39 6 The Winning of the West 



refusal to be cast down by defeat, the success witK 

 which they overran and conquered the West at the 

 very time they were struggling for life or death in 

 the East, the heroic grandeur of their great leader 

 for all this they deserve full credit. But the mi- 

 litia who formed the bulk of the Revolutionary 

 armies did not generally fight well. Sometimes, as 

 at Bunker's Hill and King's Mountain, they did 

 excellently, and they did better, as a rule, than sim- 

 ilar European bodies than the Spanish and Portu- 

 guese peasants in 1807-12, for instance. At that 

 time it was believed that the American militia could 

 not fight at all ; this was a mistake, and the British 

 paid dearly for making it; but the opposite belief, 

 that militia could be generally depended upon, led 

 to quite as bad blunders, and the politicians of the 

 Jeffersonian school who encouraged the idea made 

 us in our turn pay dearly for our folly in after 

 years, as at Bladensburg and along the Niagara 

 frontier in 1812. The Revolutionary War proved 

 that hastily gathered militia, justly angered and 

 strung to high purpose, could sometimes whip regu- 

 lars, a feat then deemed impossible; but it lacked 

 very much of proving that they would usually do 

 this. Moreover, even the stalwart fighters who fol- 

 lowed Clark and Sevier, and who did most impor- 

 tant and valorous service, can not point to any one 

 such desperate deed of fierce courage as that of the 

 doomed Texans under Bowie and Davy Crockett in 

 the Alamo. 



A very slight comparison of the losses suffered 



