vilized man
could get lost on a highway. Moreover, no knight of the middle ages was
so surely protected by his armor as they were by their skill in hiding;
the whole forest was to the whites one vast ambush, and to them a sure
and ever-present shield. Every tree trunk was a breastwork ready
prepared for battle; every bush, every moss-covered boulder, was a
defence against assault, from behind which, themselves unseen, they
watched with fierce derision the movements of their clumsy white enemy.
Lurking, skulking, travelling with noiseless rapidity, they left a trail
that only a master in woodcraft could follow, while, on the other hand,
they could dog a white man's footsteps as a hound runs a fox. Their
silence, their cunning and stealth, their terrible prowess and merciless
cruelty, makes it no figure of speech to call them the tigers of the
human race.

Unlike the southern Indians, the villages of the northwestern tribes
were usually far from the frontier. Tireless, and careless of all
hardship, they came silently out of unknown forests, robbed and
murdered, and then disappeared again into the fathomless depths of the
woods. Half of the terror they caused was due to the extreme difficulty
of following them, and the absolute impossibility of forecasting their
attacks. Without warning, and unseen until the moment they dealt the
death stroke, they emerged from their forest fastnesses, the horror they
caused being heightened no less by the mystery that shrouded them than
by the dreadful nature of their ravages. Wrapped in the mantle of the
unknown, appalling by their craft, their ferocity, their fiendish
cruelty, they seemed to the white settlers devils and not men; no one
could say with certainty whence they came nor of what tribe they were;
and when they had finished their dreadful work they retired into a
wilderness that closed over their trail as the waves of the ocean close
in the wake of a ship.

They were trained to the use of arms from their youth up, and war and
hunting were their two chief occupations, the business as well as the
pleasure of their lives. They were not as skilful as the white hunters
with the rifle[15]--though more so than the average regular
soldier,--nor could they equal the frontiersman in feats of physical
prowess, such as boxing and wrestling; but their superior endurance and
the ease with which they stood fatigue and exposure made amends for
this. A white might outrun them for eight or ten