U.S. wars and massacres against Indian nations, 1776 to 1890

In 1694, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered all friendly Indians confined to a small area.

A bounty was then offered for the killing or capture of hostile Indians, and scalps were accepted as proof of a kill.

Similarly, military engagements that led to the death of noncombatants, like the battle of the Washita, cannot be seen as genocidal acts, for the loss of innocent life was not intended and the soldiers did not aim at the destruction of the Indians as a defined group.

But, as Robert Utley has concluded in a careful analysis, it is better described as “a regrettable, tragic accident of war,” a bloodbath that neither side intended.

In 1779 the United States declared war on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) to punish them for raids they had undertaken to roll back colonial settlement.

In 1790 Secretary of War Henry Knox sanctioned such a war when he ordered the U.S. Army to “extirpate, utterly, if possible” a confederacy of Indians centered in Ohio that had rejected U.S. demands for a land cession.

adding that should Indians go to war, “they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”

This event, usually termed a battle, had some characteristics of a massacre.

The object, in George Washington’s words, was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.”

President Jefferson sent word to Indians near Detroit that “if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi,”

the loss of at least eight hundred in 1814 when Andrew Jackson, “determining to exterminate them,” as he later put it, breached their fortifications at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River.

In an attack on the Indian town of Ouiatenon on the Wabash River in Indiana in 1791 , for example, a Kentucky militia fired on Indians in five canoes who were trying to escape.

the militiamen voted on whether or not to kill their captives. When the majority vote was tallied, the militiamen proceeded to slaughter men, women, and children alike.

This is especially so of a Colorado territorial militia’s slaughter of Cheyennes at Sand Creek ( 1864 ) and the army’s slaughter of Shoshones at Bear River ( 1863 ), Blackfeet on the Marias River ( 1870 ), and Lakotas at Wounded Knee ( 1890 ).

it is clear that the United States never intended to put to death all Indians in the territory it claimed. If that is the standard for genocide, then the term does not apply.

The threat of genocide in this very strong sense of the term played a crucial role in allowing the United States to achieve its primary goal of taking Indian lands.