Interactions Between American Indians and Europeans

In the winter of 1607, Jamestown's colonists were starving, and Powhatan, the ruler of some thirty Algonquian-speaking tribes around the Chesapeake, could have let them die. Instead he traded them corn and tried to fold them into his chiefdom as useful subordinates who made copper and hatchets. Fifteen years later his brother Opechancanough tried to wipe the colony out. Neither choice was random. Native leaders between 1607 and 1754 decided whether to trade, ally or fight based on their own goals, and those goals changed as European numbers, demands and rivalries changed.

Why Native nations sought European allies

Europeans did not arrive in an empty political world. Native nations already had rivals, trade networks and wars of their own, and they treated the newcomers as one more power to use. A nation that controlled access to European guns, metal tools and cloth could defeat its enemies. Europeans, for their part, were few in number for most of the 1600s and needed Native trading partners, guides, food and fighting men. Each side used the other, so alliances were real partnerships even when the partners distrusted each other.

The fur trade of the Northeast shows the pattern most clearly. In 1609, Samuel de Champlain joined Huron (Wendat) and Algonquin warriors on a raid against the Mohawks, the easternmost nation of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, and his gunfire killed several Mohawk leaders. That single fight fixed the alignments of the next century. The French armed the Huron and Algonquins; the Dutch, trading from Fort Orange (Albany) after 1624, sold guns to the Mohawks. Smallpox in the 1630s killed about half the Huron and many Haudenosaunee, and Native nations waged mourning wars to take captives who could be adopted to replace the dead. Armed with Dutch muskets and driven by the demand for beaver pelts, the Haudenosaunee fought the Beaver Wars of the mid-1600s and broke up the Huron confederacy in 1649, scattering its survivors.

When the English took New Netherland in 1664, the Haudenosaunee kept their trade partner by switching to the English. In 1677 they and New York's governor, Edmund Andros, formed the Covenant Chain, an alliance later extended to other English colonies. The Haudenosaunee then did something smarter than picking a side permanently. Exhausted by decades of war with France and its Native allies, in 1701 they made peace with the French at Montreal and renewed ties with the English at Albany in the same summer. This Grand Settlement made them neutral between the two empires, which let them trade with both and play each against the other until the 1750s.

The French built the most accommodating relationships of any European power, mainly because there were so few French. New France had fewer than 400 settlers in 1640 and roughly 60,000 by the 1750s, compared with over a million people in the British colonies. French traders (coureurs de bois) lived in Native villages, learned Native languages and married Native women. French officials took part in Native diplomacy: they gave gifts, smoked the calumet (a decorated ceremonial pipe whose shared smoking sealed peace and alliance) and acted as mediators in disputes between allied nations. The historian Richard White called the zone this created around the Great Lakes a "middle ground," a world where neither side could dominate and both had to invent common customs to get what they wanted. Jesuit missionaries converted some Native people without demanding that they give up their land, because French officials cared far more about furs and converts than about farmland.

Land: why the English fought the most wars

English colonists came to farm, and they came in large numbers. That made the core problem land, not trade. Each family needed fields, fences and pasture, and English livestock wandered into unfenced Native cornfields. English law also defined property differently: Native communities held land in common and used different places in different seasons, while colonists treated a deed as giving one owner the exclusive right to fence and keep it forever. A Native leader who "sold" the right to use land often found he had given it up entirely.

The Chesapeake shows how a relationship of trade turned into war as colonists multiplied. Powhatan had first treated Jamestown as a tributary, a subordinate people that owed him food, goods or labor in return for his protection. After the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609 to 1614) ended with the marriage of his daughter Pocahontas to John Rolfe, peace held while Rolfe's tobacco set off a boom. Planters spread along the James River, taking Powhatan land. On March 22, 1622, Opechancanough coordinated attacks that killed 347 colonists, about a quarter of the English in Virginia. The English answered with a decade of raids, and the crisis led the Crown to dissolve the Virginia Company and take over the colony in 1624. A second great attack in 1644 failed; Opechancanough was captured and killed, and a 1646 treaty made the Powhatans tributaries confined to reserved lands. Topic 2.4 covers how Bacon's Rebellion (1676) later turned frontier land hunger against Virginia's governor and against Native peoples.

New England followed the same arc. In the Pequot War (1636 to 1637), Puritan forces with Narragansett and Mohegan allies burned the Pequot fort at Mystic and killed some 400 to 700 people, most of them women, children and old men; the survivors were enslaved or given to the allied nations. For the next generation, Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem (the hereditary leader of a Native community), kept the alliance with Plymouth he had made in 1621. By the 1670s, though, his son Metacom (the English called him King Philip) faced a different situation. Colonists now outnumbered Native people in southern New England, Wampanoag land had shrunk to a few peninsulas, Plymouth claimed authority over Wampanoag affairs, and Puritan missionaries such as John Eliot had gathered converts into some fourteen "praying towns" (villages where Christian Native people lived under Puritan rules for dress, work and worship), which divided Native communities between converts and those who kept their own ways.

The spark came in 1675, when Plymouth hanged three Wampanoags for the murder of John Sassamon, a Christian Native man who had warned the colony that Metacom was planning war. Metacom's War (King Philip's War, 1675 to 1676) followed. Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Narragansett and other warriors attacked more than half of New England's roughly ninety towns and destroyed about a dozen. Colonists feared all Native people alike: they interned Christian Natives on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where many died over the winter, and attacked the neutral Narragansetts in the Great Swamp Fight of December 1675. Alliances decided the war. Mohawk warriors, encouraged by Andros of New York, struck Metacom's winter camp, and Mohegan and Pequot fighters served with the English. Metacom was killed in August 1676 by a Native soldier serving under Benjamin Church.

