Alfred W. Crosby coined the term “Columbian Exchange” in his book of the same title. Crosby’s term referred to the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, and populations between Old World Europeans and New World Indians following Columbus’ voyage in 1492. While such an exchange may have seemed mutually advantageous, even a cursory examination of relevant historiography reveals that Old World Europeans got the better end of the bargain. However, the Columbian Exchange was not the only exchange that occurred between dissimilar cultures. In fact, over time, a “martial exchange” occurred between the two cultures that significantly transformed how each group developed warfighting skills.

For example, in 1876, General George A. Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was desperately outgunned at the Little Bighorn by Native Americans sporting state-of-the-art repeating rifles. Regarding the effect of these weapons, an eyewitness stated, “It was just like killing sheep.” Before boarding the C-47 Skytrain troop transport aircraft that would take them across the English Channel on D-Day, elements of the 101st Airborne paratroopers purposely altered their appearance to look like Indian warriors.

These cultural adaptations might never have occurred had Western Europeans not introduced muskets to the Indians in 1607, nor had the Indians shown Europeans how to skulk around the forests. Cultural adaptation is nothing new in the annals of military history. The ancient Romans were masters at amalgamating martial techniques they felt would improve their prowess in battle, while discarding those they deemed inadequate.

For example, during the first century of Republican rule, the Roman army embraced the phalanx-style battle formation from their Etruscan neighbors to the north. Additionally, the legendary Roman gladius was initially a Spanish sword that the Romans adopted from their dealings with the Celtiberians.

              Roman Gladius, Pompeii type, 1st Century A.D.

When one considers the fact that the ancient Romans and Celtiberians were near-peer competitors who shared a common European heritage, it is not that surprising that martial amalgamation would ensue. What is surprising, however, is that sophisticated Europeans, who traced their fighting styles back to the days of Gustavus Adolphus, would integrate martial techniques garnered from “half-naked savages.” Equally surprising is that Native Americans, accustomed to limited warfare, would adopt the total war ethos that has come to characterize the Western way of war. When and how did this occur?

Although Columbus was the first European explorer to discover the Americas, he was not the first to land on mainland North America. That distinction goes to John Cabot, who, in 1497, set foot on Newfoundland. Two decades later, a Spanish Conquistador named Francisco Hernández de Córdoba (c.1467-1517) encountered the Mayans in what is now called Mexico. In each of these encounters, none of the aboriginal natives possessed anything close to modern weapons, nor were they adorned with a sophisticated panoply of armor.

One of the members of the Córdoba expedition remarked upon first seeing the Aztecs that they wore quilted cotton armor, and carried bows, arrows, and “swords which appeared to be two-handed.”                                            

       John Cabot (c.1450-c.1499)

                    Aztec quilted armor

To a degree, the imbalance of martial prowess that existed between the Mayans, Aztecs, and Spanish Conquistadors contributed to the total extinction of the Mayan and Aztec empires a few years after Córdoba and Hernándo Cortés (1485-1587) landed on the Yucatan Peninsula. While the Aztecs did not survive long enough to experience a martial exchange with Western Europeans, Native American Indians along the Eastern coast of the United States and Canada most definitely did.

The transformation and development of weapons, tactics, and martial ethos resulting from the martial exchange between Native American Indians and Western Europeans was gradual. It can best be discerned by examining four major colonial confrontations between European colonists and aboriginal Indians. Those confrontations were the Tidewater Wars (1622, 1644), the Pequot War (1636), King Philip’s War (1675), and the French and Indian War (1754-63). By the time British Redcoats squared off against colonial militia in the American hinterland in the late eighteenth century, the martial exchange was all but complete. 

As early as 1609, Dutch explorers had made firearms available to Native Americans, either through trade or theft. These early firearms were matchlock muskets, meaning the weapon relied upon a smoldering match cord to ignite the gunpowder. The Swedish flintlock musket would replace the matchlock and wheellock muskets around 1640.

