DARK MIMESIS:  

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE SCALPING PARADIGM 

by 

Thomas Peotto 

 M.A., Lakehead University, 2007  

 

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT  

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF  

 

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

in  

 

The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies 

 

(History) 

 

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 

(Vancouver) 

 

January 2018 

 

©Thomas Peotto, 2018 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

ii 

 

Abstract 

 

 This thesis examines the history of scalp bounties, i.e., the payment of money or trade goods 

in wartime to volunteers, militias, and mercenaries, for the scalps of indigenous North Americans in 

the British North American colonies and the post-Revolutionary United States, from the mid-1630s to 

the end of the 19th century. Out of a general Euro-American colonial backdrop of military alliances 

with indigenous peoples against indigenous third parties and rival European colonies, and the offering 

of bounties for captives and proofs of death to indigenous and European volunteers, British colonists 

parted ways with other Europeans by grafting a specific request for scalps, per eastern North 

American practice, with a broader policy of ethnic cleansing against indigenous peoples, and the 

outsourcing of this work to frontier populations with a vested interest in seizing indigenous land and 

resources. Synthesizing and surveying primary and secondary sources, I argue that Euro-American 

scalp bounties and the pursuit of those bounties, popularly known as scalp-hunting, were informed by 

16th-century designations of indigenous Americans as illegitimate combatants, cross-cultural 

misreadings of indigenous warfare as a primordial or dysfunctional version of Europeans’, and a 

broader context of genocidal intent towards indigenous peoples collectively. Imagining themselves as 

the potential victims of Indian uprisings, Anglo-Americans invoked scalping to metonymize 

nightmare images of indigenous warriors as merciless and cruel; in turn, scalping was invoked to 

justify vigilante killings, pre-emptive violence, slave trading, and scorched earth campaigns of 

extirpation. Whites scalping Indians, on the other hand, was imagined as historically inevitable, and 

portrayed in art and culture as exemplifying their inheritance and supersession of indigenous lands, 

resources, and ‘American’ identity.  

I argue that scalp bounties among Anglo-Americans, and their justification as historically 

inevitable, is best understood as mimetic re-enactment of the dehumanizing stereotypes which 

rendered indigenous peoples as illegitimate combatants and the negative mirror image of Euro-

American settlers. I refer to this bundle of ideas, truisms, stock images and narratives as “the scalping 

paradigm.” 

  



 

iii 

 

 

Lay Summary 

 

 This thesis examines the history of scalp bounties in North America, i.e., the payment 

of rewards by colonial authorities or private citizens for the scalps of indigenous North 

Americans; and the cultural history of mercenaries and racist vigilantes, popularly known as 

‘scalp hunters.’ I argue that the historic phenomenon of offering scalp bounties against 

indigenous peoples, from the mid-1630s to the end of the 19th century, was a logical 

extension of a widely-shared European belief that ‘Indians’ were obstacles to progress if not 

illegitimate combatants, and that this designation informed disproportionate violence against 

indigenous peoples by Europeans, including scalping. Further, I outline how the isolated 

image of the Indian-killing vigilante, as either folk hero or outcast, allowed dissociation from 

a broader problem of structural racism expressed in casual prejudice and state-run campaigns 

to conquer and assimilate indigenous peoples—i.e., mass killings and cultural genocide. 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

iv 

 

 

Preface 

 In 2006, while finishing my Master’s degree at Lakehead University, I first 

conceptualized and articulated the central question of this dissertation as the history and 

historiography of scalping in colonial North America; the adoption and commercialization of 

scalping by Europeans; and the resultant double-standard by which scalping among 

indigenous North Americans was cited as justification for conquest and displacement, 

including the scalping of indigenous people by Europeans. 

 My main thesis supervisor, Dr. Coll Thrush, pointed me in the direction of settler-

colonial studies, genocide studies, intellectual and cultural history, and postcolonial theory. 

Other members of my thesis committee steered me towards the literatures of their own areas 

of study: Dr. Carole Blackburn on anthropology, indigenous ontologies, and the cross-

cultural encounter; Dr. Neil Safier (who left the committee in 2015 due to time constraints) 

on early modern ethnography, European knowledge-creation regarding the Americas, the 

creation of Euro-American societies and trans-Atlantic empires, and indigenous resistance to 

and within those empires; the late Dr. Daniel Vickers (who passed away in February 2017) 

on cross-cultural contact, conflict, and cooperation between indigenous, European, and Euro-

American societies, and the comparative study of rival European empires, particularly Spain 

and Britain; and Dr. Paige Raibmon, who joined on short notice in February 2017, on 

indigenous modernities, activism, and the “authenticity” trap of early 20th century 

anthropology and the settler imaginary.  

 No content from this thesis has hitherto been published. As my research was confined 

to surveying the primary and secondary literature and contains no interviews with or 

photographs of living persons, or of human physical or skeletal remains, ethics approval by 

the UBC Research Ethics Board was unnecessary. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

v 

 

 

Table of Contents 

 

Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... ii 

Lay Summary ........................................................................................................................... iii 

Preface...................................................................................................................................... iv 

Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................v 

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. vi 

Dedication ............................................................................................................................... vii 

Introduction: “Who Invented Scalping” and why that question matters ...................................1 

Chapter One: Scalping in the Iberian Atlantic .........................................................................59 

Chapter Two: “A Trophy of their Victory”: 16th and 17th century accounts of scalping .......110 

Chapter Three: Towards scalp-hunting: Settler colonialism and extirpationist warfare in 

Northeastern North America, 1585 – 1623  ...........................................................................152 

Chapter Four: “A Pound of Flesh”: Slavery and scalp bounties in Anglo-American frontier 

warfare, 1636 – 1717  ............................................................................................................199 

Chapter Five: Dark Mimesis: Scalp-hunting from the Seven Years’ War to the War of 1812

................................................................................................................................................243 

Chapter Six: Heading West: Scalp-hunting and Manifest Destiny, 1837 – 1876  .................289 

Chapter Seven: Scalping Culture at Frontier’s End, 1893 – 1914 .........................................351 

Epilogue .................................................................................................................................392 

Bibliography ..........................................................................................................................410 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

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Acknowledgements 

 This thesis was made possible by a Four Year Fellowship from the University of 

British Columbia (September 2008 – August 2012), a 24-month grant from the Social 

Sciences and Humanities Research Council (September 2010 – August 2012), grants from 

the UBC History Department’s Summer Research and Writing Fund (2013 through 2016), 

and the financial and moral support of my family. 

Of the potential supervisors I approached in the late summer and early autumn of 

2007, Dr. Coll Thrush was one of three who saw potential in a methodologically-

unsophisticated thesis proposal, and was the first and only potential supervisor who wanted 

to discuss it over the phone. Coll and I got along from the very beginning, and I couldn’t 

have asked for a more supportive graduate supervisor, no matter how busy he was. The same 

is true of all my committee members—Carole Blackburn, Neil Safier, Paige Raibmon, Daniel 

Vickers, all of whom took this project seriously from the outset, all of whom were role 

models of the successful academic’s work-life balance. My broader thanks must be extended 

to the faculty, staff, and graduate students of the History department during my time there, 

who offered me constructive and substantive assistance, feedback, critique, moral support, 

and guidance, whether I asked, or whether I didn’t.  

My sincere thanks and appreciation must also go to the staff, students, and faculty of 

St. John’s College, UBC, where as a Junior Fellow (from September 2008 to August 2016) I 

had community and good cheer in an often dark and drizzly city, and conversations which 

challenged and expanded my perceptions of the world and my place in it. Of the words of 

wisdom I soaked up there, an observation of Principal Henry Yu in a formal dinner address 

comes to mind, where he noted that the qualities that make for a good scholar—i.e., isolation 

and introspection—are not necessarily the traits that make one a good human being, “often 

the opposite.” In this light it’s hard not to think of Herman Melville’s warning, in The 

Confidence-Man (1857), of one ultimate conclusion of dedicatory obsession and repudiation 

of the things that make us human: “Ever on the noiseless trail; cool, collected, patient; less 

seen than felt; snuffing, smelling—a Leather-stocking Nemesis. In the settlements he will not 

be seen again…” 

I would be remiss not to note that my research, writing, and thinking about the 

difficult and ugly subject of the stereotyping and dispossession of indigenous North 

Americans, past and present, took place on unceded Musqueam territory on the shores of the 

Salish Sea, and on lands obtained in the Robinson-Superior Treaty of 1850 (Crown Treaty 

No. 60) in Ojibway / Anishinaabeg country, on the shore of Lake Superior / Gichigami. 

 Last but by no means least, my deepest gratitude to my family east and west, who, to 

cut a long and sentimental story very short, were always there.  

̶ Tom Peotto 

Thunder Bay, 27 July 2017  



 

vii 

 

 

Dedication 

 

To my parents, who gave life lessons and library cards, and never lost faith; 

To my grandparents, who showed that life is a marathon, not a sprint; 

To my brothers, who never let me get too full of myself. (“Just because you use a lot of big 

words doesn’t mean you get to dress like a slob”). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

1 

 

Introduction: “Who invented scalping?” and why that question matters 

“The Scalping Knife! General Custer and His Command Annihilated.”  

—Headline of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 25 June 18761 

“My people took scalps only to prove their stories that they had met the enemy 

and overpowered him. It is not different than the doughboys in the world war 

bringing back German helmets and other souvenirs.”  

—Luther Standing Bear (Miniconjou Lakota), 19282 

Thesis Statement 

This thesis examines the cultural history of scalp bounties: the payment of money or 

trade goods in wartime to volunteers, militias, and mercenaries, for the scalps of indigenous 

North Americans in the British North American colonies and the post-Revolutionary United 

States, from the mid-1630s to the end of the 19th century. My approach is both chronological, 

i.e., when and where scalp bounties were first offered in the North American colonies, and 

cultural, e.g., how British colonists and their descendants rationalized scalping indigenous 

enemies as a form of racialized violence, and how their incorporation of scalping into a 

system of large-scale violence removed it from a secondary importance in such contexts as 

the eastern North American mourning-war complex or Great Plains coup warfare, and made 

it part of a distinctly British variation of a Euro-American system of total war centered on 

commodified indigenous bodies and the conquest of indigenous lands and resources. For 

Anglo-Americans in particular, the contradictory images, ideas, narratives, and truisms of 

scalping and scalp bounties both raised the specter of their terror of fighting frontier wars, 

and were used to justify violence on a much larger, more organized, and impersonal scale 

                                                 
1 Cited in James E. Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the Press, and the Little Bighorn 

(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 35-36. 
2 In Winners of the West 30 August, 1928, cited in Paul L. Hedren, “The Contradictory Legacies of Buffalo Bill 

Cody’s First Scalp for Custer,” 35, in Montana: the Magazine of Western History, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring 2005), 

16-35. 



 

2 

 

than anything done by Indian enemies. Scalping became metonymic for the bundle of 

cultural givens and practices I refer to here as the scalping paradigm. 

Prologue: “The first scalp for Custer, boys!” 

 Preparing to ride into the valley of the Little Bighorn on the morning of 25 June, 

1876, the members of the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry regiment were in high spirits. Their path 

to the Little Bighorn had begun in the summer of 1874 when, in defiance of the 1868 Treaty 

of Fort Laramie, their commander Lieutenant-Colonel George Custer had led an expedition 

into the Great Sioux Reservation which confirmed the rumours of gold deposits in the Black 

Hills, an oasis of wood, game, and sheltered valleys which held spiritual significance in 

Lakota and Cheyenne sacred geography. As gold miners and adventurers flooded into the 

Great Sioux Reservation, the federal government endorsed the violation of the treaty and the 

de facto annexation of Lakota treaty lands, first offering to purchase the Black Hills then, 

when the Lakotas inevitably refused payment, opting for conquest. An ultimatum, issued in 

the boreal chill of midwinter on the northern Plains, ordered all Lakotas to report from their 

winter camps to their agencies by 31 January, 1876, which could not have been done without 

considerable injury and loss of life. Inevitably ignored, this ultimatum served as casus belli 

for a summer 1876 expedition against the Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. Under the 

command of Major-General Philip Sheridan, the three columns of the U.S. Army mustered 

out in the early summer of 1876 had two intended goals. In the immediate circumstances of 

1875-76, their task was to physically separate northern Plains Indians from the mushrooming 

Black Hills mining settlements of Deadwood, Custer, Hill City, Sheridan, etc., while their 

secondary goal was to encircle and defeat the resistance movement which had coalesced 



 

3 

 

around Sitting Bull and other traditionalist leaders in the Powder and Tongue River country 

since 1864.3 

Trained since childhood to collect wild foods and use wild plants for medicine, to 

endure the elements without complaint, and to travel long journeys and fight on foot or on 

horseback with bows, firearms, and hand weapons, the average 19th century Plains Indian 

was adept, or at least competent, in a set of skills easily transferable from hunting to warfare. 

Among Europeans of American or Old World birth, this was the exception rather than the 

rule; thus, in 1876, following an Anglo-American frontier tradition dating back to the early 

18th century, private donations among Deadwood pioneers funded $200 bounties for Indian 

scalps. The psychological role this grassroots form of violence played in shoring up the 

numerous-yet-individually-outmatched settlers’ courage was observed by General Crook’s 

adjutant, Captain John Bourke, while passing through the Black Hills that September (see 

Chapter 6). Bourke calculated that the bodies regularly found that year in ones, pairs and 

threes “in such and such a gulch” between the beginning of summer to September added up 

to around four hundred slain by Indians; whites, for their part, only “succeeded in killing an 

Indian” at “extremely rare intervals.” When they did, a carnival atmosphere broke out: 

                                                 
3 Political scientist Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark observes the reinterpretation of western treaties in the 19th 

century to designate, in the United States, Indian resistance as invasion and, in Canada, Indian rebellion as 

treason, defining indigenous peoples as nascently criminal and deviant to justify conquest and dispossession in 

an age of mass migration—see Stark, “Criminal Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land,” in 

Theory and Event, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2016), 17pp.  For general background: Robert M. Utley, The Lance and the 

Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 3-233, 115-131 on the 

Black Hills (a Lakota named Standing Elk, age 15 in 1875, later recalled “I heard Sitting Bull say that the Black 

Hills was just like a food pack and therefore the Indians should stick to it.” He puzzled over this until he figured 

it out: “Indians would rove all around, but when they were in need of something they could just go in there and 

get it”); entries “Cheyennes” (47-49), “Little Bighorn” (117-18), “Sioux” (184-87), “Sioux Wars” (187-88), in 

David J. Wishart ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska 

Press, 2007), entries “Arapahos” (22-24), “Cheyennes” (47-49), “Indian Scouts” (100-102), “Little Bighorn” 

(117-18), “Sioux” (184-87), “Sioux Wars” (187-88); Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star (San Francisco: 

North Point Press, 1984), 232-76; Jerome A. Greene, ed., Lakota and Cheyenne: Indian Views of the Great 

Sioux War, 1876-1877 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), xiii-xxvi; Thomas Powers, The 

Killing of Crazy Horse (New York and Toronto: Random House, 2010), 289-329. 



 

4 

 

“Deadwood would go crazy with delight; the skull and scalp were paraded and sold at public 

auction to the highest bidder.”4 

The widespread Anglo-American idea that scalping Indians signified victory, and was 

consistent with a carnival or jubilee atmosphere, also appeared among the 7th Cavalry. Since 

early May they had been traipsing across the northern Plains on long marches with cold 

rations and minimal sleep, and now that the Crow and Arikara scouts had found a large 

village of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos in the river valley, it looked like the end was in 

sight. Custer’s orders were to wait for his commanding officer General Alfred Terry and join 

forces with General George Crook before marching on the village, but on the morning of 25 

June no warriors could be seen through the officers’ binoculars, an observation that tempted 

Custer’s risk-taking sensibilities. It was decided: as at the Washita in 1868, the 7th would ride 

down, take the women, children, and elderly of the village hostage, and order the absent 

warriors, presumedly off hunting, to surrender when they returned. The 7th were therefore in 

a jovial mood that morning, bolstering their confidence with candid jokes about scalping the 

Indians and, per another longstanding tradition in Anglo-American frontier warfare, looting 

the village.5 

                                                 
4 On Bourke in Deadwood see John Gregory Bourke, On the Border with Crook (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891, 

second edition 1892), 380; Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 336-39; Jerome A. Greene, Slim Buttes, 1876: An 

Episode of the Great Sioux War (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), throughout. On 

Deadwood scalp bounties, see Ralph Adam Smith, Borderlander: the Life of James Kirker, 1793-1852 

(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 298 n. 50. General background: Connell, Son of the 

Morning Star, throughout; Wishart ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians, entries “Arapahos” (22-24), 

“Cheyennes” (47-49), “Indian Scouts” (100-102), “Little Bighorn” (117-18), “Sioux” (184-87), “Sioux Wars” 

(187-88); Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 3-233; Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse, 289-329. 
5 On the Washita, see Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 181-200; Wishart ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Plains 

entries “Arapahos” (22-24), “Cheyennes” (47-49), “Indian Scouts” (100-102), “Little Bighorn” (117-18), 

“Sioux” (184-87), “Sioux Wars” (187-88); Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 3-233; Powers, The Killing of 

Crazy Horse, 289-329. 



 

5 

 

 Custer’s orderly, John Burkman, remembered the troopers predicting that they’d be 

back by lunch, and placing bets on who would collect the most scalps. Private Peter 

Thompson of E Company overheard one “old soldier” say that all they had to do was “reach 

old Sitting Bull.” Then another soldier chimed in:  

“If that is all, the campaign will soon be over, and Custer will take us with him to the 

Centennial.” “Of course, said a wag, “we will take Sitting Bull with us.” This created a roar of 

laughter among those who heard him. The conversation continued, each one telling his 

neighbour what he would take when Sitting Bull’s camp was captured. 

What the 700 men of the 7th did not know was why General Crook had been delayed in their 

rendezvous: the Indians had already repulsed Crook’s force at the Rosebud on 17 June, and 

were spoiling for another fight with the soldiers. In the massive village along the banks of the 

Little Bighorn, the largest collection of Plains Indians that the scouts had ever seen, an 

estimated 1,500 warriors who had stayed up dancing the night before were stirring in their 

tipis.6  

Riding into battle after breakfast, First Sergeant John Ryan of Company M heard 

Second Lieutenant Charles Varnum calling out “‘Thirty days furlough to the man who gets 

the first scalp.’ We were very anxious for the furlough,” remembered Ryan, “but not so 

particular for the scalp.” Indeed, the soldiers had several reasons to be anxious. First, the 7th’s 

esprit de corps was sapped: several of Custer’s most experienced officers had been 

temporarily reassigned for the Centennial, and up to thirty percent of his troops were raw 

recruits, some of whom were native speakers of German, Italian, and Irish Gaelic with 

limited English. Due to budget shortcuts, some had never fired their dragoons’ carbines in 

                                                 
6 Thompson cited in Paul L. Hedren, We Trailed the Sioux: Enlisted Men Speak on Custer, Crook, and the 

Great Sioux War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003), 17-19 (my italics); Burkman cited in Connell, 

Son of the Morning Star, 405-22; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 3-233. 



 

6 

 

basic training, and the soft copper shells of their standard-issue carbine ammunition could 

jam during ejection when deformed by gunpowder or verdigris buildup. A third, nonmaterial 

factor was an omnipresent dread about what victorious Indians did to their white captives, 

reinforced by images and narratives repeated again and again in the American oral tradition 

and mass media. “As motivational tool,” writes historian Alan Taylor, “Indian-hating was 

double-edged.” Invoking scalping, either as a marker of Indian warriors’ putative ferocity or 

to promise an inevitable, just victory over them, “initially aroused white men to fight, but it 

ultimately invited them to fear.”7  

Many of the 7th probably held a mental image of Seth Eastman’s 1850 engraving The 

Death-Whoop: of a Dakota warrior, holding his knife in his right hand and triumphantly 

raising his enemy’s scalp in his left, exulting over a slain Indian enemy. The scene, and its 

vivid and straightforward visual language of victor and vanquished, seems to have struck a 

chord in the Anglo-American imagination; in 1868, the federal government commissioned 

Eastman to rework it as an oil painting for display in the White House. Paul Hedren notes 

that it was regularly copied by 19th-century artists seeking to capture the merciless and 

savage qualities Europeans attributed to Indians at war—as in an 1873 Harper’s Weekly 

editorial illustration, “Modocs Scalping and Torturing Prisoners”. Replacing the slain Indian 

of Eastman’s original with a scalped American soldier and adding a background scene of 

gaunt, wolfish Indians immolating a naked white prisoner, the artist could capture and 

                                                 
7 Ryan cited in Hedren, We Trailed the Sioux, 17-19; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 3-233; on carbines, see 

Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 306-310; “As motivational tool…” in Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: 

American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 157-59. 



 

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express widespread public hatred for the Modocs in familiar terms of Indian cruelty and 

white victimhood which had little or no relevance to actual events in northeastern California.8 

The Death-Whoop, like other Dakota scenes Seth Eastman engraved for Henry 

Schoolcraft’s six-volume series on Native Americans (1851-57), reappeared in The American 

Aboriginal Portfolio (1853), an illustrated tract co-authored with his second wife Mary 

promoting Protestant missions among the Sioux. Having been stationed at Fort Snelling, 

Minnesota from 1830 to 1849 where he was briefly married to a Dakota woman (1830-32), 

Lt. Eastman was considered an expert on the Dakotas and, by extension, Indians generally. 

Yet he and Mary’s ventriloquized Dakota perspectives merely reflected Anglo-American 

truisms: that scalping was vastly important to Indians, and was emblematic of the individual 

and cultural pathology the Eastmans attributed to “the warrior, with his ungoverned passions, 

[…] delighting in war and glorious deeds,” and “the woman, with her superstition and 

degradation.” Mary’s accompanying 1853 text for The Death-Whoop declared scalping to 

express “all the horrible passions of the human heart.” Some authors had found a sort of 

pagan magnificence in such spectacles, but the Eastmans had only contempt and pity: after 

fighting like “savage beasts that war unceasingly in the forests of the uncivilized,” one kills 

the other, and the victor is in “the ecstasy of his triumph.” As “[e]very nerve in his body is 

thrilling with joy,” the warrior “shouts the appalling death-cry.” If this is the warrior’s first 

scalp, “the amount of his happiness” is almost “unendurable” since both his mother, “and the 

                                                 
8 The repetitive copying of The Death-Whoop was noted in 1941 by Gabriel Nadeau in “Indian Scalping: 

Technique in Different Tribes,” 185-89, in Bulletin of History of Medicine, Volume X, No. 2 (July 1941), 178-

194, reprinted in W.G. Spittal, ed., Scalping and Torture: Warfare Practices among North American Indians 

(Ohsweken, Ontario: Iroqrafts Indian Reprints, 1985), 18-34. Felicia Wivchar, “The House Indian Affairs 

Commission—Seth Eastman’s American Indian Paintings in Context,” in Federal History Issue 2 (January 

2010), 16-27; Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer,” 23-25; “Modocs Scalping and Torturing Their Prisoners” in 

Boyd Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence 

(University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC, 2014), 50-75.  