The war killed perhaps 600 to 1,000 colonists and about 3,000 Native people; relative to population, it was among the deadliest wars in American history. Its effects lasted. Native power in southern New England was broken, and hundreds of captives, Metacom's wife and son among them, were sold into slavery in the West Indies. Colonists came away with a hardened view of Native people as enemies, fed by captivity narratives such as Mary Rowlandson's (1682).

Farther south, English demand produced a different kind of violence. Carolina's traders, many from Barbados, bought Native captives from allied nations such as the Westos and later the Yamasees and shipped them to the Caribbean. The historian Alan Gallay estimates that between about 24,000 and 51,000 Native people were enslaved through this trade from 1670 to 1715. During Queen Anne's War (1702 to 1713), Carolina's former governor James Moore led raids that destroyed the Spanish missions of the Apalachee in Florida and carried off thousands of captives. The trade drove Native nations into debt and endless raiding, and in 1715 the Yamasees and their allies turned on Carolina in the Yamasee War (1715 to 1717), which nearly destroyed the colony. Afterward, Carolina's planters relied far more on enslaved Africans (Topic 2.6).

Even Pennsylvania, founded on William Penn's policy of buying land and keeping peace with the Lenape (Delaware) in the 1680s, turned. In the 1737 Walking Purchase, Penn's sons produced an old deed granting the land a walker could cover in a day and a half, then hired trained runners who covered more than 60 miles on a cleared path, taking about 1.2 million acres. When the Lenape protested, the Haudenosaunee, who claimed authority over them and valued their alliance with Pennsylvania, ordered them off the land in 1742.

The Pueblo Revolt and Spanish accommodation

Spain's goals in the Southwest were different again: converts for the Catholic Church, tribute and labor for colonists, and a buffer protecting the silver mines of Mexico. After Juan de Oñate's brutal conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Santa Fe became the capital in 1610. Franciscan friars built missions in the Pueblo towns, and colonists collected corn, cloth and labor from Pueblo families through the encomienda, a grant of the right to Native tribute and work. The friars at first tolerated Pueblo people mixing Catholic rites with their own, then turned to suppressing them: they raided kivas (ceremonial chambers), burned kachina masks and whipped religious leaders.

In the 1670s, drought, famine and heavy Apache and Navajo raids struck at the same time, and many Pueblo people concluded that abandoning their own ceremonies had caused the disasters. In 1675, the governor arrested 47 Pueblo religious leaders for "sorcery" and hanged several. One of the men released was Popé (Po'pay), from Ohkay Owingeh. From Taos he coordinated dozens of towns that spoke different languages, using runners carrying knotted cords that counted down the days. On August 10, 1680, the Pueblos rose together and killed about 400 Spaniards, including 21 of the colony's Franciscans. Some 2,000 survivors retreated south to El Paso. For twelve years the Pueblos ruled themselves and destroyed churches and Spanish records.

The Pueblo alliance did not last. Drought and raids continued, and old divisions among towns resurfaced. Diego de Vargas led the Spanish back in 1692, and after fighting that lasted until 1696 Spain controlled New Mexico again. But the Spanish who returned governed differently, because the revolt had shown what pushing too hard would cost:

• The encomienda was not restored in New Mexico, and demands for forced labor eased.
• Friars largely stopped trying to wipe out Pueblo ceremonies, and many Pueblo people practiced Catholicism alongside their own religion.
• The Crown recognized each pueblo's land through formal grants.
• Spanish and Pueblo forces fought together as allies against Apache and Navajo raiders and, after the Comanche appeared on New Mexico's frontier in the early 1700s, against Comanche raids too.

The revolt had another long effect. Horses left behind by fleeing Spaniards spread through Native trade networks onto the Plains, where nations such as the Comanche built a mounted way of life that later made them the dominant power of the southern Plains (Topic 2.4 covers these changes in Native life).

Reading European sources on Native peoples

Nearly every written source from this period was written by a European, so this topic is where AP practices sourcing: identifying a source's point of view, purpose, historical situation and audience. A missionary's report, a trader's letter and a colonial governor's official account can describe the same Native nation in completely different ways, and the differences tell you about the writer as much as the subject.

Take John Smith's two accounts of his capture by Opechancanough in December 1607. A True Relation, printed in London in 1608 from a letter Smith sent home, describes kind treatment and generous meals and never mentions Pocahontas saving his life. That story first appears in his Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), written after the 1622 attack, when Smith was promoting himself and English readers saw the Powhatans as treacherous enemies. Historians disagree about whether the rescue happened at all, or whether Smith misunderstood an adoption ceremony; the change between the two accounts is itself evidence of how the situation in which he wrote shaped what he told.

Worked examples

Where students lose points

On the exam

Expect multiple-choice sets built on a colonist's, missionary's or official's account of Native people, asking what situation produced it or what followed. A short-answer question can ask you to explain a cause or effect of a specific conflict (Metacom's War, the Pueblo Revolt) or how relations changed over time, and answering it takes a named nation, leader or event, not "the Native Americans." In essays, this topic supplies evidence for prompts on colonial expansion, imperial rivalry, and comparisons among Spanish, French, Dutch and English colonies.