In such a war the small parties were really the most dangerous, and in the aggregate caused most damage.

It is less of a paradox than it seems, to say that one reason why the Indians were so formidable in warfare was because they were so few in numbers.

Had they been more numerous they would perforce have been tillers of the soil, and it would have been far easier for the whites to get at them.

They were able to wage a war so protracted and murderous, only because of their extreme elusiveness.
There was little chance to deliver a telling blow at enemies who had hardly anything of value to destroy, who were so comparatively few in number that they could subsist year in and year out on game, and whose mode of life rendered them as active, stealthy, cautious, and ferocious as so many beasts of prey.
Ravages in Kentucky.
Though the frontiers of Pennsylvania and of Virginia proper suffered much, Kentucky suffered more.

The murderous inroads of the Indians at about the close of the Revolutionary war caused a mortality such as could not be paralleled save in a community struck down by some awful pestilence; and though from thence on our affairs mended, yet for many years the most common form of death was death at the hands of the Indians.