For three centuries, from the earliest colonial encounters through the closing of the frontier, warfare between European settlers and Indigenous peoples shaped the North American continent in ways that no other single force could match. The American Indian Wars were not a single conflict but a sprawling, fragmented series of hundreds of distinct engagements, campaigns, treaties, and betrayals spanning vastly different geographies, cultures, and historical periods. Understanding them as a coherent whole reveals patterns of dispossession, resistance, and adaptation that defined the American experience. The earliest conflicts between colonists and Indigenous nations were shaped by roughly equal power dynamics. Eastern woodland tribes possessed military capabilities, territorial knowledge, and population numbers that made them formidable adversaries an ...