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, 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.” [Footnote:  Col.  Jas. Smith, “An Account,” etc., Lexington, Ky., 1799.] A comparison of the two victories gained by the backwoodsmen, at the Great Kanawha, over the Indians, and at Kings Mountain over Ferguson’s British and tories, brings out clearly the formidable fighting capacity of the red men.  At the Kanawha the Americans outnumbered their foes, at King’s Mountain they were no more than equal; yet in the former battle they suffered twice the loss they did in the latter, inflicted much less damage in return, and did not gain nearly so decisive a victory.

    Twofold Character of the Revolution.

The Indians were urged on by the British, who furnished them with arms, ammunition, and provisions, and sometimes also with leaders and with bands of auxiliary white troops, French, British, and tories.  It was this that gave to the revolutionary contest its twofold character, making it on the part of the Americans a struggle for independence in the east, and in the west a war of conquest, or rather a war to establish, on behalf of all our people, the right of entry into the fertile and vacant regions beyond the Alleghanies.  The grievances of the backwoodsmen were not the same as the grievances of the men of the seacoast.  The Ohio Valley and the other western lands of the French had been conquered by the British, not the Americans.  Great Britain had succeeded to the policy as well as the possessions of her predecessor, and, strange to say, had become almost equally hostile to the colonists of her own stock.  As France had striven for half a century, so England now in her turn strove, to bar out the settlers of English race from the country beyond the Alleghanies.  The British Crown, Parliament, and people were a unit