Indians usually preferred to engage their enemies individually or in small groups. Whenever soldiers or frontiersmen gathered in numbers over five hundred, they would wait to attack until smaller squads broke away and made themselves more vulnerable targets. That was a most effective strategy, because small-unit skirmishes best suited the fiercely individualistic fighting style of warriors who were notorious for refusing to obey commands in the heat of battle. Most chiefs had long since decided that it was easier to manage ten or twelve blood-blinded braves running helterskelter than a thousand of them. Besides, the great majority of warlike tribes hated each other so infernally as to render impossible the alliances that large-unit warfare would have required.

There were notable exceptions, however. Sometimes large numbers of Indian warriors would bond together to take on an equal-size army of white men, especially when the whites...