The War of Surprise Raids, Torture, and Terror — From Powhatan to Gaza
Commentary on “The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America 1500–1800” by Wayne E. Lee
Readers of this book may be surprised to learn that Native Americans, aka “Indians,” were amazingly like every other hunter-gatherer culture in the world. They were warlike. They fought their wars by ambush and surprise. They lived by the military maxim that “if you find yourself in a fair fight, you’ve screwed up.”
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has read “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage” by Lawrence H. Keeley (1996). Keeley’s book gets a fair number of favorable citations in “The Cutting-Off Way” by author Wayne Lee.
I read Keeley’s book nearly thirty years ago. I remember being fascinated by the wealth of evidence that debunked the “peaceful savage” myth. I don’t know how prevalent the myth is today, but I think I recall being surprised at the wealth of data in the archeological record pointing to the fact that Neolithic hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time killing each other.
This archeological record included an abundance of arrows at what were probably “battle sites” and human skeletons exhibiting battle wounds. Keely noted that many archeologists insisted on describing the people they were studying as peaceful, but the “trout in the milk” was all the skeletons of people killed by violence.
I remember as a child in the 1960s reading a children’s book on ancient cultures, specifically the ancient Mayans, that insisted that the Mayans did not practice warfare. In the 1970s and 1980s, archeologists began to notice that an awful lot of Mayan artworks involved blood and torture. Eventually, the archeologists acknowledged that the “peaceful” Mayans were every bit as warlike as the Aztecs.
Keely offers this nice summary:
Primitive war was not a puerile or deficient form of warfare, but war reduced to its essentials: killing enemies with a minimum of risk, denying them the means of life via vandalism and theft (even the means of reproduction by the kidnapping of their women and children), terrorizing them into either yielding territory or desisting for their encroachments and aggressions. At the tactical level primitive warfare and its cousin, guerilla warfare, have also been superior to the civilized variety. It is civilized warfare that is stylized, ritualized, and relatively less dangerous. When soldiers clash with warriors (or guerillas), it is precisely these “decorative” civilized tactics and paraphernalia that must be abandoned by the former if they are to defeat the latter. Even such a change may be insufficient, and co-opted native warrior must be substituted for the inadequate soldiers before victory belongs to the latter. (Keeley, p. 175)
These themes are paid off in Lee’s book. Lee is interested in rebutting the charge that Indians engaged in a “skulking way of war.”[1] In Lee’s view, the term “skulking” is derogatory to “Indian courage” and dismisses the “rational calculation behind their mode of combat.” Lee describes the “cutting-off” mode of conduct as follows:
The term comes from a common English expression from the period, “to cut off,” because it so accurately describes the tactical and operational goals of an Indian attack, at both small and large scales — indeed its scalability is one of its primary strengths. Lacking deep reserves of population and also lacking systems of coercive recruitment, Native American Nations were wary of heavy casualties. Their tactics demanded caution, and so they generally sought to surprise their targets. The size of the target varied with the size of the attacking force. A small war party might only seek to “cut off” individuals found getting water or wood, or out hunting. A larger party might aim at attacking a whole town, again hoping for surprise. At small or large scales, most often the attackers sought prisoners to take back to the home village. Once revealed by its attack, the invading war party generally fled before the defenders’ reinforcements from nearby related towns could organize. (Lee, p. 3, Kindle Edition)
This strategy could be scaled up or down depending on the objective.
It was also a completely rational strategy for a hunter-gatherer population. The Achilles heel of hunter-gatherer communities is their small size and precarious grip on survival. If such a community loses too much manpower (or womanpower), it loses the ability to maintain itself economically, demographically, or militarily. So, hunter-gatherers have to husband their human resources. They can’t go in for massive set-piece, win-all battles which might leave the winner debilitated.
Of course, this consideration works the other way also. The other side cannot afford to lose population either. Lose too many people and the losers face a death sentence. Such losers find it prudent to pack up and leave for more open territories where they might have better luck or they blend into other stronger populations (“Nations”).
As Keely established concerning pre-historic and primitive populations and Lee confirmed for North America, hunter-gatherer populations were in a constant state of low-level warfare. The warfare played out fights over resources, slight, or revenge. In some ways, it resembles the feuding of the Hatfield and McCoys and could last just as long. [2]
Such wars would be launched by a surprise attack. A successful first strike could be devastating. If the element of surprise was missing, the attacked community could call on assistance and attempt to counter-ambush the attackers or chase them out of the territory while inflicting casualties. The total number of dead might number in the handful, but over time such small numbers could add up to a demographic tipping point.
Primitive warfare had a high lethality — higher than civilized warfare:
Finally, the skulking paradigm likely underplays the level of lethality in precontact warfare in North America. There is archaeological evidence for the long continuity of a style of war that could be highly destructive and lethal. Three examples are the large-scale massacre at Crow Creek in South Dakota in the fourteenth century; a cemetery site in Illinois from the same era indicating a persistent series of violent attacks; and a recent reexamination of 119 precontact burials in southern New England showing that a remarkable 15 percent of them had died from violent trauma, 20 percent of whom were women or children. (pp. 17–18, Kindle Edition)
If modern America had a death by violence rate of 15%, the number would be in the tens of millions.