Matchlock musket, c. 1640

In his Narratives of Early Virginia, John Smith (1580-1631) related how amazed he was that the Powhatan Indians had been taught by the Pilgrims to effectively use smoothbore muskets. That same year in New France, Samuel de Champlain (1574-1635) recorded an experience he had with the Iroquois near what is now Lake Champlain. 

An adroit cartographer and illustrator, Champlain drew what has become known as “The Defeat of the Iroquois on Lake Champlain.” This drawing depicts Champlain and his men facing down dozens of hostile Indians armed only with bows and arrows. Champlain and a couple of his men discharged their muskets into the crowd, killing three Iroquois chiefs. 

In 1616, Virginia settlers learned how to cultivate tobacco. As Virginia’s tobacco production boomed, planters increasingly encroached upon Indian land, bringing their ravenous livestock with them. Both cattle and pigs devoured Indian cornfields, and this naturally fomented bitter resentment among Indians who sat by and watched English planters destroy their livelihood. With the death of the amenable Powhatan in 1618, his younger brother, Opechancanough (1554-1646), took over as paramount chief. Unlike his elder brother, Opechancanough chose not to live in peace with the white settlers. 

In a letter dated April 12, 1621, William Powell warned Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the founders of the Virginia Company, that Opechancanough had ordered that his young warriors, suited for war, should muster before him. Even before this incident, Virginia’s governor had petitioned King James II to let the people return to England and “not to suffer the Heathen to triumph over us.”

Opechancanough denied the rumors, and the Jamestown colonists fell back into a false sense of security. This was precisely what Opechancanough wanted. Things came to a head on March 22, 1622, when Powhatan Chief Opechancanough launched a brutal surprise attack on Jamestown settlers, killing 347 men, women, and children. There is little doubt that the possession of muskets by the Powhatans exacerbated the number of deaths.                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                 The Defeat of the Iroquois on Lake Champlain

Nevertheless, while the Powhatan’s actions against the Jamestown settlers in 1622 displayed all the trappings of a total war policy, Native Americans had yet to adopt this martial ethos from Europeans. In fact, John Smith observed that the Indians “seldome make warre for lands or goods, but for women and children, and principally for revenge.”

Perhaps more than anything else, revenge for losing their land seems to have motivated Opechancanough to strike out at the greedy colonists. Conversely, the Jamestown military leaders, many of whom had experience fighting in some of Europe’s bloodiest wars, advocated a harsher approach to deal with the Indians. As an example, the Virginia House of Burgesses enlisted five times the number of men as it had for previous campaigns to carry out punitive raids on the Powhatan. Moreover, John Martin (c.1562-1627), a planter who desired to enslave the Powhatan, proposed using 200 soldiers to scorch Indian fields and fishing areas in the hopes of starving them into submission.

Three months after Opechancanough’s initial attack, Virginia Council members sanctioned Martin’s plan and began the systematic destruction of the Powhatans’ agricultural resources. In addition to employing a “feedfight” policy to deal with hostile Indians during the Tidewater Wars, the Jamestown settlers also resorted to poisoning key leaders. On May 12, 1623, Captain William Tucker met with some key tribal representatives under the guise of a prisoner exchange. When the English proposed a toasting of the peace with the Indians, some 250 drank the deadly poison. Unfortunately for the English, Opechancanough was not among those who imbibed the poisoned wine.

For the next nine years, the Powhatan and colonists continued to fight one another as the English increasingly employed tougher measures for dealing with their Indian neighbors. One indicator of this was the Privy Council’s August 6, 1628, decree to the governor of Virginia, mandating that “Every settler is to provide himself with arms, both offensive and defensive, within a year from date, on pain of punishment.”

Finally, in 1632, the governor of Virginia signed a treaty with some of the warring tribes. Trade between Indians and the settlers resumed, and life returned to the uneasy peace that existed before Opechancanough’s massacre ten years earlier. However, Opechancanough’s wrath remained unsatisfied.

