Oh Great One, do you have some source for this? Did we learn it from the savages themselves? Did Lewis report having to skirt Indian Wars on the Expedition in his Journal? My guess is that the Indians had no more propensity for war than other humans, and where it existed it may have had more to do with the propensity for thievery among others living nearby.
ML/NJ
Man is a war-making creature. Always has been. Always will be.
Sometimes there is no other option but to resist with arms.
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of thosewhom they oppress.” Frederick Douglass August 4, 1857
Quite true. Unfortunately, given the history and prehistory of other human groups, this doesn't mean they were peaceful.
I highly recommend War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Laurence Keeley.
http://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126
The author compiles what is known of "primitive" cultures from archaeology, anthropology and early explorers. What he found is that the vast majority of such societies had a much higher death rate from war than more modern "civilized" societies.
For example, the 20th century is often called the most violent century in human history, with an estimated 100 to 200 million people killed in its wars. If the average death rate from warfare from the dozens of primitive societies he studied had applied worldwide during the 20th century, 2 billion people would have died.
And that's just the average war death rate of primitive societies. Some were much more warlike than the average.
This really shouldn't surprise us much. Let's assume Tribe A was peaceful and warlike Tribe B moved in next door. Either Tribe A quickly became warlike in self-defense or it quickly became extinct. The book documents numerous examples of this extinction, BTW.