Frontier Wars and the Other Colonial Models

Three empires, three relationships with Native peoples

The exam wants you to be able to compare English colonisation with the French and the Dutch, because the contrast explains the different patterns of conflict.

• French — few settlers, a fur economy running along the St Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Success depended on Native trappers and Native permission, so the French built alliances, intermarried, and sent missionaries rather than farmers.
• Dutch — a company venture at New Netherland, focused on trade and profit, tolerant of many religions and nationalities because tolerance was good for business.
• English — whole families arriving to farm. Settlement needed land permanently cleared of its previous users, which made sustained conflict structural rather than accidental.

The organising sentence: a colony that wants trade needs Native partners; a colony that wants land needs Native absence. That single difference predicts most of what follows.

Metacom's War, 1675–1676

Two generations of New England growth had pushed farms into Wampanoag land, and colonial courts had begun trying Native people under English law. The war that followed — led by Metacom, called King Philip by the English — was proportionally among the deadliest in American history, destroying dozens of towns on both sides.

Its result set the pattern for New England: Native power east of the Appalachians was broken, survivors were sold into slavery or confined to small tracts, and English settlement expanded without effective check.

The Pueblo Revolt, 1680

In New Mexico, decades of forced labour and the suppression of Native religion — kivas destroyed, ceremonies punished — produced a coordinated uprising under Popé that drove the Spanish out of the province for twelve years.

The revolt is the single best evidence that Native people could win, and it changed Spanish behaviour: when Spain returned, it eased labour demands and tolerated Pueblo religious practice alongside Catholicism. Resistance altered the terms of colonisation.