As a final act of defiance, the old Powhatan warrior launched another surprise attack on a group of settlements in March 1644. Although his warriors were able to kill between 400 and 500 settlers, this time the burgeoned population was more than prepared to retaliate. On Good Friday, 1644, Opechancanough was captured and then murdered by a soldier assigned to guard him, thus ending the Tidewater Wars.

Unfortunately, hostilities between European colonists and Native Americans did not cease with the death of Opechancanough. In fact, other regions along the Atlantic seaboard experienced violence between the dissimilar cultures, and with this violence came a change in the way many white settlers perceived the Indians. 

Colonial officials, both in Virginia and in England, proclaimed that the cruel way the Powhatan attacked their settlements during the Tidewater Wars proved conclusively that natives lacked all humanity, and any future dealings with them were no longer constrained by the rule of law or feelings of compassion. Moreover, Alfred A. Cave argues in his The Pequot War that “The idea of savagery in opposition to civilization was thus an essential part of the English colonizers’ sense of identity.”

To be sure, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony subordinated their commerce and trade with the Indians to their religious practice because they brought with them a strong ideology that essentially filtered everything they did, said, or thought through a spiritual context. As a result, any actions against Native Americans, no matter how unseemly, could be promptly justified because the Puritans saw themselves as instruments of Divine wrath to be outpoured on the heathen. Nowhere in colonial history was this more clearly seen than in the liquidation of the Pequot Indians in 1637.

In The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians, Patrick M. Malone argues that the Pequot War “May have been the first example of total war in New England.” Indeed, John Grenier posits that the destruction of the Pequot fort at the hands of the English was arguably the most glaring example of extirpative warfare practiced in colonial America. In fact, it was the Pequot War, or more appropriately, the Pequot genocide, that showed Native Americans once and for all that those traditional restraints which limited deaths in aboriginal warfare were simply liabilities when it came to battling the English.

The cause of the Pequot War is one of the classic “whodunits” of colonial American history. The conspiracy and mystery surrounding the slaughter of the Pequots centered on one Captain John Stone, a trader who embarked upon a journey up the Connecticut River to trade with the Dutch. According to John Mason’s account, some Niantic Indians, whom Stone took along to pilot his skiff up the river, murdered Stone and one other man once they fell asleep. 

In retaliation, English settlers, under the command of Mason and John Underhill, initiated a punitive expedition to rid themselves of the Pequot. John Winthrop offers a conflicting account, asserting that the Pequots did not attempt to deny culpability in Stone’s death. Rather, according to Winthrop’s journal, the Pequot explained that since their grand chief had been killed by the Dutch, they in turn killed Stone because they assumed he was Dutch. Whether responsibility for Stone’s death rested on the Niantics or the Pequots made little difference to the Massachusetts Bay colonists.

For some time, the Pequots had competed with the Narragansets for dominance of the wampum trade. The unique manufacturing process that went into fashioning wampum made it a highly sought-after commodity to be used in the fur trade. Moreover, the fact that the Pequot outnumbered the Narragansetts further fueled aboriginal rivalry, which led the Pequot to ask Massachusetts Bay colonists for help in late 1634. Winthrop relates that the resulting meeting produced a treaty that included a clause that the Pequots turn over Captain Stone’s killers.

When the Pequot failed to hand over Stone’s assailants, the colony deployed an armed expedition under the command of John Endicott in 1636 into the heart of Pequot territory. While historians have conjectured a variety of reasons for Endicott’s invasion, Alfred A. Cave provides what is perhaps the most cogent motivation for Puritan aggression towards the Pequot. Cave argues that “In the Puritans' vision of the New World as a spiritual battleground between the Elect and the Forces of Darkness, the survival of the New World Zion required decisive action to nip in the bud the Indian conspiracies whose existence, though intangible, was necessary to fulfill Puritan ideological expectations.”

