Along with assimilation and dispossession, military aggression was long one of the main strategies that Euro-American settlers and their governments employed in their relations with Native American peoples. The Manuscript Division's collections document this history from the American Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century. The term Indian Wars reflects the sense that the multitude of individual battles and campaigns against specific Native groups formed a broader, centuries-long struggle for American expansionism on the one hand, and indigenous resistance on the other.

The breadth of these collections reflects the Division's strength in military history more broadly. This page describes 47 collections that range from a single autograph to 40,000 items. The collections below are sorted into pre and post-1865. The War of 1812 and the Seminole Wars are particularly well-represented in the pre-1865 collections, while the post 1865-collections cover how the Plains were settled through violent engagements with various Native groups in the second half of the 19th century.

These collections universally come from non-Native people; and with the exception of one collection, from white American military men. Some of these men took an interest in Native cultures beyond their military duty and developed close relationships with indigenous people. Hugh Lenox Scott's collection, for example, demonstrates the salvage ethnography of the period, conducted by individuals who wanted to preserve the indigenous cultures they saw as threatened with extinction.

Standout collections related to Indian Wars include the papers of three men who were consecutive commanding generals of the United States Army from 1869-1895: Generals William Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and John Schofield. These three collections alone extensively cover the height of the Indian Wars and the closing of the frontier. The papers of Sherman and Sheridan have been digitized and made available online, providing easy access to primary sources on this key moment in American history.