while
a reversal of the process shows an appalling decrease. Moreover, as the
bands broke up, wandered apart, and then rejoined each other or not as
events fell out, two successive observers might make widely different
estimates. Many tribes that have disappeared were undoubtedly actually
destroyed; many more have simply changed their names or have been
absorbed by other tribes. Similarly, those that have apparently held
their own have done so at the expense of their neighbors. This was made
all the easier by the fact that the Algonquins were so closely related
in customs and language; indeed, there was constant intermarriage
between the different tribes. On the whole, however, there is no
question that, in striking contrast to the southern or Appalachian
Indians, these northwestern tribes have suffered a terrible diminution
in numbers.

With many of them we did not come into direct contact for long years
after our birth as a nation. Perhaps those tribes with all or part of
whose warriors we were brought into collision at some time during or
immediately succeeding the Revolutionary war may have amounted to thirty
thousand souls.[7] But though they acknowledged kinship with one
another, and though they all alike hated the Americans, and though,
moreover, all at times met in the great councils, to smoke the calumet
of peace and brighten the chain of friendship[8] among themselves, and
to take up the tomahawk[9] against the white foes, yet the tie that
bound them together was so loose, and they were so fickle and so split
up by jarring interests and small jealousies, that never more than half
of them went to war at the same time. Very frequently even the members
of a tribe would fail to act together.

Thus it came about that during the forty years intervening between
Braddock's defeat and Wayne's victory, though these northwestern tribes
waged incessant, unending, relentless warfare against our borders, yet
they never at any one time had more than three thousand warriors in the
field, and frequently not half that number,[10] and in all the battles
they fought with British and American troops there was not one in which
they were eleven hundred strong.[11]

But they were superb individual fighters, beautifully drilled in their
own discipline;[12] and they were favored beyond measure by the nature
of their ground, of which their whole system of warfare enabled them to
take the utmost possible benefit. Much has been written