In other words, the Puritans saw the destruction of the Pequots as their God-sanctioned crusade against “the Devil’s instruments.” Endicott’s mission was entirely punitive in nature. He was to reiterate the demand that Stone’s killers be turned over, thus ensuring the Pequot knew he meant business. Additionally, he had orders to kill the men of Block Island and take their women and children captive. To accomplish his task, Endicott and 90 Massachusetts men raided the Pequots’ village on Block Island and torched the surrounding fields. After Endicott returned to the colony, the Pequots laid siege to Fort Saybrook and conducted various “hit-and-run” attacks on the colonists.

The siege, coupled with the raids, revealed to the colonists their vulnerability. Something more decisive would need to be done to cow the rebellious Pequot. In May 1637, John Mason led 90 Connecticut soldiers, along with 70 Massachusetts troops under John Underhill, against a Pequot fort on the Mystic River. As soon as the attack commenced, Pequots fled to their wigwams to barricade themselves inside. Others tried to escape the fort only to be cut down by the English and their Indian allies. Mason and Underhill then led the way in the wanton butchery of women and children, setting fire to the Pequot fort. Within seconds, the entire village was on fire. The English withdrew to form a ring around the doomed fort as the fire raged uncontrollably. Mohegans and Narragansets waited in a larger circle beyond the soldiers. When it was all over, some 700 Pequot lay dead. 

 New England White Settlers Attack the Pequot  Indian Fort During the Pequot War of 1637

The effect this had upon the Mohegans and Narragansets was substantial. To state they were shocked would be an understatement. It is almost certain they had never experienced this type of total war before and were completely horrified. By the time King Philip’s War commenced in 1675, the Wampanoags, Narragansets, Nipmucs, and Pawcatucks imitated the precedent set in the Pequot War. Essentially, they waged war on all colonists, not just combatants, and they used every available means to dispatch their enemies, thus demonstrating that a total war ethos had been successfully exchanged between Indian and colonists. One example concerns laying waste to the colonial village of Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 4, 1675.

Under orders from the Massachusetts Council, Major John Pynchon, a fur trader from Springfield and local militia commander, led his forces away from Springfield to investigate a suspected Indian threat. Neighboring Indians, waiting in the wings, took advantage of his absence to burn the village to the ground. In a letter to John Russell, Maj. Pynchon described the scene he discovered.

“The Town in flames, not a house or barn standing except Old Gooden Branch’s, till we came to my house & then Mr. Glover’s. John Hitchcock’s and Gooden Stewary’s, burnt down with Barns, corn and all they had…Many more that have not for subsistence they tell me; houses & the Barns belonging to them are Burnt & all the Livelihood of the owners, & what more may meet with the same strokes the Lord only knows. Many more had their estates Burnt in these houses: So I believe 40 families are utterly destitute of Subsistence; the Lord show mercy to us. I see not how it is Possible for us to live here this winter, & If so the sooner we were helped off, the Better.”

It would seem that the Indians had overcome their aversion to total war and adapted to the white man’s way. Another martial exchange involved the colonial adaptation of Indian musketry techniques. Using firearms acquired from colonists, Indians inflicted horrendous losses on Europeans completely unaccustomed to forest warfare. Indeed, in a letter from John Eliot written to Robert Boyle two years after King Philip’s War began, Eliot bemoaned the ineffectiveness of European tactics as compared to the Indian’s “skulking way of war.” Moreover, Captain Thomas Wheeler, a colonist who survived an Indian attack during that war, described how the Indians fired their muskets “from behind bushes.”

King Philip’s War, which began when the former Wampanoag chief died, humbled the European settlers. What started as a small war soon engulfed New England as the new Wampanoag chief, Metacomet (Philip) (1638-1676), created a pan-Indian alliance against the English.

Time and again, Indians ambushed English colonists in the forested regions of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and until the English learned to solicit the assistance of their Indian allies and to replicate their martial tactics, they proved no match for the warriors who opposed them.

One of the first Indian tactics the English adopted during King Philip’s War concerned the method of firing their muskets. For several years, Europeans had been employing the volley fire technique in battle. Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus is generally credited with inventing this, and the British quickly adopted it, as did most Western European armies. The problem in deploying volley fire in the densely forested regions of colonial America was that it was largely ineffective. Unlike the pitched battlefields of Europe, in which opposing armies lined up opposite their enemy, Native Americans eschewed this form of battle and instead preferred to attack from concealment.

