Every tree trunk was a breastwork ready prepared for battle; every bush, every moss-covered boulder, was a defence against assault, from behind which, themselves unseen, they watched with fierce derision the movements of their clumsy white enemy.  Lurking, skulking, travelling with noiseless rapidity, they left a trail that only a master in woodcraft could follow, while, on the other hand, they could dog a white man’s footsteps as a hound runs a fox.  Their silence, their cunning and stealth, their terrible prowess and merciless cruelty, makes it no figure of speech to call them the tigers of the human race.

Unlike the southern Indians, the villages of the northwestern tribes were usually far from the frontier.  Tireless, and careless of all hardship, they came silently out of unknown forests, robbed and murdered, and then disappeared again into the fathomless depths of the woods.  Half of the terror they caused was due to the extreme difficulty of following them, and the absolute impossibility of forecasting their attacks.  Without warning, and unseen until the moment they dealt the death stroke, they emerged from their forest fastnesses, the horror they caused being heightened no less by the mystery that shrouded them than by the dreadful nature of their ravages.  Wrapped in the mantle of the unknown, appalling by their craft, their ferocity, their fiendish cruelty, they seemed to the white settlers devils and not men; no one could say with certainty whence they came nor of what tribe they were; and when they had finished their dreadful work they retired into a wilderness that closed over their trail as the waves of the ocean close in the wake of a ship.

They were trained to the use of arms from their youth up, and war and hunting were their two chief occupations, the business as well as the pleasure of their lives.  They were not as skilful as the white hunters with the rifle[15]—­though more so than the average regular soldier,—­nor could they equal the frontiersman in feats of physical prowess, such as boxing and wrestling; but their superior endurance and the ease with which they stood fatigue and exposure made amends for this.  A white might outrun them for eight or ten miles; but on a long journey they could tire out any man, and any beast except a wolf.  Like most barbarians they were fickle and inconstant, not to be relied on for pushing through a long campaign, and after a great victory apt to go off to their homes, because each man desired to secure his own plunder and tell his own tale of glory.  They are often spoken of as undisciplined; but in reality their discipline in the battle itself was very high.  They attacked, retreated, rallied or repelled a charge at the signal of command; and they were able to fight in open order in thick covers without losing touch of each other—­a feat that no European regiment was then able to perform.