Native Resistance

That opens up a new possibilty. Didn't the Great Plains originally have farming societies that were overrun by the more nomadic tribes? Those surviving could be a basis for Native societies with the technological capabilities to do better than the white invaders.

The Great Plains had some farming societies like the Mandan living along rivers, but there was never widespread farming in the great plains and nothing on the level of the southeast moundbuilders, let alone the Maya or Aztec. Going by the fate of the 5 civilized tribes anyway, the adaptation of European technology by farming natives is no guarantee of the ability to resist white invasion.
 
That sounds bizarrely stupid. As in, this is playing to all their weaknesses in a war against the whites.

And the politics...it's not much better.

You have to remember that for North American tribes, fighting was done on an individual basis and had no resemblance to European armies. You don't have a King of the Shawnee levying troops from each of his towns for an army led by officers, with beatings for insubordination and execution for desertion. Tribes were rarely led by a single permanent leader, instead each village usually had it's own chief, and fighting forces were simply raised by convincing warriors to come and fight. Bravery and honor were also big parts of the reason for fighting in that style, hanging back would be seen as cowardly, and surrendering was unimaginable.

British support for Indian raids

The Northwest Territory, comprising the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, had been an area of dispute between the Indian Nations and the United States since the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. The British Empire had ceded the area to the United States in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The Indian Nations followed Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet and the brother of Tecumseh. Tenskwatawa had a vision of purifying his society by expelling the "children of the Evil Spirit": the American settlers. Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh formed a confederation of numerous tribes to block American expansion. The British saw the Indian nations as valuable allies and a buffer to its Canadian colonies and provided arms. Attacks on American settlers in the Northwest further aggravated tensions between Britain and the United States. The Confederation's raids hindered American expansion into potentially valuable farmlands in the Northwest Territory.
The British had the long-standing goal of creating a large "neutral" Indian state that would cover much of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. They made the demand as late as the fall of 1814 at the peace conference, but lost control of western Ontario at key battles on Lake Erie, thus giving the Americans control of the proposed neutral zone.

I don't know a ton of information about this plan, but I do know it was attacked very nastily by the British Opposition of the time.

Pardon me for derailing my own thread, but this makes me think-could a nomadic society survive to some degree in the industrial age? Could a nomad-run nation be at least somewhat competetive with the other nations and defend their land effectively, or would such a nation be forced to forgo their free-roaming ways and settle in order to "keep up with the Jones's?"

Yes, nomadic hunter-gatherer societies can survive up to the industrial age, (look at the San of South Africa, although they're in serious trouble) but only by living in areas too remote or desolate for others to intrude on them.

Nomad-run nation is basically an oxymoron, unless you're going by the older definition of nation=ethnic group. There's no such thing as a nomadic-run state, forming into a state is purely a characteristic of sedentary societies. And as long as the land is suitable for agriculture, a nomadic society is always going to lose to an agrarian society, simply because the agrarian society will support 10 times the population of the nomadic one, without even going into advantages due to hierarchy, trade, etc.

What was the REAL aim there? What would have happened if the War of Independance was lost, moderate americans's demand met and all, in theory, if the Crown kept the Colonies? The British Army once marching west?

I can't answer this too in-depth, but settlement west would probably have continued in a more measured fashion, with allied tribes such as the Iroquois being given a wide berth. The 1770s equivalent to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, was mulling proposals to start one new colony in the Ohio territory, and another along the Mississippi, right into 1774. (Random note for ATLs: Benjamin Franklin wrote to him to suggest all new American colonies ought to have have elected governors like Connecticut and Rhode Island. End derail)

That opens up a new possibilty. Didn't the Great Plains originally have farming societies that were overrun by the more nomadic tribes? Those surviving could be a basis for Native societies with the technological capabilities to do better than the white invaders.