During King Philip’s War, English colonists quickly realized the advantage of taking careful aim from behind cover to kill their enemy and began enlisting Indian allies to instruct them in principles of basic marksmanship. The utilitarian makeup of most Native Americans drove their desire to master all aspects of the white man’s flintlock, to include becoming apt gunsmiths as well as inventing what was arguably the first “shotgun.”

Before the Pequot War, Native Americans had begun modifying acquired flintlock muskets. They shortened the barrels and utilized pistol balls instead of larger-caliber musket balls. The effect was essentially the same as a modern-day shotgun. With the pull of the trigger, multiple shot was ejected from the business end of a flintlock with devastating effect, especially at close quarters. Colonists soon recognized the military application of using multiple lead balls in their muskets.

In History of the Indian Wars, historian William Hubbard relayed that one group of colonial soldiers loaded their muskets with “ten or twelve pistol-bullets at a time” and fired into a group of Pequots who were huddled together hiding in a swamp. The obvious goal of the aforementioned scenario was to kill the maximum number of enemy combatants with a single trigger pull. Given the present-day application of the combat shotgun, one can trace its genesis to the industrious colonial Indians.

By the summer of 1676, special units comprised of a mixture of colonial militiamen and Indian allies began turning the tide of King Philip’s War. Of particular note was Captain Benjamin Church, arguably one of the forerunners of today’s elite U.S. Army Rangers.          

Captain Benjamin Church (c.1639-1718)

Church trained his forces to emulate Indian fighting tactics. Church and his men skulked the forests in search of hostile Indians to ambush using their own tactics against them.  Taking a lesson from their Indian advisors, they traded their colonial attire for buckskins, soft moccasins, and even camouflaged “themselves from the waist upwards with green boughs” to blend in with the surrounding terrain.

Again, another martial exchange had been confirmed, and discerning colonial officers began urging changes in military doctrine. Most of these martial adaptations would be used with great effect against French and Indian troops during the next major colonial conflict.

The French and Indian War, also known as the Great War for Empire, started over control of the Ohio Valley. Following the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, France established a series of forts along major waterways connecting the Great Lakes with New Orleans. In between this line of French outposts and the edge of the Appalachians lay 400 miles of expansive territory ripe for the picking. This prime real estate was drained mainly by the Ohio River and its various tributaries, and was inhabited by the Six Nations, a confederation of various tribes led by the Iroquois.

Because the French knew they were vastly outnumbered by the British, they turned to their former allies, the Abenaki Indians, to bolster their fighting strength. Due to the inherent animosity between the Abenaki and Iroquois, who sided with the English, both sides used their Indian allies to further their own interests. One of the more noteworthy examples of this involved British Major General Edward Braddock’s (1695-1755) defeat on the Monongahela River.

When word reached the English crown that France had built a new fort near where the Ohio forks into the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, the Crown dispatched Maj. Gen. Braddock to secure England’s North American colonies. Braddock’s official mission was to eliminate Fort Duquesne (modern-day Pittsburgh).

Unbeknownst to Braddock, Fort Duquesne housed some 800 tribal warriors allied with the French. For undetermined reasons, Braddock chose to not bring Indian allies along on his trek to Duquesne. Before nearing the fort, Braddock’s forces bumped into a French and Indian coalition. In the ensuing melee, French and Indian warriors subjected the British Redcoats to a humiliating defeat.

Following their debacle at the Monongahela, British forces were quick to utilize Indian allies against further skirmishes with the French. Unfortunately, most Mohawks that had assisted the English previously decided to take a hiatus from the fighting. Without Indian assistance, the British army was at a marked disadvantage in the forested wilderness. What was needed was a frontiersman with the skill and audacity to undertake any mission, no matter how hazardous. The man who fit the bill was none other than the notorious Robert Rogers.

