Let me speak to something I've been looking at recently.

Uninhabited Chirikof Island is about as remote a place as you can find in North America. It's a small rock of about 33,000 acres and blasted by North Pacific winds and rain year-round. Yet, for a time, it appears to have been an important battleground between Aleut and Sugpiaq/Alutiiq tribes.

Chirikof is between the Kodiak Archipelago and the Alaska Peninsula, which made it an important crossroads for trade. According to archaeological evidence, Chirikof has had periods of inhabitation and periods of vacancy. Now, we know Alutiiq and Aleut tribes fought pretty much constantly, usually for slaves and to settle other conflicts, but it's difficult to say what happened on Chirikof, since there are no written records and the island was uninhabited when the Russians arrived and called it "Foggy Island."

One interpretation for the cycle of activity/non-activity on Chirikof is warfare. If we assume that the conflict mirrored the ones we know took place on the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak, there is a recipe for total conquest.

Chirikof doesn't have big salmon runs (it has some), and it likely didn't support a big population. That could make it possible for total conquest by a war party, and keeping it would be valuable for control of the trade routes.

Please delete/ignore if you don't care for cloud-castle speculating.

The largest one I recently read about was the Beaver Wars of the late 17th and early 18th century. While there is no question the colonial powers had a lot of influence the fighting was primarily done between Native Americans.

The French, in modern Canada, were allied with the Huron. The Huron were often engaged in raids and skirmishes with the Iroquois. The French were primarily concerned with acquiring pelts which were a lucrative trade item in Europe. Beaver pelts in particular were quite popular as hats.

The French were smart enough to only supply guns to their allies the Huron. The Iroquois, entirely aware the advance in firepower of their enemies was to their detriment, found willing traders in first the Dutch and later the English. The Dutch and English, operating from the Hudson valley, were more than willing to trade guns for pelts.

The resulting wars, using advanced European weaponry, eventually engulfed most of the northwest. The Iroquois defeated the Huron and eventually turned south pushing the tribes out that occupied modern western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Eventually their English allies began treating them as belligerents as the Iroquois themselves began to represent a threat to the eastern colonial holdings.

A map of their conquests shows how far they conquered outside their original lands in upstate New York. Many of the lands were claimed as “hunting ground” and were expected to be held in perpetuity. This war had many long lasting consequences for the Iroquois that would manifest in the next century with their eventual conquest by the British and newly created Americans.