This is exactly what I was looking for. It seems that modern examples get retroactively applied to past circumstances. I can't for the life of me remember what the threads were and they are long since dead, but I saw it several times in which some form of the United States manages to conquer Canada at some point before the civil war. The consensus seemed to be that the United States couldn't possibly hold that territory because "all my wilderness and guerrillas!" and such nonsense, conveniently ignoring important facts like the guerillas somehow surviving a year without starving, freezing, or being slaughtered by hostile native tribes before they can actually amount to anything, or that maybe every nation in the americas is very experienced in fighting what we would call guerilla warfare, especially sinced they gained all that experience in their frontier regions. It just bugged me that people thought this without considering how dangerous the wilderness of the Americas could be if you do not know what you are doing and/or are unprepared.