Not as much in the Great Plains, but there were definitely farming societies in the Mississippi basin! They built large burial mounds and had pottery and trade. Their problem wasn't being overrun by nomadic tribes, it was decimation by smallpox, etc, in the 16th century. (Though if you really want to get into it, at the time they were already suffering a decline due to the Little Ice Age when the epidemics hit) In fact the death toll caused them to abandon the permanent settlements and disperse into semi-nomadic tribes, and they were the ancestors of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and many other tribes. I wrote about them some more in another thread, but it would take me awhile to find it.

Sorry for the mega-post.
 
You have to remember that for North American tribes, fighting was done on an individual basis and had no resemblance to European armies. You don't have a King of the Shawnee levying troops from each of his towns for an army led by officers, with beatings for insubordination and execution for desertion. Tribes were rarely led by a single permanent leader, instead each village usually had it's own chief, and fighting forces were simply raised by convincing warriors to come and fight. Bravery and honor were also big parts of the reason for fighting in that style, hanging back would be seen as cowardly, and surrendering was unimaginable.

But that's the problem. It has nothing to do with beatings for insubordination or anything, and everything to do with the fact that their strengths aren't in Furor Celtia style charges. Treating war against Europeans as something where they can apply that is going to end poorly whatever the reason for the stupidity is.

This is about the most easily-exploited situation for the Europeans that they could ask for.
 
But that's the problem. It has nothing to do with beatings for insubordination or anything, and everything to do with the fact that their strengths aren't in Furor Celtia style charges. Treating war against Europeans as something where they can apply that is going to end poorly whatever the reason for the stupidity is.

This is about the most easily-exploited situation for the Europeans that they could ask for.

I don't really think native society was hierarchical enough to change that. I meant by bringing up beatings and hanging that European warfare was based on obedience to superiors and rigorous military discipline, while native warfare was based on bravery and honor. You couldn't just change that without deeply changing Native American society.

...unless I'm not quite following what you're saying, which is completely possible. :)
 
I don't really think native society was hierarchical enough to change that. I meant by bringing up beatings and hanging that European warfare was based on obedience to superiors and rigorous military discipline, while native warfare was based on bravery and honor. You couldn't just change that without deeply changing Native American society.

...unless I'm not quite following what you're saying, which is completely possible. ;)

I think you're sorta following.

You don't need obedience to superiors and rigorous military discipline. But the NAI (Native American Indians) would be able to fight from ambush and other forms of surprise and confusion and misleading rather than just charging blindly in, judging by the skills we know they had.

Focusing on bravery and honor against Europeans plays to their weaknesses, technological and numerical.
 
I think you're sorta following.

You don't need obedience to superiors and rigorous military discipline. But the NAI (Native American Indians) would be able to fight from ambush and other forms of surprise and confusion and misleading rather than just charging blindly in, judging by the skills we know they had.

I'm not sure. Fighting from ambush isn't going to stop an attacking army or a wave of invaders, at least not when you're heavily outnumbered. But... I'm not going to speculate any further about tactics because military history is not my forte.
 
Well, this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braddock_expedition

Meeting engagement, deliberate ambush - still works out the same way.

Looks more like just a bad battle for the British than anything showing the superiority of the ambush method. Front of the army panics and runs back into the back of it, regulars who are totally unused to fighting in the woods, regulars and colonial militia accidentally shooting each other, and the death of the commander causing the formations to collapse. And of course it wasn't an ambush. The British lost to a force half their size, but that's not particularly unusual anywhere, and it wasn't a trend.

Look, there's no doubt guerrilla warfare is highly successful in some environments, but I don't think the Native Americans could have simply done way better in battles against Europeans if they had only used ambush tactics rather than rush tactics. If they could have, they would have.
 
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Looks more like just a bad battle for the British than anything showing the superiority of the ambush method. Front of the army panics and runs back into the back of it, regulars who are totally unused to fighting in the woods, regulars and colonial militia accidentally shooting each other, and the death of the commander causing the formations to collapse. And of course it wasn't an ambush. The British lost to a force half their size, but that's not particularly unusual anywhere, and it wasn't a trend.

Pretty much what you'd expect of a regular force in bad country, however. An ambush couldn't have done much more if it had been one.

