It is very difficult to speak of American Indians generally, because tribes are quite different from one another and from region to region. That said, from what I’ve learned in my research, relations between the average American settler and American Indians were usually quite cordial, to the point where intermarriage was not uncommon even in the 1800s and some non-Indians, particularly escaped slaves, were even accepted into tribes.
Usually. When relations went sour, many Indian tribes carried out the time-honored tradition of raiding. Raiding usually involved attacks on remote settlements that could not easily defend themselves. Such tactics were used in the Powhatan uprising and Metacomet’s war in the 1600s, by the Mohawks in the 1700s, and by the Apaches from time immemorial until their defeat and incarceration in the late 1800s.
The Apaches are particularly notable. The Chiricahua Apaches had a long tradition of raiding for profit and revenge. They were quite successful, too. Over a period of two hundred years, they managed to essentially depopulate Spanish settlements in the region surrounding their sacred mountain range, and began to prey upon American settlers after the Mexican War. The presence of American settlers quickly reduced available game and provided attractive targets. In 1857, one agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated that if the Chiricahuas had to “abandon their maurauding expeditions… one half of their subsistence is cut off.” (Leider and Page, Wild Justice, p. 11)
These attacks were amost exclusively delivered against your average run-of-the-mill American settlers, especially ranchers, whose stock was particularly coveted by the Apaches. When one band of Apaches finally acquiesced and allowed themselves to be placed on a reservation, Geronimo railed, broke out with a small group of about 70 warriors, and subsisted solely on raiding for two and a half years on both sides of the border, at the same time evading thousands of Mexican and American troops. When Geronimo finally turned himself in for the last time in 1886, his tribe was loaded onto trains and shipped to Florida, where they would begin twenty-seven years of captivity as prisoners of war.
Anyway, I think that it is the Apaches, among others, who inspired the popular legend that led to the “Cowboys and Indians” game. As an aside, one of my friends, a former Chairperson of her tribe, recently told me that as a kid she hated playing Cowboys and Indians with her brothers and their friends, because they always made her play the cowboy!