nable to
teach their own troops how to fight them. Harmar and St. Clair were both
fair officers, and in open country were able to acquit themselves
respectably in the face of civilized foes. But they did not have the
peculiar genius necessary to the successful Indian fighter, and they
never learned how to carry on a campaign in the woods.

They had the justifiable distrust of the militia felt by all the
officers of the Continental Army. In the long campaigns waged against
Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis they had learned the immense superiority
of the Continental troops to the local militia. They knew that the
Revolution would have failed had it not been for the continental troops.
They knew also, by the bitter experience common to all officers who had
been through the war, that, though the militia might on occasion do
well, yet they could never be trusted; they were certain to desert or
grow sulky and mutinous if exposed to the fatigue and hardship of a long
campaign, while in a pitched battle in the open they never fought as
stubbornly as the regulars, and often would not fight at all.

The Regulars in Indian Warfare.

All this was true; yet the officers of the regular army failed to
understand that it did not imply the capacity of the regular troops to
fight savages on their own ground. They showed little real comprehension
of the extraordinary difficulty of such warfare against such foes, and
of the reasons which made it so hazardous. They could not help assigning
other causes than the real ones for every defeat and failure. They
attributed each in turn to the effects of ambuscade or surprise, instead
of realizing that in each the prime factor was the formidable fighting
power of the individual Indian warrior, when in the thick forest which
was to him a home, and when acting under that species of wilderness
discipline which was so effective for a single crisis in his peculiar
warfare. The Indian has rarely shown any marked excellence as a fighter
in mass in the open; though of course there have been one or two
brilliant exceptions. At times in our wars we have tried the experiment
of drilling bodies of Indians as if they were whites, and using them in
the ordinary way in battle. Under such conditions, as a rule, they have
shown themselves inferior to the white troops against whom they were
pitted. In the same way they failed to show themselves a match for the
white hunters of the great plains when on equal terms.