[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