backwoodsmen.

These armed hunters, woodchoppers, and farmers were their own soldiers.
They built and manned their own forts; they did their own fighting under
their own commanders. There were no regiments of regular troops along
the frontier.[46] In the event of an Indian inroad each borderer had to
defend himself until there was time for them all to gather together to
repel or avenge it. Every man was accustomed to the use of arms from his
childhood; when a boy was twelve years old he was given a rifle and made
a fort-soldier, with a loophole where he was to stand if the station was
attacked. The war was never-ending, for even the times of so-called
peace were broken by forays and murders; a man might grow from babyhood
to middle age on the border, and yet never remember a year in which some
one of his neighbors did not fall a victim to the Indians.

There was everywhere a rude military organization, which included all
the able-bodied men of the community. Every settlement had its colonels
and captains; but these officers, both in their training and in the
authority they exercised, corresponded much more nearly to Indian chiefs
than to the regular army men whose titles they bore. They had no means
whatever of enforcing their orders, and their tumultuous and disorderly
levies of sinewy riflemen were hardly as well disciplined as the Indians
themselves.[47] The superior officer could advise, entreat, lead, and
influence his men, but he could not command them, or, if he did, the men
obeyed him only just so far as it suited them. If an officer planned a
scout or campaign, those who thought proper accompanied him, and the
others stayed at home, and even those who went out came back if the fit
seized them, or perchance followed the lead of an insubordinate junior
officer whom they liked better than they did his superior.[48] There was
no compulsion to perform military duties beyond dread of being disgraced
in the eyes of the neighbors, and there was no pecuniary reward for
performing them; nevertheless the moral sentiment of a backwoods
community was too robust to tolerate habitual remissness in military
affairs, and the coward and laggard were treated with utter scorn, and
were generally in the end either laughed out, or "hated out," of the
neighborhood, or else got rid of in a still more summary manner. Among a
people naturally brave and reckless, this public opinion acted fairly
effectively, and there was generally but