if not, with his lance, bow, arrows, and
tomahawk, the warrior enters the war-path. In the closer country, for
water and fuel, he trusts to the streams and to the trees of the forests
or mountains; when in the prairie, to the mud holes and chasms for
water, and to the buffalo-dung for his fire. His rifle and arrows will
always give him enough of food.

But these supplies would not, of course, be sufficient for a great
number of men; ten thousand for example. A water-hole would be drained
by the first two or three hundred men that might arrive, and the
remainder would be obliged to go without any. Then, unless perchance
they should fall upon a large herd of buffaloes, they would never be
able to find the means of sustaining life. A buffalo, or three or four
deer can be killed every day, by hunters out of the tract of an
expedition; this supply would suffice for a small war party, but it
would never do for an army.

Except in the buffalo ranges, where the Comanches, the Apaches, and the
Southern Shoshones will often go by bands of thousands, the generality
of the Indians enter the path in a kind of _echelonage_; that is to say,
supposing the Shoshones to send two thousand men against the Crows, they
would be divided into fifteen or twenty bands, each commanded by an
inferior chief. The first party will start for reconnoitering. The next
day the second band, accompanied by the great chiefs, will follow, but
in another track; and so on with a third, till three hundred or three
hundred and fifty are united together. Then they will begin their
operations, new parties coming to take the place of those who have
suffered, till they themselves retire to make room for others. Every new
comer brings a supply of provisions, the produce of their chase in
coming, so that those who are fighting need be in no fear of wanting the
necessaries of life. By this the reader will see that a band of two
thousand warriors, only four or five hundred are effectually fighting,
unless the number of warriors agreed upon by the chiefs prove too small,
when new reinforcements are sent forward.] We were divided into four
war parties: one which acted against the Bonnaxes and the Flat-heads, in
the north-east; the second, against the Cayuses and Nez-perces, at the
forks of the Buona Ventura and Calumet rivers; the third remained near
the settlement, to protect it from surprise; while the fourth, a very
small one, under my father's command, and to which