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

by Wayne E. Lee

Incorporating archeology, anthropology, cartography, and Indigenous studies into military history, Wayne E. Lee has argued throughout his distinguished career that wars and warfare cannot be understood by a focus that rests solely on logistics, strategy, and operations. Fighting forces bring their own cultural traditions and values onto the battlefield. In this volume, Lee employs his "cutting-off way of war" (COWW) paradigm to recast Indigenous warfare in a framework of the lived realities of Native people rather than with regard to European and settler military strategies and practices.

Indigenous people lacked deep reserves of population or systems of coercive military recruitment and as such were wary of heavy casualties. Instead, Indigenous warriors sought to surprise their targets, and the size of the target varied with the size of the attacking force. A small war party might "cut off" individuals found getting water, wood, or out hunting, while a larger party might attempt to attack a whole town. Once revealed by its attack, the invading war party would flee before the defenders' reinforcements from nearby towns could organize. Sieges or battles were rare and fought mainly to save face or reputation. After discussing the COWW paradigm, including a deep look at Native logistics and their associated strategic flexibility, Lee demonstrates how the system worked and evolved in five subsequent chapters that detail intra-tribal and Indigenous-colonial warfare from pre-contact through the American Revolution.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Military Fiction, Politics, Native American, American

300 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2023

About the author

A specialist in early modern military history, with a particular focus on North America and the Atlantic World, Wayne Lee is Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reviews

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

231205 The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America 1500-1800 by Wayne E. Lee

https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Off-Wa...

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) https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civ... 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” were all the bodies obviously 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. “ (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.” 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, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 3). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.

This strategy could be scaled up or down depending on objective.

It was also a completely rational strategy for a hunter-gatherer population. The Achilles Heal 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 with respect to 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. 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.12

Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (pp. 17-18). The University of North Carolina Press. 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.

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.

Misunderstanding of each sides 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.

Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 74). The University of North Carolina Press. 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.

Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 74). The University of North Carolina Press. 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 auxilliaries, however, remained relevant to the closing of the west.

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 to have forts situated in their territory because of such concerns and because it invited the traders who provided a life-blood of Western goods. The Indians were dependent on western technology, such as gun powder and guns. Guns often broke. Indians lacked the ability to 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.

Lee gives an explanation for 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.

History’s relevance is never far removed from modern events. I was reading this book shortly after Hamas’ brutally uncivilized 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 back 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 own 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.

These civilizations were in conflict. Some one was going to lose.

Someone did lose.

[Sanjay Banerjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incorporating archeology, anthropology, cartography and indigenous American studies into military history, the author argues that wars and warfare should not only be seen by a focus resting solely on logistics, strategy and operations. Warring parties bring their own cultural traditions and values. He has therefore recast warfare in a framework of the lived realities of native people rather than follow the earlier studies by using the framework of European and Settler military strategies and practices.

[Lloyd Earickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Economists talk a lot about “natural experiments.”  Since constructing an economically relevant experiment along the lines of a traditional scientific experiment is somewhat impossible, or at least impracticable, economists will instead write papers and do studies of instances in histories or of places in the world where particular conditions existed that allow them to at least partially isolate the variables in which they are interested.  This idea of “natural experiments” has relevance beyond economics, especially in fields like anthropology, psychology, and other, human-centric sciences.  Sometimes, I think that the protracted isolation of the “old world” from the “new world” – that is, the lack of contact between the humans of the Americas and the humans of Asia, Europe, and Africa for some ten thousand years – represents the most significant natural experiment anyone will ever study (at least until we have a space colony that gets cut off from the rest of the species for a few thousand years).  If only it were easier to study.

The problem is that, almost universally, the indigenous peoples of the Americas did not write things down.  This is not exclusive to the Americas, as plenty of peoples in other parts of the world also did not write things down, but in places like Europe, Africa, and Asia, peoples that did not write tended to, over time, rub against peoples that did, and end up documented, more or less naturally, through them.  Not so in the Americas, at least until the onset of “contact.”  Lee uses the term to mean when American aborigines encountered outside (mainly European) peoples, or their follow-on effects, for the first time, and I shall mimic him.  He calls the period before contact “prehistory,” and the period after “history,” referring to the original meaning of those terms, where prehistory is the period before things were written down, and history comes once writing commences.  Thus, in trying to examine this greatest natural experiment, scholars are reliant on a combination of scant physical evidence, and the documentation that occurred post-contact.  The latter, though, as valuable as it is, also represents the single largest confounding variable the “experiment” could have, and parsing Native society prior to contact based on that evidence is a treacherous task.

