Chickasaw and Choctaw. Documented fact: the Chickasaw, supplied with English firearms through Carolina, raided across the lower Mississippi valley, taking captives from the Choctaw and others; the Choctaw, the larger people, traded principally with the French and fought the Chickasaw in recurring wars through the first half of the 1700s (White, 1983; Ethridge, 2010). The French–Chickasaw wars framing part of this were colonial class; the Chickasaw–Choctaw raiding within it was intertribal (White, 1983; Ethridge, 2010).
• Attribution caution. A raid's sponsors were often in Charleston or Mobile while its fighters were Chickasaw, Choctaw, Westo, Yamasee, or others; who "began" any single southeastern war is frequently Debated, and first aggression is not assigned where the sources record competing claims (Gallay, 2002; Ethridge, 2010).

The Southwest: Navajo–Pueblo and Apache Raiding Economies (Intertribal, inside a Colonial Borderland)

• A captive-and-livestock economy. Documented fact: Brooks (2002, Captives and Cousins) documents a centuries-long system in which Apache, Navajo (Diné), Ute, Comanche, Kiowa, Pueblo, and Spanish/Mexican communities raided one another for captives and livestock, then traded, ransomed, adopted, or held them — spreading kinship even as it renewed violence. Pueblo towns were both targets and participants (Brooks, 2002).
• Navajo–Pueblo. Documented fact: Navajo raiding of Pueblo and Hispano settlements for sheep and captives, and Pueblo and Hispano raiding in return, ran in cycles from the 1700s into the 1860s, driven partly by the pastoral economy — a flock lost to drought or raiders could be rebuilt by raiding (Brooks, 2002; White, 1983). Yearly figures in New Mexican reports are one side's accounting (Brooks, 2002).
• Apache raiding. Documented fact: Western Apache and other Apache groups practised raiding — for livestock, food, and captives — as an economic activity distinguished in Apache practice itself from warfare for revenge (Basso, ed., 1983, from Goodwin's papers). It touched Pueblo, Navajo, O'odham, and Mexican settlements; O'odham–Apache hostility is among the longest-running intertribal conflicts in the Southwest record (Basso/Goodwin, 1983; Brooks, 2002).

Cross-Reference Only — Colonial Class

• The Pueblo Revolt, 1680. The Pueblo peoples' coordinated rising in August 1680, organised in the Spanish record under the Tewa leader Po'pay of Ohkay Owingeh, expelled Spain from New Mexico for twelve years (Knaut, 1995; Liebmann, 2012). It was an anti-colonial war — colonial class — standing here only as this cross-reference. Its intertribal consequence noted above stands: the dispersal of Spanish horses in 1680 fed the horse frontier (Hämäläinen, 2008).

Sources

• Basso, Keith H., ed. (1983). Western Apache Raiding and Warfare: From the Papers of Grenville Goodwin. University of Arizona Press.
• Brandão, José António (1997). "Your Fyre Shall Burn No More." University of Nebraska Press.
• Brooks, James F. (2002). Captives and Cousins. University of North Carolina Press.
• Buchanan, Meghan E. (2022). Life in a Mississippian Warscape. University of Alabama Press.
• Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site (n.d.). Stockade / palisade interpretation.
• Calloway, Colin G. (2003). One Vast Winter Count. University of Nebraska Press.
• DeLay, Brian (2008). War of a Thousand Deserts. Yale University Press.
• DeMallie, Raymond J., ed. (2001). Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 13: Plains. Smithsonian Institution.
• Dye, David H. (2009). War Paths, Peace Paths. AltaMira Press.
• Ethridge, Robbie (2010). From Chicaza to Chickasaw. University of North Carolina Press.
• Ethridge, Robbie & Shuck-Hall, Sheri M., eds. (2009). Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone. University of Nebraska Press.
• Gallay, Alan (2002). The Indian Slave Trade. Yale University Press.
• Haas, Jonathan & Creamer, Winifred (1993). Stress and Warfare Among the Kayenta Anasazi. Field Museum.
• Hämäläinen, Pekka (2008). The Comanche Empire. Yale University Press.
• Hämäläinen, Pekka (2019). Lakota America. Yale University Press.
• Hämäläinen, Pekka (2021). "The Kinetic Empires of Native American Nomads." In The Oxford World History of Empire, Vol. 2. Oxford University Press.
• Havard, Gilles (2001). The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701. McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Hunt, George T. (1940). The Wars of the Iroquois. University of Wisconsin Press.
• Iseminger, William R. (2010). Cahokia Mounds: America's First City. History Press.
• Jennings, Francis (1984). The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. W. W. Norton.
• Knaut, Andrew L. (1995). The Pueblo Revolt of 1680. University of Oklahoma Press.
• LeBlanc, Steven A. (1999). Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest. University of Utah Press.
• Liebmann, Matthew (2012). Revolt. University of Arizona Press.
• Milner, George R. (1999). "Warfare in Prehistoric and Early Historic Eastern North America." Journal of Archaeological Research 7.
• Mishkin, Bernard (1940). Rank and Warfare Among the Plains Indians. J. J. Augustin.
• Ostler, Jeffrey (2004). The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism. Cambridge University Press.
• Reilly, F. Kent III & Garber, James F., eds. (2007). Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms. University of Texas Press.
• Richter, Daniel K. (1992). The Ordeal of the Longhouse. University of North Carolina Press.
• Secoy, Frank Raymond (1953). Changing Military Patterns on the Great Plains. J. J. Augustin.
• Trigger, Bruce G. (1976). The Children of Aataentsic. McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Trigger, Bruce G. (1985). Natives and Newcomers. McGill-Queen's University Press.
• van de Logt, Mark (2010). War Party in Blue: Pawnee Scouts in the U.S. Army. University of Oklahoma Press.
• White, Richard (1983). The Roots of Dependency. University of Nebraska Press.
• Willey, P. (1990). Prehistoric Warfare on the Great Plains. Garland.
• Willey, P. & Emerson, Thomas E. (1993). "The Osteology and Archaeology of the Crow Creek Massacre." Plains Anthropologist 38.
• Zimmerman, Larry J. et al. (1981). The Crow Creek Site (39BF11) Massacre: A Preliminary Report. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Flagged / weakest-sourced points: (1) Crow Creek — attackers unidentified; the captive reading of the missing young women is inference; toll ranged (486 minimum vs. c. 500+ vs. c. 800 estimated population). (2) The c. 1776 Black Hills date rests on winter-count tradition, not a dated document. (3) Massacre Canyon casualties range c. 50–156; unresolved. (4) Beaver Wars causation is Debated among Hunt, Richter, Jennings, and Brandão. (5) Cahokia's palisade purpose and the Haas & Creamer Kayenta reading are Debated. (6) Southeastern decline figures are Ethridge's estimates, not censuses. (7) Huronia 1649 and Blue Coat's village 1843 casualties vary too widely to number.