he Indians. The
forest tribes were exceedingly formidable opponents; it is not too much
to say that they formed a far more serious obstacle to the American
advance than would have been offered by an equal number of the best
European troops. Their victories over Braddock, Grant, and St. Clair,
gained in each case with a smaller force, conclusively proved their
superiority, on their own ground, over the best regulars, disciplined
and commanded in the ordinary manner. Almost all of the victories, even
of the backwoodsmen, were won against inferior numbers of Indians.
[Footnote: That the contrary impression prevails is due to the boastful
vanity which the backwoodsmen often shared with the Indians, and to the
gross ignorance of the average writer concerning these border wars. Many
of the accounts in the popular histories are sheer inventions. Thus, in
the "Chronicles of Border Warfare," by Alex. S. Withers (Clarksburg,
Va., 1831, p. 301), there is an absolutely fictitious account of a feat
of the Kentucky Colonel Scott, who is alleged to have avenged St.
Clair's defeat by falling on the victorious Indians while they were
drunk, and killing two hundred of them. This story has not even a
foundation in fact; there was not so much as a skirmish of the sort
described. As Mann Butler--a most painstaking and truthful
writer--points out, it is made up out of the whole cloth, thirty years
after the event; it is a mere invention to soothe the mortified pride of
the whites. Gross exaggeration of the Indian numbers and losses prevails
even to this day. Mr. Edmund Kirke, for instance, usually makes the
absolute or relative numbers of the Indians from five to twenty-five
times as great as they really were. Still, it is hard to blame backwoods
writers for such slips in the face of the worse misdeeds of the average
historian of the Greek and Roman wars with barbarians.] The red men were
fickle of temper, and large bodies could not be kept together for a long
campaign, nor, indeed, for more than one special stroke; the only piece
of strategy any of their chiefs showed was Cornstalk's march past
Dunmore to attack Lewis; but their tactics and discipline in the battle
itself were admirably adapted to the very peculiar conditions of forest
warfare. Writers who speak of them as undisciplined, or as any but most
redoubtable antagonists, fall into an absurd error. An old Indian
fighter, who, at the close of the last century, wrote, from experience,