 

8 

 

maiden he loves, will glory in his success.” With pious sarcasm, the Eastmans paraphrased 

Proverbs 31:10: “the fame of her son and husband is dear to the Indian woman, and the price 

of an enemy’s scalp is far above rubies.” The young man, adorning his first scalp with beads, 

“feast[s] his eyes upon the horrid sight.”9 

Until age 16 Seth Eastman’s Dakota grandson Ohiyesa, the fifth child of Eastman’s 

daughter Wakantakawin who, under the baptismal name Dr. Charles Eastman, later became a 

Boston-College-trained physician, only knew Americans by reputation. In his memoir Indian 

Boyhood (1902) he quoted his uncle’s description of them as a wealthy, but very peculiar 

people, and as poor fighters not worth counting coup on. The “common warriors,” his uncle 

said, were “driven forward like a herd of antelopes” by their officers, and fought “from 

compulsion and not from personal bravery.” His uncle’s belief that individual shows of 

prowess and fearlessness, the metric of martial success among Plains Indians, were the 

exception rather than the rule among Americans, is widespread and implicit in testimonials 

from Indian combatants at Little Bighorn. Thus the Miniconjou chief American Horse could, 

with no contradiction, praise an officer who sacrificed himself to cover his men’s retreat as 

“the bravest man [the Sioux] have ever fought” while at the same time mentioning soldiers 

who “became foolish” with fear and begged to be taken prisoner; “none were left alive for 

even a few minutes.” Soldier Wolf, a Cheyenne, said Major Reno’s cavalry were so 

frightened they couldn’t shoot straight and “seemed to be drunk”; chasing them was “like 

chasing buffalo,” said another Cheyenne also named American Horse, a comparison echoed 

by the Cheyenne Little Hawk. “[I]t was just like killing sheep,” said an Unkpapa, known as 

                                                 
9 Mary and Seth Eastman, The American Aboriginal Portfolio (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1853), 

iii (“ungoverned passions… degradation”), 26-27 (“all the horrible passions… horrid sight”); Proverbs 31:10: 

“Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.”  



 

9 

 

Rain-in-the-Face, to the journalist W. Kent Thomas through an interpreter in 1894. “Some of 

them got on their knees and begged; we spared none [.]”10 

Emotions ran high on both sides of the battlefield, and the Indians were both furious 

and frightened at how close the soldiers had come to attacking their families. A teenage 

Unkpapa named Iron Hawk later told John Neihardt of putting an arrow through a soldier, 

knocking him off his horse, and beating him long after he was dead: “I was mad, because I 

was thinking of the women and little children running down there, all scared and out of 

breath.” When a fiftysomething Cheyenne woman named White Necklace saw the stripped 

corpse of a soldier lying nude on the hillside, she remembered that her niece’s body had also 

been found stripped after Colorado militia had attacked Sand Creek in 1864. Her niece had 

also been decapitated, so “I jumped off my horse and did the same to him.” As defeat at 

Indian hands loomed, the soldiers’ morning confidence was replaced by panic, and the 

Indians began seeing things which made little or no sense to them. An Unkpapa remembered 

taking part in the pursuit of a cavalryman over a six or seven mile chase, and being the 

American’s last remaining pursuer as the other four Indians dropped out and turned back to 

the village. The lone Unkpapa had neither bow nor gun, and was on the verge of giving up 

when the soldier looked over his shoulder at him, drew his pistol, and shot himself in the 

head. Kate Bighead, a Cheyenne woman, not only saw soldiers committing individual 

                                                 
10 Charles Eastman, Indian Boyhood (1902) cited in Peter Nabokov ed., Native American Testimony: A 

Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992 (Penguin Books, 1991 [1978]), 

21-24; on family background, see Carol Lea Clark, “Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Elaine Goodale 

Eastman: A Cross-Cultural Collaboration,” in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature Vol. 13, No. 2 (Autumn 

1994), 271-280, and entry “Eastman, Charles (1858-1939)” in Wishart, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains 

Indians, 64-65; Greene ed., Lakota and Cheyenne, 31-72: American Horse (Miniconjou) 33-37, American 

Horse (Cheyenne) 49, Soldier Wolf 51-52, Little Hawk (“chased them like buffalo”) 62; Rain-in-the-Face 

quoted by W. Kent Thomas, “The Personal Story of Rain-in-the-Face,” in Cyrus Townsend Brady ed., Indian 

Fights and Fighters (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 279-292 (285: “sheep… we 

spared none”); on Rain-in-the-Face see Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 380-400. 



 

10 

 

suicide, but also saw “several different pairs” of soldiers “fire their guns at the same time and 

shoot one another in the breast.” In the post-reservation period, a Cheyenne named Wooden 

Leg observed, Indians who “tried to tell of the soldiers killing themselves” learned that 

whites “always became angry and said the Indians were liars [.]” Fearful of reprisals or 

punishment, Little Bighorn’s Indian veterans stuck to flattering stories of 7th Cavalry heroism 

or held a discreet silence.11  

On 27 June, General Terry and his forces entered the Little Bighorn valley to find a 

vast, abandoned village site, recently-interred Indians in burial lodges and scaffolds, and 430 

survivors of the 7th Cavalry fortified on a blufftop. In the valley, Lt.-Col. George Custer and 

268 scouts, soldiers, and civilians of the 7th lay dead. The news from Montana, arriving a 

week later, soured the afterglow of the double celebration of the Centennial and the 4th of 

July. Up to this point, the 1876 campaign had been considered as an unnecessary and 

embarrassing war spawned from the “Indian Ring” scandals of embezzlement and corruption 

in the Indian Department and the broader Grant administration. Now national attention 

quickly shifted to the martyrs of the 7th Cavalry, and Little Bighorn became a manifestation 

of America’s national nightmare: scalping, mutilation, and tortured death at the hands of 

Indians. “Massacre of Our Troops,” screamed the New York Times, and headlines across 

America made heavy use of “butcher,” “slaughter,” “annihilated,” and “massacre.”12  

                                                 
11 Iron Hawk cited in Nicholas Black Elk and John Neihardt, annotated by Raymond J. DeMallie, Black Elk 

Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Albany, NY: State University of New York 

Press, 2008 [1932]), 94-97; White Necklace cited in Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse (New York 

and Toronto: Random House, 2010), 289-329; Indians’ anger, battlefield suicides, Wooden Leg (308) and the 

horse chase (313-14) in Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 285-314, 410-22; Kate Bighead, as told to Thomas B. 

Marquis, “She Watched Custer’s Last Battle,” in Paul Andrew Hutton ed., The Custer Reader (Norman, OK: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 363-377. 
12 Hugh J. Reilly, “The Press,” in Brad D. Lookingbill ed., A Companion to Custer and the Little Bighorn 

Campaign (Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 387-403; Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, 31-54; Jim Piecuch 

and Jason Lutz, “Indian Ring Scandal,” in Spencer C. Tucker et. al., eds., The Encyclopedia of the North 



 

11 

 

Responses to Little Bighorn were informed by the broadly-shared Euro- and Anglo-

American belief that Indians were their savage antithesis, defective shadows of civilization 

whose societies were barbaric and nascently criminal. Internal criticism regarding the 1876 

war often stopped at a small group of malcontents within American society that respectable 

people wished to distance themselves from, such as the Indian-Ring embezzlers and the 

squatters of the Black Hills, frontier ruffians and crooked public officials who must be 

“snarling, villainous, immoral, ignorant, gauche”; by contrast, Indians’ normal state was 

presumed to be deviance, illustrated by such lateral comparisons as the use of the term 

“banditti” to describe both Plains Indian warriors and Civil War guerrillas. Hence the great 

evidentiary weight placed on the soldiers’ post-mortem mutilations at Little Bighorn, as 

when the editor of the St. Louis Dispatch raged that this “proves that the Sioux have learned 

nothing from civilization,” followed by a statement of explicit dehumanization and genocidal 

ideation: that “the hostile element of this race” should “be exterminated” like “other 

vampires of the woods.” Revenge for the 7th Cavalry by the conquest and forcible 

assimilation of the Indians from what the Montana Missoulian dubbed a “life of 

vagabondage” were called for in newspapers across America, particularly in the western 

states, as when the Bismarck Tribune demanded that treaties be torn up and the Indians be 

assimilated into American society “as they are, criminals and paupers,” which would require 

the government to “hang or shoot the murderers” and jail others. Whether indigenous peoples 

could become “modern” or were inexorably doomed by Manifest Destiny was an unresolved 

controversy of the late 19th century, but the essential benignity of American society, like the 

                                                 
American Indian Wars, 1607-1890: A Social, Political, and Military History, volume 1, A-L (Santa Barbara, 

Denver, Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2011), 384-85. 



 

12 

 

imagined inevitability of the Indian’s extinction through cultural assimilation or armed 

counterinsurgency, was not up for debate.13 

Bogeyman images of Indian war, some dating back 300 years, were swiftly attached 

in the public mind to Little Bighorn. As late as 1931, an Unkpapa woman, She Walks With 

Her Shawl, had to point out that “Very few soldiers were mutilated” and “Not a single soldier 

was burned at the stake” when characterizing Little Bighorn as “not a massacre, but a hotly 

contested battle between two armed forces.” Though Terry and Crook’s forces did report 

seeing at least some soldiers’ bodies posthumously mutilated, not even the most hostile 

witnesses at Little Bighorn—or, for that matter, in the Modoc War—had reported or claimed 

any evidence of victims burned at the stake. Here, She Walks With Her Shawl was struggling 

valiantly against the Anglo-American collective unconscious. By the late 18th century, a 

sense of potential victimhood vis-à-vis Indians had come to define European self-perception 

in British North America to a greater extent than in their Spanish and French counterpart 

colonies. Lurid scenarios of European settlers scalped, tortured, immolated, violated and 

murdered by fiendish, ogre-like Indians circulated in the Anglo-American oral tradition and 

the gruesome texts and illustrations of newspapers, pamphlets, and early commercial media. 

The somber Protestant considerations of the captivity narrative genre, of which Mary 

                                                 
13 Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, 146-168, also notes that the by-now archaic term banditti was 

still being used as a pejorative—in 1875, General Sheridan had asked the secretary of war to set up military 

tribunals to try white supremacists in Louisiana as ‘banditti’ (Mueller 181). On the legal definition of 19th 

century Plains Indians as social deviants and criminals, see Stark, “Criminal Empire”; as will be noted in 

Chapters 1 and 2, the identification of “barbarians” with deviance and criminality to justify imperial violence as 

a civilizing mission, has a much longer history. “[T]he Indian was marked for gradual extinction by the uneasy 

coalition of his friends and foes”—Alden Vaughan, cited in Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: 

Elementary Structures of Race,” 885, in The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Jun., 2001), 866-

905; on vanishing Indian mythology in the 19th century, see Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White 

Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (University Press of Kansas, 1982), esp. 3-78. For “snarling, villainous, 

immoral, gauche”: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist,” in The Atlantic 

Monthly online, posted 1 May 2014, 11:30 am ET. 



 

13 

 

Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) was archetypal, had swiftly 

given way to a saleable pornography of violence intended to instill pathos, horror, and terror 

to a degree which overwhelmed the reader’s sensibilities, an effect Peter Silver calls “the 

anti-Indian sublime.” While the austere early captivity narratives had sidestepped the 

question of motive by presenting Indians as God’s implements to test the faithful, the later, 

secular horror stories suggested only that the Indian was both implacably vengeful and 

innately depraved. By the time of the Seven Years’ War, notes Silver, “Every kind of writing 

placed immense weight on scalping, which, together with ‘murder,’ in fact became a 

metonym for Indian war.”14 

As the first reports filtered back from Montana, events of 25-26 June were simplified 

and streamlined to confirm, or conform to, pre-existing narratives of frontier war and 

civilization’s struggle against savagery. A faded Civil War icon’s death in Montana became a 

mythic “last stand” combining elements of the Charge of the Light Brigade, Roncesvalles, 

and Thermopylae: following their orders to the bitter end, the 7th Cavalry had gone out 

swinging against a pitiless barbarian horde. This clash between civilized American order and 

barbarous Indian chaos, with the former on the defensive against the latter, was clearly 

delineated in the iconography of “Last Stand” artwork. In such famous examples as John 

Mulvany’s Custer’s Last Rally (1881) and Otto Becker’s Custer’s Last Fight (1896), the 7th 

                                                 
14 She Walks With Her Shawl cited in Greene ed., Lakota and Cheyenne, 31-72 (45: “Not a massacre”); Peter 

Silver, Our Savage Neighbours: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton and 

Company, 2008), xix-xxvi, 49-94 (77-79: metonym; 83-85: “the anti-Indian sublime”); Richard VanDerBeets 

ed., Held captive by Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642-1836, revised edition (Knoxville: University of 

Tennessee Press, 1994 [1973]), xi-xxxix; Richard VanDerBeets, The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American 

Genre (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), ix-x, 1-50; “Captivity Narratives” in Edward 

Buscombe ed., The BFI Companion to the Western (Singapore: Da Capo Press, 1988), 78-81; Birgit Hans, 

“Captivity Narratives” (45-46) in Wishart ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians; Sara Humphreys, “The 

Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston,” in Canadian Review of American Studies Vol. 41, 

No. 2 (2011), 149-178. 



 

14 

 

Cavalry, wielding sabers and rifles and buttoned up in their blue uniforms, were invariably 

encircled by warbonneted, painted Indians wielding a panoply of modern and primitive 

weapons. Periodically, participants from the Little Bighorn remarked upon the simplified 

binary of these pictorial conventions: too many warbonnets in Becker’s lithograph, observed 

Lieutenant Varnum, who also noted that the soldiers had doffed their gauntlets and blue coats 

in the summer heat. When Rain-in-the-Face, during his 1894 interview by W. Kent Thomas 

at the Chicago World’s Fair (see Chapter 7), was shown an artist’s impression of the last 

stand and asked his thoughts, he “studied it a long time, and then burst out laughing,” listing 

several errors and announcing “This picture is like all the white man’s pictures of Indians, a 

lie.” In doing so he punctured the stock iconography of Stone Age Indians and high-tech 

Americans: “This picture gives us bows and arrows. We were better armed than the long 

swords [i.e., soldiers].” The high-caliber repeating rifles distributed through Indian 

Department treaties for buffalo hunting, and carried by many Indian combatants at Little 

Bighorn, were much more reliable than the dragoons’ finicky carbines: “Their guns wouldn’t 

shoot but once—the thing wouldn’t throw out the empty cartridge shells.”15 

Additional meaning was added by turning Little Bighorn into a clash of personalities 

between George Custer, the Union’s dashing “Boy General” of the Civil War, and a Lakota 

or Dakota leader known to the American public such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, or even 

Inkpaduta—despite the fact that Custer was almost unknown among the Sioux, Northern 

Cheyennes, and Arapahos in the summer of 1876. Though many Southern Cheyennes knew 

                                                 
15 Thomas, “The Personal Story of Rain-in-the-Face,” in Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 279-292 (285: 

“burst out laughing… shells”). On Little Bighorn iconography, see Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 354-69 

(Varnum cited 365); Larry McMurtry, O What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West, 1846-1890 (New 

York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 37-40; Reilly, “The Press”; Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, 193-

214.  



 

15 

 

and despised George Custer for his surprise attack on the Washita in 1868, calling him Long 

Hair or Creeping Panther, no Cheyenne archenemy seems to have been proposed; instead a 

potential nemesis was found in Rain-in-the-Face, who George Custer’s younger brother Tom 

had once arrested on charges of killing two fossil hunters who wandered too far from the 

1874 Black Hills expedition. Rain-in-the-Face, who W. Kent Thomas deemed “utterly 

heartless and unprincipled,” seemed a fitting antihero: declaring his subject, then 60 years 

old, as “still a Hercules,” Thomas gave his 1876 measurements as 5’9”, 195 lbs with a forty-

six inch chest, praising him as “the most pronounced type of the ideal Fenimore Cooper, 

dime novel Indian in America.” So, in 1876, the Omaha Daily Herald wrote that Rain-in-the-

Face had cut out George Custer’s heart, mounted it on a pole, and held a war dance around it, 

an allegation Custer’s widow Elizabeth repeated in her memoir Boots and Saddles (1885), 

writing that Tom Custer’s heart had been excised to satisfy “The vengeance of that incarnate 

fiend.” The story was probably lifted from the biography of Washakie, a famous chief of the 

Eastern Shoshones, and Rain-in-the-Face alternately denied and claimed credit for it until the 

end of his life.16 

                                                 
16 Thomas, “The Personal Story of Rain-in-the-Face,” in Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 279-292 (281: 

“forty-six inch chest”; 291-92: “utterly heartless… still a Hercules… dime novel Indian”); Connell, Son of the 

Morning Star, 380-99, 409-422; Bighead and Marquis, “She Watched Custer’s Last Battle”; Powers, The 

Killing of Crazy Horse, 289-329; Jerome A. Greene, Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 

1867-1869 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 1-60. Inkpaduta, a war leader in the Dakota 

Uprising of 1862, had fled to Canada to escape reprisals; though present at Little Bighorn along with two of his 

sons, in 1876 Inkpaduta was well into his sixties and almost blind. Taoyateduta or Little Crow, another Dakota 

leader during the Uprising, was shot and scalped by a Minnesota farmer in 1863, while Inkpaduta died of old 

age in Manitoba in the winter of 1881-82 – see Paul N. Beck, Inkpaduta: Dakota Leader (Norman, OK: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 121-139. Washakie reportedly danced with a Crow warrior’s heart at the 

tip of his lance after an Eastern Shoshone – Northern (“Bannock”) Shoshone victory in a border war with the 

Crows in March 1866, at present-day Crowheart Butte, Wyoming; “The story, often repeated, that Washakie ate 

a Crow’s heart is not given credence by those who knew Washakie,” writes his biographer Grace Raymond 

Hebard in Washakie: Chief of the Shoshones (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 [1930]), 

151-52; on the divisions of the Shoshones, see Wishart, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians, entry 

“Shoshones” (181-82). 



 

16 

 

Two other trends involved dramatically overestimating the number of Indian 

combatants, and imagining Little Bighorn as a carefully-laid ambush, such as the claim 

published in the Miner of Butte, Montana that riverbanks had been hollowed out for cover 

and logs piled as breastworks. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow blended all these legends into a 

heady broth in his poem “The Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face” (1880). At a council among “the 

mountains dark and high” the dyarchs of the Sioux, Sitting Bull and Rain-in-the-Face, swear 

revenge on “the White Chief with yellow hair!” Custer is lured “Into the fatal snare” of the 

valley of the Little Bighorn where, “Like a bison among the reeds, / In ambush the Sitting 

Bull / Lay with three thousand braves / Crouched in the clefts and caves, / Savage, 

unmerciful!” Their work done, the Indians “fled in the night” while Rain-in-the-Face 

“uplifted high in the air” Custer’s “brave heart” as a “ghastly trophy.”17 

In his 1894 interview, Rain-in-the-Face subtly cast cold water on the American 

public’s obsession with the idea that Custer’s foes had scalped the strawberry-blonde curls 

which, in his iconography, cascaded from beneath his heroically oversized white hat. After 

boasting of how he had cut out Tom Custer’s heart, “bit a piece out of it and spit it in his 

face,” and felt “satisfied and sick of fighting; I didn’t scalp him,” he then implied an unmanly 

end for George Custer: the women, he said, “hunted for Long Yellow Hair [i.e., Custer] to 

scalp him, but could not find him. He didn’t wear his [uniform], his hair had been cut off, and 

the Indians didn’t know him.” The outlines of this were true: Custer had gone to battle in a 

scout’s buckskins, and with his hair cut short against his receding hairline he would have 

made a poor trophy even if recognized. But the idea that Custer had died anonymously and 

                                                 
17 Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 380-99; Reilly, “The Press”; Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, 

31-54.  



 

17 

 

maybe been scalped by women was too much for the reporters to bear. “[I]f you didn’t kill 

Long Yellow Hair, who did?” pressed W. Kent Thomas. “I don’t know. No one knows,” 

replied Rain-in-the-Face, to which another reporter persisted, asking why the hero Custer 

“wasn’t scalped, when everyone else was? Did you consider him too brave to be scalped?” 

“No, no one is too brave to be scalped, that wouldn’t make any difference,” answered Rain-

in-the-Face. Reading between the lines, irritation radiates from his reply: he theorized that 

Custer’s heroic corpse “must have laid under some other dead bodies” and then threw an 

undetected jab, noting he didn’t know Custer hadn’t been scalped “till I heard it long 

afterward from the whites.”18 

The myth of the last stand, with Custer himself as the central figure and icon of 

Anglo-American heroism, could inspire such relatively tasteful works as Mulvany’s tense, 

claustrophobic Custer’s Last Rally. Hemmed in by swirling clouds of prairie dust thrown up 

by the Indians’ horses, Custer and his grim, exhausted survivors prepare for the final battle, 

in a painting whose predominant tones are dusty greys and light browns with a few splashes 

of vivid red. However, Mulvany’s painting was gallery art which would of necessity reach a 

much smaller audience than Otto Becker’s kitschy, full-colour rendition Custer’s Last Fight. 

Reworked from a lost original by Cassilly Adams on commission from the Anheuser-Busch 

brewing corporation of St. Louis, Missouri, the former gateway to the West, mass production 

placed Becker’s lithograph across America on the 20th anniversary of Little Bighorn and for 

decades afterwards; it was seen by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, in such formats 

as beer trays, calendars, and handouts, large-scale reprints for bars and saloons, and smaller 

                                                 
18 Thomas, “The Personal Story of Rain-in-the-Face,” in Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters, 279-292 (289: 

“satisfied and sick of fighting”), (290-91: “running in the dark… long afterward from the whites”); Connell, Son 

of the Morning Star, 380-99. 



 

18 

 

versions for rec rooms. Replacing Mulvany’s claustrophobic alkali dust clouds for a wide-

open backdrop of blue prairie skies and rolling green plains, Becker proffers a collage of 

19th-century imperialist imagery of the West against the rest, mixing the Sioux War of 1875-

77 with the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. Custer, in golden buckskins, rages in the painting’s 

center with saber and spent, clubbed pistol in hand, as a horde of Sioux pour from all sides; 

while their feathered warbonnets, tomahawks, and knives, are recognizably “Indian,” the 

knobkerrie-style clubs and broad-bladed spears in their panoply, as well as their chocolate-

brown skin and large, oval, Zulu-style leather shields, give the impression of Isandlwana and 

Rorke’s Drift. In the foreground of the painting’s lower left quadrant, the Indians wield rifles, 

pistols, and war clubs, while the mirroring lower right quadrant is decidedly gorier: the 

Indians here wield mostly edged weapons, and two soldiers—it’s unclear whether they’re 

dead or merely unconscious—are being scalped, while a third is being stabbed with a knife. 

In the foregrounded right-hand corner are a heap of three dead, nude soldiers, at least one of 

whom has been scalped.19 

That recent European immigrants such as the Irish-born Mulvany and the German-

born Becker had publicly affirmed their American identity by illustrating heroic, gruesome 

images of Indians scalping whites was no accident. By the time of the Seven Years’ War, 

notes Peter Silver, the narrative of shared vulnerability to the literal and symbolic violations 

of Indian war was the common denominator for collective “white” Euro-American identity in 

                                                 
19 On Mulvany and Becker see Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 21, 361-69; McMurtry, O What a Slaughter, 

37-40; and The BFI Companion to the Western, 87 (entry “Chromolithography”). On “savage war” see Richard 

Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 

1992), 1-62, 112-14, 645, 729 n. 6. On 19th-century “West and the rest” sensibilities, see Patrick B. Sharp, 

Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture (Norman, OK: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 2007), esp. 3-95; on their survival in the present, see Pankaj Mishra’s review of Niall 

Ferguson’s Civilisation: The West and the Rest (Allen Lane, 2011), “Watch this man,” in the London Review of 

Books Vol. 33, No. 21 (3 November 2011), 10-12.  



 

19 

 

Britain’s North American colonies, uniting newly-arrived migrants and American-born 

creoles and cutting across the lines of language, creed, political affiliation and nationality. 

