Rethinking the “Indian War”

The standard interpretation of Washington Territory’s “Indian War” of the mid-1850s is not only east-west in its orientation, it also leaves little room for Indian auxiliaries, let alone mercenaries-for-hire from the north Pacific coast. “Northern Indians” from what later became northwestern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska provided crucial productive, reproductive, and military labor for early Euro-American settlers. Because Coast Salish communities on both sides of the border had experienced decades of raids and conflicts with various groups of northern Indians by the 1850s, Euro-Americans’ hiring of northern Indians in particular illustrates the importance of intra-Indian geopolitics to subsequent events. When placed in this larger context, the “Indian War” of 1855–56 in western Washington must be seen as part of a longer continuum of disputes involving distant Native groups, intra-Indian negotiations, and forms of Indigenous diplomacy. A closer look at how the key players involved attempted to manipulate these connections for their own purposes complicates our understandings of the military conflicts of the mid-1850s and reveals the significance of evolving Native-newcomer and intra-Indian relations in this transformative decade

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