The Indian, moreover, not only fought well and to the death, if surrounded, but he had a discipline and plan of battle which were most effective for the wilderness.  It seems probable that, if the experiment had been properly tried, the Indians might have been turned into better soldiers than the famous Sikhs; and the French, who used the red men skillfully, if without much discipline, found them formidable and effective allies.  They cut off more than one English and American army, and the fact that they resorted to ambush and surprise does not detract from their exploits.  It was a legitimate mode of warfare, and was used by them with terrible effect.  They have fought more than one pitched battle against superior numbers when the victory hung long in the balance, and they have carried on guerrilla wars for years against overwhelming forces with extraordinary persistence and success.  There is no savage, except the Zulu or Maori, who has begun to exhibit the natural fighting quality of the American Indian; and although the Zulu appears to have displayed greater dash, the Indian, by his mastery of the tactics of surprise, has shown a far better head.  In a word, the Indian has always been a formidable savage, treacherous, cruel, and cunning to an extreme degree, no doubt, but a desperate and dogged fighter, with a natural instinct for war.  It must be remembered, too, that he was far more formidable in 1790 than he is to-day, with the ever-rising tide of civilized population flowing upon him and hemming him in.  When the Constitution came into being, the Indians were pretty well out of the Atlantic States, but beyond the Alleghanies all was theirs, and they had the unbroken wilderness as their ally and their refuge.  There they lay like a dark line on the near frontier, threatening war and pillage and severe check to the westward advance of our people.  They were a serious matter to a new government, limited in resources and representing only three millions of people.

Fortunately the President was of all men best fitted to deal with this grave question, for he knew the Indians thoroughly.  His earliest public service had been to negotiate with them, and from that time on he had been familiar with them in peace and in diplomacy, while he had fought with them in war over and over again.  He was not in the least confused in his notions about them, but saw them, as he did most facts, exactly as they were.  He had none of the false sentimentality about the noble and injured red man, which in later days has been at times highly mischievous, nor on the other hand did he take the purely brutal view of the fighting scout or backwoodsman.  He knew the Indian as he was, and understood him as a dangerous, treacherous, fighting savage.  Better than any one else he appreciated the difficulties of Indian warfare when an army had to be launched into the wilderness and cut off from a base of supplies.  He was well aware, too, that the western tribes were