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Frontier Warfare

This image from Henry Lewis' Das Illustrirte Mississippithal (1858) depicts a scene from the struggle for control of the American West. Here a Native American warrior displays a scalp he has removed from a fallen combatant. Native American tribes in this region maintained a cycle of bloody struggles for primacy in the many years preceding the arrival of white Americans. American expansion occasioned new violence, as Indian warriors raided American settlements and forts. Several organized uprisings, including Tecumseh's struggle for Indian unity that culminated in the War of 1812 and the Black Hawk War of 1832, matched combined Native American forces against Americans' state and federal troops. Each of these clashes pushed Native Americans farther west, leaving their former territory open to white settlement.