The “indignant vulnerability” these stories engendered, “what could literally be called their 

violent self-pity,” was paired with a projective fantasy Richard Slotkin calls “savage war,” in 

which Europeans imagined indigenous resistance to encroaching settlement as invasion with 

genocidal intent—as when an 1857 New-York Daily Times journalist attributed Sioux attacks 

on Iowan and Minnesotan settlers to “a war of extermination on our North-Western 

frontiers.” This reverse-colonial nightmare went hand in hand with portrayals of Indians as 

dysfunctional, primitive versions of Europeans, whose land ownership was illegitimate, 

whose lifestyle was nascently criminal, and who had to be destroyed by any means 

necessary. This, in turn, sanctified warfare on a for-profit basis: Indian scalps redeemed for 

colonial bounties, captives sold into slavery, plunder of villages freely taken, widowed land 

opened to speculators and squatters.20 

But colonists also killed, scalped and mutilated Indians when no bounty money was 

offered and when they risked the disapproval of their peers, acting out, projecting, and re-

enacting their dark fantasies of Indian warfare upon indigenous victims. Drawing on the 

historic examples of ranger captains like Benjamin Church and Robert Rogers, and male 

frontier vigilantes such as Lewis Wetzel of Ohio and Thomas “Tom” Quick of Pennsylvania 

(Hannah Duston, a woman who slew and scalped her Abenaki captors in 1697, was too 

                                                 
20 Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, states (94) that this “indignant vulnerability” of pre-Revolutionary America 

“would be one of the new nation’s most characteristic and long-lasting cultural products”; Walter Hixson 

concurs in American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York, 2013), describing (197-98) an “[internalized] 

propensity for traumatic, righteous violence, and a quest for total security” through disproportionate force—

cited in Walter L. Hixson, “Policing the Past: Indian Removal and Genocide Studies,” 440, in The Western 

Historical Quarterly Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter 2016), 439–443. “a war of extermination” cited in Mueller, 

Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, 149.  



 

20 

 

Amazonian for most mythographers’ tastes), the Anglo-American oral tradition created the 

myth of the Indian-hunting, Indian-killing vigilante, who had so successfully adopted 

Indians’ woodcraft and fighting style that he could beat them in wilderness war. An 

ambivalent figure driven to violent obsession by the horrors of Indian war or a nemesis 

summoned by Indians’ aggression and hubris, the Indian-killer, who combined European 

superiority and rustic American virility, served as Anglo-American wish fulfillment as hero, 

antihero, or villain. He was a compensatory fantasy for settlers’ anxieties of being, almost 

invariably, outmatched when fighting Indians, and was nakedly white-supremacist: as Watts 

puts it, the frontiersman “who could out-savage the savage […] assured a white superiority 

and destiny, even at the atavistic level of individual combat.” But the “fierce, rude settler 

who drives the savage from the land” was also slated to pass away per Manifest Destiny’s 

teleology of a three-stage frontier pattern, in which Indian-killing frontiersmen were 

inevitably absorbed or driven off by urban-agrarian-industrial civilization. The white savage 

was as inexorably doomed as the Indians he slaughtered, allowing readers to “vicariously 

tremble” in safety.21 

Elevated to American popular culture and literature during the Jacksonian period, the 

scalp-taking Indian-hunter joined the American popular imagination’s roster of white 

savages: the “half-horse, half-alligator” western boatman, the Rocky Mountain fur trapper, 

the scout, and the cowboy. All were the first iterations of the American superhero, who 

                                                 
21 “The fierce, rude settler”: Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, cited in John Shelton Lawrence and 

Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero (Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge: William B. 

Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 49-64. Edward Watts, “Exploration, Trading, Trapping, Travel, and 

Early Fiction, 1780-1850,” (19: “out-savage the savage… vicariously tremble”), in Nicolas Witschi ed., A 

Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West (John Wiley & Sons: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 

2011), 13-28; Gary Hoppenstand, “Justified Bloodshed: Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods and the 

Origins of the Vigilante Hero in American Literature and Culture,” in The Journal of American Culture Vol. 15, 

No. 2 (June 1992), 51-61; Humphreys, “The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston”. 



 

21 

 

operates outside of stifling laws and flawed institutions, wielding unconventional tactics and 

overwhelming power to successfully wage one-man wars against Indians, bandits, criminals, 

and other enemies of civilization. He appears as pure fiction as Natty Bumppo of James 

Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) and as the Indian-killer Colonel John 

Moredock; the latter, originating in the repetitive writings of “professional Westerner” James 

Hall between 1828 and 1857, was combined with Natty Bumppo in his enduring form as a 

“Leather-stocking nemesis” in chapters 26 to 28 of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man 

(1857) regarding the “metaphysics of Indian-hating”. He appears as the Quaker antihero 

Nathan Slaughter in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Gothic novel Nick of the Woods (1837), as 

the ahistorically-chivalrous Seguin of Thomas Mayne Reid’s The Scalp-Hunters (1851), and 

as the central, Satanic figure of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985): the hulking 

polymath-pedophile-murderer Judge Holden of Texas, who originated in Samuel 

Chamberlain’s highly embellished Mexican-American War memoir My Confession. Other 

famous Indian-hunters were real people whose lives had been transmuted into legends for 

their commercial, artistic, and folkloric possibilities: the heroes Daniel Boone, Davy 

Crockett, and Kit Carson, and the villainous scalp-hunter captains James Kirker and John 

Joel Glanton, versions of whom peep out of Reid’s The Scalp-Hunters, Chamberlain’s My 

Confession and McCarthy’s Meridian. Through the accident of Little Bighorn, Custer, an 

undecorated Indian fighter in his lifetime, ascended into that pantheon. While his Civil War 

peers’ roles in the Indian wars were gradually forgotten, the mythic Custer, the Gilded Age’s 



 

22 

 

martyr-hero and the 1960s’ Indian-hating génocidaire, “stands forever on that dusty Montana 

slope.”22 

“I stood between savagery and civilization most all my early days,” claimed a figure 

in silk and velvet who, on the morning of 17 July, allegedly took the first scalp for Custer. 

Fearing retaliations in the wake of Little Bighorn, several hundred Sioux and Cheyennes had 

fled north from the Spotted Tail and Red Cloud agencies heading for the Powder River. Not 

far from Red Cloud the 5th Cavalry, assigned to cut off the Cheyennes and drive them back to 

the agency, set an ambush on the hill overlooking Warbonnet Creek. Only one casualty 

resulted from the skirmish between the 5th and the Cheyenne scouts: a young warrior named 

Yellow Hair, distinguished by his American-flag breechcloth and the long blond scalp he 

wore at his belt. In a 1929 interview Beaver Heart, another of the Cheyenne scouts, recalled 

that morning’s events: his horse had just been shot beneath him, and Yellow Hair had 

reminded him “that we had to do some fighting to keep the soldiers away from the women 

and children, […] then rode down the line of the soldiers away from us.” Yellow Hair 

tumbled to the ground after his horse was shot, then was felled by a volley; “The bullets were 

flying all around him, [and] he was not killed by any one man as far as I could see.” A 

uniformed sergeant was the first to reach the body and hoist Yellow Hair’s warbonnet for the 

                                                 
22 Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 105-06 (“embedded like a fossil… dusty Montana slope”); Lawrence and 

Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero, 1-64; Michael R. Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763-1861: Ohio and 

Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University 

Press, 1994 [1990]); 1-26, 214-224; Jon T. Coleman, Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear and the 

Rise of the American Nation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012); Nathan E. Bender, introduction to the new 

edition of Raymond W. Thorp, Jr. and Robert Bunker, Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson (Indiana 

University Press, 2016 [1968, 1959]), ix-xiv; Zeese Papanikolas, Trickster in the Land of Dreams (University of 

Nebraska Press, 1998), Chapter Four: “Cowboys, Wobblies, and the Myth of the West,” 73-90; Hoppenstand, 

“Justified Bloodshed”; on James Hall, see Richard Drinnon, Facing West: the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating 

and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 191-215. 



 

23 

 

soldiers. Then another man, not in uniform, “came up to where Yellow Hair laid and sit 

down [sic] near his head.”23 

Donald Brown, an enlisted man of the 5th, saw chief of scouts William Cody “ride up 

to Col. Merritt and hold up the scalp and heard him say “Here is one for Custer!” […] Merritt 

did not seem to appreciate the scene but apparently deprecated it.” Born on an Iowa farm in 

1846, the violence of America’s midcentury frontier shaped the contours of Cody’s life: his 

father was stabbed in 1854 for giving an abolitionist speech in Kansas, and the lingering 

wounds killed him a few years later, driving William Cody to work at age 11. In quick 

succession he served as a teamster, a buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, a 

guerrilla in a Union cavalry regiment, a scout for the postwar federal Army, and a hunting 

guide for eastern millionaires and European royalty. Through these upper-class connections, 

and his own skills as athlete and raconteur, William Cody in the late 1860s began 

transforming himself into “Buffalo Bill” Cody, the real-life incarnation of the Indian-slaying 

frontier hero, who appeared in stage plays and such licensed dime novels as 1872’s Buffalo 

Bill’s Last Scalp. This was a collaboration with several amanuenses: his agent Maj. John 

Burke, and the writers Ned Buntline, whose 1869 dime novel Buffalo Bill: King of the 

Border Men lifted heavily from tales of Wild Bill Hickock, and Prentiss Ingraham, author of 

Cody’s “savagery and civilization” credo. Ned Buntline had “created the theatrical Buffalo 

Bill from dime-novel stereotypes,” notes Sandra Sagala, “but William Frederick Cody took 

the fabrication and made him real.” At the centre of what Philip Deloria dubs this “deliberate 

confusion of fiction and action” was the living body of William Cody, in Jefferson Slagle’s 

                                                 
23 Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer,” 16-35; Beaver Heart cited in Greene ed., Lakota and Cheyenne, 80-84; “I 

stood between savagery and civilization” in Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero, 49-64; 

Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 332-36. 



 

24 

 

words “both assert[ing] a version of western history and then claim[ing] that history [as] 

accurate because he performed it.”24  

When the United States declared war on the Sioux and Cheyennes in the spring of 

1876, Cody closed his show at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and re-enlisted, 

“telling the audience his services were needed in the real West.” Events at Warbonnet Creek 

provided material to refashion into his self-made legend, in which he was aided by another 

amanuensis: First Lieutenant Charles King of the 5th Cavalry’s K Company. As war 

correspondent for the New York Herald, King wrote a version of events republished 

regionally in Wyoming’s Cheyenne Daily Leader, which clarified the heroism of Cody and 

the 5th by omitting Cody’s scalping of Yellow Hair and demonizing the Cheyennes. Accusing 

them of fleeing the reservation to prey on white settlers, King smeared them as traitors 

fattened on government rations: “beggarly, treacherous rascals” whose “ruling passion” was 

“love of rapine and warfare.” Transforming the 5th Cavalry into potential victims of the 

Indians, Crook surmised that the Cheyennes were not only trying to waylay two couriers, but 

fall on the 5th’s unprotected baggage train and “tear” American scalps with their “gleaming 

knives.” He ventriloquized for the Cheyennes as sadistic, cowardly liars: “Six to one we’ll 

slay and scalp them without danger to ourselves, and a hundred to one we will brag about it 

the rest of our natural lives.” Yet the paradoxes of King’s racism also held that Indians, like 

                                                 
24 Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero, 49-64; Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage 

(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 77-100 (100: “made him real”); Jefferson D. Slagle, 

“America Unscripted: Performing the Wild West” (435: “to both assert… performed it”), in Witschi ed., A 

Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, 427-442; Philip J. Deloria, Indians in 

Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), 52-108 (58: “deliberate confusion of fiction and 

action”); Darlis A. Miller, Captain Jack Crawford: Buckskin Poet, Scout, and Showman (Albuquerque, NM: 

University of New Mexico Press, 2012), 67-90; Sarah J. Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A 

History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (New York, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1986), 68-76; 

Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer,” 16-35; Wishart ed., Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians, entries 

“Hollywood Indians” (82-83), “Summit Springs, Battle of” (198). 



 

25 

 

other colonised peoples, responded enthusiastically to force, and repeated a variation of a 

400-year-old Euro-American myth: that Indians recognized Europeans as their equals, or 

superiors (see Chapters 1, 2). When the 5th cut them off and Cody slew their champion, the 

Cheyennes were “baffled and astounded, for once in a lifetime beaten at their own game.” 

When Cody appeared at Red Cloud agency the next day, King claimed that the Indians 

“followed” him “with awe-filled eyes.”25  

Though eyewitness Donald Brown said he saw Cody kill Yellow Hair, Cheyenne 

observers, as well as several dissenting American voices, said Yellow Hair was killed in a 

crossfire of untraceable bullets. A scout named Richard Stirk accused Cody of taking credit 

for another’s shot, and a counter-claim attributed Yellow Hair’s death to a Corporal 

Wilkinson. Charles King relocated the scene to make Cody’s killing of Yellow Hair 

unimpeachable, writing that Bill broke ranks to pursue “a superbly accoutred warrior” a half-

mile from the column, where he slew him in a rifle duel. King also effaced the identity of 

Yellow Hair by misidentifying him as a better-known Cheyenne chief named Yellow Hand, 

which he blamed in 1932 on mistranslation by the scout Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier. An 

excerpt from a letter Cody wrote from Red Cloud agency to his wife Louisa on 18 July, “I 

killed Yellow Hand a Cheyenne chief in a single-handed fight,” indicates that the single-

combat story and the misidentification of Yellow Hair were established as canonical almost 

immediately. After Cody’s discharge from service in late August these details were further 

embellished and reworked with Prentiss Ingraham into a new five-act play entitled The Red 

                                                 
25 Brown cited in Richard E. Jensen, ed., Voices of the American West, Volume 2: The Settler and Soldier 

Interviews of Eli S. Ricker, 1903-1919 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 360-61, 420 

n. 106; Captain Charles King, Campaigning with Crook (1891; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964 

reprint), 23-52; Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 67-90; Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 68-76; 

Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer,” 16-35; Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 332-36. 



 

26 

 

Right Hand; or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer, whose fifth and final act was the 

“Yellow Hand fight.” Alternated with performances of his previous season’s show, Life on 

the Border, audiences across America from October 1876 to July 1877 saw Cody and an 

actor in redface re-enact the “first scalp for Custer.” It also appeared in his 1879 

autobiography, with a comfortingly familiar illustration by Mark Twain collaborator Truman 

“True” Williams—an obvious copy, observes Paul Hedren, of Eastman’s The Death-

Whoop.26 

 On stage and in print, Cody and Prentiss Ingraham’s version of events was a Homeric 

duel. Under Merritt’s orders to rescue the couriers, Cody and fifteen picked men had slain 

three Cheyennes already and were fighting their second skirmish of the morning a half-mile 

from the column when a “handsomely decorated” Cheyenne “war chief” recognized Cody by 

reputation. As a teenage buffalo hunter in the 1850s, Lakotas at Fort Laramie had known 

Cody as Pahaska, “Long Hair”; now, supposedly, Cody’s Cheyenne opponent “sang out to 

me, in his own tongue: “I know you, Pa-he-haska; if you want to fight, come ahead and fight 

me.”” Ingraham and Cody’s version of events occurred in three stages. First, both combatants 

charged at each other and fired their rifles; Cody’s shot killed Yellow Hand’s horse, Yellow 

Hand’s shot went wide, but Cody’s horse stepped in a hole and spilled him to the ground. 

Both stood up and fired a second volley; Yellow Hand missed again, while Cody’s bullet 

“struck him in the breast.” As Yellow Hand “reeled and fell,” Cody drove his knife “to its 

                                                 
26 Letter to Louisa cited in Jeff Barnes, The Great Plains Guide to Buffalo Bill: Forts, Fights & Other Sites 

(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2014), 102-05; Stirk cited in Jensen ed., Voices of the American West, 

volume 2, 283, 420 n. 106; the Corporal Wilkinson theory and King’s identification of “Little Bat” as the weak 

link in the translation chain in Charles King, “My Friend, Buffalo Bill,” in Winners of the West 10, no. 1 

(December 1932), in Peter Cozzens, Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890: the Army and the Indian 

(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2001), 364-371; King, Campaigning with Crook, 23-52; Miller, Captain 

Jack Crawford, 67-90; Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 68-76; Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer,” 

16-35; Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 332-36. 



 

27 

 

hilt in his heart,” before “I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds.” As the soldiers 

rode up, he “swung the Indian chieftain’s top-knot and bonnet in the air, and shouted: “The 

first scalp for Custer.””27  

 To prop up this story, Cody brought Yellow Hair’s scalp, warbonnet, shield, six-

shooter, and other personal effects on tour with him. Initially displayed in theatre windows 

before shows, Cody removed them to a glass case kept stageside during performances after 

the New England press and clergy denounced (in King’s paraphrase) “the blood-stained 

trophies of his murderous and cowardly deeds.” Through what Jefferson Slagle calls 

“circular authentication,” the presence in the theatre of material objects from Warbonnet 

Creek, including the scalp of a once-living young man and the silk and velvet stage outfit 

Cody had donned just before the skirmish, served to imbue his retelling with a veneer of 

authenticity. Yet despite, or because of, the implausibilities, Cody’s legend resonated with 

such fans as Mark Twain, General Philip Sheridan and Theodore Roosevelt because it 

reflected what they wanted to believe about their nation’s unique combination of heroic 

violence and unbesmirched innocence: that three centuries of wars with indigenous peoples, 

like four years of internecine slaughter in the Civil War, were just bumps in the road of 

progress and had not negatively impacted the national psyche. The pairing of Buffalo Bill 

and Yellow Hand was, like the late-19th-century dyadic image of the cowboy and the Indian 

which Cody helped popularize, a comfortable myth of white savages subduing worse 

                                                 
27 The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, the famous hunter, scout and guide: An 

Autobiography (Frank E. Bliss: Hartford, Conn., 1879), 343-44, in Chapter 30, “A Return to the Plains,” 340-

53; Bobby Bridger, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West (Austin, TX: University of Texas 

Press, 2002) xi, 6, 87-91 (notes that Pahaska was supposedly the Lakotas’ name for Custer, also); Jefferson D. 

Slagle, “America Unscripted: Performing the Wild West,” 435 (“to both assert… performed it”), in Witschi ed., 

A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, 427-442. 



 

28 

 

savages, kitschy images described by Jodi Byrd as “synecdochal trophies of genocide that 

rewrite mastery into perpetual repetition.”28  

Borrowing a concept from psychoanalysis, Lorenzo Veracini notes that such self-

exculpatory stories function for settler-colonial societies as “screen memories,” proffering 

simplified versions of events to conceal a more complex and troubling reality. As noted 

above, the master-narrative justifying Anglo-American violence against Indians, Slotkin’s 

logic of massacre, held that the only way to save white families from the bereavement of 

Indians killing, mutilating, scalping and torturing white soldiers and civilians were 

retaliatory, or preemptive, massacres of Indians; the corollary, that Indians had families too, 

was unconvincingly explained away or subjected to a discreet silence by such mythologizers 

as Charles King and Ned Buntline. In 1929, Beaver Heart and Yellow Hair’s sister, Josie 

Yellowtanglehair, dismissed the story of a single combat and the heroic, lucrative “Buffalo 

Bill” image constructed atop it. Beaver Heart pointed out that Lakota and Cheyenne were 

mutually unintelligible languages, ruling out Yellow Hair’s supposed challenge to “Pa-he-

haska”: “Buffalo Bill, who ever he was, could not talk Cheyenne and Yellow Hair could not 

talk English or Sioux, and I do not know how these two people could talk to each other.” 

Josie Yellowtanglehair concurred that her brother was killed by “one of the bullets fired by 

the soldiers,” not a single combat. Beneath the prairie chivalry was an ugly truth: a month 

after Warbonnet Creek, Josie Yellowtanglehair and other family members had collected 

                                                 
28 Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 56-58; Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage, 77-100; Slagle, “America 

Unscripted: Performing the Wild West,” 427-442; Lawrence and Jewett on Cody’s famous fans in The Myth of 

the American Superhero, 49-64; “synecdochal trophies” in Jodi A. Byrd, “Follow the Typical Signs: Settler 

Sovereignty and Its Discontents,” in Settler Colonial Studies Vol. 4, No. 2 (2014), 151-54. 



 

29 

 

Yellow Hair’s bones from the battlefield, and “we could see by marks on his skull that he had 

been scalped.”29  

Introduction: “Who scalped who?” Problems, questions, and historiography 

 More than three centuries before Custer, Cody, Beaver Heart and Yellow Hair, 

soldiers, missionaries, diplomats and explorers of 16th and 17th-century Europe noted that 

Indian warriors in North America, from the deserts of northern Mexico to the Gulf of St. 

Lawrence, brought enemies’ scalps back to their villages as trophies or proofs of victory. 

While not an exact analogy, the contemporary European practice of publicly displaying the 

severed heads of traitors, rebels, and bandits offered a familiar cross-cultural parallel (see 

Chapter 2). As Spain, France, Britain and the Netherlands’ North American colonies formed 

trading and military alliances with indigenous peoples, Indians and Europeans came to 

understand that their definitions of warfare and licit violence had broad commensurabilities, 

but also differences that each party found peculiar or disturbing. In some cases, these 

differences could be overlooked: joint expeditions of Europeans and Indian allies against 

indigenous third parties or rival European-Indian coalitions were the norm in North 

American warfare until well into the 19th century. To this end, early modern Indians and 

Europeans exchanged captive Indian and European enemies and dismembered enemy body 

parts, such as hands, feet, heads, and scalps, through what Andrew Lipman describes as 

“pidgin communications,” which “conveyed simple messages about trust and power” but 

“obscured many secondary meanings.”30  

                                                 
29 Beaver Heart and Josie Tangleyellowhair in Greene ed., Lakota and Cheyenne, 80-84; Lorenzo Veracini, 

Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 75-94 (“screen memory” 86-90); 

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 112-14. 
30 Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudjik, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of 

Mesoamerica (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North 



 

30 

 

The idea that certain enemies could be enslaved under certain circumstances was not 

new to early modern Europeans or Native Americans, notes Alan Gallay, but the slave trades 

which arose from the encounter “[were] an entirely new enterprise” to both. Indian warriors 

continued to seek martial glory through such precontact channels as taking scalps and 

prisoners, adopting captives into their villages, and gifting their allies with enslaved mutual 

enemies, while the contact-period arms race necessitated trading other captives to European 

allies for firearms, horses, and trade goods. In the Spanish, French, and British colonies, 

these slave trades compensated for chronic labour shortages and offered material and status 

benefits for Euro-American slaveowners, although colonial laws prohibiting or regulating the 

enslavement of Indians required disguising slavery as indentured servitude or hard-labour 

sentences. Similarly, wartime rewards for Indian body parts, as when the governor of Nueva 

Vizcaya (today’s Mexican states of Chihuahua and Durango) offered trade goods for the 

heads of Tepehuanes in 1617 in the context of the Tepehuán revolt (1616-20), overlaid new 

material and commercial considerations onto indigenous warfare’s earlier, non-commercial 

motives. But 16th- and 17th-century Spanish wars against, and alliances with, indigenous 

peoples who scalped enemies in northern Mexico and the American Southwest did not 

automatically produce Hispanic scalp bounties. Until late in the 19th century, authorities in 

Spanish America and Brazil suppressed revolts by Ibero-Americans, mestizos and Indians by 

decapitating rebels and displaying their heads; in the case of Indians, bounties on paired ears 

                                                 
America (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Colin G. Calloway ed., Dawnland Encounters: 

Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 

1991) 1-24, 133-176; Colin G. Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial 

Encounters in Scotland and America (Oxford University Press, 2008), 88-116; Thomas W. Dudley, Wolves for 

the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-90 (Lincoln and London: 

University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Andrew Lipman, “ ‘A Meanes to Knitt Them Togeather’: The Exchange 

of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” in The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan. 2008), 3-

28 (5: “pidgin communications”). 



