American Rifle - Alexander Rose [15]
The American terrain was particularly murderous. The forests that had once covered much of western Europe had long been cleared, but over here the whole country, as one general informed Prime Minister William Pitt, was “an immense uninhabited wilderness overgrown everywhere with trees and underbrush, so that nowhere can anyone see twenty yards.”96
Wilderness fighting favored fleety, camouflaged, loosely organized bands of men traveling light and adeptly using trees, ravines, and rocks to pick their targets and snipe at the enemy before scuttling to another hiding place. The Indians’ favored strategy was to dispatch scouts to detect approaching enemies, then ambush them in a vulnerable position, such as alongside a river or along a path passing through a ravine.97 Upon deducing the enemy’s weaknesses, Indian bands executed a complicated series of tactical maneuvers to deploy into a “half-moon” formation that would flank the unfortunates and pick them off.98
Such attacks nearly always occurred from a distance, using rifles or bows, for it was a rash chief who engaged trained soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting.99The tomahawk and club, accompanied by a war whoop, could be terrifying for raw militia and settlers, but disciplined redcoats accustomed to stopping cavalry charges in their tracks with “cold steel bayonets” proved tougher to break. General Jeffery Amherst was so confident in his soldiers’ steadfastness that he often cut the time-honored number of ranks from three to two (the famous “thin red line” formation later seen at Waterloo and Balaclava) because “no yelling of Indians... can possibly withstand two ranks, if the men are silent, attentive, and obedient to their officers.”100 From even such an early date, facility with a bayonet-tipped musket was associated with mass discipline and hard fighting, the rifle with individual skill and enterprise.101
Eventually, Americans adapted to wilderness fighting (and frontier living) by adopting Indian tactics and tricks. So it was that while school-boys in New York toiled over their Latin declensions, youths out west learned how to “imitat[e] the noise of every bird and beast in the woods,” as Joseph Doddridge wrote of western Pennsylvanians after the French and Indian War. “The imitations of the gobbling and other sounds of wild turkeys often brought those keen eyed and ever watchful tenants of the forest within the reach of the rifle.”102
Woodland skills once used for peaceful purposes could easily be turned to warlike ends—by both sides. That proficiency in turkey calls during the day, and of wolves or owls at night, also allowed Indian warriors and European rangers alike to locate each other in the deep woods without alerting their human quarry.103 Likewise, camouflaging oneself to hunt beasts was a skill needed to hunt people. Accordingly, the Indians “apparel[ed] themselves from the waist upwards with green boughs, that our Englishmen could not readily discern them, or distinguish them from the natural bushes.”104 Whites soon abjured their bright-colored clothes for scruffy browns and greens.105 Veterans of frontier fighting even began campaigning in the months of October and November, when expeditions into the forest were less risky because, as one soldier put it, “of the trees losing their leaves, by which one can see a little through the woods, and prevent the enemy’s surprises.”106
The Indians also kept “a deep silence in their marches and motions”—unlike newly arrived whites, who, complaining loudly about their rations and making lewd remarks, were blissfully unaware that their approach could be heard by awaiting attackers. Not only did the Indians keep their mouths shut, they traveled noiselessly thanks