nd arraying
himself in the fighting costume of his own people.

* See "The Fight for a Free Sea," by Ralph D. Paine (in "The
Chronicles of America").

For two-thirds of the time, the war went badly for the Westerners, and
only at the end did it turn out to be a brilliant success. The reasons
for the dreary succession of disasters are not difficult to discover.
Foremost among them is the character of the troops and officers. The
material from which the regiments were recruited was intrinsically good,
but utterly raw and untrained. The men could shoot well; they had great
powers of endurance; and they were brave. But there the list of their
military virtues ends.

The scheme of military organization relied upon throughout the West was
that of the volunteer militia. In periods of ordinary Indian warfare
the system served its purpose fairly well. Under stern necessity, the
self-willed, independence-loving backwoodsmen could be brought to act
together for a few weeks or months; but they had little systematic
training, and their impatience of restraint prevented the building up
of any real discipline. There were periodic musters for company or
regimental drill. But, as a rule, drill duty was not taken seriously.
Numbers of men failed to report; and those who came were likely to
give most of their time to horse-races, wrestling-matches, shooting
contests--not to mention drinking and brawling--which turned the
occasion into mere merrymaking or disorder. The men brought few
guns, and when drills were actually held these soldiers in the making
contented themselves with parading with cornstalks over their shoulders.
"Cornstalk drill" thus became a frontier epithet of derision. It goes
without saying that these troops were poorly officered. The captains and
colonels were chosen by the men, frequently with more regard for their
political affiliations or their general standing in the community than
for their capacity as military commanders; nor were the higher officers,
appointed by the chief executive of territory, state, or nation, more
likely to be chosen with a view to their military fitness.

So it came about, as Roosevelt has said, that the frontier people of the
second generation "had no military training whatever, and though they
possessed a skeleton militia organization, they derived no benefit from
it, because their officers were worthless, and the men had no idea of
practising self-restraint or obeying orders long