 

31 

 

coexisted with Indian slavery across Latin America. In Hispanic North America, scalp 

bounties only appeared with large-scale American migration in the later 19th century, as 

Anglo-American mercenaries were hired in Mexico in the 1840s and vigilantes and militias 

appeared in 1850s California, Arizona, and New Mexico following annexation by the United 

States (see Chapter 6).31 

 In his study of New France’s relations with indigenous peoples in the continental 

interior between the late 17th and early 19th centuries, Richard White proposed that 

“accommodation and common meaning” were created through “a process of creative, and 

often expedient, misunderstandings.” As the French “could neither dictate to Indians nor 

ignore them,” and vice versa, both parties deployed a shared set of protocols, symbols, ritual 

phrases, and images, reinterpreting them per the needs of the moment and “appealing to what 

                                                 
31 Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston and 

New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English 

Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (Yale University Press, 2002), 1-20 (8: the slave trade as “entirely 

new enterprise”); Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and 

Clark (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 205, 313-65; Brett Rushforth, Bonds of 

Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina 

Press, 2012); Brett Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance,” 54, in The William and 

Mary Quarterly Third Series, Vol. 63, No. 1 (January 2006), 53-80; Brett Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer 

You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,”782 n. 13, in The William and Mary Quarterly vol. 60, no. 

4 (October 2003), 777-808; William A. Starna and Ralph Watkins, “Northern Iroquoian Slavery,” in 

Ethnohistory Vol. 38, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), 34-57; Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois 

Experience,” in The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 40, No. 4 (1983), 528-559; Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, “A 

Different Look at Native American Depopulation: Comanche Raiding, Captive Taking, and Population 

Decline” in Ethnohistory Volume 61, No. 3 (Summer 2014), 391-418; Smith, Borderlander, 270 n. 20, calls the 

Nueva Vizcaya bounty the first of its kind in North America, and lists the price of a Tepehuán head as four 

hatchets, four knives, four hoes, four machetes, and a coarse garment; as will be noted in subsequent chapters, 

allied Indians were often paid in trade goods rather than cash. Regarding ears, David Weber cites Ralph Smith 

(“in an article whose scope is larger than its title suggests”) that the bandeirantes, the 17th-century slave traders 

and explorers of interior Brazil, cut off Indians’ ears, as was done in the Viceroyalty of New Granada 

(northwestern South America) in the 18th century. Mark Santiago notes an account of an English merchant 

captain in North Africa during the Spanish-Algerian War in 1732: during dinner with the officers, they were 

notified of a victory over Ottoman forces near Oran by being presented with “two plates full of Turks ears 

instead of plates of cherries.” Whether this suggests a medieval Iberian origin for ear bounties in Latin America 

is outside the scope of this thesis. Ralph A. Smith, “The Spanish ‘Piece’ Policy in West Texas,” in West Texas 

Historical Association Year Book 68 (1992), 7-24, cited in David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their 

Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 364 n. 247; 

Smith, Borderlander; Mark Santiago, The Jar of Severed Hands: Spanish Deportation of Apache Prisoners of 

War, 1770-1810 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 81-97 (84-85: “Turks ears”). 



 

32 

 

they perceive[d] to be the values and practices” of the other. When Anglo-American settlers 

succeeded the French in the continental interior following the Seven Years’ War, a century 

and a half of negotiated indigenous and European coexistence was replaced by tension and 

periodic violence. Often in express defiance of British government policy, pre-Revolutionary 

Anglo-American vigilantes “adopted what they regarded as Indian means – massacre and 

torture – to keep the boundaries between Algonquian and white societies intact.” Joyce 

Chaplin concurs, describing “continual” warfare between British colonists and Algonquians 

in Virginia and New England as the “common mode of interaction” from the end of the 16th 

century until the Pequot War (1636-38). In White’s “middle ground,” French and Indians 

“had made an uneasy bargain to suspend some of their cultural differences […] to avoid self-

defeating violence.” By contrast, notes Chaplin, British colonists aspired to “be like the 

enemy but not as him,” and styled themselves as “counterparts of Indians, not so as to 

express sympathy with them, […] but to fight and kill them.”32 

 As indicated by the appearance of a vaunting Indian warrior lifting his enemy’s scalp 

on the cartouche of Guillaume Delisle’s 1703 map of Canada, by the turn of the 18th century 

scalping served as visual and symbolic shorthand for North America’s primitive exoticism in 

European art, culture, and intellectual life, parallel to 16th-century images of Brazilian 

cannibalism and Mexican human sacrifice. But what John Grenier identifies as a distinct 

Anglo-American way of war, centered around the institutions of “extirpative war, ranging, 

                                                 
32 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 

(Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ix-x (“creative… misunderstandings,” 387-95 (391: 

“massacre and torture”); “Introduction,” Susan Sleeper-Smith, 3-8; Richard White, “Creative 

Misunderstandings and New Understandings,” 9-14, Philip J. Deloria, “What is the Middle Ground, Anyway?” 

15-22, Catherine Desbarats, “Following the Middle Ground,” 81-96, in William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 

LXIII, No. 1 (January 2006), “Forum: The Middle Ground Revisited”; Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: 

Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge and London: 

Harvard University Press, 2001), 79-115. 



 

33 

 

and scalp hunting,” had also come into existence by the turn of the century, sprung from 

Britain’s colonial policies of mass migration and perpetual land wars to annex more 

indigenous lands and resources. By the turn of the 18th century Britain possessed the most 

densely-populated, urbanized colonies in North America, which gave commercial and 

economic strength but military liability: Anglo-American colonists were mostly town-

dwelling craftsmen and farmers with little or no military experience beyond militia drill, 

poorly prepared by training or lifestyle to fight wars with Indian neighbours. In the Pequot 

War (1636-38), Kieft’s War (1640-45), and King Philip’s War (1675-76), outmatched British 

(or, in the case of Kieft’s War, Dutch) colonists won by attrition, combining the scorched-

earth campaigns of European total war with the mourning-war system of Indian allies by 

paying rewards for enemies’ heads, hands, feet, scalps, and prisoners. The first true scalp 

bounty, in which money was offered explicitly and solely for scalps, appeared in July 1689, 

the first year of King William’s War (1689-97), when Massachusetts authorities declared 

soldiers would receive £8 from the public treasury for every Indian scalp redeemed, and 

“whatever Indian plunder falls into their hands.” New France followed suit: according to the 

September 1688 deposition of an indigenous New England man named Magsigpen or 

Graypoole, New France’s Governor-General Denonville had already offered bounties to 

allied Indians for the scalps of British colonists and their Mohawk allies, which his successor 

Frontenac followed in 1691 with bounties for British prisoners.33 

                                                 
33 John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 (Cambridge 

University Press, 2005), esp. 1-52; Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics 

among the New England Indians (Lanham, New York, London: Madison Books, 1991); Steele, Warpaths; Guy 

Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast 

(Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); on cartography and Guillaume Delisle, see 

Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage: and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas 

(Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1997 [1984]), 276-77, and Susi Colin, “Woodcutters and Cannibals: 

Brazilian Indians as seen on early maps,” in Hans Wolff ed., America: Early Maps of the New World (Munich: 



 

34 

 

 From the dawn of the 18th century until the end of the 19th, Anglo-American colonists 

prosecuted wars of total destruction against Indians with a fervor that perturbed Spanish, 

French, and many Anglo-American observers. Both French and British authorities offered 

scalp bounties in wartime, but British settlers paired these with massacres and acts of ethnic 

cleansing that aimed to drive indigenous peoples beyond the western horizon. Spanish, 

French, and British colonies all traded in Indian slaves, but Anglo-Americans rendered even 

Indian slave labour superfluous by ramping up the scale of the African slave trade following 

the Yamasee War (1715-17). Anglo-American settlers antagonized allied and enemy Indians 

alike through squatting, poaching, robbery, assault, and crooked land deals, and genocidal 

ideation was openly voiced at all levels of public discourse, a phenomenon which increased 

after the American Revolution and became unofficial state policy in the Jacksonian period. 

Henry Knox, U.S. Secretary of War since 1786, made the “melancholy reflection” on 

retirement in 1794 “that our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian 

nations than […] the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”34 

How and why it was that Euro-Americans in the late-19th-century United States could 

vilify Indians for scalping their enemies, while celebrating whites who scalped Indians, could 

be a touchy subject, particularly if the corollary question, of whether Europeans who scalped 

Indians had forfeited their presumed moral high ground, was raised. Luther Roby, the editor 

of an 1831 history of the Seven Years’ War, is typical in blaming the Indians to exonerate 

                                                 
Prestel, 1992), 175-181; “Examination of Magsigpen, An Indian,” in John Romeyn Brodhead, Documents 

Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York; Procured in England, Holland and France, Vol. III 

(Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1858), 71-72. 
34 Henry Knox cited in Michael D. Green, 482-83, in “The Expansion of European Colonization to the 

Mississippi Valley, 1780-1880,” in Bruce Trigger ed., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the 

Americas volume 1: North America, Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 461-538; Alan Gallay 

identifies the end of the Yamasee War as “the birth of the Old South” (338) in The Indian Slave Trade, 315-44. 



 

35 

 

New England scalp hunters: if New Englanders of the era “sometimes deviated from the 

usages of civilized warfare, in making use of the scalping knife, the barbarity of the enemy, 

the law of retaliation, and the emergency of the time must be their apology,” stated Roby’s 

foreword. “They were compelled to fight the Indians upon their own terms.” Another theory 

suggested European settlers, in acclimating to the Americas’ natural and human environment, 

had adopted scalping as inevitably as tobacco, pumpkins, and indigenous loanwords. “The 

wilderness masters the colonist,” stated Frederick Jackson Turner, drawing an 

environmental-determinist link between American wilderness and human savagery in his 

address to the American Historical Association at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893: 

“Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts 

the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.”35 

Earlier in the century, travellers and ethnographers on both sides of the Atlantic had 

been reconsidering scalping, speculating on its changes over time under European influence 

and per universalizing stadial theories of “primitive” warfare. Inevitably, George Catlin’s 

description of pre- and post-contact Plains Indian warfare and weaponry in an 1832 letter 

from the Upper Missouri discussed scalping. With a tinge of the 19th century’s endemic 

“vanishing Indian” myth, Catlin began by separating “authentic” indigenous weaponry made 

of wood, stone, and bone, and the mass-produced steel knives and axeheads “carried into the 

Indian country by thousands and tens of thousands, and sold at an enormous price.” Such 

were diabolical additions to Plains warfare, as the Indian’s “untutored mind […] has not been 

                                                 
35 Frederick Jackson Turner, 59 (“takes the scalp”) in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 

59-81, in Martin Ridge ed., History, Frontier, and Section: Three Essays from Frederick Jackson Turner 

(Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); Roby cited in Richard Slotkin, Regeneration 

Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600 – 1860 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan 

University Press, 1973), 4. 



 

36 

 

ingenious enough to design or execute anything so savage or destructive as these civilized 

refinements on Indian barbarity.” Catlin’s account becomes more interesting as he unravels 

European claims to moral superiority by outlining the ironies of their involvement and 

complicity in ‘savage’ warfare. The much-feared “scalping knife,” for instance, was simply a 

one-edged butcher knife, manufactured for “sixpence” in England, with “the impress of 

G.R.” [Georgius Rex] on the blade, “and sold to the poor Indian in these wild regions for a 

horse.” Scalping he assigned a functional purpose as confirming enemy slain in preliterate 

communities “where it is as lawful and as glorious to slay an enemy in battle, as it is in 

Christian communities.” He then attempted, inconsistently, to explain away the European 

nightmare images of scalping by claiming that Indians, by and large, only scalped live 

enemies after assuming they were dead—undercut by his illustrations of a dying warrior on 

hand and knees, with an arrow in his side and his scalplock removed, while his victorious 

enemy looms over him with his scalplock in his hand, adjacent to a drawing of a white man 

with a massive patch of scar tissue in the middle of his hairline. In passages heavily 

influenced by Montaigne, Catlin wrote that while he considered scalping “a disgusting 

custom,” an Indian’s scalping of a slain enemy was a lesser indignity to a corpse than many 

of those performed by Europeans, while scalping of a living person, who could survive the 

ordeal, was not necessarily as cruel as killing them. He then fired the last salvo by reminding 

his readers that the British and American governments, during the War of 1812 and the 

Revolutionary War, had both offered and paid scalp bounties to “thousands of their “red 

children” […] for every “scalp” of a “red” or a “blue coat” they could bring in!”36  

                                                 
36 George Catlin, “Letter No. 29: Mouth of Teton River, Upper Missouri,” in Letters and notes on the manners, 

customs, and condition of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (London, 1841 [1892 reprint]), 232-40. Dippie, 

The Vanishing American, 3-78, and on Catlin, 25-31; see also Kathryn S. Hight, “ “Doomed to Perish”: George 

Catlin’s Depictions of the Mandan,” in Art Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Summer 1990), 119-124; The “untutored 



 

37 

 

Other authors noted that a surprisingly high number of Europeans in the New World 

had scalped Indians, or mutilated other Europeans in fashions thought outré, and wondered 

what this said about European prehistory. “It is generally, but falsely, supposed that only 

Americans scalp,” declared the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton in a short 1864 

monograph which made provocative and unverifiable claims; “the practice is Asiatic, 

European, and African.” He was on safe ground when citing Herodotus on the Scythians, a 

people of ancient Ukraine and southern Russia described in Greek and Roman ethnography 

as scalping enemies for trophies; cross-cultural comparisons between indigenous North 

Americans and the ancient Scythians had been made since the contact period (see Chapter 1). 

Burton’s evidence for Africa and Europe was much shakier: he reported that a Scottish 

traveller had seen Africans carrying dried enemies’ scalps in the 1840s, an assertion attested 

in no other source but Burton’s 1864 article, and identified scalping in the annals of the 

Franks and Anglo-Saxons and in the Visigothic law codes of the 7th to 9th centuries, not 

mainstream consensus among classicists or medievalists. Among Native Americans, said 

Burton, the “solemn rite of scalping” had declined over time as trade had replaced earlier 

blades of flint, obsidian, “or other hard stone” with iron and steel; in “the laxity of modern 

days,” warriors had abandoned the “humane custom” of an earlier period when “men 

scrupulously awaited the wounded man’s death” before scalping him.37  

                                                 
mind” is a reference to an oft-quoted snatch of verse from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1734), Epistle I, 

Chapter 3, verses 99-100: “Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor’d mind / Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the 

wind”—in The Works of Alexander Pope (Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995), 193. Nineteenth-century 

frontiersmen often sarcastically cited the poem to derogatorily refer to Indians, individually or collectively, as 

“Lo”—see Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 172.  
37 Richard F. Burton, “Notes on Scalping,” in The Anthropological Review Vol. 2, No. 4 (February 1864), 49-

52. In a footnote to his 1885 multi-volume translation of The Arabian Nights he described certain men’s topknot 

or sidelock haircuts in the Near East as “a precaution lest the decapitated Moslem’s mouth be defiled by an 

impure hand; and thus it would resemble the chivalry-lock by which the Redskin brave (and even the “cowboy” 

of better times) facilitated the removal of his own scalp.” Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights 

and a Night, volume 1 (The Burton Club: United States, 1885), 308 n. 3. Scalping in Africa he attributes to a 



 

38 

 

The idea that European weaponry had eroded earlier moral or cultural restrictions on 

scalping was the central premise of Georg Friederici’s 1906 doctoral dissertation, Skalpieren 

und ähnliche Kriegsgebräuche in Amerika (“Scalping and Similar Warfare Customs in 

America”). From contact-period texts and comparison with Mesoamerican and South 

American archaeology and ethnography, Friederici theorized that in the precontact period 

entire heads had been the preferred trophy of war across the Americas, with scalping as a 

regional variation limited to North America’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts. He proposed that the 

casualties of indigenous warfare increased as Spanish, French, Dutch and English colonists 

introduced steel knives, axes, and firearms in the 16th and 17th centuries, replacing less-

efficient weapons of stone, shell, and wood; then, when these colonies began offering 

bounties for scalps and heads to encourage indigenous allies in intercolonial wars, indigenous 

warparties weighed down by guns and ammunition phased out decapitation for scalping. 

                                                 
‘Mr Duncan’ [John Duncan] Travels in Western Africa in 1845 and 1846; a digitized copy of volume 2 

(London: Richard Bentley, 1847) is available, but contains no reference to scalping. Axtell and Sturtevant noted 

in 1980 that “Georg Friederici reported that his extensive search for Burton's references – other than Herodotus 

– was fruitless. (Skalpieren und ähnliche Kriegsgebräuche in Amerika [Braunschweig, 1906], 134).” –James 

Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?” 452 n. 1, in The William 

and Mary Quarterly third series, vol. 37, no. 3 (July 1980), 451-472. Burton’s attribution of scalping to the 

Germanic tribes in the early middle ages was a citation from Abbé Emmanuel H. D. Domenech, Seven Years’ 

Residence in the Great Deserts of North America, Volume 2 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and 

Roberts, 1860), 356-58: “It appears also that the decalvare of the ancient Germans is nothing other than the 

operation of the scalp mentioned in the laws of the Visigoths: Capillos et cutem detrahere. According to the 

Annals of Flude, the Franks still scalped about the year 879, and the Anglo-Saxons also.” The general 

consensus of medievalists is that the decalvatio of the 7th century Visigothic code, in its conjunction of being 

meted out with 100 lashes and its explicit intent to humiliate, probably means public shaming by shaving of the 

head rather than scalping, as long hair was seen among Germanic peoples as a sign of individual free status and 

high rank for members of a royal family—see Floyd Seyward Lear, “The Public Law of the Visigothic Code,” 

in Speculum, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jan., 1951), 1-23, 6 n.34, 15-16; E.A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (Oxford: At 

the Clarendon Press, 1969), 41, 104 n. 1; Peter Heather ed., The Visigoths from the Migration Period to the 

Seventh Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge: the Boydell Press, 1999), 378 n. 9, “Discussion” 

390-99. Further, the meticulous lists of fines for injuries to specific body parts in other contemporary Germanic 

law codes do not list the scalp itself as a body part liable to injury, while distinctions were drawn between 

seizure of the hair, injuries which expose the bone of the head, and injuries which expose the brain—see Lisi 

Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 71-73, 82, 99-102, 105; 

Theodore J. Rivers, trans. and ed., Laws of the Alamans and Bavarians (University of Pennsylvania Press, 

1977), 47-48, 52, 85-86, 130-39. 



 

39 

 

Though 20th century archaeology and ethnology indicate that artistic representations and 

osteological evidence of scalping across continental North America both predate the contact 

period by centuries, and Friederici overstates the impact of European scalp-bounty 

declarations on indigenous warfare, he appears to have been the first theorist to seriously 

consider indigenous North American warfare, and specifically scalping, as adaptive over 

time both in the contact and pre-contact period. Friederici also observed that European 

colonists went beyond simply scalping indigenous enemies, and listed documented cases 

from the Seven Years’ War to the War of 1812 where British colonists made mementoes of 

slain indigenous men’s skin, and how New Englanders and French-Canadians in the Seven 

Years’ War had flayed and scalped each other’s corpses. Why Euro-Americans should have 

scalped or skinned indigenous enemies in the first place, and why the practice was most 

prevalent in the British colonies, went unexamined.38 

In 1910 George Bird Grinnell, an anthropologist and ethnographer of the Pawnees, 

Cheyennes and Blackfoot Confederacy, subtly observed in his article “Coup and Scalp 

Among the Plains Indians” that scalping had been much less important among 19th century 

Plains Indians than Europeans imagined: “To scalp an enemy was not an important feat and 

in no sense especially creditable.” Enemy bodies were often unscalped, and the scalp itself 

                                                 
38 Georg Friederici, “Scalping in America,” from the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (1906), 423-

439; Anastasia M. Griffin ed., trans., “Georg Friederici’s Scalping and Similar Warfare Customs in America 

with a Critical Introduction,” M.A. thesis, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Studies, 

University of Colorado at Boulder (Proquest: UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2008). On the warfare practices of 

the contact period as continuations of warfare as discerned in the archaeological record, see Linda Cordell, 

“Indigenous Farmers,” 201-266, and Bruce Smith, “Agricultural Chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands,” 267-

324, in Bruce Trigger ed., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas volume 1: North 

America, Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert P. Mensforth, “Warfare and Trophy Taking in the 

Archaic Period,” in Olaf H. Prufer, Sara E. Pedde, and Richard S. Meindl eds., Archaic Transitions in Ohio & 

Kentucky Prehistory (Kent & London: The Kent State University Press, 2001), 110-138; Richard J. Chacon and 

Rubén G. Mendoza eds., North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence (Tucson, AZ: University of 

Arizona press, 2007); Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye eds., The Taking and Displaying of Human Body 

Parts as Trophies by Amerindians (New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2007).  



 

40 

 

was merely “a trophy, something to show, something to dance over—a good thing but of no 

great importance”; neither killing nor scalping an enemy “was regarded as an especially 

creditable act.” By contrast, counting coup, “to touch the enemy with something held in the 

hand, with the bare hand, or with any part of the body,” endowed the man or boy responsible 

with “the greatest credit,” especially to strike or touch an unhurt, living enemy this way “and 

to leave him alive,” which was “frequently done.” Grinnell noted that the rush for first coup, 

“the fact that, when an enemy was killed or wounded, brave Indians rushed toward him,” was 

thus mistaken by white observers as a race for the scalp, though “As a matter of fact they 

cared little or nothing for the scalp but very much for the credit of touching the fallen man. 

Most people are untrustworthy observers,” he noted acidly, “and draw inferences from their 

preconceived notions, rather than from what actually takes place.”39 

Grinnell’s true target in “Coup and Scalp” was his readers’ preconceived notions that 

Plains Indians were either unimaginative holdovers from the Stone Age or cultureless hordes 

dedicated to violence. Having neatly sidestepped the tiresome, repetitive arguments about 

scalping, Grinnell supplanted it with a lively description of the complex rules, regulations, 

and institutions of coup warfare as practiced by Cheyennes, Arapahos, and other Plains 

peoples, depicted as human beings seeking personal recognition through a system designed 

to weed out liars and falsifiers and verify combat achievements. He noted the possibilities for 

heated arguments on who had struck the first coup, how many coups were permissible on a 

single enemy, and the mechanisms for adjudicating these disputes by panels of fellow 

warriors and holy men. Later on, reminding his reader that Indian dances were carefully-

                                                 
39 George Bird Grinnell, “Coup and Scalp Among the Plains Indians,” in American Anthropologist Vol. 12, No. 

2 (Apr. - Jun., 1910), pp. 296-310 (“untrustworthy observers” 303). 



 

41 

 

delineated ceremonies, “not merely haphazard jumpings up and down and posturings,” he 

leads us into a labyrinthine description of how Cheyenne scalp dances quickly turned to 

courtship: the “sweethearts’ dance,” the “matchmaking dance,” the “slippery dance,” the 

“galloping buffalo-bull dance.” Wryly, he ostensibly returned to his theme by concluding 

“These were all scalp dances.”40 

A counter-narrative, which James Axtell and William Sturtevant place as early as 

1820, conflated the European offering of cash for scalps with a European invention, or 

introduction, of scalping to the continent. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, when 

the once-militarily-powerful Six Nations had been scattered and restricted to reservations by 

the United States and abandoned by former allies in France and Britain, Cornplanter, a 

Seneca chief and the brother of the Longhouse prophet Handsome Lake, publicly burned his 

British military uniform and destroyed his officers’ regalia and medals; a series of religious 

visions had informed Cornplanter that war was antithetical to an indigenous way of life. 

