52 The Winning of the West 



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 undisci 

 plined, 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, a good book on the subject, summed 

 up the case very justly when he said : "I apprehend 

 that the Indian discipline is as well calculated to 

 answer the purpose in the woods of America as 

 the British discipline is in Flanders; and British 

 discipline in the woods is the way to have men 

 slaughtered, with scarcely any chance of defending 

 themselves." 4 A comparison of the two victories 

 gained by the backwoodsmen, at the Great Kan- 

 awha, over the Indians, and at King's Mountain 

 over Ferguson's British and tories, brings out 

 clearly the formidable fighting capacity of the red 

 men. At the Kanawha the Americans outnumbered 



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. 

 4 Col. Jas. Smith, "An Account," etc., Lexington, Ky., 1799. 