What this means is that Indian populations were in a constant state of movement and change. The current fad for “land acknowledgments” is based on a false ideology of the “peaceful savage” who has been on the land since time immemorial. In fact, whatever nation is being “acknowledged” is simply the last population that drove the prior population off the land and usually shortly before Americans arrived to bring peace to the land, and, ironically, to save the losers from extinction. [3]
Indians had a conceptual space for “right of conquest.” Lee explains:
And two decades later that defeat was thrown in their face when the Cherokees sought to relieve their debts by ceding this land to the colonists in the early 1770s. The Creeks immediately objected, saying that they claimed “part of … [that] land in right of conquest, having obliged the Cherokees during the war between them to abandon it.” (p. 197, Kindle Edition)
Indian warfare — the “cutting-off way” — made rational sense. It did keep Europeans mostly penned to the Eastern Seaboard for two hundred years. It had its successes against the Western Way of War when the Indians could attack the logistics of the Westerners or abandon territory rather than stand and defend villages. [4]
Misunderstanding of each side's approach to warfare went both ways. Lee tells the reader about the Powhattan surprise attack that initiated the Second Powhattan War:
The attack came on March 22, 1622. The Powhatans went about their business normally at the beginning of the day. By this time many of them had regular personal or economic contacts within the English settlements, and at the prescribed moment, all around the English colony, the Indians, already intermingled with the populace, picked up various agricultural tools (having come in unarmed) or appeared from the surrounding woods and set upon the English. They killed all those who came within reach that day, probably more than 350 people, completely wiping out some settlements. Tellingly, however, there was no follow-up. Having administered their lesson, the Powhatans went home. They surely expected retaliation, even as they would from another Native society, but they would not be caught unawares, and probably expected to be able to prevent any kind of equivalent damage to themselves. They prepared for the cutting-off war of raid and counterraid but presumed that their initial successful attack would give them the advantage in the long run. (p. 74, Kindle Edition)
What the Powhattan did not expect was that the Europeans would prosecute the war in the Western way, i.e. staying in the field, shock tactics, willingness to absorb casualties, and fighting to the end.
Despite these limits to the attack, the English did not respond to the lesson in the expected manner. They prepared to fight a war according to their own model of continuous campaigning: not raiding, but taking, destroying, and hopefully exterminating — largely in the hope of establishing their control over more land. In this the colonists succeeded to a horrifying degree, usually failing to catch very many Indians, but deliberately and thoroughly destroying their towns and crops. Indian efforts to negotiate a peace were repeatedly rebuffed until the war crept to a close in 1632. (p. 74, Kindle Edition)
Lee also describes the Tuscarora War of 1712–1713. In the first year of the war, the Tuscarora successfully used forts to fend off an English assault. This gave them the confidence to double down on the strategy of fortification. This time the English brought artillery and Indian auxiliaries. When they seized the fort, they killed or captured 1,000 out of the 5,000-person Tuscarora Nation. This ended the Tuscarora as an independent nation. They emigrated from western South Carolina and became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.
The lesson here is that civilized nations can go into the field when they choose with more firepower and better logistics and stay in the field longer. With the assistance of native auxiliaries providing the irregular warfare skills the Western forces lack, the Western approach can be essentially unbeatable.
Lee provides a chapter comparing the situation of the Irish and the Indians. At the same time that the English were dealing with pacifying Native Americans, they were also dealing with pacifying Native Irishmen. The Irish were unassimilable because of their Catholic religion. Irish forces — the Kerns — were used as native auxiliaries in the same way that the English in North America used Indian forces. Eventually, the Kerns became supernumerary because of technology. Indian auxiliaries, however, remained relevant to the closing of the western frontier in America.
Lee provides insight into the relationship of Indians with European communities. A careful reader of this review might remember how the Powhattans were integrated into the English settlements where they were able to launch their surprise attacks. Native Americans often flocked to English and American forts for protection when they were on the losing side.
Indian Nations were often insistent on having forts situated in their territory because of such concerns and because it invited the traders who provided a lifeblood of Western goods. The Indians were dependent on Western technology, such as gunpowder and guns. Guns often broke. Indians could not repair the guns on their own and so needed the English and Americans to fix their guns and sell them the gunpowder that had become integral to their way of life.
Access to gun technology was critical. The Nations who obtained gun technology were able to destroy their more primitive neighbors and control the important trade network with the Europeans. Lee writes:
In contrast, David Silverman analyzed region after region within North America, and in each of them he finds one Native Nation gaining early access to guns and more or less immediately adopting them and thereby gaining an advantage over a less well-connected Native Nation. Usually, however, that initially disadvantaged Nation relatively quickly found a comparable source for guns and reestablished an equilibrium of sorts. This simplifies his argument, and elides the fact that some Nations were in fact destroyed in this process, but the larger point for our purposes is that guns were avidly sought after, and we must ask why that would be. (pp. 138–139, Kindle Edition)
Lee explains something that always puzzled me, namely, why did Indians give up the bow and arrow? It seems like gun technology is slower and less reliable than a bow and arrow.
