their own number.  In the other a still more remarkable defence was made by thirty-one men under Major James Powell against an even larger force, which charged again and again, and did not accept their repulse as final until they had lost three hundred of their foremost braves.  For years the Sioux spoke with bated breath of this battle as the “medicine fight,” the defeat so overwhelming that it could be accounted for only by supernatural interference. [Footnote:  For all this see Dodge’s admirable “Our Wild Indians.”]

But no such victory was ever gained over mountain or forest Indians who had become accustomed to fighting the white men.  Every officer who has ever faced these foes has had to spend years in learning his work, and has then been forced to see a bitterly inadequate reward for his labors.  The officers of the regular army who served in the forests north of the Ohio just after the Revolution had to undergo a strange and painful training; and were obliged to content themselves with scanty and hard-won triumphs even after this training had been undergone.

    Difficulties Experienced by the Officers.

The officers took some time to learn their duties as Indian fighters, but the case was much worse with the rank and file who served under them.  From the beginning of our history it often proved difficult to get the best type of native American to go into the regular army save in time of war with a powerful enemy, for the low rate of pay was not attractive, while the disciplined subordination of the soldiers to their officers seemed irksome to people with an exaggerated idea of individual freedom and no proper conception of the value of obedience.  Very many of the regular soldiers have always been of foreign birth; and in 1787, on the Ohio, the percentage of Irish and Germans in the ranks was probably fully as large as it was on the Great Plains a century later. [Footnote:  Denny’s Journal, passim.] They, as others, at that early date, were, to a great extent, drawn from the least desirable classes of the eastern sea-board. [Footnote:  For fear of misunderstanding, I wish to add that at many periods the rank and file have been composed of excellent material; of recent years their character has steadily risen, and the stuff itself has always proved good when handled for a sufficient length of time by good commanders.] Three or four years later an unfriendly observer wrote of St. Clair’s soldiers that they were a wretched set of men, weak and feeble, many of them mere boys, while others were rotten with drink and debauchery.  He remarked that men “purchased from the prisons, wheel-barrows, and brothels of the nation at foolishly low wages, would never do to fight Indians”; and that against such foes, who were terrible enemies in the woods, there was need of first-class, specially trained troops, instead of trying to use “a set of men who enlisted because they could no longer live unhung any other way.” [Footnote:  Draper Collection.  Letter of John Cleves Symmes to Elias Boudinot, January 12, 1792.]