[Footnote 13:  The system of prairie warfare is so different from ours, that the campaign I have just related will not be easily understood by those acquainted only with European military tactics.

When a European army starts upon an expedition, it is always accompanied by waggons, carrying stores of provisions and ammunition of all kinds.  There is a commissariat appointed for the purpose of feeding the troops.  Among the Indians there is no such thing, and except a few pieces of dried venison, a pound weight of powder, and a corresponding quantity of lead, if he has a rifle, but if not, with his lance, bow, arrows, and tomahawk, the warrior enters the war-path.  In the closer country, for water and fuel, he trusts to the streams and to the trees of the forests or mountains; when in the prairie, to the mud holes and chasms for water, and to the buffalo-dung for his fire.  His rifle and arrows will always give him enough of food.

But these supplies would not, of course, be sufficient for a great number of men; ten thousand for example.  A water-hole would be drained by the first two or three hundred men that might arrive, and the remainder would be obliged to go without any.  Then, unless perchance they should fall upon a large herd of buffaloes, they would never be able to find the means of sustaining life.  A buffalo, or three or four deer can be killed every day, by hunters out of the tract of an expedition; this supply would suffice for a small war party, but it would never do for an army.

Except in the buffalo ranges, where the Comanches, the Apaches, and the Southern Shoshones will often go by bands of thousands, the generality of the Indians enter the path in a kind of echelonage; that is to say, supposing the Shoshones to send two thousand men against the Crows, they would be divided into fifteen or twenty bands, each commanded by an inferior chief.  The first party will start for reconnoitering.  The next day the second band, accompanied by the great chiefs, will follow, but in another track; and so on with a third, till three hundred or three hundred and fifty are united together.  Then they will begin their operations, new parties coming to take the place of those who have suffered, till they themselves retire to make room for others.  Every new comer brings a supply of provisions, the produce of their chase in coming, so that those who are fighting need be in no fear of wanting the necessaries of life.  By this the reader will see that a band of two thousand warriors, only four or five hundred are effectually fighting, unless the number of warriors agreed upon by the chiefs prove too small, when new reinforcements are sent forward.] We were divided into four war parties:  one which acted against the Bonnaxes and the Flat-heads, in the north-east; the second, against the Cayuses and Nez-perces, at the forks of the Buona Ventura and Calumet rivers; the third remained near the settlement, to protect it from surprise; while the fourth, a very small one, under my father’s command, and to which I was attached, remained in or about the boat-house, at the fishing station.  Independent of these four parties, well-armed bands were despatched into the Umbiqua country both by land and sea.