Read More: You Can’t Tell the Story of 1776 Without Talking About RaceĪt the end of the seventeenth century, nearly simultaneous Indigenous rebellions against European imperial ambitions in all regions of North America almost thwarted English, French, and Spanish colonists. The English would not reoccupy their prewar borders until 1700. More than a thousand colonial homes had been burned, and some two dozen towns had been either destroyed or severely damaged. The colony suffered the loss of a staggering £150,000 in property at a time when £100 was a very comfortable yearly salary. New England had lost six hundred soldiers, roughly ten percent of its strength, and at least a thousand colonists had died. The violent clashes between Native Americans and colonists during the late 1670s, which came to be known as Metacom’s War, or King Philip’s War to the English, were a shocking calamity to the colonists, even in apparent victory. The Appalachians and the lands west of them remained largely unknown to white people. At midcentury, colonial settlements in North America consisted of some two dozen seaside towns and a handful of forts of little consequence on the coastal plains curbed by Indigenous power, the English colonists had spread up and down along the Atlantic coast, latching onto its sheltering estuaries and managing only fleeting inroads into the continent’s interior. The wars with the far more numerous and larger Native nations stretched the colonists near their breaking point. In truth, the massacres exposed a deep-rooted European anxiety over enduring Indigenous power: the attacks were so vicious because the colonists feared the Indians who refused to submit to their rule.
There are many examples of similar inversions that occurred with other notable battles: the Pequot and Raritan massacres of 16, respectively, seemed to mark the sweeping collapse of Indigenous power in the Northeast. They were more expected than extraordinary. Seen from the Native American perspective, however, Red Cloud’s War and Custer’s Last Stand appear not as historical anomalies, but as the logical culmination of a long history of Indigenous power in North America. Both Red Cloud’s War and the Battle of Little Bighorn-in which the Lakota Indians and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies defeated the U.S.-have entered the history books as flukes, blamed on poor leadership and on a canny enemy familiar with the terrain.
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