The answer is in the ‘stopping power.” A lead bullet would put an animal or human down immediately. Arrows could be dodged by humans or leave lethal, but not immediately lethal, wounds in animals that would then require lengthy pursuit. [5]
History’s relevance is never far removed from modern events. I was reading this book shortly after Hamas’ brutally uncivilized October 7, 2023 surprise attack on peaceful Israelis where Israeli women were raped, children were killed, and hostages were taken.
It does not take much imagination to recognize this as the classic “cutting-off way” of war. Hamas has recreated the surprise raid and run-away style for the same reasons that Hunter-Gatherer populations did, namely, they can’t afford to waste their manpower in a set-piece battle that they are going to lose.
The Israeli response is classically “Western.” Israel has gone into Gaza with sufficient manpower, firepower, and resolve to exterminate the threat of another surprise attack. It may lack the element of “native auxiliaries,” but if Keeley is right, it may have to jettison some or all of the “decorative” tactics of civilized warfare, e.g., giving warning before bombing, not destroying power and water supplies used by the civilian population, etc. If that happens, it shouldn’t be surprising.
The Israel-Hamas analogy also allows us to reflect on the history of Indian-Western interaction. These were two vastly different civilizations. One of them believed that surprise attacks on civilian populations across the border fell comfortably within the “laws of war.” They couldn’t change. For them to adopt a civilized/western perspective would have been idiotic. They could never win that way.
On the other hand, the European society could hardly live next to a population that could come boiling across the border at a time of their choosing and which would then, as a matter of their laws of war, rape civilian women, kidnap civilian children, and murder civilian men. The Western Way of War required a complete and total response to such depredations. [6] Lee observes:
The Europeans also had notions of retaliation, but they were much more thoroughly lethal. The European ideology of revenge presumed that an original violation of norms, however “small,” authorized a no-holds-barred retaliation. (p. 80, Kindle Edition)
These civilizations were in conflict. Someone was going to lose.
Someone did lose.
[1] The term comes from Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (1991; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
[2] Lee discusses the role of torture in ending the cycle of revenge as follows:
Since much warfare was originally motivated by a desire for revenge, a desire that Kruer has reminded us was intensely emotional, the lengthy and elaborate rituals of torture practiced on a few individuals standing in for someone “responsible” for the original death may have forestalled or obviated the need for killing greater numbers of the enemy group. Ironically, torture may have helped end feuds. (Lee, p. 90, Kindle Edition)
Perhaps if the McCoys had ritually tortured a Hatfield to death, the feud could have ended sooner?
[3] For example, the Navaho were gradually exterminating the Hopi/Zuni/Pueblo Indians prior to America putting a lid on inter-tribal warfare. As the National Park Service explains:
THE PUEBLO AND NAVAHO FIGHT It was a hard time for the Pueblos, who were harassed by the Whites, Navaho, Utes, and Apaches, as well as by internal dissensions. The Navaho took advantage of the Pueblo pre-occupation with the Spanish invaders to raid towns, drive off the herds, gather up the harvest, and steal women. Their attacks were constant and devastating enough to force the Jemez to abandon two of their pueblos in 1622. Later they became the deadly enemies of the Zuni, whom they forced back to inaccessible mesa villages. The Zuni tried to trap the marauding Navaho, who came on horseback at night, into pits, ten feet deep, filled with sharp stakes and artfully concealed by branches (Ten Broeck, 1860:81).
The reader should recognize from Lee’s book that this account is describing full-fledged “cutting-off way” warfare practiced by the Navaho against the Pueblo.
[4] Victor Davis Hanson classically defined “The Western Way of War
as involving heavy infantry slugging things out in a set piece battle for all the marbles. However, since a lot of Greek warfare consisted of the virtually impossible task of despoiling vineyards to provoke a battle, there was a fair amount of raid and counter-raid going on. See Victor Davis Hanson, “The Western Way of War.”
[5] This book gave me new respect for Daniel Day-Lewis’s “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992). I don’t know if anyone was as accurate as shown in that movie, but one does get a sense of the stopping power of a lead bullet. Also, the scenes of torture and surprise fit into the theme of this book. Finally, the backstory of Wes Studi’s character (“Magua”) who had been kidnapped by the Mohican and made a member of the Mohican Nation is something that happened to captured Indians who were lucky enough not to be turned into the object of torture or merely made a slave. Lee explains:
In this “mourning war” complex Haudenosaunee families adopted prisoners to replace dead kinspeople, while torturing those not selected in a venting of their grief. (p. 89, Kindle Edition)
Magua was lucky.
[6] Lee observes:
In another example of incongruence, European revenge could be unlimited in scale and target, but the desire for revenge was not triggered by simple death in open battle. Those killings were recognized as legitimate. Not so for Native Americans, for whom any death warranted blood revenge. In contrast, Indians could put aside revenge needs once the proper rituals of peace had been concluded; Euro-American colonists frequently proved incapable of doing the same. (p. 97, Kindle Edition)