There had been “no wars or fighting” in North America, he announced, before the arrival of 

Europeans such as the French, who “offered to furnish us with instruments of every kind and 

sharp knives to take the skins off their [enemies’] heads.” Cornplanter’s proposal that 

indigenous societies had been, or were, less warlike or violent than Europeans (taken by 

Cornplanter to an admittedly ahistorical extreme), and the repudiation of Europeans as fair-

weather friends who would turn on indigenous allies when convenient, were the core 

elements of the European-invention-of-scalping counter-narrative, inverting Europeans’ 

claims to moral superiority. In Chicago in 1879, when Omaha activist Susette La Flesche 

denounced a recent large-scale killing of Utes in Colorado by federal troops, a journalist 

                                                 
40 Grinnell, “Coup and Scalp Among the Plains Indians,” 296-310. 



 

42 

 

interjected “But you are more barbarous in war than we,” citing “acts of atrocity upon 

captives and the bodies of the dead.” “Scalping, you mean, I suppose,” replied La Flesche, 

citing a 1755 Massachusetts scalp bounty against the Penobscots in her rebuttal “Don’t you 

know that the white man taught Indians that?”41 

Revisionists aimed to directly challenge Euro-Americans’ traditional narratives of 

heroism and martyrdom at the hands of savages, and drew connections between the stock 

images of vicious, animal-like Indians and the cash paid out for the pelts of animals and the 

scalps of human beings. In 1969, the Lakota theologian and activist Vine Deloria Jr. cited the 

1755 Penobscot scalp bounty to this effect: once Indians had been downgraded in the 

colonists’ imagination from pre-Lapsarian children of nature to a “picturesque species of 

wildlife, […] Scalping, introduced prior to the French and Indian War by the English,” 

confirmed “that Indians were wild animals to be hunted and skinned.” Deloria also noted the 

structural limitations of indigenous warfare to challenge the savage-war myth of genocidal 

Indians: members of war parties had to supply their own food and followed proven leaders as 

volunteers, rather than being drafted or fighting for wages; furthermore, they fought to 

protect game populations and for “courageous exploits,” not to take territory “which they 

could not settle,” which was “inconceivable” to most Indians. “Killing others simply to rid 

the land of them,” i.e., ethnic cleansing and genocide, “was even more inconceivable,” 

                                                 
41 Axtell and Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut,” 451-53; James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: the Cultural 

Origins of North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 259-333; On religious revivalism among 

the Six Nations and Ohio Valley peoples in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, see Green, 492-94, in “The 

Expansion of European Colonization to the Mississippi Valley, 1780-1880”; James R. Lewis and Ellen 

Dobrowolski, “Native American Prophet Religions,” in James R. Lewis and Inga B. Tøllefsen eds., The Oxford 

Handbook of New Religious Movements Volume II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016),  495-515. 



 

43 

 

meaning Europeans’ and Americans’ ‘civilized’ warfare was “the deadly antithesis of the 

Indian’s.”42 

The counternarrative that Europeans had, or could have, invented scalping itself, not 

just scalp bounties, gained ground in the aftermath of the termination era in the United States 

and Canada, and as opposition to the Vietnam War reached its zenith. This was not 

coincidence. By the 1960s, European and North American claims to be the most moral, 

benevolent societies in history were looking particularly shaky after two world wars; 

industrialized mass murders in the heart of Europe of such scope that the neologism genocide 

was required to explain them; the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 

the annual increase in the world-destroying power of Western and Soviet nuclear arsenals; 

brutal colonial counterinsurgencies in Algeria, Korea, and Indochina; and the violent 

suppression of civil rights movements in the United States and Canada. In North America, 

indigenous peoples had just weathered 20 years of attempts to legally dismantle their hold on 

                                                 
42 Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (London: Collier-MacMillan Ltd., 1969), 

6-7 (scalp bounties), 204-05. Other authors of the late 1960s endorsed the revisionist viewpoint, or at least 

strongly suggested it. In The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), “literary critic and moralist” Leslie 

Fiedler wrote scalping “seems not to have been an Indian custom at all until the White Man began offering 

bounties for slain enemies.” In that same year Peter Farb, an environmental writer, singled out New Netherland 

governor Willem Kieft as the prime suspect for spreading scalp bounties, though waffling on whether he had 

invented them: “whatever its exact origins, there is no doubt that [the spread of] scalp-taking… was due to the 

barbarity of White men rather than the barbarity of Red men”—Fiedler and Farb cited in Axtell and Sturtevant, 

“The Unkindest Cut,” 452. In 1970, Dee Brown (in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the 

American West (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1973 [1970]) very strongly insinuated that the Spanish had introduced 

scalping to the American Southwest, in passages redolent of the Black Legend of the Spanish as uniquely cruel 

and medieval: “On August 18 the general decided to “stimulate the zeal” of his troops by posting prize money 

for captured Navaho livestock. […] As the soldiers’ pay was less than twenty dollars per month, the bounty 

offer did stimulate them, and some of the men extended it to the few Navahos they were able to kill. To prove 

their soldierly abilities, they began cutting off the knot of hair fastened by a red string which the Navahos wore 

on their heads. The Navahos could not believe that Kit Carson [the chief scout] condoned scalping, which they 

considered a barbaric custom introduced by the Spaniards. (The Europeans may or may not have introduced 

scalping to the New World, but the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English colonists made the custom popular by 

offering bounties for scalps of their respective enemies.)” (11) He followed by describing the Apaches as 

“veterans of 250 years of guerrilla warfare with the Spaniards, who taught them the finer arts of torture and 

mutilation but never subdued them.” (24-25) 



 

44 

 

the few lands and resources they had left, and they only had to turn on the nightly news to 

watch Southeast Asia become collateral damage as an anticolonial faction waged 

asymmetrical war against the industrial power of the United States – a situation not unlike 

theirs in the previous century. The overall message indigenous people were trying to send is 

succinctly expressed by Mi’kmaw historian Daniel Paul’s history of the Mi’kmaq, from 

Governor Cornwallis’ mid-18th-century scalp bounties against them to residential schools: 

We Were Not the Savages. The revisionists aimed to challenge the self-justifying traditional 

narratives of savage war: the hubris-nemesis sequence of Indian warriors’ cruelties and 

Indian-hunters’ revenge; the redrawing of all Indian victories as horrible massacres of whites; 

and white massacres of Indians as regrettable exceptions or heroic battles—for instance, 

General Nelson Miles’ description of the Wounded Knee Massacre (29 December, 1890), in 

which panicked soldiers opened fire upon a crowd of Sioux while disarming them, as a 

“battle” against “a hungry, wild, mad horde of savages,” for which he handed out eighteen 

Congressional Medals of Honor. At the center of Indian-war horror stories were the perfect 

victimhood of colonists and a scenario of reverse-colonialism: that the little Europes that 

migrants and refugees had created in the New World, even to the level of the nuclear family, 

would be ripped apart and destroyed by savage Indians. By invoking this nightmare, 

Europeans, particularly Anglo-Americans, had sanctified the for-profit destruction of 

indigenous communities and families through scalp bounties, slave trading, and land 

speculation.43 

                                                 
43 Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages: Collision between European and Native American Civilizations, 

third edition (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2006); Axtell and Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who 

Invented Scalping?”; General Miles’ “hungry, wild, mad horde of savages” were supposedly planning, via the 

Ghost Dance, ““a more comprehensive plot than anything ever inspired by the prophet Tecumseh”—cited in 

Hixson, “Policing the Past: Indian Removal and Genocide Studies,” 442. 



 

45 

 

But the European-invention-of-scalping argument was a weak vessel for this 

message. Firstly, simply inverting the iconography of savage war by replacing villainous 

Indian warriors with depraved white scalp-hunters did not challenge the traditional belief that 

scalping, like cannibalism and human sacrifice, was a cultural or personal mark of Cain for 

either indigenous warriors, or white criminals and frontier deviants (lumped together in 

lateral comparisons in traditional Winning-of-the-West narratives). As in post-structuralist 

revisionist arguments which uncritically conflate human sacrifice and anthropophagy with 

their polemical, colonial uses to erroneously reduce these entirely to European fictions (cf. 

William Arens’ 1979 salvo The Man-Eating Myth), the idea that European definitions of 

violence are the universal moral standard is unintentionally reified, and indigenous peoples’ 

“entitlement to have minds of their own,” in Reay Tannahill’s words, is rejected. Which 

brings us to the second problem: mainstream Western discourse on indigeneity, such as the 

Plains Indian imagery appropriated wholesale by the 1960s counterculture, was and is still 

dominated by fantasies of Indians as the West’s ultimate outsiders—as primordial, “Stone 

Age” peoples who lack historical agency. Taken at face value, the European-invention-of-

scalping narrative reifies Enlightenment historicism by reducing them to collision victims of 

a world history driven by Westerners.44 

                                                 
44 José Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New 

Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 31-83, 

on cannibalism (“the Indians embody European values” 63, 78-80); see also Bettina E. Schmidt, ““The 

Interpretation of Violent Worldviews: Cannibalism and other violent images of the Caribbean,” in Bettina E. 

Schmidt and Ingo W. Schröder eds., Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (Routledge: London and New York, 

2001), 76-96; Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, “Conclusions,” in Chacon and Dye, Taking and 

Displaying, 630-654; Chacon and Mendoza, “Ethical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding Indigenous 

Wafare and Violence in North America,” in North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence 222-32; 

Donald W. Forsyth, “Three Cheers for Hans Staden: the Case for Brazilian Cannibalism,” in Ethnohistory Vol. 

32, No. 1 (Winter), 1985, pp. 17-36; Laurence R. Goldman, “From Pot to Polemic: Uses and Abuses of 

Cannibalism,” 1-26, Don Gardner, “Anthropophagy, Myth, and the Subtle Ways of Ethnocentrism,” 27-50, and 

Michael Pickering, “Consuming Doubts: What Some People Ate? Or What Some People Swallowed?” 51-74, 

in Laurence R. Goldman ed., The Anthropology of Cannibalism (Westport, CN: Bergin & Garvey, 1999); 



 

46 

 

Westerners’ arguments about whether indigenous people past and present were either 

victims or villains have very real consequences for the living indigenous people invoked in 

these solipsistic spats. As Devon Mihesuah observes, appearances in the public arena of 

ostensibly well-meaning cultural productions, which simply recycle stereotypes, invariably 

prompt responses by reactionaries who proffer archaic stories of Indian criminality and 

dysfunction as “the truth”: in response to 1991’s revisionist Western Dances with Wolves, for 

instance, old Lakota horror stories were trotted out en masse by those who “feel the need to 

educate us about the “real” Lakotas.” The challenge for 21st century indigenous politics, note 

Darren Ranco and Beth Conklin, is to surmount the stereotypes which marginalize or 

discredit indigenous voices in mainstream discourse and, in so doing, “to expand outsiders’ 

notions of who native people are and what they want and need.” For Westerners, the terms of 

the challenge are those Chinua Achebe suggested regarding popular perceptions of Africans: 

to think of “people – not angels, but not rudimentary souls either – just people, often highly 

gifted people and often strikingly successful in their enterprise with life and society.”45 

                                                 
William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 

1979), pg. 9: “I am dubious about the actual existence of this act as an accepted practice for any time and 

place”, pg. 21: “I have been unable to uncover adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form 

for any society”, pg. 139: “the idea of “other” as cannibals, rather than the act, is the universal phenomenon,” 

cited in Goldman, The Anthropology of Cannibalism, 13; Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood: A History of the 

Cannibal Complex (Stein and Day, 1975), 105, cited in Kimberle S. López, Latin American Novels of the 

Conquest: Reinventing the New World (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 191 n. 12, 

192 n. 14, lit review on the cannibalism debates post-Arens 28-36. On Indians as counter-images of Westerners 

see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the 

Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978) and Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the 

Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993 [1992]). On historicism, i.e., the belief that 

“the task of the social sciences [is] to furnish us with long-term historical prophecies,” and that devotees “have 

discovered laws of history which enable them to prophesy the course of historical events,” see Karl Popper, The 

Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966 [1945]), 1-5. 
45 Mihesuah asks what value a 1988 history of the Southern Plains, which uses archaic, racialized language to 

characterize 19th-century Comanches as animal-like deviants, “lurking” Comanche men living in “lairs” with 

their “squaws,” holds for her Comanche father-in-law—in Devon Mihesuah, “Should American Indian History 

Remain a Field of Study?” in Devon Abbot Mihesuah and Angela Cavendish Wilson eds., Indigenizing the 

Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities (Lincoln and London: University of 

Nebraska Press, 2004), 143-159. Her point is unintentionally proven by journalist S.C. Gwynne’s incredibly 



 

47 

 

Dark mimesis: Thesis statement and methodology 

 European colonists and migrants in the 17th century, as noted above by Joyce Chaplin, 

Richard White, and Andrew Lipman, attempted to communicate with allied and enemy 

indigenous peoples through simplified, repeated acts, phrases, and symbols which they 

believed would convey clear messages. Through their efforts to define, and then 

approximate, Indian thought and culture as they understood it, Europeans and Euro-

Americans also defined themselves through comparison. Among the predominantly French-

Canadian and métis46 labourers of the 18th and 19th century fur trade, Carolyn Podruchny 

denotes an ethos of trying to “beat all Indians at the race” as the underlying logic in voyageur 

masculinity: not only to emulate and replicate indigenous men’s labour skills of hunting, 

fishing, snowshoeing, canoeing, and dogsledding, and their masculine virtues of athleticism, 

endurance, fortitude, good-humoured stoicism, and individual freedom, but to surpass them. 

On Mexico’s northern frontier in the 18th and 19th centuries, Ana María Alonso outlines how 

                                                 
retrograde Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most 

powerful Indian tribe in American history (New York and London: Scribner, 2010) which expends hundreds of 

pages describing white Texas settlers “raped and disembowelled” by “Stone Age pagans on horseback”; on the 

pitfalls of midcentury Comanche ethnography and pervasive myths of the Comanches as some nadir of 

primitivism, see William C. Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies: Enduring Veterans, 

1800 to the Present (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002 [1999]), 251-73; Pekka Hämäläinen, The 

Comanche Empire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 342-61; and Gary Clayton 

Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875 (Norman, OK: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 172-84, 419 n. 45. On the need to avoid seemingly-benign stereotypes of 

indigenous and postcolonial peoples as well as negative ones, see Beth Conklin, “Speaking Truth To Power,” in 

Anthropology News Vol. 44, Issue 7 (October 2003), 5; Beth Conklin, “Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs: 

Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism,” in American Ethnologist Vol. 24, No. 4 (November 

1997), 711-37; Darren J. Ranco, “The Ecological Indian and the Politics of Representation: Critiquing The 

Ecological Indian in the Age of Ecocide,” in Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis eds., Native Americans 

and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska 

Press, 2007), 32-51; Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (1977), in 

V. B. Leitch ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 

1783-1794 (1793: “just people”). 
46 I use small-m métis in this thesis to indicate people of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, cognate with 

mestizo in Spanish, and capital-M Métis for the historic Métis communities of the Red River and Western 

Canada. See Adam Gaudry and Mary Agnes Welch, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/metis/ , 

published 11/07/09, revised 11/16/16, accessed 1:39 pm EST, 18 December 2017.  

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/metis/


 

48 

 

norteños (northerners), specifically the serranos (mountaineers) of the Sierra Madre in 

Chihuahua state, defined their identity as white Hispanics through binary opposition against 

Apache and Comanche enemies. Far from the central government in the Valley of Mexico 

and beset by mounted Indian raiders, norteño violence became defined by egalitarianism and 

charismatic leadership, not unlike warfare in Apachería and Comanchería. At war, norteños, 

many of whom were of indigenous or mestizo ancestry, raided indigenous enemies’ villages 

to steal livestock and kidnap women and children, as Apache and Comanche enemies did. 

Correspondingly, norteños stressed that their Ibero-American culture and Catholicism 

elevated them as a civilized gente de razón (people of reason) above the unconverted, 

unconquered Apaches and Comanches, barbarous gentes sin razón (peoples without reason). 

In the British North American colonies, Philip Deloria has described how the figure of the 

Indian, reimagined per European carnival traditions, became the icon of the “absolute, 

anarchic freedom” that Anglo-Americans wished to appropriate for themselves in the New 

World. Simon Harrison also notes that European customs of making and selling mementoes 

from the personal possessions, skin, and body parts of famous criminals, which continued in 

Britain and North America until the end of the 19th century, provides a partial origin point for 

the scalping and flaying of trophies from slain Indians: such acts gained “new dimensions of 

meanings” when “re-imagined as acts of war,” becoming “militarized, […] strongly 

racialized and, in a certain sense, democratized.”47 

                                                 
47 Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade 

(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 1-17 (11: “beat all Indians at the race”), 52-85, 165-

308; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 1-70, 186 

(“absolute, anarchic freedom”); Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on 

Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1995), 1-111; Simon Harrison, 

Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), 

39-47. 



 

49 

 

 Neil Whitehead, in his analysis of Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1596 account of his journeys 

in Guiana, pointed the way towards a succinct theoretical model. Through mimesis, 

Europeans borrowed indigenous words, place-names, ideas, symbols, and material objects to 

deploy in communication with indigenous peoples and each other, ascribed with what they 

believed were mutually-identifiable meanings. Indigenous peoples also mimetically engaged 

with European intellectual and material culture, and Whitehead notes, as per White’s middle 

ground, “the two-way, mutualistic, character of cultural transmission.” The meanings created 

from and communicated through mimesis were not necessarily accurate, or benign, an 

observation Whitehead accredits to Michael Taussig: during the Amazon rubber boom of the 

late 19th and early 20th century, overseers in the Putumayo region of northwestern Amazonia 

engaged in acts of violent mimesis to brutalize Indians who failed to meet rubber-tapping 

quotas. Overseers who imagined their lives as perpetually endangered by Indian plots, 

cannibals, vipers, jaguars, and the jungle itself reacted in a similar way to the violently self-

pitying colonists of 1750s Pennsylvania: performing acts of “mimetic savagery” that 

approximated the savagery they attributed to and projected onto the enslaved rubber-tappers. 

These fictions of “colonial terror” and their associated panic and anxiety “were a potent 

political force without which the work of conquest,” i.e., the “killing and torturing” of people 

imagined as “phantoms of wild disorder,” “could not have been accomplished.” What 

mimesis looked like from the other side of the frontier is indicated by Castle McLaughlin in 

her study of ledgerbook art, the pictographic records of coups set down by Plains Indian 

warriors in accounts books plundered from teamsters. McLaughlin proposes a subcategory of 

“war books” with a dual purpose: by inscribing their exploits onto an instrument of 



 

50 

 

knowledge collection and dissemination, preliterate Plains resistance leaders mimetically 

expressed their dominance over, and laid claim to, an alien form of enemy power.48 

 Within this thesis I propose that scalp hunting in British North America, as set of 

practices and as collection of ideas, comprised an act of colonial mimesis which attempted to 

exorcise Anglo-American settlers’ nightmarish visions of savage warfare; to express their 

anger across a cross-cultural divide towards an enemy they believed only understood violent 

force; and enact their fantasy of Indian war as man-hunting, which explicitly and implicitly 

dehumanized their targets as quarry, animals to be hunted. Most importantly, the fantasy of 

the Indian-killing white savage as ersatz Indian articulated Manifest Destiny’s historicist 

myth of Anglo-Americans as rightful inheritors of the North American continent from 

peoples they both fetishized and loathed, while the idea of inevitable Indian disappearance 

sanctified violence—on the grounds that “killing speeds destiny”— from the grassroots to the 

highest levels of government. Combined with a grand teleology of Anglo-Saxon cultural and 

biological superiority over other Europeans and colonized peoples, these ideas and shared 

cultural attitudes, referred to here as the scalping paradigm, were omnipresent and 

ubiquitous, “a set of commonsense notions that [were] rarely examine[d].”49  

                                                 
48 Neil Whitehead trans., The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter 

Ralegh (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 1-116; Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, 

and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 

82-91, 121-23, and throughout; Castle McLaughlin, A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The 

Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon” (Harvard University Press, 2013), 6, 61-68, 79-80, and Colin 

Calloway’s review, Great Plains Quarterly Volume 35, No. 3 (Summer 2015), 309-310. 
49 “commonsense notions” in Margaret D. Jacobs, citing and paraphrasing Wolfe’s “Land, Labor, and 

Difference”: “[H]istorical actors may not often state or even be aware of their intent but are influenced by a set 

of commonsense notions that they rarely examine.” –Jacobs, “Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing? Are These Our 

Only Choices?” 446-47, in The Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter 2016), 444–448. In “Land, 

Labor…” Wolfe notes a cluster of these widely-accepted, commonsense ideas on race and ethnicity in an 1757 

letter from white Virginian Peter Fountaine to his brother Moses, decrying Virginia’s “swarms” of “mulatto 

bastards”; Peter proposes white male intermarriage with indigenous women as the preferable alternative, not 

least because “We should become the rightful heirs to their lands and should not have smutted our blood, for the 

Indian children when born are as white as the Spaniards or Portuguese” and only darken through the use of 



 

51 

 

That indigenous peoples and Anglo-Americans were scalping each other in eastern 

North America by the early 18th century suggests a facile symmetry, but upon closer 

inspection the understanding and enactment of scalps and scalping were profoundly 

asymmetrical. The “mourning-war complex” of indigenous peoples of the Atlantic seaboard 

and midcontinental interior aimed to inflict reciprocal injuries on enemy polities, meted out 

higher honours for captive-taking than for scalping, and did not consider human cultural 

differences as signs of innate biological difference (see Chapters 2, 3, 4). By contrast, early 

modern Europeans considered Indians as innately inferior to themselves and inflicted 

wartime casualties on Indians disproportionate to injuries received; while all European 

colonies in the New World aimed for conquest of indigenous peoples and annexation of their 

lands and resources, Anglo-Americans worked towards extirpation through large-scale 

massacres and acts of ethnic cleansing. Anglo-American soldiers and militias, often unable to 

find, engage, or defeat Indians in battle, targeted their property instead, torching their villages 

and fields in campaigns of attrition to destroy stored food and winter shelter. Scalp bounties, 

offered by colonial officials and state governments during the 18th and early 19th centuries 

and by private donors in the late 19th century west, offered psychological and financial 

support to rangers, militiamen, settlers, and frontier vigilantes, incidentally providing source 

material for stories of heroic or antiheroic Indian-killing folk heroes (see Chapters 4, 5, 6).  

                                                 
body-paint and exposure to the sun (for related early modern ideas of Indians’ essential whiteness, see Chaplin, 

Subject Matter, 157-198, 243-279). Among the themes Wolfe notes “would animate [Anglo-] American racial 

discourse for centuries to come” – and, as shall be seen later in this thesis, already existed and animated Latin 

America’s casta system—includes “the recruitment of Indians to furnish their usurpers with sovereign rights to 

the soil” (883-84). As Philip Deloria notes in Playing Indian, that recruitment could be entirely symbolic, as in 

the deployment of the Lenape sachem Tamenund for the Tammany Society fraternal organization of New York, 

and forego actual intercourse entirely; the same could be said of the apocryphal “Cherokee grandmother” stories 

that crop up in many family histories in the United States. “Killing speeds destiny”: see Benjamin Madley, 

“Patterns of frontier genocide, 1803–1910: the aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of 

Namibia,” 168-69, in Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 6, No. 2 (2004), 167-92. 



 

52 

 

“[T]hat the Americas are built on the invasion and destruction of a populated land 

with hundreds of distinct, complex societies, and a centuries-long slave trade involving 

millions of Africans,” writes Comanche author and curator Paul Chaat Smith, “is the 

minimum requirement for making sense of the history of our countries.” Yet Walter Hixon 

notes that even when a general pattern of racialized violence, overt and institutional, by 

Europeans against indigenous North Americans is agreed upon, some Western scholars and 

many members of the public recoil at the concept of genocide, which North Americans 

largely reserve for others, e.g., “Turks, Nazis, Cambodians, Rwandans, and other truly evil 

peoples.” Boyd Cothran concurs, observing that the term genocide turns conversations “into 

a debate over definitions,” diverting attention from “the people for whom this is not merely 

an academic exercise” but impacts “their everyday lives.” Beyond ethnocentric insistence 

that “it can’t happen here,” arguments over North American genocide tend to bog down at 

three points: a) upholding the Third Reich’s centrally-planned, industrialized mass killings as 

the criterion of true genocide, what Ben Kiernan calls a “colloquial sense of total, state-

organized, physical extermination,” and a corresponding difficulty of interpretation re: low-

tech mass murders and grassroots mass killings, including those performed in defiance of 

central authority and/or in the absence of a strong federal state; b) the Sorites paradox of 

what proportion of a group must be killed to constitute genocide, or whether survival of the 

group somehow disproves genocide; c) whether every act of violence between indigenous 

peoples and Europeans from Mexico to the Arctic should be treated collectively as one 

continuous case, in what Benjamin Madley calls an “all or nothing” approach.50  

                                                 
50 E.g. dismissing genocide as “popular in academic circles,” followed by “there is no debate that at times the 

government and the citizens treated the Indians unfairly”—Mueller, Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud, 195. 

