Reply #8: It gets better.

[Igel]

In Texas there was a bit of genocide going on. A number of ethnicities had been wiped out. The tribes under threat of genocide befriended the Spanish when they showed up and went along with them in order to avoid extermination. They even went so far as to engage in false-flag operations to trick the Spanish, both raiding Spanish camps as well as faking a raid on their own camps.

The Spanish eventually wised up and realized they were being played. Still, to defend Spanish territory they set up the mission system and did manage to achieve a stalemate with the Apaches.

(Having the locals draw the new arrivals into their political and military shenanigans is also to be seen in various other places where Europeans ran across Native Americans.)