For more than three hundred years, white men battled Native Americans for control of the North American continent. Beginning shortly after European settlers landed on the shores of the present-day United States in the early seventeenth century and continuing until the dawn of the twentieth century, white settlers and soldiers waged an unrelenting war to claim the lands that Native Americans, or Indians, had long considered their own. Though the underlying cause of the wars was the white settlers' craving for land, the tensions were heightened by the huge cultural differences that separated the two peoples. Whites and Native Americans had very different ideas about how to use land, the meaning and importance of promises, and how to wage war. These cultural differences added to the tragedy of the Indian Wars.

From the beginning, the white conquerors had tremendous advantages. They possessed superior weapons...