Had they [Eastern Indian tribes] been able to unite more effectively as a single force and had their British allies been more constant and reliable, they may have been able to hold white immigration in check and if they couldn't force the whites back across the mountains, at least they may have been able to carve out a large territory for themselves in the East. It wasn't, as it seems today, a dream necessarily doomed from the start. It could have been done.
Sorry, I disagree with you on that supposition.
First, they didn't have to "carve out a large territory". They had it already. The Iroquois confederacy, for example, trapped and hunted and farmed a vast territory which encompassed most of modern day New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and parts of Wisconsin, as well as southern Quebec and Ontario. And they lost this vast holding over the span of less than a hundred years.
Second, the British were rarely allies of the eastern tribes, and never allies of the Iroquois confederacy, nor the more westerly tribes such as the Sauk, Fox, Chippewa, and Ojibway. The French, on the other hand, worked hand in hand with these tribes and were staunch allies. Hence, the "French and Indian War". But although the French were allies of the Indians, they weren't really interested in doing anything more than getting rich off them by means of the fur trade. They didn't particularly care to "civilize" the Indians beyond what was needed to encourage trade. The French Jesuit missionaries did much to spread Christianity to these tribes, but you would hardly be able to call that a civilizing influence. The British colonies, by way of contrast, were land-hungry and never particularly interested in anything the Indians had other than their lands. The northeastern Indian tribes had the misfortune of not having the mindset or experience to recognize the threat to their survival until it was too late.
But the third and most compelling reason the Indians could not have pushed the Europeans back into the sea was that there weren't enough Indians to start with to do so, and once European diseases such as smallpox, measles, and diphtheria spread among them, their populations dwindled mightily. Birth rates could not keep up with mortality, and further populations losses due to war were the eastern tribes' death knell. It's well-documented that the Iroquois' traditional torture-and-murder of all captives significantly changed during this time period, and captives became seen as having value if incorporated into the tribes to try to increase their supply of breeding women and men who could wage war. Moreover, by the mid-1700's Scots-Irish immigration was really picking up steam, and the ratio of white immigration to Indian birth rate was likely close to 100:1. The net result was that between 1650 and 1750 the population balance in eastern North America reversed, with whites becoming the overwhelmingly dominant demographic.
Immigration and disease doomed the eastern tribes' hegemony over the eastern woodlands. War was only the final straw.
