In other words: was the hostility and violence of encounters between Native Americans and early Americans/colonists the foregone conclusion we see in popular American culture? Was it ever possible to set up camp on the fringes of a colony and not concern yourself with being ambushed by Natives?
I'm asking only about the area of what is now the continental United States, but it's hard to pinpoint a specific time period I'm asking about here. However, since I'm asking about a time when Native Americans would have been numerous and prevalent enough to pose a significant threat to the average person - I guess I'm necessarily asking about the 18th century and before.
Anyhow - there were several "Indian Wars", as most of us are aware, and it's pretty obvious the Native Americans did not have an overall positive relationship with the nascent USA/colonies; but was the American frontier really as violent and dangerous for colonists/citizens as portrayed in films/popular culture?
I find it hard to believe that going beyond the frontier of, say, the Ohio Territory in the Colonial Period would have been fraught with shootouts and ambushes and the equivalent to operating behind enemy lines, as it is almost universally portrayed... But then again, it'd be entirely reasonable for Native Americans to attack a white man on sight.
Thanks in advance!
Short answer: it depended on the tribe and on the settlers. If you went to one tribe first to trade, then encountered the enemy of that tribe, they could often be hostile, seeing you as an ally of their enemy. If you offered good trade terms, then there would be peace. However once Europeans began expanding, the natives began to fight back, and things got much more violent.
For example, during one of the very first French expeditions, Samuel de Champlain encountered the Huron and Algonquin tribes and agreed to join them in a raid against their enemies, the Iroquois. After that, the Iroquois would often kill French settlers on sight. However, if you were Dutch, the Iroquois would be willing to receive you as an ally, since the Dutch were their primary trading partners.
Natives were often willing to help out early settlers. By the time English settlers arrived, Native populations had already been decimated by disease, so they had little defense against newcomers and simply hoped that they came in peace. They often started out helping the newcomers, like Powhatan in Virginia agreeing to send food to the the starving colonists there. Later Powhatan would try to "starve out" the English, then attacked them as new settlements popped up.
In New England things quickly turned sour, with the Pequot War, which resulted in the near extermination of the Pequot tribe. Later on, even the Wampanoag tribe, who had been friendly with the colonists, waged war on the colonies to fight subjugation and English expansion. The English made a lot of enemies due to their policies with natives and their insistence on expansion.
The French did a bit better, and were often on quite good terms with the Natives, even signing a peace treaty with the natives. With many natives forging trade relations with France, they turned against France's rival England, meaning it was dangerous for the English to go west into territories occupied by French allies.
It was so dangerous, that the British authorities actually banned settlement west of the Appalachians. This upset American colonists, who went west anyway, and were often killed there by native inhabitants. The Ohio Valley was particularly contentious and violent actually due to competition for the fur trade, and there were wars there between Iroquois, Algonquins, Sioux, French, and English.
In short, the colonists brought a lot of this on themselves, but the frontier was quite violent. Early settlers were able to survive through diplomacy and trade, however once their expansionist desires became clear things often descended into violence. European empires supported this violence against their competitors through their networks of trade and alliances.
Sources: American Colonies by Alan Taylor
At the Edge of Empire by Eric Hinderaker and Peter Mancall
It can be really hard to say without knowing exactly where, when, and who we're talking about. Something it is really important to understand is that there weren't these big monolithic cultures or societies that we think about, or that popular culture portrays. Some tribes might have been very violent and dangerous, other tribes maybe not so much.
A book I'd maybe recommend on the topic is something like Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands by James F. Brooks. While it doesn't specifically talk a whole lot about people of northern european descent coming from the west, it really focuses on relations between the Spanish and Natives in what is now the American Southwest. What you get from the book is a deeper understanding of the variety, the differences, how varied the people of the new world really were. As well as the types of interactions that they had with incoming people. It also gives a good picture of early life in the western frontier lands before colonization by settlers from English (and former English) colonies.
How would it have been after the establishment of the USA? Once the colonial and fur trade wars were resolved, how would it have been for a white family traveling into the New Mexico territory for instance?