In The Cutting-Off Way, Lee more than rises to the challenge.  Rather than engaging in “Russeauistic retrospective utopianism” (that’s a real quote – scholars can get nasty with each other), Lee presents a nuanced, complex portrait of indigenous warfare during, prior to, and just after the contact period, examining the question from the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war.  In doing so, he helps to make sense of a period and of outcomes that can seem, at times, nonsensical.  If you ever look at the history of hostility between the Native Americans and the settlers, and wonder how it got the way it did, a lot of it will make more sense after reading this book.  Rather than calling it a culture clash, which seems to diminish the issue, think of it as a slow, painful grinding of mismatched gears, where neither understands the other, but both know they don’t quite fit together properly.

Especially in addressing such sensitive and charged topics, that nuance is important.  Many histories I’ve read shy away from examining the issues that Lee examines in The Cutting-Off Way, and those that don’t are prone to oversimplifying or imposing their own assumptions upon the data.  I’m sure that Lee brings his own biases to his study of this natural experiment, but he does an admirable job of attempting to account for them, and he repeatedly acknowledges the difficulty of ever wholly grasping another culture and all its nuances.

The Cutting-Off Way presents the indigenes and their habits of conflict not as helpless victims, violent savages, passive nature-loving utopists, but as complex peoples with motivations, mores, and ideas of warfare as developed as their old-world counterparts’, encapsulated in the idea of “cutting off.”  Native peoples had shared expectations of prisoner treatment, territorially conquest, and the conduct and usual outcomes for conflict that were suited to their environment, even if they were alien to the Europeans.  That mismatch, in Lee’s telling, was a major source of the conflicts that arose between settlers and natives.

I make a light study of military strategy, mostly to better capture such concepts in my own writing, and it was with that in mind that I first added The Cutting-Off Way to my reading list.  In fact, I had a specific story in mind for which I thought a better understanding of the tactics and stratagems employed by Native Americans in warfare would be informative (Wellspring of Nations is the tentative title); instead, as usual, I am left reminded that I may never capture the complexity and wonder of real humanity in my fictitious musings.  The Cutting-Off Way does address military matters – again, at tactical, operational, and strategic levels – but to call it a military strategy book is far too limiting.  No, this is a history book, written though the lens of warfare, and perhaps the best treatment of its kind I’ve encountered (for any society, not just for Native American matters).  I highly recommend you read Lee’s The Cutting-Off Way.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a narrative history, but a chapter-by-topic analysis of both the logic of and practice of Native American warfare. A valuable source for anyone interested in this topic and the Eastern Woodlands Indians in general. Does a good job comparing different sources when an issue is disputed.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed and learned a lot from WL's new book. It puts together war and society, war and culture, and other themes/methods of military history to assess the Cutting-Off Way in a concise and well-argued book. It also judiciously finds balance points and synthesis among previous scholars, making corrections without putting anyone down.

WL makes a few big points in the book. The first is the idea of the cutting-off way as a style of warfare that reflected the capacities and cultures of Indian nations. There was a longstanding belief among historians that Indians did not deploy the kinds of violent shock tactics that were ostensibly the style of the Western way of war. Instead, WL argues that most Eastern Woodlands tribes had small population bases and limited capacity to seize and administer territory, as most were not yet at the state level of development. They therefore fought a kind of war that emphasized raids, outflanking maneuvers, and so on designed to cut off a foe from resupply, from allied forces, etc, getting them to submit to the demands of the victory. This could still be a deadly form of warfare, but it did not seek outright battle, even after European contact. Indians fought this way because it made the most sense to do so given their logistical and demographic constraints.

Another big point of this book was that indigenous warfare was shaped by both culture and strategic/political ends. This may seem obvious, but there was a longstanding view both among historians and European-Americans that Indian warfare was a reflection of cultural impulses, not a strategic act designed to achieve political ends. There were, of course, cultural drivers for war, especially at the individual level, where young men sought glory, status, and resources. A good deal of Indian warfare was about revenge cycles and the taking of captives, although each of these had a political logic of their own. Nonetheless, WL shows that tribes did seek to carve out and expand territory, control hunting grounds, build coalitions against each other, fend off European and rival indigenous settlement, and other very political objectives. Their form of "conquest," however, didn't look like that of European states at the time, as conquest was more about clearing out enemies and laying claim to a space that was possessed as sovereign territory but not administered (or even settled) like an early modern state might do. This didn't mean they had no idea of territory, as many Europeans assumed at the time and many people still believe today.

