The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 by Wayne E. Lee (review)

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• The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 by Wayne E. Lee
• David J. Silverman

The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800. By Wayne E. Lee. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 287. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7378-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7377-6.)

The title of Wayne E. Lee’s excellent The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 comes from his argument that the primary goal of Indian warfare in colonial-era eastern North America was “to cut off” individuals, small bands, and even entire villages (p. 3). The attacking party would usually retreat if it lost the element of surprise or sustained too many casualties, or if defensive reinforcements arrived. Native people’s reasons for war were various. They included quests for captives and plunder, the negotiation of tributary relationships, fights for control of territory or trade routes, blood revenge, and more. Lee argues convincingly that understanding these patterns must begin with deep ethnography, addressing Indigenous forms of subsistence, social organization, labor, governance, and cultural beliefs about war. He contends that a combination of decentralized polities, economies that required men to hunt and that produced meager horticultural margins, and limited means of transportation and storage did not permit Indians to form large armies that could conquer and hold territory in concentrated campaigns. Instead, wars involved hounding the enemy with usually small-scale seasonal strikes, sometimes for years. War was endemic. Sometimes, but only rarely, was it catastrophic.

This book is remarkable in its depth and breadth. Chronologically, it ranges from first contact through the Revolutionary era, addressing practically every significant intertribal and Indian-colonial conflict east of the Mississippi River on record. Lee has a firm command of every major published primary and secondary source on the subject. He also draws on archaeology, environmental history, gender history, geography, material culture, political theory, and demographic history. This is old-fashioned ethnohistory in the best sense of the phrase.

The Cutting-Off Way is written and designed for a wide audience. Lee’s prose is crystal clear and refreshingly jargon-free. The University of North Carolina Press deserves praise for the book’s numerous carefully designed and placed maps. Though Lee engages in several historiographical debates [End Page 598] (including with this reviewer), he is never too technical. One of Lee’s interventions is his criticism of the longtime standard in the field, Patrick M. Malone’s The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Lanham, Md., 1991), for posing too stark a transition between Native tactics before and after European contact and for downplaying the strategic reasons for Native warfare in favor of emphasizing revenge. By contrast, Lee sees great continuity between ancient and colonial-era Indian ways of war. First, large-scale ritualized warfare coexisted with “the cutting-off way of war” in both periods (p. 2). Second, he cites ample archaeological evidence that precontact Indian warfare was terribly lethal, sometimes on a grand scale. Finally, he stresses political and economic considerations as drivers of Indigenous conflict. Such critical interventions should contribute to this book’s becoming a standard title on the syllabi of undergraduate and graduate courses and the reading lists of military history enthusiasts.

Specialists will benefit not only from Lee’s convincing thesis but also from his innumerable pointed insights. For instance, he submits that the geographically distributed villages within tribal territories allowed Indians to come to each other’s defense in the event of a siege. Likewise, the purpose of palisades was less to hold off attackers indefinitely and more to buy time for reinforcements to arrive. Those palisades became far less useful and less often employed with the advent of steel axes, European siege guns, and lengthy sieges by colonial armies. When on the offensive, Native people’s need to provide for the sustenance of warriors, the favored tactic of ambush, and the goal of taking prisoners led attacking groups to set up base camps in enemy territory. Hunters and small ambushing parties would fan out from there, stash captives and...