The colonists learned how to minimize the chances of an enemy ambush, sometimes employed a hit-and-run style of fighting, often utilized a mobile strategy, and not infrequently adopted terror tactics that included torture; killing women, children, and the elderly; the destruction of Indian villages and food supplies; and summary executions of prisoners or their sale into slavery in faraway lands. In time, warfare in the colonies came to be associated with a manner of fighting that England’s career soldiers variously called “irregular war,” “bush war,” or simply the “American way of war.”1