                         Robert Rogers (1731-1795)

Rogers, a youthful Scotsman, managed to gain considerable fame due to his exploits during the French and Indian War. Rogers was also a regular figure during the American Revolution. Patterned after Benjamin Church, Rogers’ Rangers, as they came to be known, perfected guerrilla warfare to the point that the British crown decided they were indispensable.

Similar to Church’s guerrilla fighters of King Philip’s War, Rogers’ Rangers shunned traditional military uniforms. Rather than the emblematic British bright red coat and white trousers, the Rangers donned short, green coats and buckskin trousers. In place of leather footwear, they wore Indian leggings or moccasins and sported a blue woolen bonnet for headgear. Their weaponry consisted of smoothbore muskets, tomahawks and knives. Rogers and his Rangers became so adept at fighting the French and Indians that they earned the moniker “white Indians.” When it came to stealthy, close-quarters combat, Rogers’ Rangers were second to none.

By the time the French and Indian War ended in 1763, it had become common practice for colonial forces to employ Native American fighting tactics. Indeed, thanks to men like Benjamin Church and Robert Rogers, guerrilla warfare became not only an acceptable method of dealing with hostile forces; it proved necessary when British Regulars landed at Lexington and Concord in 1775. As colonial militia battled it out with British regulars in the forests and backwaters of the colonies, a fighting ethos was being forged that would reverberate for centuries to come.

For example, the use of primitive camouflage by Native Americans, particularly the application of tree branches, leaves, etc., can be seen in the camouflage “tree” pattern uniforms used by the German Waffen-SS during World War II.

            German Waffen-SS Plane Tree smock                                                                                        Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP)

In fact, the “Plane Tree” pattern, developed by Otto Schick in 1936, proved the longest surviving design. A study of German SS camouflage demonstrates that Schick’s designs represented the best camouflage ever fielded by Western armies. Even today, one can see echoes of Schick’s genius in military camouflage with the U.S. Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP) worn by the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard. Therefore, an argument can be made that today’s camouflage uniform owes its genesis and success to the Indians of colonial America.

Another lesson learned from Native Americans that has been adapted to modern fighting units concerns the use of field or “combat” rations. Patrick M. Malone mentions that Indian maize “was valuable as a lightweight combat ration for warriors traveling great distances.” Indeed, Indians on patrol saw the benefit of having a high-calorie food source that did not require a cooking fire.

At the beginning of World War II, the “D-ration” was designed as a lightweight source of calories, which could be carried in a soldier’s pocket and was used to much the same effect as that of the Indians hundreds of years prior.

As previously mentioned, airborne infantry assigned to the 101st Airborne Division parachuted into France wearing Indian war paint and sporting Mohawk haircuts. While many of their more traditional counterparts may have thought them foolish, the effect upon their Nazi opponents was marked. In his book, Fighting with the Filthy Thirteen, 101st Airborne paratrooper Jack Womer described how they all decided there was a certain shock value in not only looking like, but sounding like a wild Indian on the warpath. Womer said of D-Day, “It frightened the Krauts and caused them to hesitate or run away rather than stand and fight us." 

Charles "Chuck" Plaudo, 101st ABN, June 5, 1944

To discover where American paratroopers learned this psychological tactic, one need only study colonial encounters between British Redcoats and Native Americans.  Assistant Deputy Quartermaster General, Lieutenant Matthew Leslie of the 44th British Regiment, survived the 1755 massacre at Monongahela and recalled, “The yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me to the hour of my dissolution.” Arguably, Native Americans were keen to exploit the concept of psychological warfare.

In the space of less than two hundred years, the martial exchange between Native Americans and Western Europeans had effected sweeping changes in both cultures. Regarding the Native Americans, they mastered the use of firearms, bullet casting, and fighting knives and increased their diplomatic acumen with the white man. For Western Europeans, they gained far more in the exchange, as it is certainly not a stretch to conclude that many of the lessons learned in the harsh colonial wilderness are clearly evident among modern Western militaries.

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