Look, there's no doubt guerrilla warfare is highly successful in some environments, but I don't think the Native Americans could have simply done way better in battles against Europeans if they had only used ambush tactics rather than rush tactics. If they could have, they would have.

If they had tried more, we'd see more. Ambush tactics play to their strengths as woods-savvy. Rush tactics play to their weaknesses.
 
This has been discussed before, and I think the consensus was that it was theoretically possible up to about 1650, after that, no. With King Philip's War (or Metacomet's) being the last possible chance to expel the New Englanders.

Fully agricultural societies simply out breed and outnumber semi-agricultural ones, and the tech difference was huge. Let alone the military tech of combat (ideas as much as weaponry).
 
I wrote a series of scenarios where the Indians do significantly better than they did historically and collected them into a book called "American Indian Victories" about ten years ago. I'm currently revising the book. I posted part of a sample scenario in the books and media section of the forum. It's at:

https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=236940


Basically, Indians lost because they entered the New World with only the subset of then current human technology that was useful in Siberia and Alaska. That put them thousands of years behind what was happening in the Middle East and China. They didn't catch up because the New World was smaller than the Old World, tilted so that innovations had to cross climate zones rather than spread along them and lost most of the best potential domestic animals shortly after Indians arrived. Indian populations didn't get big enough to support crowd diseases until late in the game, and not everywhere, so diseases mostly went from Europe to the New World.

For Indians to resist more successfully, they had to somehow neutralize the disease factor at least partly, get more technologically sophisticated and be lucky.

That being said, it wasn't impossible for them to do better than they did historically. Some tribes did do rather well for themselves. The Navaho went from about 4000 people to more than 300,000 while most tribes were shrinking to extinction. I've never read a convincing explanation of why. They (along with the Apaches) do have a different blood-type than most Indians (AB versus O) and some people theorized that some blood-types make you less susceptible to smallpox. That doesn't appear to be the case. So, why did they grow? Figure that out and figure out a way to spread whatever they had to other Indians and you might have something.

Some other tribes that did rather well for a while:

- The Mapuche of Chile and Argentina, who held out against Spanish conquest from the 1530s into the late 1800s when they ran up against railroads and machine guns,
- the Yaqui of northwestern Mexico, who first encountered Spain in the 1530s and were still fighting for autonomy as late as the Mexican Civil War in the early 1900s,
- The Chichemics. A collection of desert tribes in north-central Mexico who fought the Spanish for thirty years from 1560 into the 1590s. The Spanish considered them the best archers in the world and finally decided that it was easier to pay them off than to fight them. That was a devastatingly effective strategy, unfortunately, as it turned proud warriors into in many cases a collection of lazy drunks.

Tribal people or city-states with no central power tended to do better against the Spanish because the Spanish couldn't hijack a central government and make it work for them, but tribal people had trouble uniting against the type of encroachment English settlers used. So Spain took over the civilized areas, while others took over most of the tribal areas.
 
IMO, you should really stop using "Indian" for the natives of the Americas, although it did give a pretty hilarious mental image.

Actually different people have different thoughts on it. I remember being told Indians was wrong growing up only to have a lecturer at a presentation on Native American culture say that he preferred to be called Indian. He felt that Native American was a silly title, since anyone born here is native and everyone's ancestors came here from somewhere else regardless of how long ago it might have been.
 
Actually different people have different thoughts on it. I remember being told Indians was wrong growing up only to have a lecturer at a presentation on Native American culture say that he preferred to be called Indian. He felt that Native American was a silly title, since anyone born here is native and everyone's ancestors came here from somewhere else regardless of how long ago it might have been.

That was kind of my take on it, though I think some political circles insist on Native American.
 
That was kind of my take on it, though I think some political circles insist on Native American.

I've heard Amerindian as a sort of compromise, though that word typically describes the inhabitants of the entire Americas, not just North America.
 
I thought First Nations was the generally accepted and most commonly used term for the indigenous peoples of North America living in what is now Canada (except for the Inuit and Métis peoples).

For the states and nations, yeah, albeit in my generation, we called them 'amérindiens' as an... 'ethnonym'?
 
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