“the minimum requirement” from “On Romanticism,” 13-27, in Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know About 

Indians is Wrong (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 20; Hixson, “Policing the 



 

53 

 

Upon closer inspection, a series of North American genocides by different European 

colonies against specific indigenous groups, expressed through scalp bounties and other 

means, are readily apparent. Article 2 of the UN’s 1948 genocide convention itemizes, as (a) 

through (e), five means of attempting to destroy ethnocultural groups, of which only one (a) 

comprises actual killings and the other four, all of which were inflicted on indigenous groups 

and individuals in the Americans through deliberate colonial policy and unofficial vigilante 

actions, involve weakening and indirectly killing groups and their members by (b) causing 

serious bodily or mental harm; (c) deliberately subjecting members to living conditions 

calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures 

intending to prevent births; and (e) forcible transfer of children to other groups. All of these 

can occur in the absence or defiance of a strong central government—the grassroots 

implications of which, states Mahood Mamdani, are troubling and overlooked by many 

                                                 
Past: Indian Removal and Genocide Studies,” 439; Boyd Cothran, “Melancholia and the Infinite Debate,” 436, 

in The Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter 2016), 435-38; Benjamin Madley, “Reexamining 

the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods” (133: “all-or-nothing”) in The 

American Historical Review Vol. 120, No. 1 (February 2015), 98-139; Benjamin Madley, “Understanding 

Genocide in California Under United States Rule, 1846–1873,” in The Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 47, 

No. 4 (Winter 2016), 449-61; Gary Clayton Anderson, “The Native Peoples of the American West: Genocide or 

Ethnic Cleansing?” in The Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter 2016), 407-433; Jacobs, 

“Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?”; Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and 

Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 1-40 (10: 

“colloquial sense”); R.J. Rummel, “When and Why to Use the Term Democide for “Genocide”,” 24-28, and 

Deborah Harris, “Defining Genocide: Defining History?”, 29-37, in William L. Hewitt, ed., Defining the 

Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust in the Twentieth Century (Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, 

NJ, 2004); Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6-18; 

Alexander Laban Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide,” 1-40, David 

Maybury-Lewis, “Genocide Against Indigenous Peoples,” 43-53, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Coming to Our 

Senses: Anthropology and Genocide,” 348-81, in Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The 

Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 348-81; David Stannard, 

"Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship", 245-90, in Alan S. Rosenbaum ed., Is the 

Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, second edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 

2001 [1995]), 245-290. For an example of Madley’s “all-or-nothing” approach, as well Devon Mihesuah’s 

warning against reiteration of 18th-century stereotypes and frontier horror stories as “setting the record straight,” 

see William M. Osborn, The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During the American-Indian War from Jamestown 

Colony to Wounded Knee (New York: Random House, 2000). The allusion to Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t 

Happen Here (1935) is deliberate. 



 

54 

 

genocide theorists. That “most attacks on Indians led to 300 or fewer casualties and were 

isolated attacks,” as G.C. Anderson points out, does not disprove genocide, but is consistent 

with sociologist Leo Kuper’s 1981 model of the “genocidal massacre,” in which exemplary 

violence as “object lesson or warning” is performed against a section of a group, such as a 

village, a band, or a clan lineage, with intent to intimidate or weaken the broader corporate 

group. In the case of categories (d) and (e), Margaret Jacobs points out that the killing or 

removal of indigenous women and children in North American frontier wars, as in the 

indigenous slave trades and the tiered scalp bounty payments which offered successively 

lower sums for the scalps of adult men, adult women, and children, should not be considered 

as incidental, but placed “at the very center of our analysis” of attempts to destroy indigenous 

peoples “as distinct sovereign entities […] as long as women bore and raised children within 

Indian households and communities, tribal affiliation would remain.” Scalp bounties, 

enslavement, and mass killings are the most extreme consequences of, in Kai Erikson’s 

words, when “one people manages to neutralize the humanity of another,” and the most overt 

end of what Nancy Scheper-Hughes calls a “genocidal continuum” in which a larger 

proportion of bystanders convinced of the morality and necessity of genocide, assist, 

celebrate, or quietly condone the violent actions of a few—for instance, turning novels of 

heroic génocidaires, such as Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837) or Mayne Reid’s The Scalp-

Hunters (1851), into bestsellers (see Chapter 6).51 

                                                 
51 Hixson, “Policing the Past”; Cothran, “Melancholia and the Infinite Debate”; Madley, “Reexamining the 

American Genocide Debate” (cites Kuper, 110-11); Madley, “Understanding Genocide in California Under 

United States Rule, 1846–1873”; Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910”; Kiernan, Blood and 

Soil, 1-40 (on Kuper’s “genocidal massacre,” 13-16); Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: 

Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5-14; 

G.C. Anderson, “The Native Peoples of the American West: Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?,” 411; Jacobs, 

“Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing?” (448: “center of our analysis”); Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity”; 

Scheper-Hughes, “Coming to Our Senses”; Bettina Arnold, “Justifying Genocide: Archaeology and the 



 

55 

 

In observing these patterns across the span of 500 years, specific case studies such as 

Madley’s comparative analyses of the Pequots in 17th-century New England and the Yuki in 

19th-century California are necessary, both to remind us that genocide is not an abstract 

theoretical phenomenon but a conscious human action, and that beneath broad categories like 

“indigenous peoples” are several hundred ethnocultural groups whose historic experiences, 

pre- and post-contact, are idiosyncratic and distinct. Distinction and idiosyncracy also 

characterize the methodologies and strategies by which Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, 

and British colonies in the Americas tried to subdue indigenous societies, to assimilate their 

members into the lowest rungs of a Euro-American caste system, to exclude them as 

perpetual outsiders, or to annihilate them. “We do not suffer competitions between different 

types of cancer as to which is to be celebrated as unique or worst,” writes Israel Charny; “All 

cases of genocide are similar and different, special and unique, and appropriately subject to 

comparative analysis.”52 

Chapter Outlines 

 My first three chapters discuss how Anglo-American scalping imagery arose out of 

the first two centuries of trans-Atlantic encounter in North America. Chapter One, “Scalping 

                                                 
Construction of Difference,” in Hinton ed., The Anthropology of Genocide, 96-115 (Erikson cited 101). On 

entrenched stereotypes as sanctifying or legitimizing mass killings, see also Alexander Tsesis, Destructive 

Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way For Harmful Social Movements (New York and London: New 

York University, 2002), 48-65. 
52 Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate” (132: case studies of North American genocides 

“avoids problems associated with considering all Native Americans together”). Charny: “The central question in 

this book is whether it is possible to say, as one contributor says explicitly and several others say more 

guardedly, “Not all mass murders are genocide.” Can there be a case of mass murder which is not genocide? I 

do not believe so. […] it is no different than a book about cancer diseases that kill; the various killer cancers are 

similar and different. We do not suffer competitions between different types of cancer as to which is to be 

celebrated as unique or worst. I believe that all cases of genocide are similar and different, special and unique, 

and appropriately subject to comparative analysis.” Israel Charny’s foreword, Rosenbaum ed., Is the Holocaust 

Unique? Second edition, x-xi (Charny’s italics). 



 

56 

 

in the Iberian Atlantic,” notes how well-established Classical and medieval myths and 

images of primitivism, particularly skull-cups and anthropophagous feasts, often overwrote 

early mentions of scalping in Iberian soldiers’ and missionaries’ accounts from Mexico and 

Florida. Such accounts of American primitivism were informed by two interrelated processes 

I explain in Chapter 1: the anthropology of deficiency, in which other human societies are 

imagined and described as defective and primitive versions of the observer’s; and Savagism, 

the identification of members of “deficient” societies with half-human and liminal beings 

such as demons, ogres, witches, and the primordial humans of the dawn of time. But not all 

Iberian authors followed suit: the first mestizo historian, Garcilaso de la Vega ‘el Inca,’ was 

the first to cast scalping as anticolonial resistance. Chapter Two, “A Trophy of Their 

Victory,” notes the differing textual and visual treatments, ethnographies, and 

rationalizations of scalping in North America by a dozen 16th and 17th century authors from 

various European countries. Chapter Three, “Scalping and Settler Colonialism in Early 

British America,” outlines the formation of Britain’s distinctive land-grabbing colonial 

pattern in Virginia and New England from the founding of Jamestown (1607) to the Pequot 

War (1636-38), the development of for-profit Indian war in the form of slave trading and 

bounties offered to allies for body parts, and the appearance of the central elements of the 

scalping narrative: of innate Indian treachery and the unique victimhood status of Anglo-

American settlers in Indian war. 

 Chapters Four through Six describe the institutionalization of scalp bounties among 

colonial authorities and the entrenchment of scalp-hunting as practice and as idea among 

Anglo-Americans. Chapter Four, “A Pound of Flesh: Slave Hunting and Scalp Bounties in 

Anglo-American Frontier Warfare,” describes the dual role of enslavement and scalp 



 

57 

 

bounties as means of extirpation in 18th century Indian wars, the eclipse of the Indian slave 

trade and decapitation of Indians in Anglo-America, and the burgeoning grassroots-level 

hatred of Indians as an element of Anglo-American frontier life. Chapter Five, “Dark 

Mimesis: Scalp-hunting from the Seven Years’ War to the War of 1812,” analyses the rise of 

the Indian-killing frontiersman as a template for folk heroes in the Revolutionary era and in 

the Jacksonian-era United States, while accusations of scalping served as polemic: both 

British and Americans accused each other of complicity in scalping and war crimes, and of 

being true “white savages,” from the Revolution to the War of 1812. Counterpoints are raised 

in the 1833 memoirs of Sauk war leader Black Hawk, and the furor over the memoirs of the 

“white Indian” John Dunn Hunter. Chapter Six, “Scalping and Manifest Destiny,” looks at 

the spread of Anglo-American scalp-hunting in the Hispanic Southwest and Great Plains 

from prior to the Mexican-American War to the Sioux War of 1876, with an interest in four 

case studies: the scalp hunters James Kirker and John Joel Glanton, contracted in northern 

Mexico to hunt Apaches; the spread of scalp bounties in 1850s California; scalping in the 

Sand Creek massacre of 1864 Colorado; and treatment of scalping in the Slim Buttes incident 

of September 1876. 

 Chapter Seven, “Scalping Culture at Frontier’s End,” examines how such notable 

public figures as Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Rain-in-the-Face, and Buffalo Bill Cody, all of 

whom were associated in the public imagination with larger-than-life stories of scalping, 

negotiated and renovated their public images at the World’s Fairs of the fin de siècle era. A 

brief epilogue traces the aftermath of scalp-hunting and scalp bounties in the 21st century, 

how indigenous artists and activists invoke it to point to past and present dispossession, and 



 

58 

 

the broader survival of colonial fantasies of a world divided between civilization and 

barbarian chaos. 

 

 

 

 



 

59 

 

Chapter One: Scalping in the Iberian Atlantic 

Other animals, in fine, live at peace with those of their own kind […] But with 

man, —by Hercules! most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.   

 –Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis (AD 77-79), Book VII53 

Odysseus: Who is their leader? Do they have a democratic state? 

Silenus: They are nomads; nobody listens to anybody about anything. 

—Euripides, Cyclops (ca. 5th century BC)54 

Prologue: Bring me the hair of Roque de Yelves 

 In La Florida del Inca, his 1605 account of Hernando de Soto’s expedition to conquer 

Florida (1539-1542), the Peruvian man of letters Garcilaso de la Vega ‘El Inca’ writes that in 

March 1540, two conquistadores named Simón Rodríguez and Roque de Yelves ventured 

beyond the expedition’s winter camp near present-day Tallahassee to gather wild fruit in the 

forest. Clambering in the branches of a fruit tree, the two conquistadores were surprised by 

Apalachee warriors armed with their signature weapon, a powerful bow. Yelves leapt to the 

ground and began to run, but his flight was cut short by a flint-headed arrow in the back, “a 

quarter of it passing on through his chest.” Rodríguez, still in the tree, was shot at “as if he 

were some wild beast that had climbed there” and fell to the ground dead with three arrows 

“piercing him from side to side.” What happened next required some explanation from 

Garcilaso to his readers: 

Hardly had he fallen when they cut off his head, or rather I should say all the scalp in a 

circle, and carried it away as a testimony of what they had done. (It is not known by what 

skill the Indians remove the scalp so easily from a person.) Roque de Yelves they left 

prostrate and did not take his scalp, for a relief of mounted Spaniards who had not been far 

away was now coming too close to permit them to do so. Nevertheless, after giving his 

                                                 
53 John Bostock and H.T. Riley trans., The Natural History of Pliny, Vol. II (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), 

120. 
54 Cited in François Hartog, Janet Lloyd trans., The Mirror of Herodotus: the Representation of the Other in the 

Writing of History (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1988), 193-206. 



 

60 

 

companions a brief account of what had occurred, this cavalier presently called for confession 

and expired. (Book II, Chapter XXV)
55 

As 16th-century Spanish had no precise, succinct words for the hair-bearing skin of the head, 

like the modern English noun “scalp,” or a verb to describe its removal such as “to scalp,” 

Garcilaso had to make do with the vague circumlocution todo el casco en redondo, literally 

“all the skull in a circle.” The Inca cited another expedition survivor, Alonso de Carmona, to 

indicate other members of Soto’s army met a similar fate:  

…when our men went into the forest to cut firewood, these Indians rushed up at the sound of 

the axe and slew them. They removed the chains from the Indians who had been brought 

along to carry the wood on their backs, and they took the crown of each Spaniard (this being 

the thing they most prized), to decorate the arm of the bow with which they fought.
56 

Carmona concluded that more than twenty conquistadores were killed this way during their 

time in Apalachee. “It is our opinion,” wrote John and Jeannette Varner, “that the Inca has 

used the word corona here to mean scalp.”57 

 In describing the Apalachees’ scalping of conquistadores The Inca, the first Hispanic 

writer born in the Americas and the first mestizo author in history, broke ranks with his peers 

in two significant ways. As will be indicated throughout this chapter, even mentioning 

scalping went against a prevailing trend in 17th century accounts of New World violence, 

                                                 
55 John Grier Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner eds., trans., The Florida of the Inca (Austin: University of 

Texas Press, 1962), 257, footnote 12, my italics. Original text: “…lo derribaron muerto, y apenas hubo caído, 

quando le quitaron la cabeza: digo todo el casco en redondo, que no se sabe con qué maña lo quitan con 

grandísima facilidad, y lo llevaron para testimonio de su hecho. A Roque de Yelves dexaron caído sin quitarle 

el casco, porque el socorro de los Españoles á caballo, por ser la distancia breve, iba tan cerca que no lo dio 

lugar á los Indios á que se lo quitasen. Este en pocas palabras contó el suceso, y pidiendo confesion espiró 

luego.” In Historia de la Florida por El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Book 2 of 4 (Madrid: Imprenta de 

Villalpando, 1803), 204-05. 
56 Original text: “y quitavan al Español la corona, que era lo que ellos más preciavan, para traerla al brazo del 

arco con que peleavan.” Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 258-59, footnote 13, my italics. 
57 Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 258-59, footnote 13. On the struggle to find succinct, specific words 

and descriptors for scalping in Western European languages in the 16th and 17th centuries, Axtell and Sturtevant, 

“The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?” 462-65. 



 

61 

 

where it was overlooked or overwritten in favour of ancient European signs of alterity, 

barbarism, and wildness: anthropophagous feasts, human sacrifice, and the fashioning of 

cups and bowls from human skulls. If mentioning scalping in the context of contemporary 

North America set The Inca decades ahead of his peers, his overall approach put him ahead 

by centuries. While not opposed to the peaceful incorporation of indigenous peoples into the 

Spanish Empire through conversion to Christianity, The Inca’s account, which Erin 

Vaccarella points out is disguised as an adventure narrative to avoid censure by the 

Inquisition, subversively critiques the morality of armed conquest, particularly in Garcilaso’s 

scenes where Indian rulers denounce the Iberians as brigands and robbers. The Inca, 

descended maternally from a long line of Inca warrior-nobility, also refuses the double-

standard by which indigenous military traditions automatically prove the morality of 

European invasion and conquest. Designating the Apalachees and other peoples of the 

American Southeast as sovereign indigenous polities resisting Soto’s invasion, La Florida 

del Inca is arguably one of, if not the, first anticolonial works of Atlantic literature.58 

 This chapter describes how European travellers and geographers in the 16th century 

Atlantic world, particularly in the context of colonial encounters in the Iberian Americas, 

created the intellectual and cultural foundations for Euro-American ideas of and attitudes 

towards scalping in the 17th and 18th centuries (see Chapters 2 and 3). Imagining the 

Americas as primordial heterotopic spaces and indigenous peoples as fundamentally similar 

                                                 
58 On Inca Garcilaso: Erin Vaccarella, “Echoes of Resistance: Testimonial Narrative and Pro-Indian Discourse 

in El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s La Florida Del Inca”, 101, in Latin American Literary Review Vol. 32, No. 64 

(2004), 100-119; D.A. Brading, “The Incas and the Renaissance: the Royal Commentaries of Inca Garcilaso de 

la Vega,” in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (May, 1986), pp. 1-23; Weaver, The Red 

Atlantic, 100-103; Rabasa, “ “Porque soy indio”: Subjectivity in Garcilaso's La Florida del Inca," in Writing 

Violence on the Northern Frontier, 199-225; as first mestizo writer and first American-born Hispanic author, 

Lawrence A. Clayton et. al. ed., The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North 

America in 1539-1543, volume 1 (The University of Alabama Press, 1993), xxii. 

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=jlatiamerstud


 

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to the liminal beings and prehistoric humans of European myths, descriptions of American 

violence focused on acts Europeans considered exotic, primordial, and frightening, meaning 

Europeans ultimately defined, and stigmatized, indigenous American warfare as irrational 

and focused on dismemberment. Reading off European myths of human wildness onto actual 

ethnocultural groups in real geographic spaces, colonial neologisms designated New World 

peoples as outré and at least half-mythic: anthropophagi became caníbales, homines 

sylvestres became salvajes.59 While scalping itself, as a marker of indigenous exoticism, was 

often sidestepped in 16th- and early 17th-century accounts (see Chapter 2) in favour of more 

traditional European signs of primitivism, the central narratives of Indian war were laid down 

early. The Indian was an illegitimate combatant; their retaliation or resistance was savage 

war; European invasion was reimagined as self-defense; and European violence against 

Indians, always conceived as retaliatory or preemptive and ranging from exemplary 

massacres, to slavery, to conquest, was justified in circular fashion: with the stigma of the 

Indian as illegitimate combatant. 

Introduction: Man-eaters, White Gods, and myth in 16th century America 

 Understanding how and why a late-19th-century audience believed Prentiss Ingraham 

and William Cody’s story of a duel between Buffalo Bill and Yellow Hand requires 

investigation of how Europeans imagined the Americas and their place in it. On the surface 

level of Ingraham and Cody’s story are three fairly obvious themes: Cody’s moral 

righteousness in avenging, from an Anglo-American viewpoint, a past injustice (“the first 

                                                 
59 On European categories for New World peoples, see Richard Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images 

of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 12-14; and Olive 

Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage: and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas 

(Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1997 [1984]), 63-80. 



 

63 

 

scalp for Custer!”); the aggression of Yellow Hand in challenging Cody directly; and Cody’s 

victory through means considered unconventional in European warfare, i.e., the weapons and 

tactics of “savage war”. Another message lies just beneath the surface when we consider that 

Yellow Hand specifically challenges Cody by his Indian name of Pahaska, saying “I know 

you” though they have never met. This implies that Cody is recognized, perhaps renowned, 

among the Indians—otherwise, why challenge him to a duel? Expressed here in the fiction of 

Yellow Hand’s recognition of Cody as a famous Indian-slayer, as in other Anglo-American 

works of art and literature cited throughout this thesis, is a European desire not only to 

imagine themselves possessing superior qualities—e.g., moral, intellectual, cultural, racial, 

etc.—which permit them to triumph over the Indians, but to be recognized as such by 

Indians, who in so doing endorse or reify colonialism. As will be outlined here, the myth of 

European superiority was paired with two myths of the Americas’ natural and human 

geography: that the Americas, unlike Europe, were a primordial space outside of, or 

staggered behind, historic time; and that the peoples of the Americas were accordingly 

primitive, closer to the primordial humans of Classical and Biblical etiological myths. 

 In the case of the “duel with Yellow Hand,” Cody and Ingraham were peddling a 

story which their target audience took as partially or absolutely true—that is, a myth. “There 

are always multiple narratives of any historical moment,” notes Matthew Restall, “but that 

does not mean that as interpretations they cannot tell us something true.” Imagining Indians 

reifying, through conscious or unconscious recognition, Europeans’ putative superiority is to 

imagine a willing surrender to European master-narratives of colonialism in the Americas: 

the denial of coevalness between colonizer and colonized, and the overwriting or 

supersession of indigenous ontologies, geographies, and other forms of presence and 



 

64 

 

knowledge with European cartographies and ethnographic fantasies of Indians. These self-

congratulatory scenes, often attached years or decades afterwards by mythographers, recur in 

16th- and 17th-century European accounts.60  

Columbus’ persona as a “master of signs,” who could perfectly understand the 

Indians’ gestures as early as landfall in October 1492, recurs in his later assertion that he 

overawed the Indians of Jamaica by predicting an eclipse with his almanac in 1504. 

Supposed Indian uncertainty as to whether Columbus and his crew were deities or demigods 

from the heavens serves as ancestor or forerunner to the mimetic claims of Hernán Cortés 

that Moctezuma and other Mesoamericans took them to be gods, followed by the post-1560 

myth of Cortés being mistaken for Quetzalcoatl, and conquistadores from Peru to North 

America’s Great Plains introducing themselves as “hijos del Sol” or “sons of the Sun.” In 

Brazil, a 1663 account by the Jesuit Simão de Vasconcellos claimed that Diogo Alvares, a 

16th-century interpreter and middleman between Portuguese colonial authorities and the 

Tupinambá, had so terrified the Indians by discharging a matchlock while bird-hunting that 

they prostrated themselves at his feet. Though the story postdated Alvares’ death by more 

than a century, it became a standard scene in the history of Brazil until the mid-1800s, and 

his Tupí name Caramuru (Eel) was fancifully retranslated as “son of thunder,” “man of fire,” 

“sea dragon,” etc., to express the Indians’ supposed amazement at his firearm. Europeans 

took these myths seriously: in Virginia in 1607, Columbus’ Jamaica story inspired John 

                                                 
60 Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 

2003), xiii-xix, and throughout; On the denial of coevalness (pace Johannes Fabian) and the goal of the 

decolonizing project as denial of the denial of coevalness, see Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the 

Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), ix-

xxii, 1-25, and throughout; Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of 

Mexico,” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 108, No. 3 (June 2003), 659-687 (660: In that this version of 

the conquest overwrites real issues of violence and inequality with an unreal fantasy of adoration and 

gratification, “It is essentially a pornographic vision of events, albeit in a political rather than a sexual sense.”) 



