But making the attack, as they usually did, with the expectation of
success, all were equally dangerous. If their foes were clustered
together in a huddle they attacked them without hesitation, no matter
what the difference in numbers, and shot them down as if they had been
elk or buffalo, they themselves being almost absolutely safe from harm,
as they flitted from cover to cover. It was this capacity for hiding, or
taking advantage of cover, that gave them their great superiority; and
it is because of this that the wood tribes were so much more formidable
foes in actual battle than the horse Indians of the plains afterwards
proved themselves. In dense woodland a body of regular soldiers are
almost as useless against Indians as they would be if at night they had
to fight foes who could see in the dark; it needs special and
long-continued training to fit them in any degree for wood-fighting
against such foes. Out on the plains the white hunter's skill with the
rifle and his cool resolution give him an immense advantage; a few
determined men can withstand a host of Indians in the open, although
helpless if they meet them in thick cover; and our defeats by the Sioux
and other plains tribes have generally taken the form of a small force
being overwhelmed by a large one.

Not only were the Indians very terrible in battle, but they were cruel
beyond all belief in victory; and the gloomy annals of border warfare
are stained with their darkest hues because it was a war in which
helpless women and children suffered the same hideous fate that so often
befell their husbands and fathers. It was a war waged by savages against
armed settlers, whose families followed them into the wilderness. Such a
war is inevitably bloody and cruel; but the inhuman love of cruelty for
cruelty's sake,[20] which marks the red Indian above all other savages,
rendered these wars more terrible than any others. For the hideous,
unnamable, unthinkable tortures practised by the red men on their