Indigenous Ability

The following missive can be applied to not merely frontier trade-knife, bowie knife, tomahawk, foils, sabers, epees, but also to “schooled” unarmed combat and precision military maneuvers. The informed among us are already quite familiar with the fact that some of the best troops from Europe fought in Early America. These crack troops were schooled by some of the best military minds that Great Britain and the Continent had to offer, and yet they encountered more persistent and baffling resistance than they expected and/or had confronted in warfare in the Old World. The early colonists [some were schooled in the European military tradition, many were not] took their cue from what they encountered in the Indigenous Tribes of this new land. This new warfare if it can be encapsulated at all might be expressed in a proverb originating in the Northeastern tribes that can be loosely translated as “ Advance like foxes, fight like catamounts [panthers], and fly like birds.” F