List of Indian massacres

Overview

"Indian massacre" is a phrase whose use and definition has evolved and expanded over time. The phrase was initially used by European colonists to describe attacks by indigenous Americans which resulted in mass casualties. While similar attacks by colonists on Indian villages were called "raids" or "battles", successful Indian attacks on white settlements or military posts were routinely termed "massacres". Knowing very little about the native inhabitants of the American frontier, the colonists were deeply fearful, and as time passed, "far more white Americans eagerly consumed Indian atrocity stories around the family table and in popular literature and newspapers than ever interacted with Indians or witnessed an Indian raid." Emphasis was placed on the depredations of "murderous savages" in their information about Indians, and as the migrants headed further west, fear was the prevailing emotion behind their thoughts and actions concerning Indians. In some instances motivated by politics, in Colorado for example, "stories in the News continued to stir those fears: wild rumors of Indian conspiracies were heralded as fact; any violence at all between whites and Indians was reported as an Indian 'massacre'".

The phrase eventually became commonly used to also describe mass killings of American Indians. Killings described as "massacres" often had an element of indiscriminate targeting, barbarism or genocidal intent. As noted by one historian, "Any discussion of genocide must, of course, eventually consider the so-called Indian Wars, the term commonly used for U.S. Army campaigns to subjugate Indian nations of the American West beginning in the 1860s. In an older historiography, key events in this history were narrated as battles. It is now more common for scholars to refer to these events as massacres. This is especially so of a Colorado territorial militia's slaughter of Cheyennes at Sand Creek (1864) and the army's slaughter of Shoshones at Bear River (1863), Blackfeet on the Marias River (1870), and Lakotas at Wounded Knee (1890). Some scholars have begun referring to these events as "genocidal massacres," defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes to provide a lesson to the larger group.

It is difficult to determine the total number of people who died as a result of "Indian massacres". In The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, lawyer William M. Osborn compiled a list of alleged and actual atrocities in what would eventually become the continental United States, from first contact in 1511 until 1890. His parameters for inclusion included the intentional and indiscriminate murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners. His list included 7,193 people who died from atrocities perpetrated by those of European descent, and 9,156 people who died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans. Many of the incidents included on this list are not mentionned in Osborn's book. In An American Genocide, The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846-1873, Historian Benjamin Madley recorded the numbers of killings of California Indians between 1846 and 1873. He found evidence that during this period at least 9,400 to 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Indians. Most of these killings occurred in more than 370 massacres (defined as the "intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed noncombatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise").

List of massacres

This is a listing of some of the events reported then or referred to now as "Indian massacre". This list only contains incidents that occurred in Canada or the United States or territory presently part of the United States.