Finally, an interesting theme to me was the idea of an indigenous military revolution, which Lee argues largely did not happen. Indians did get access to European firearms and quickly became expert at them, replacing bows to a significant extent. But they largely folded firearms into the existing practice of the cutting-off way of war because they lacked the economic, logistical, and demographic bases to do much else. They were largely dependent on alliances with Europeans to repair guns and acquire gunpowder. They also lacked the manpower basis to form European-style pike and shot units that democratized and eventually revolutionized European warfare. Finally, they could not make their own artillery and rarely operated it. Instead, Indians leveraged their knowledge, adaptability, and speed across-country to continue to compete with (and often partner with) European settlers.

This worked for a long time! For hundreds of years after first contact, Indians remained the arbiters of the vast majority of Eastern North America. The story of how that fell apart is a much longer one, but WL's book reinforces this important truth about colonial-era American history.

Anyways, this is a very good book for people into military history and war and culture, but my caveat is that it assumes a good deal of knowledge about colonial and indigenous history between 1500-1800. If you don't have that, it might be hard to follow at times.

[Adger Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author starts with the supposition that there was an "Indian way of war", though he objects to the use of the term "skulking" because it suggests a degree of opportunism and a lack of sophistication that seems unmerited. The warfare practiced by Mississippean paramount chiefdoms in the heyday of the Mississippean culture is not the subject of this book, rather the author treats the warfare carried on by Americans after the great Mississippean chiefdoms and into the early European contact period. During this time period, most American wars were between Americans (with perhaps a European power as a bit player), and it is to reconstruct these wars that this book is devoted.

Considering constraints of agriculture, technology, politics, and other matters, Lee presents some novel but well-reasoned ideas.
1. Americans waging war were averse to casualties (on their own side), but, if they achieved sufficient tactical surprise, were perfectly willing to inflict casualties sufficient to eradicate a town.
2. Failing to achieve surprise often meant raiders would withdraw and lurk about a town in hopes of picking up prisoners or scalps.
3. Endemic raiding of this kind could (over the course of a few years or a decade) render a town and its surrounding area uninhabitable by defenders, who would often then withdraw to an area further removed in their homeland to make the attackers journey toward them longer.
4. Americans were well aware of this kind of result and indeed hoped for it, as it would lead to a greater distance between them and their enemies and which would result in less pressure on animal and vegetable resources to be harvested in their home area.

Lee presents a whole chapter on the meanings and aims of war, but, alas, does not present a chapter on what "peace" might have meant, though it is evident that what Americans conceived of as "peace" might not have matched well with what Europeans expected "peace" to mean.

All in all, an extremely thought-provoking and well-argued piece of work.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really happy with this read. Super worthwhile, would recommend more generally beyond military history. As Lee explains, analysis of Native American military culture and practice requires understanding of Native American (in this case Eastern Woodlands Nations) subsistence patterns and culture. Lee does an excellent job advancing his theory of a “cutting off” way of war based on surprise, and explains how this fit into broader cultural patterns and was enabled by the hunting and subsistence systems of the Eastern Woodlands. Particularly interesting to me, though not unique to Lee, was his explanation of how markedly different cultural expectations could lead both Native Americans and Europeans to see the other side as particularly savage and with poor regard for non-combatants. Lee persuasively argues that the Native Americans of the eastern seaboard had extremely extensive practices of war, but also a system of cultural restraints and paths to de-escalation, and he then explains these systems.

[David Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and specialized but one of the most thought-provoking works I've read in recent years. Lee offers up a new paradigm for thinking about Native American warfare in Eastern North America both before and after the arrival of Europeans. In doing so, he also offers ways to think about topics beyond his strict subject: modern guerrilla warfare, the different ways that culture and socioeconomic conditions combine to influence a nation's strategy, the ways that the introduction of advanced weapons can destabilize the status quo, and more. Just typing that made it seem immensely nerdy, but it's 100% up my alley, and might be up your alley, too.