The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800

Ever since its publication in 1991, Patrick Malone’s The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Madison Books) has served as the standard primer on early Native American “ways of war” and their adaptation through contact with European colonists. Although Malone confined his study to New England in the years 1600 to 1677, The Skulking Way of War established a paradigm that many scholars extended across a broader sweep of time and the whole of the Eastern Woodland culture zone. Wayne Lee has had enough.The Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lee is a leading authority on early Native American military history whose work is distinguished by attention to the cultural and structural underpinnings of military institutions and practices. His objections to The Skulking Way of War are both semantic and interpretive. In the former case, the adjective skulking—used by early English colonists—was and remains inherently derogatory, crediting Indians for neither valor nor strategy. More substantively, Lee disagrees with Malone’s assertion that precontact Native American warfare was, as a rule, relatively bloodless until Europeans introduced the concept of unrestrained, “total” war. As Lee and the archaeological record demonstrate convincingly, Native war could be and often was exceptionally sanguinary. He suggests that it might have been more so had Native peoples not so highly valued living captives or possessed the means of inflicting more casualties.In place of a “skulking way,” Lee proposes a “cutting-off” way of war. While this expression was likewise used by English observers, it accurately describes the goals and methods of Indian attacks. Lee further argues that the cutting-off paradigm is scalable, encompassing each of the “levels of war” that military historians use to analyze military actions: the strategic, the operational, and the tactical. Most of the extant literature (Malone included) focuses on the last of these, acknowledging superlative Native skill in individual warfare in wooded terrain while denying or eliding any grander purpose to Indian operations than grinding old axes against ancient enemies, slaking young men’s thirst for martial glory, or satisfying some more recent blood feud. Lee acknowledges each of these motivations but argues (provocatively, to some) that Natives also waged war for political objectives, among them scoring a “coup” (sensu Frederic Gleach) to rebalance external relationships and even territorial conquest. Logistical frailty prevented Indians from accomplishing the later aim in a single campaign, but successive raids over years could and did render certain lands uninhabitable, yielding “conquest by harassment” (33). Ambitious campaigns might endeavor to “cut off” entire villages at once, inflicting casualties and seizing as many prisoners as possible before the inevitable pursuit from neighboring villages. But even the most modest war party relied on similar logistical practices and the element of surprise to cut off whatever was safely assailable.Although a relatively short book, The Cutting-Off Way is too rich to summarize fully here. In part, this is because half of the book’s eight chapters are derived from earlier publications and have their own theses and lines of argument. They cohere rather well, however, and provide updated (albeit in cases abridged) versions of some of Lee’s earlier works, all of which enrich his analysis in The Cutting-Off Way. An archaeologist in his own right, Lee draws on that field as well the latest works in anthropology and history to craft a compelling ethnohistorical analysis that—to this reader’s satisfaction—succeeds in correcting Malone while complementing more recent works such as David Silverman’s Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (2016).