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.