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An alternative way of counting "attacks" would be to score each event, no matter the number of persons killed or captured (etc.), as a single attack. This is difficult to do because some "events", as described in the literature, stretched over several days, and because we can not always distingush separate events during a single raid. An extensive raid on the settlements, for example, might result in attacks on several individual, and widely separated homesites, over the course of a week, but might be recorded in the records as simply "X persons killed in July". An attack on a single family that resulted in the loss of ten settlers, would score the same as ten separate events over the course of a raid that resulted in the loss of the same number of settlers. But the planning and execution of a raid stretching out over ten days, and involving attacks at ten separate locations, albeit less successful attacks, imlies much more activitity than a single event that was very successful. The approach chosen biases the results in favor of very successful raids (from the perspective of the native Americans), provides a good index to the effect on the settlers, but does not gauge the level of Indian activity very well. |