Between the rise of British and European colonization (1600s) and the end of the western frontier (1890s), colonial, state, and federal governments conducted wars against native peoples of many tribal nations. In the main, along with countless casualties on both sides, those conflicts led to Indians’ defeat and loss of homelands and forced their removal to reservations.

As colonies and states determined to open and expand territories for white settlement, Indians resisted. Powhatan tribes did so at Jamestown, Virginia in 1622, fueling the intermittent battles that reduced Virginia's Indian population to fewer than 1,000 by 1680.

Blacks and Indians struggled as enemies and allies. Slave and free black militiamen fought beside whites in King William's War (1689–97) and in the French and Indian War (1754–63). But a black-Indian alliance sustained the First (1817–18), Second (1835–42), and Third (1855–58) Seminole Wars. Runaway slaves and rebel Creek (Seminole) Indians countered the federal invasion of Florida, but they finally lost. In the Civil War, Seminoles backed the Union; Cherokees helped the Confederacy. About fifty “Seminole Indian Scouts,” removed from Florida in 1858, became Buffalo Soldiers in the postwar West. When the Colorado Utes virtually wiped out the US cavalry post in 1879, black and Indian soldiers rescued the survivors.