This timeline of the American Indian Wars traces roughly two and a half centuries of armed conflict, forced removal, and treaty violations between colonial and later US authorities and Native American nations, from early colonial-era fighting through the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.
Colonial-Era Conflicts, 1637–1676
Armed conflict between European colonists and Native nations began well before the founding of the United States. In 1637, English colonists in Connecticut, aided by rival Native allies, waged a brief but devastating war against the Pequot nation, culminating in an attack on a fortified village on the Mystic River in which several hundred Pequot people, many of them non-combatants, were killed; the war left the Pequot nation shattered as a political power in the region. Four decades later, a broader and even more destructive conflict, known as King Philip’s War, pitted the Wampanoag leader Metacom, whom the English called King Philip, and allied Native nations against expanding New England colonies. The war, fought between 1675 and 1676, was proportionally one of the deadliest conflicts in American history for the colonial population and resulted in the deaths, displacement, or enslavement of a large share of the region’s Native inhabitants, permanently weakening Native political power across much of New England. These early conflicts established a pattern that would recur across the following two and a half centuries: colonial or, later, federal expansion into land held by Native nations, followed by armed resistance, and, more often than not, military defeat and further loss of territory for the Native side.
Removal and Resistance, 1830–1876
As the United States expanded westward in the nineteenth century, federal policy shifted toward the systematic removal of Native nations from lands desired by settlers. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by President Andrew Jackson, authorized the government to negotiate, and where necessary compel, the relocation of southeastern Native nations to territory west of the Mississippi River. The most infamous consequence of this policy was the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation beginning in 1838, a journey remembered as the Trail of Tears, during which an estimated several thousand Cherokee people died from disease, exposure, and starvation along the route; similar removals affected the Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole nations. Resistance to encroachment and broken treaties continued across the Great Plains and West in subsequent decades, culminating in engagements such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876, in which combined Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces, resisting continued incursions onto treaty-protected land following the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, defeated and killed Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and much of his 7th Cavalry command.
Land Loss and Wounded Knee, 1887–1890
Military resistance was accompanied by policies designed to dismantle Native landholding and cultural practice. The Dawes Act of 1887 divided communally held reservation land into individual allotments, ostensibly to encourage assimilation into farming; in practice, the policy resulted in a substantial net loss of Native-held land over the following decades, as allotted parcels passed out of Native ownership. Widespread hardship and loss on the reservations during this period contributed to the spread of the Ghost Dance movement, a religious revival that authorities in some areas viewed with alarm. Tensions surrounding the movement culminated on December 29, 1890, when US 7th Cavalry soldiers killed an estimated 150 to 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, in an event that began as an attempt to disarm the group and ended in mass killing. The Wounded Knee Massacre is generally regarded by historians as marking the effective end of large-scale armed conflict between the US government and Native American nations, though the dispossession, forced assimilation policies, and struggles over sovereignty and land that produced it continued to affect Native communities well into the twentieth century and beyond. Later federal policies, including forced boarding-school education and the eventual reversal of allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, reflect the long aftermath of this period, and Native nations have continued to pursue legal, political, and cultural efforts to reclaim land, treaty rights, and recognition into the present day.