thousand souls.[7] But though they acknowledged kinship with one
another, and though they all alike hated the Americans, and though,
moreover, all at times met in the great councils, to smoke the calumet
of peace and brighten the chain of friendship[8] among themselves, and
to take up the tomahawk[9] against the white foes, yet the tie that
bound them together was so loose, and they were so fickle and so split
up by jarring interests and small jealousies, that never more than half
of them went to war at the same time. Very frequently even the members
of a tribe would fail to act together.

Thus it came about that during the forty years intervening between
Braddock's defeat and Wayne's victory, though these northwestern tribes
waged incessant, unending, relentless warfare against our borders, yet
they never at any one time had more than three thousand warriors in the
field, and frequently not half that number,[10] and in all the battles
they fought with British and American troops there was not one in which
they were eleven hundred strong.[11]

But they were superb individual fighters, beautifully drilled in their
own discipline;[12] and they were favored beyond measure by the nature
of their ground, of which their whole system of warfare enabled them to
take the utmost possible benefit. Much has been written and sung of the
advantages possessed by the mountaineer when striving in his own home
against invaders from the plains; but these advantages are as nothing
when weighed with those which make the warlike dweller in forests
unconquerable by men who have not his training. A hardy soldier,
accustomed only to war in the open, will become a good cragsman in fewer
weeks than it will take him years to learn to be so much as a fair
woodsman; for it is beyond all comparison more difficult to attain
proficiency in woodcraft than in mountaineering.[13]