 

65 

 

Smith’s attempt to overawe his captor Opechancanough with a compass, and informed his 

perception of the adoption ceremony which birthed the legend of his rescue by Pocahontas 

(see Chapter 3).61 

To point out that stories of Indians recognizing and corroborating Europeans’ right to 

rule them were infantilizing and, perhaps more importantly, untrue, misunderstands the 

function and purpose of myth. “In order to exist,” observes Janaína Amado on the myth of 

Caramuru, “a myth must correspond to profound social needs.” Bruce Lincoln offers a more 

succinct definition of myth: “ideology in narrative form.” While myth and history, observes 

Peter Bietenholz, both spring from a desire to render the past and present in understandable 

terms, and are more intertwined than many historians would like to admit, Paul Cohen and 

Richard Slotkin draw clear distinctions between the historian and the mythographer: the 

historian “streamlines the past into post hoc systems of narrative meaning,” notes Cohen, 

while myth, in Slotkin’s words, “expresses ideology in a narrative, rather than discursive or 

argumentative, structure.” Through isolating “one strand from a complex picture” and 

emphasizing it “to the exclusion of all else,” myth offers its audience an “emotional 

investment in an essentialized understanding of certain individuals and events.” This 

narrative strand may be drawn from, attached to, or encapsulated within a mythic scene, an 

action, or object, to “dramatize the world vision in a constellation of powerful metaphors.”62  

                                                 
61 Townsend, “Burying the White Gods,” 659-687; Janaína Amado, “Mythic Origins: Caramuru and the 

Founding of Brazil,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (November 2000), 783-811; 

see also Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600 (Austin, TX: University of 

Texas Press, 2005), 1-15, 80-95; on Columbus’ self-presentation as “master of signs” see Tzvetan Todorov, 

Richard Howard trans., The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (Norman, OK: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 1999), 1-50. 
62 Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 

throughout (147: “ideology in narrative form”); Peter G. Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends 

in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1994), 401-06; 

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600 – 1860 



 

66 

 

Over time, the myth is “increasingly conventionalized and abstracted” until its origin 

as a work of creative expression has been forgotten, and allusions to the myth via symbols, 

keywords, icons, or historical clichés—e.g., Columbus’ compass, Caramuru’s matchlock, 

Custer’s saber, and Cody scalping Yellow Hand—serve as mnemonic devices which invoke 

a vast subtextual iceberg of meanings. Mythic scenes or myths of historic events can also be 

re-interpreted and approached from a different angle to offer new or revisionist myths, often 

as one-sided and factionalist as the myths they replaced (see Introduction pp. 43-44). Paul 

Cohen makes a particularly important observation when he notes that new myths, to be 

accepted among the pantheon of older myths, must “possess at least a degree of plausibility” 

in conforming to pre-existing beliefs: “They must be believable, even if not true.”63 

The genesis of scalp bounties in North American frontier warfare dates back to the 

mid-17th century (see Chapter 3), but the ultimate source of late 19th century myths regarding 

Euro-American violence, particularly the Indian as barbarous illegitimate combatant and the 

European frontiersman as white savage, draw from much older sources in the European 

intellectual tradition. My first section in this chapter, “The myth of the man-eating horde: 

scalping in ancient and medieval thought,” surveys the intellectual history of European 

perceptions of primitivism, particularly two interrelated processes I describe as Savagism and 

                                                 
(Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 1-56; Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The 

Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 1-26 (“narrative, rather than 

discursive or argumentative, structure”), 259-60 (“Myth is not only something given but something made, a 

product of human labour, one of the tools with which human beings do the work of making culture and 

society”); Amado, “Mythic Origins”; Paul Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and 

Myth (Columbia University Press, 1997), 64, 211-222, 293-95 (195: Cohen defines mythic power as “the 

emotional investment in an essentialized understanding of certain individuals and events that isolates out one 

strand from a complex picture and emphasizes it to the exclusion of all else.”). 
63 “increasingly conventionalized and abstracted”: Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 1-26; I borrow “vast subtextual 

iceberg” from Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11, second edition 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006 [2003]), 30-32; Cohen, History in Three Keys, 211-222 (on one-

sidedness, factionalism, and presentism in revisionist historical myths), 293-95 (“plausibility… believable, even 

if not true”). 



 

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anthropology of deficiency, and the ways in which accounts of scalping in ancient Greek and 

Roman texts only indirectly influenced 16th-century accounts of New World violence. My 

second section, “Sepúlveda’s false dilemma: Savagism and illegitimate combatants from 

Columbus to Valladolid,” describes the identification of indigenous peoples with ancient and 

medieval European myths of wild or primordial men, the relatively rapid creation of the 

ethnographic category of the “Indian,” and the enduring process I refer to as the Sepúlvedan 

false dilemma: attacking the European strawman image of the Indian as pure victim to justify 

the most hostile, contemptuous stereotypes of Indians and, in so doing, to justify enslavement 

and mass killings. My third section, “Skull-cups, cannibal feasts, and the logic of massacre,” 

shows how early accounts or references to indigenous violence sidestepped scalping in 

favour of older images of primitive violence—e.g., flaying, anthropophagy, skull-cup 

trophies and bacchanalian feasts, designated the Indian as barbarian in ways consistent with 

ancient European myths and narratives, prefiguring the later uses of scalping in North 

American frontier war stories. My epilogue observes how these images from the ancient 

world, particularly the barbarian invasions that ended the Roman empire in the West, were 

invoked and inverted for anticolonial purposes in Inca Garcilaso’s La Florida del Inca. 

The myth of the man-eating horde: scalping in ancient and medieval thought 

Through a trans-Atlantic interplay of images, ideas, and self-representations, 

European myths of primordialism and heterotopia were attached to the Americas and its 

peoples, creating new conceptual categories and colonial neologisms to name them: ‘the 

Indies,’ the ‘West Indies,’ the ‘New World,’ and ‘America,’ whose peoples were ‘Indians’ 

and ‘Cannibals,’ ‘savages’ marked by their ‘red skin.’ Various authors have noted, rightly, 

the influences of European geographical and ethnographic writing on early accounts of the 



 

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Americas, some dating back to Greek and Roman times, though encounter historiography 

should not be reduced to Westerners “talking about ourselves talking about ourselves”. “[N]o 

matter how much discursive construction may be involved in their representations,” warns 

Zhang Longxi, cultures and histories “are not in themselves entirely and exhaustively 

discursive.” Neil Whitehead concurs: for all the overstatement of the Americas’ familiarity 

which can recur in 16th-century accounts, “there yet remains a residual element in European 

description that can be taken only to refer to some new reality that was encountered,” like the 

cosmetic annatto paint which reddened Brazilians’ skin, the ethnonym Kalinago misheard 

and retransmitted as Caribe or Canibal, and Caribbean loanwords which proved useful in 

conceptualizing the mainland, such as cacique for an Indian headman or leader, canoa for 

small boats with neither sail nor rudder, Tabaco for the pan-American sacred herb which 

would benefit British colonialism in Virginia (see Chapter 3). Cultural construction and self-

representation were joint projects: as Europeans were defining indigenous peoples as Indians 

and trying to extend power over them, indigenous peoples were resisting European dominion 

and, once educated in European literary modes, writing counter-histories of the Conquest like 

the 16th-century Nahuatl accounts of the conquest, or Inca Garcilaso’s accounts of Florida 

and Peru. “[C]olonial texts are complex documents,” noted Whitehead, “reflecting not only 

the desire of the conqueror but the recalcitrance of the conquered.”64  

                                                 
64 On the composite nature of early accounts of the Americas, see J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 

1492-1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1970]); Fredi Chiapelli ed., First Images of America: The 

Impact of the New World on the Old, 2 volumes (Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press, 1976); 

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750 (Chapel Hill and London: 

University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, 

Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and other peoples in the Early Modern Era 

(Cambridge: 1994), inc. Rolena Adorno, “The Indigenous ethnographer: The “indio ladino” as historian and 

cultural mediation,” pp. 378-402; Anthony Grafton with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient 

Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MS and London, England: the Belknap 

Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); David Gordon White’s review of Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: 

Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (University of Chicago Press, 1999), in The Journal of Religion Vol. 81, 



 

69 

 

As Robert Berkhofer observed, European descriptions of the Americas’ natural and 

human geography from 1492 onwards, whether positive, negative, or ambivalent, were 

premised in a myth of binary opposition where the Americas were a primordial mirror of 

Europe, and its peoples were the primitive antithesis of Europeans. Arising from this 

widespread belief was the idea that the Americas shared similar or identical conditions to 

those of a primordial epoch, described in Classical, Biblical, and medieval myths of the 

Golden Age, Eden, and the Terrestrial Paradise, placing the Americas out of sync with 

European chronology. If the primordial argument made the New World seem older, the 

“telluric inferiority” hypothesis posited that the Americas had emerged later from the Biblical 

floodwaters and were still drying out, which had hindered the development of indigenous 

American societies. Early modern ethnography conceptualized and expressed these taken-

for-granted assumptions of indigenous American primitivism through what Berkhofer calls 

“description by deficiency”: cataloguing, in pedantic detail, how indigenous societies did not 

measure up in Europeans’ estimations. Some of this was congruent with European criticisms 

of internal outsiders. Like Judaism, Islam, or rival sects of Christianity, indigenous religiosity 

was “superstition” or “idolatry”; indigenous lifeways involving seasonal movements between 

food sources was imagined as erratic wandering, like the movements of Tatars, Romani 

“Gypsies,” and other pastoralists; simple or sparse material culture was likened to the poverty 

                                                 
No. 4 (Oct., 2001), 688-690 (“talking about ourselves talking about ourselves”); Zhang Longxi, Mighty 

Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998), 1-83  (2-3: 

“self-enclosed language game”), 14 (“not reduce China”), (55-56: cultural difference without absolute 

opposition), (83: “no such thing as the ‘Other’”); Neil Whitehead’s introduction, The Discoverie of the Large, 

Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 

1997), 1-110 (26: “colonial texts… recalcitrance”). 



 

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of European peasants, who were often directly or laterally compared to American 

“savages.”65 

When the traits of liminal, half-human folkloric beings like the man-eating ogre, the 

witch or sorcerer, and the wild man were attributed to stereotyped groups, everyday contempt 

could merge with paranoid, monstrous images. Within Europe, the figure of the sorcerer or 

witch who harmed others with black magic and offered human sacrifice to the Devil was 

attached to Jews, heretics, and “Gypsies,” a fantasy with deadly consequences. Against a 

backdrop of legalized discrimination, European Jews were targeted in periodic massacres and 

persecutions inspired by rumours of child sacrifice, host desecration, or poisoning; Romanian 

nobility owned “Gypsies” as slaves until 1848; tens of thousands of Catholics and Protestants 

were condemned as Satan’s servants, tortured, and executed during the 16th and 17th 

centuries. As Catholics and Protestants condemned each other as the enemy within, the 

Ottoman armies marching through southeastern Europe were imagined as the forces of 

Antichrist.66  

                                                 
65 Antonello Gerbi, Jeremy Moyle trans., The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 

(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973 [1955]), xv-xviii, 3-156; Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 3-47; 

Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, 117-140, where he crucially observes that 17th and 18th 

century missionaries read incommensurabilities between European and indigenous political and religious 

language as signifying absences from American societies (e.g., “without law, without king, without faith”), 

precluding the existence of analogues or functional equivalents; he calls these “anti-lexica”. François Hartog, in 

his study of Greek perceptions of the Scythians, notes that ancient ethnographers only imagined nomadism as 

an accumulation of negatives, i.e., things they do which are imagined to be absent from nomads’ lives: plough, 

eat bread, live in houses, build altars, etc.—in Hartog, Janet Lloyd trans., The Mirror of Herodotus: the 

Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1988), 193-

206. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 10-108: “Even among our own people, we can see many peasants who 

are little different from brute animals,” wrote Francisco de Vitoria (1492-1546), and Jesuit missionaries 

habitually spoke of the “savages” of southern Europe: Asturias, Calabria, Sicily, and the Abruzzi, or “these 

Indies.” Town-dwellers in France habitually called peasants sauvages until the end of the 19th century, despite 

this legally constituting slander, with fines or jail sentences if convicted—see Eugen Weber, Peasants into 

Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 

3-8. 
66 Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome: An account of Gypsy slavery and persecution (Ann Arbor, Mich.: 

Karoma Publishers, Inc., 1987); James Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community, second edition (New York: 

Hermon Press, 1976 [1938]); Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Persecution Perpetuated: The 



 

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European images of Turks combined medieval Islamophobia with much older 

stereotypes of Central Asians as pitiless destroyers, expressed in scenes in art and literature 

where Turks, Tatars, and Mongols ate their victims. Following what I call the anthropology 

of deficiency to its logical extreme, this portrait of animal-like Central Asians reduced them, 

like later defamatory images of indigenous peoples of the Americas, though in the general 

absence of Central Asians or a situation of colonial power over them (quite the opposite) into 

a monstrous anti-society. Identified in the early medieval Alexander legends with Christian 

eschatology’s Gog and Magog or, in the medieval Germanies, with the Lost Tribes of Israel, 

folklore placed these ferocious subhumans behind a great mountain range. Kept in place 

either by the armies of Prester John or the Iron Gate of Alexander, they lived without law, 

culture, religion, or cuisine on a raw-food diet of vermin, unclean bodily substances, and 

human flesh. Like the process of Orientalism described by Edward Said and other forms of 

the much-studied binary-opposition model, this myth of an antisociety reduces real 

ethnocultural groups to negative mirror-images of the normative self. What is specific about 

this form of binary opposition is captured by Gananath Obeyesekere in his definition of 

Savagism: the identification of specific peoples as possessing the animal-like, monstrous 

traits of folkloric liminal beings such as witches, ogres, and wild men, or representing human 

beings from a presocial primordial era, known in Western discourse as “the state of nature.” 

Savagism reads etiological human-origin myths and folkloric stories of liminal beings as 

                                                 
Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany,” in The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 

127, Issue 3 (August 2012), 1339-1392; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of 

Christians in Medieval Christendom, revised edition (University of Chicago Press, 1993 [1973]), ix-xi, 1-50; 

Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London and New 

York: Routledge, 1996), 7-58; Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief 

(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002); entry “Witch hunts” in Norman Davies, Europe: A 

History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 436-37; Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and 

the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (Cleveland and NY: 

Meridian Books, 1961 [1943]). 



 

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literally, rather than metaphorically, true, and identifies these mythic figures with extant 

ethnocultural groups. Savagist binary opposition uses anthropology-of-deficiency arguments 

to deny the most fundamental human traits to their targets, accusing them of ignorance of the 

use of fire, the incest taboo, language, law, etc., explaining these away with positive, 

negative, or ambivalent comparisons to children, animals, and liminal beings. Through this 

mutually-reinforcing process, real human societies are reduced to abstracted stereotypes 

influenced by myth, which are cited as evidence to confirm those myths. This forms the 

substratum of the North American scalping paradigm, and the broader horror-image of Indian 

war as savage war.67 

                                                 
67 “A key premise of evolutionary anthropology was the collapse of time and space whereby ethnography 

recapitulated prehistory—to leave Europe was to travel back in time. Hence the equivalence asserted between 

contemporary Aborigines and Europeans’ primal forebears was not just a projection onto colonized people of 

European fantasies of self. It also furnished an evidenciary supplement.” Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and 

the Transformation of Anthropology, 25. John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and 

Thought (Harvard University Press, 1981); Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and 

Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Gustav Jahoda, Images of 

Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 

esp. 51-196. On the binary-opposition model see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books (a 

division of Random House), 2003 [1978]), 1-7, 46-49, 92-95, 100-03, 203-04; Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula, 

127-35; Seymour Phillips, “The outer world of the European Middle Ages,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit 

Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and other peoples 

in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: 1994), 23-63; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder 

of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 26-51; Travis Zadeh, Mapping Frontiers 

Across Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation, and the ‘Abbasid Empire (London and New York: I.B. Tauris 

& Co. Ltd., 2011), 1-7, 42-43, 76-77, 83-84, 90-93, 144-46, 148-160. Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: 

Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600 (Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J. Brill, 1995), 1-82, 180-81, 1-7 

(Luther and Gog and Magog), 76: Odoric of Pordenone’s account of his travels to China and Mongolia 

describes the Great Khan as “magnus Canis”; a middle High German translation by Konrad Steckel, in 1359, 

translates this as “der grosse hunt” or “the great dog”. On binary oppositions past and present, see Timothy 

Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 

Press, 2008); Zhang, Mighty Opposites, 1-83; Michel Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and 

Knowledge in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1-14, 39-63, 179-83; 

Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,”  in V. B. Leitch ed., The Norton 

Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 1783-1794. On 

contemporary Anglo-American self-identification as a modern, successful “First World” against a backwards, 

dysfunctional Latin American “Third World,” see Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadores, 215-233; on 

Eastern Europe as Western Europe’s dysfunctional mirror, Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of 

Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 357-61;  



 

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In outlining how indigenous Australians were defined by 18th century jurists and 19th 

century anthropologists as peoples so primitive they lacked understanding of land rights or 

conception, Patrick Wolfe crucially observes that such designations are not just “ad hoc 

rationalization[s]” but have “deep historical anchorage.” Just how deep that anchorage goes 

is indicated by Brent Shaw in his studies of Near Eastern accounts of pastoralists, in which 

an “organized and structurally consistent set of ideas,” and an associated “ideology” of 

nomad savagery as antithesis to civilization, has been repeated from the 2nd millennium B.C. 

to the Enlightenment. Pastoralists were imagined as “nomads,” which meant cultureless 

drifters who followed, rather than led, their herds, a mobile lifestyle which easily lent itself to 

brigandage and was thus nascently criminal. A series of binary oppositions also cast 

pastoralists as the rough antitheses of civilization who wore hides instead of textiles, had 

tents instead of houses, ate raw food, were ignorant of law and culture, and promiscuously 

mated within their wandering hordes without understanding of marriage or incest.68  

Greek and Roman theorists added the stock phrase “women held in common” to 

describe these mixed matings, which allowed a possible positive interpretation (as in Plato) 

of lack of marriage as a form of autarky or primitive communism. Otherwise the model was 

unchanged: the shepherd’s life is the “idlest” of all economic modes, wrote Aristotle, as 

animals impose their will on humans who “are compelled to follow, cultivating, as it were, a 

living farm.” In theorizing mixed economies Aristotle can only suggest an aristocratic 

“ploughman-hunter” after “a shepherd and a robber.” Enlightenment social theorists would 

carry this forward with a four-stage model in which pastoralist “barbarians” were the second-

                                                 
68 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 1-128—he also warns of the dangers of 

anthropology as “discourse appropriated into state practice” (177); Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference,” 869-

70 (“The point is rather to indicate the deep historical anchorage of settler-colonial discourse, which is much 

more than some ad hoc rationalization that sprang up spontaneously in the Australian context”). 



 

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most-primitive form of economic life, and hunter-gatherer “savages,” with the imaginary 

Indians of the New World as archetypal, were primitives par excellence. The early modern 

and Enlightenment category of “savagery” was consistent with the Greek and Roman 

theorists’ model of the state of nature, which envisioned a period in human history lacking 

fire, language, law, agriculture, when people had collected the produce of the uncultivated 

“virgin earth” as Varro put it, “acorns, arbutus berries, mulberries, and other fruits”. Drawing 

from the Golden Age myth, it captured its ambivalences: depending on the authors’ purpose, 

the state of nature could be an idyll of autarkic simplicity where, in the absence of personal 

gain and plunder, theft and murder were absent; a “savage and brutal” prehistory when, in 

Cicero’s words, “men wandered at random over the fields, after the fashion of beasts, and 

supported life on the food of beasts”; or a strange era mingling praiseworthy and bizarre 

qualities. Like the Biblical imagery of human primordialism which sprang from the same 

well of Near Eastern sources, mythic depictions of the state of nature are long-lived; as 

archaeologist Clive Gamble notes, “We still await the discovery of the first wooden club and 

fur wrap from the old Stone Age.”69 

                                                 
69 Primary sources: Aristotle, Politics Book I, 1256a – 1256b, William Ellis trans., Politics (London and 

Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1928 [1912]); Plato, Republic Book 2, 369c - 372e, Paul Shorey trans., in 

Plato in Twelve Volumes, volumes 5 and 6, and Laws Book 3, 677a - 684a, R.G. Bury trans., Laws, in Plato in 

Twelve Volumes, volumes 10 and 11 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1967-69); Marcus 

Terentius Varro, De Re Rustica (on Agriculture), Book 2, Section 1. 1-5, W. D. Hooper and H. B. Ash trans., 

Cato and Varro on Agriculture (Harvard University Press: Loeb Classical Library, 1934); Marcus Tullius 

Cicero, De Inventione, Book 1, Chapter 2, C.D. Yonge trans., The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 

(London: George Bell & Sons, 1888). Benjamin Isaac notes in The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity 

(Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford, 2004), 406-10, that Plato’s prehistory was adopted without 

much change by Cicero (De Officiis 1.11-14, 2.11-15), Lactantius (Divinae Institutiones 6-10), Isidore of 

Seville (Etymologiae 14.2.4-6), Augustine (de Civitate Dei 14.44). Secondary sources: Stephanie Moser, 

Ancestral Images: the Iconography of Human Origins (Sutton Publishing, Limited: United Kingdom, 1998); 

Clive Gamble, “The Peopling of Europe 700,00 – 40,000 Years before the Present,” in Barry Cunliffe ed., 

Prehistoric Europe: An Illustrated History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5-41; Brent 

D. Shaw, “Fear and Loathing: the Nomad Menace and Roman Africa,” in C.M. Wells ed., L’Afrique romaine: 

les conférences Vanier 1980 (Ottawa: Éditions de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1982), 29-50, and Brent D. Shaw, 

“‘Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk’: the Ancient Mediterranean Ideology of the Pastoral Nomad,” in Ancient 

Society 13-14 (1982-83), 5-31, both reprinted in Brent D. Shaw, Rulers, Nomads, and Christians in Roman 



 

75 

 

The dyadic early modern image contrasting textile-clad Europeans with Indians in 

hides, feathers, or nude, is prefigured by Savagist imagery from the ancient world. The defeat 

of savages by civilization is metonymized in Mesopotamian and Egyptian imperial art where 

the king, heroically oversized and armed to the teeth, personally executes nude barbarian 

leaders while his troops pile up barbarian corpses and tally the dead with severed body parts. 

The Pylos fresco of the late Bronze Age, in which armed, armoured, and textile-clad 

Mycenaean warriors kill and rout poorly-armed, sheepskin-clad bandits or hill tribesmen 

implies that the dyad had gone west to mainland Greece by at least the 12th century B.C. By 

the 5th century B.C., Classical Greeks were using Savagist and anthropology-of-deficiency 

arguments to identify distant peoples and exotic geographical spaces with human or other-

than-human monstrousness. Within Greece, Thessaly was envisioned as a land of witches 

and centaurs, while impoverished, rustic Arcadia was supposedly the last region to abandon 

human sacrifice and adopt agriculture. The peoples north of Greece, known as Thracians, 

were considered uniquely fierce and stupid, practitioners of both human sacrifice and 

cannibalism. That Thracians were overrepresented in the Greek slave trade was not 

                                                 
North Africa (Variorum, 1995); H.W.F. Saggs, Babylonians (London: British Museum Press, 1995), 60, 75-76, 

80-89, 91-94; Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, 60-74, 82-109, 248-51, 406-10; On the 

“colour-blind” tendencies of Greek and Roman ethnography, which saw savagery in both Europe and Africa 

while praising Egyptians and Ethiopians as wise and sophisticated (negatively, as wealthy and decadent), see 

Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Graeco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: 

Belknap Press, 1970), 169-195, and Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Before Color Prejudice: the Ancient View of Blacks 

(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), 49-59, 85-87, 99-108. On Enlightenment and post-

Enlightenment social theories ranking “savagery” lower than “barbarism,” see Calloway, White People, Indians, 

and Highlanders, 77-81; Thomas, Skull Wars, 44-51; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of 

Anthropology, 43-68. Outside the scope of this thesis is the Savagist tradition in Asia. The earliest Confucian 

texts, the Four Books and Five Classics (ca. 300 BC), refer to barbarian peoples bordering China, some of 

whom eat raw food, do not eat grain, wear the skins of birds and animals, and live in caves or holes in the 

ground—see Mu-chou Poo, Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes toward Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, 

Egypt, and China (Albany, NY: State University of New York press, 2005); Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of 

Race in Modern China (London: Hurst & Company, 1992), 1-29. On the deployment of these images in 

medieval and Meiji Japan to justify conquest of Hokkaido and the Ainu, and, in the latter period, Japanese 

academics’ localization of American racial pseudoscience vis-à-vis Native Americans to make anti-Ainu 

prejudice consistent with 19th-century thought, see Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan 

(London: Routledge, 1996), 26-29, 42-50. 



