The American Revolution took place in Indian country.
This is true in two senses. First, the physical landscape of the Revolution—the fields and forests through which troops marched and fought—was shaped by the continent's original inhabitants. Second, and more important, the mental landscape of the Revolution, from its originating conflicts to its military tactics to the Founders' ideas about freedom and the role of government, was also shaped by the continent's original inhabitants.
Before the arrival of Europeans, New England had been inhabited for at least 11,000 years. Those first peoples didn't like biting insects, thorny underbrush, and poison ivy. They did like berries, nuts, and tubers. Regular burning of undergrowth helped get rid of the bad stuff and promote the good stuff. Natives set fires in spring or fall, when dampness made the flames easy to control. Centuries of burning transformed big swaths of the eastern forest into woodlands so open and parklike that John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, boasted he could gallop a horse through them.
Native villages clustered around New England's many rivers. Cornfields and gardens filled the riverbanks and drifted back into fire-maintained mosaics of berry fields and orchards. Threaded through this edible landscape was a network of trails—although trails may be the wrong term to describe roadways that were as much as 10 feet wide and many miles long.
With the British came epidemic diseases, especially smallpox, that depopulated the villages. Warfare further cleared the land. Settlers erected their new homes atop the old, their fields on land already cleared for farms. The first 50 colonial villages in New England were built on the sites of emptied native settlements. The roads among them were constructed over native roads.
Much as the Thirty Years' War in Europe was fought on the geography created by the Roman Empire, the Revolution was fought on the geography created by native people. When Gen. Benedict Arnold went to capture Fort Ticonderoga, he marched along an ancient Indigenous trade route between Massachusetts Bay and the upper Hudson Valley. Today that road is Route 2, the "Mohawk Trail," the main highway across northern Massachusetts. On their final, victorious march to Yorktown, the army led by Gen. George Washington and French Gen. Rochambeau went down the King's Highway, a network of widened native roads that linked the 13 colonies. Yorktown itself had been one of the capitals of Tsenacommacah (Powhatan Confederacy), the native imperium encountered by the English at Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. And so on.