 

76 

 

coincidence, and Aristotle may have been thinking of Thracians when formulating his 

“natural slave” argument: that a certain rare type of human being, more often found among 

foreigners than Greeks, could be so animal-like that enslaving them was beneficial for both 

parties. If men “intended by nature for slavery” were unwilling to submit, “such a war is by 

nature just.”70 

Exotic geographical spaces and their peoples were also identified with primordialism 

and liminal beings. Homer’s Cyclopes, giant shepherds who ate travellers, were located by 

5th-century Athenian playwright Euripides on Sicily, where Greek colonies coexisted with 

native Sicels imagined as shepherd-brigands. The mythic Amazons, warrior-women who in 

legend had invaded Athens, were depicted in 5th-century art as Persians following Xerxes’ 

burning of Athens, while the lecherous, drunken satyrs sported Thracian shields and staves. 

In the Hellenistic period, the Greek king Attalus I commemorated a victory over a Celtic 

                                                 
70 On violent royal art in the ancient Near East see Poo, Enemies of Civilization; Bruce Lincoln, Religion, 

Empire, and Torture: The case of Achaemenian Persia, with a postscript on Abu Ghraib (Chicago and London: 

The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 17-33, 67-96; Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and 

Representation in Mesopotamia (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 40-68; John F.X. McKeon, “An 

Akkadian Victory Stele,” in Boston Museum Bulletin Vol. 68, No. 354 (1970), pp. 226-243. On the Pylos 

fresco, see Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit, Melanie Hersey trans., The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory 

(Blackwell Publishing: 2005 [2001]), 212, and Carl W. Blegen, “The Palace of Nestor Excavations at Pylos, 

1952,” in American Journal of Archaeology vol. 57, no. 2 (April 1953), 59-64; Aristotle, Politics Book I, 

1256b, Ellis trans. On the ubiquity of enslaved Thracians in ancient Greek society and the corollary ubiquity of 

dehumanizing stereotypes of Thracians see Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek self-definition through 

Tragedy (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1989), 50-69, 103-67 (134: 5th-century BC depictions of Cyclopes as 

shepherds, Amazons as Scythians, satyrs as Thracians), 191-92, 202 n. 6, 211-13 and Clare Kelly Blazeby, 

“Woman + Wine = Prostitute in Classical Athens?” in Allison Glazebrook and Madeleine M. Henry, Greek 

Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BC –200 CE (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin 

Press, 2011), 86-105. On Near Eastern influences on Bronze Age and Classical Greece see Walter Burkert, 

Margaret E. Pinder and Walter Burkert trans., The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek 

Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Arthur Cotterell, 

Origins of European Civilization (London: the Rainbird Publishing Group, 1985), 10-116; Mary R. Lefkowitz 

and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina 

Press, 1996); Dennis D. Hughes, Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (London and New York: Routledge, 

1991), particularly 71-138; John Boardman, The Archaeology of Nostalgia: How the Greeks re-created their 

mythical past (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2002); Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity 

(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011); on the Arcadian myth, see François Hartog, Janet 

Lloyd trans., Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece (University of Chicago Press, 2001), 

133-50, 174-75;  



 

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kingdom in Asia Minor by commissioning a depiction of the Gigantomachy, a mythic battle 

of the Olympians against giants embodying primordial chaos. Through the presence of Greek 

colonies in southern Italy, Savagist ideology entered Roman thought. Roman descriptions of 

pastoralists repeated the nomad “ideology” by rote: on Corsica and Sardinia, in the North 

African deserts, and in mountain ranges from the Atlas to Anatolia to the Balkans, Roman 

writers saw nascently-criminal drifters always on the verge of banditry. The true savages of 

the Roman imagination were to their north: Celts, Germans, and Scythians, warrior tribes 

who sacrificed their enemies to the gods, or worse. Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (ca. 

A.D. 79) stated that many tribes of the Scythians beyond the Danube “feed ordinarily on 

mans flesh”, all the more believable since, according to Homer’s Odyssey, cannibal giants 

had once existed in Italy itself; on the other side of the Alps, Celtic and Germanic tribes “kill 

men for sacrifice after the maner of those Scythian people,” which Pliny thought little 

different than “chewing and eating their flesh.” Julius Caesar’s exaggerated, Savagist portrait 

of trans-Alpine Europe distinguished the Celts of southern and central Gaul, town-dwelling 

agriculturalists who traded with Rome and drank wine, from the Belgae of the northwest, 

who shunned Roman trade and herded cattle for meat and milk, against the feral Germans 

east of the Rhine, whose young men proved themselves by hunting aurochs, moose, and 

unicorns. Pomponius Mela wrote (AD 43) that the Germans ate raw meat, and the mind’s eye 

of Seneca the Younger, in De Providentia (ca. 1st century AD), saw Germans living in 

wagons like Scythians, roaming frigid woods and marshes, hunting wild beasts beneath 

overcast skies: “Are they unhappy, do you think? There is no unhappiness for those whom 

habit has brought back to nature…” It could get worse than this: according to Strabo, the 



 

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Celts of Ireland lived as a primordial horde who habitually practiced cannibalism and incest 

(see Chapter 2).71 

Returning to Pliny the Elder: north of the Dnieper, far beyond the Roman empire’s 

frontiers, he placed the Anthropophagi, his habitual Scythian man-eaters who “use to drinke 

out of the sculs of mens heads, and to weare the scalpes, haire and all, in steed of 

mandellions or stomachers before their breasts, according as Isogonus the Nicean 

witnesseth.” Greek descriptions of Scythians ranged from ethnographies consistent with 

archaeological findings in Ukraine, southern Russia, and Central Asia, to wild stories in 

which scalping was merely a footnote to familiar Savagist tropes of barbarism and 

heterotopia. Beneath the legends, it must be emphasized that the Scythians were an actual 

historic people, identified by modern archaeologists and ethnohistorians as speakers of an 

Indo-Iranian language and as early exemplars of the distinct Central Asian cultural and 

economic pattern of pastoralism, equestrianism, and mounted archery. Elements of 

Herodotus’ ethnography in Book IV of his Histories have been confirmed by two centuries of 

archaeology: the Scythians, or at least the ruling class he dubs the “Royal Scythians,” did 

sport elaborate tattoos, interred their kings and queens in lavish burial mounds with sacrifices 

of horses and servants, and traded extensively with the Greek port towns of the Black Sea. 

Osteological discoveries from the Scythian periods of Ukrainian and southern Russian 

                                                 
71 Plato, Laws Book 3, 677a - 684a, R.G. Bury trans.; Euripides, E.P. Coleridge trans., The Cyclops, in Whitney 

J. Oates and Eugene O’Neill, Jr., eds., The Complete Greek Drama, volume 1 (New York: Random House, 

1938), 393-420; Seneca, de Providentia 4.14, cited in Isaac, Invention of Racism, 427-39. On the inaccuracy of 

Julius Caesar’s ethnography of Europe, including the existence of unicorns in the Black Forest (Commentaries 

on the Gallic War, VI.25-28), see Barry Cunliffe, Greeks, Romans, and Barbarians: Spheres of Interaction 

(London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1988), 80-117, 174-192. On Pomponius Mela, see J. Otto Maenchen-Helfen, ed. 

Max Knight, The World of the Huns: Studies in their History and Culture (Berkeley, LA, and London: 

University of California Press, 1973), 2-19, 64-65. Pliny the Elder, Philemon Holland trans., The Historie of the 

World, Commonly called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus (London, 1601), VII.2. 



 

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archaeology also prove some of Herodotus’ darker tones: cut marks along the hairlines of 

skulls from southern Russia are consistent with accounts of Scythians scalping their enemies, 

while the remains of a Scythian town at the archaeological site of Belsk includes a workshop 

for converting skulls into lacquered drinking cups or bowls, which Herodotus proclaimed a 

Scythian warrior’s ultimate trophy of victory over his enemy.72 

Per his mission statement to record “great and marvellous deeds” of both Greeks and 

barbarians, Herodotus’ Scythian ethnography was ambivalent. Though cataloguing various 

Scythian customs the Greeks considered outré—i.e., decapitating, flaying, and scalping 

enemies; fashioning cloaks and napkins, bowcases, and drinking cups as trophies from 

enemies’ scalps, skin, and skulls; drinking wine unmixed with water; drinking the blood of 

their enemies; and offering human sacrifices to Ares—he considered them and a related 

Central Asian people, the Massagetae, ultimately praiseworthy as, in his estimation, the only 

peoples besides the Greeks to successfully resist the Persian empire. Hartog notes that 

Herodotus defies the prevailing derogatory reading of pastoralism in Classical ethnography 

by elevating it from economic mode to military strategy: by packing their families and wealth 

onto wagons and driving great herds of livestock for dairy and meat, the Scythians can avoid 

Persian conquest by retreating into the steppes, harassing and starving out a larger, less 

mobile foe. While later generations of Classical ethnographers echoed Herodotus’ theme of 

unconquered Scythians, they were more interested in tropes and icons of Scythians’ 

monstrousness, some of which Herodotus repeated while professing to disbelieve: stories of 

Scythian tribes who were cyclopean, had cloven hoofs for feet, fought gryphons for gold, 

                                                 
72 Pliny, Holland trans., VII.2; On the historicity of Herodotus, see Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark 

Herodotus: the Histories (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 752-55 (on Belsk). A digest of sources on skull-

cups in Europe, primary (contemporary) and secondary (modern archaeology), is provided by M.L. West in 

Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford University Press, 2007), 493.  



 

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were werewolves, or dined habitually on human flesh. Herodotus endorsed the existence of 

one tribe of man-eating Scythians, consistent with the Savagist criminalization of nomads: 

the Androphagi, “herdsmen without fixed dwellings, […] the most savage of men” with “no 

notion of either law or justice” and “the only people in this part of the world to eat human 

flesh” (IV.106-07).  

Scythians functioned for ancient Greeks and Romans as indigenous Americans did 

for early modern Europeans, as a focus on which to project their fantasies and thought 

experiments on primitivism and exoticism, and many of the same narratives about indigenous 

Americans are prefigured in the material on Scythians. Like the Greek myth of the Lapiths, a 

tribe of hardy Thessalian mountaineers, waging war upon and wiping out the Thessalian 

centaurs, the dyadic image of noble savages at war with savages appears in the Scythian 

corpus: Diodorus Siculus (ca. 1st century BC) reported that Euphorus of Cyeme (ca. 4th 

century BC), expanding on an allusion in Homer’s Iliad to two northern peoples, 

“Hippemólgoi, mare’s-milk drinkers” and “Ábioi” or “distant ones” (Iliad XIII.1-6), had 

decided the former must be benevolent, autarkic philosophers who ate dairy instead of killing 

animals for meat, and waged perpetual war against the man-eating Scythians. The uses of 

indigenous Americans, like Montaigne’s Brazilians or Baron de Lahontan’s Huron character 

Adario, as outsiders through which their authors ventriloquized European society’s flaws and 

contradictions, were foreshadowed by Scythian characters who examined the Mediterranean 

world and found it wanting: the legendary Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, and the 

characters of Lucian of Samosata’s Scythian romances Toxaris and The Scythian. Scythians, 

who in stereotype were pale-skinned, green-eyed, and red-haired, personified in the Greek 

imagination the extreme north just as “Ethiopians,” sub-Saharan Africans, personified the 



 

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extreme south; in the Hellenistic period this topos of bookending human geography with 

North Africa on one end and eastern Europe on the other had spread across the 

Mediterranean world, as expressed in a pairing of “barbarian” (read: Berber, i.e., North 

Africa) and “Scythian” by Paul to express the universal relevance of Christianity in 

Colossians 3:11.73 

But as evidenced by Pliny’s repetition of old stories of man-eating Scythians scalping 

and trepanning their victims, the Scythians functioned in the Classical mind as embodiments 

of human wildness, as either ferocity or dysfunction. Such references were widespread in 

Classical Athens, where Scythia was omnipresent: Athens purchased vast amounts of Black 

Sea grain and fish from Scythia, as well as slaves. Some of these slaves served as an 

Athenian police force who wore distinct uniforms—perhaps, Balbina Bäbler points out, 

because the hardy Scythians were seen as incorruptible noble savages, which may explain the 

negative mirror image of Athenian comic playwrights, particularly Aristophanes, of Scythian 

police as gibberish-speaking, timid fools. Invoking scalping could be used to add exotic 

danger to updated versions of traditional myths, as in fragments of Sophocles’ lost play 

                                                 
73 On the myths of Golden Age conditions being applied to extant peoples by ancient ethnographers, see Paul T. 

Keyser, “Greek Geography of the Western Barbarians,” 37-70, in Larissa Bonfante, The Barbarians of Ancient 

Europe: Realities and Interactions (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and entry “Skúthes” [Scythians] in 

Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich eds., Geoffrey W. Bromiley trans., Theological Dictionary of the New 

Testament vol. 7, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995 [1971]), 447-450. 

Ancient Greek medical theory believed mare’s-milk cheese, a rarity in the Hellenic world, had superb health 

benefits—see D. Braund, “Greeks, Scythians and Hippake, or ‘Reading Mare’s-Cheese’”, in Gocha R. 

Tsetskhladze ed., Ancient Greeks West and East (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 521-530; Lucian, A.M. Harmon trans., 

“Toxaris, or Friendship” in Volume 5 of 8 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), 101-208; 

Lucian, K. Kilburn trans., “The Scythian, or the Consul,” in Volume 6 of 8 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard 

University Press, 1959), 239-258; Richard I. Pervo, “With Lucian: Who Needs Friends? Friendship in the 

Toxaris,” in John T. Fitzgerald ed., Greco-Roman Perspectives on Friendship (Society of Biblical Literature 

Resources for Bible Study Number 34. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1997), 163-180; David Goldenberg, 

“Scythian-Barbarian: The Permutations of a Classical Topos in Jewish and Christian Texts of Late Antiquity,” 

in Journal of Jewish Studies 49 (1998), 87-102. Colossians 3:11, King James Bible: “Where there is neither 

Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in 

all.”  



 

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Oenomaus, which mentions a head “shaved [or scalped] to make a napkin in the Scythian 

manner” and describes the titular legendary tyrant roofing his palace with human skulls “to 

dramatize his savagery.” A fragment of a painted cup, dated to the 490s BC, which Dyfri 

Williams interprets as an “unusually vivid Centauromachy,” the battle of the Lapiths and 

Centaurs, shows a fully-armoured Greek fighter whose helmet has been accessorized with a 

scalp—clearly not his, since tufts of his own hair peek out from around the edges of his 

helmet. But many invocations of Scythians, particularly the negative stereotypes of their 

wandering, drunkenness, and scalping, were comedic, contemptuous, or both. In Classical 

Athenian slang, “nomad,” a term considered synonymous with “Scythian,” referred to an 

itinerant craftsman or street prostitute. The verb skuthizo, and compound verbs aposkuthizo 

and periskuthizo, appear to have literally meant “to scalp” but could be used as figures of 

speech for shaving the head, for haircuts uncomfortably close to the scalp, or for drunkenness 

and hangovers; like Gauls and Germans, Scythians were believed to be intemperate drunks.74    

Prefiguring Montaigne by millennia, Savagist discussions in antiquity raised the idea 

that civilized people could behave more cruelly than true savages. Denouncing political 

opponents he accused of arranging for Roman citizens to be robbed, imprisoned, and 

executed (Against Verres, 2.5.150), Cicero posited that if he were to tell this sad story to 

Scythians rather than jaded Romans, “I should move the pity of even those barbarous men.” 

The negative articulation of civilized cruelty as more barbarous than barbarians’ is central to 

the portrayal of Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and his persecutions of Jews 

                                                 
74 Balbina Bäbler, “Bobbies or Boobies? The Scythian police force in Classical Athens,” in David Braund, ed., 

Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interactions in Scythia, Athens and the Early Roman Empire (sixth century BC 

– first century AD) (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2005), 114-122; Dyfri Williams, “Onesimos and 

the Getty Iliupersis,” 47, in Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum, vol. 5 (Malibu: the J. Paul Getty 

Museum, 1991), pp. 41-64; “nomad” as “streetwalker” in Shaw, “ ‘Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk’,” 24; 

Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, 112-172;  



 

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during his reign in the 2nd century BC, in the stories of martyrdom and torture of the 

deuterocanonical Books of the Maccabees. In 2 Maccabees 4:47, Antiochus’ death sentences 

for political opponents are characterized as so unjust that “if they had told their cause, yea, 

before the Scythians, [they] should have been judged innocent” (King James translation). 3 

Maccabees 7:5, as prelude to horrors to come, speaks of Antiochus’ forces rounding up and 

executing Jews without trial, “girding themselves with a cruelty more savage than that of 

Scythian custom” (Revised Standard Version).75  

In its interconnections between the destruction of families, torture by fire, and 

scalping while living as a form of tormented death, the gruesome martyrdom story of 2 

Maccabees 7:1-42 strangely and eerily prefigures the American frontier’s horror stories of 

the mid-18th century. Antiochus orders an exemplary Jewish woman and her seven sons 

brought before him, commands them to violate the Mosaic laws by tasting pork, and orders 

them whipped and scourged when they refuse. When one of the seven sons announces their 

readiness to die rather than break the sacred laws, Antiochus, flying into a fury, proves 

himself more cruel than the Scythians: ordering that “pans and cauldrons” be made red-hot, 

Antiochus commands his servants to cut out the young man’s tongue, scalp him—the Greek 

Septuagint text reads περισκυθίσαντας, “periskythísantas”—and cut off his hands and feet, 

then fry him in a giant skillet (2 Maccabees 7:1-5). A second brother is brought forward, 

scalped, and asked whether he will eat pork rather than meet a similar fate; he refuses, and is 

similarly “tormented and mangled” (2 Macc. 7:7-8, King James). One by one the five 

                                                 
75 Aubrey de Sélincourt trans., John Marincola ed., Herodotus: The Histories (Penguin: 2003 [1954]), 90-94; 

Hartog, Mirror of Herodotus, 156-70; entry “Skúthes” [Scythians] in Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich eds., 

Geoffrey W. Bromiley trans., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament vol. 7, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: 

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995 [1971]), 447-450; Jan Willem van Henten and Friedrich 

Avemarie, Martyrdom and Noble Death: Selected Texts from Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Christian Antiquity 

(London: Routledge, 2002), 66-70. 



 

84 

 

remaining brothers and their mother are killed horribly, while promising Antiochus of their 

imminent bodily resurrection in Heaven and the impending wrath of God. The King James 

translation of the early 17th century translated the first martyr’s scalping and dismemberment 

as “cut off the utmost parts of his body” (2 Macc. 7:4) but when describing the scalping of 

the second wrote “pulled off the skin of his head with the hair” (2 Macc. 7:7). With a post 

facto finality similar to those of the captivity narratives, the Biblical author concludes, “Let 

this be enough now to have spoken concerning the idolatrous feasts, and the extreme 

tortures” (2 Macc. 7:42).76 

Early modern allusions and lateral comparisons between Scythians and indigenous 

Americans almost always sidestepped scalping itself in favour of ancient topoi of Scythian 

wildness: nomadism, cruelty, mobile warfare, and cannibalism. In Lafitau’s ethnographic 

study of the Iroquois, Moeurs des sauvages amériquains (1724), scalping was compared to 

Scythian headhunting, rather than scalping. Cotton Mather, in Magnalia Christi 

Americana (1702), invokes the Scythians to castigate American Indians’ general ferocity, 

calling them “those worse than Scythian Wolves” and lamenting “our Shepherds […] worried 

unto death by the Scythian Wolves of our Wilderness”. Building on José de Acosta’s 1590 

suggestion that some ancient people had migrated to the Americas by an unknown overland 

route from Asia, Georgius Hornius proposed in 1652 that Scythians, as well as Chinese and 

Phoenicians, were the Indians’ ancestors, on the grounds that Herodotus’ description of the 

Scythians scalping their slain enemies “depicts for us precisely the Florida or Huron Scyth, 

cutting into the head of his dead enemy so that he can take the skin away with the hair.” The 

                                                 
76 entry “Skúthes” [Scythians] in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament vol. 7, 447-50; van Henten and 

Avemarie, Martyrdom and Noble Death, 66-70; 



 

85 

 

Jesuit Relation of 1642 describes the Iroquois as “these Barbarians” who “carry on war in the 

fashion of the Scythians and Parthians,” referring not to scalping but to hit-and-run raids with 

bows and arrows. The fragmented, polyvalent corpus of Scythian knowledge in Classical and 

medieval geography meant that a one-on-one reading of one people’s relevance to the other 

was not systematically performed in the contact period; however, accounts of the Scythians 

prefigure images of American Savagism in intriguing ways.77 

Sepúlveda’s false dilemma: Savagism and illegitimate combatants from Columbus to 

Valladolid 

 In March 1493 the Genoese navigator and revisionist geographer Christopher 

Columbus arrived in triumph in Barcelona, presenting Ferdinand and Isabella forty tropical 

birds, strange gold jewellery, and six survivors of two dozen captives from, he thought, the 

Indian ocean. In his journals and his letters Columbus claimed to have understood the 

Indians’ signs and gestures from the very beginning, allowing his distinction between the 

Taínos (their word for “good”) and the Caribs. The former had welcomed his sailors with 

fresh provisions and were described in familiar Golden Age terms: gentle and friendly to the 

point of naïveté, quick to learn, and culturally blank, having no religion or technology. 

Columbus wrote in his diary on 14 October that some of the Indians, through the gestures 

that he somehow understood perfectly, “were asking us if we had come from the sky.” 

                                                 
77 Dickason, The Myth of the Savage, 32-35; David Allen Harvey, “Living Antiquity: Lafitau’s Moeurs des 

sauvages amériquains  and the Religious Roots of the Enlightenment Science of Man,” in Proceedings of the 

Western Society for French History vol. 36 (Michigan Publishing: University of Michigan Library, 2008), 75-

92; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702), Book 2 (64: “those worse than Scythian 

Wolves”), Book 7 (110: “those Scythian Wolves of our Wilderness”); Reuben Gold Thwaites ed., trans., The 

Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents Volume XXII: Québec, Hurons, 1642 (Cleveland: the Burrows Brothers, 

1898); Hornius cited in Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 235; José de Acosta, Jane E. Mangan ed., Frances 

M. López-Morillas trans., Walter Mignolo commentary, Natural and Moral History of the Indies (Durham and 

London: Duke University Press, 2002), Book I, chapter 20-24 (pp. 61-72), Book VII, chapter 3 (pp. 385-86). 



 

86 

 

Columbus noted also a multitude of hamlets and villages, the seedbed of civilization in 

European thought, while Columbus’ second son Ferdinand described Indians shuttling 

between hunting and fishing spots “at fixed seasons, moving from one ground to another.” A 

traveller on the 1492 voyage, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, compared them to ancient nomads: “We 

consider them to be like Scythians, wanderers without fixed habitations living off the fruits 

of the land.” As these cultureless Taíno Indians were not only gentle but also “lazy to the 

greatest degree” (“perezosos en grandísima manera”), converting them to Christianity and 

putting them to work tilling colonists’ fields, tending crops, and mining gold was in 

everyone’s best interest.78  

As Nicolás Wey-Gómez critically observes, a key element in transmitting Old World 

mythology onto New World peoples was identifying physically-human beings as culturally-

monstrous, thus enabling comparison to the Plinian monsters who prowled the tropics in the 

European imagination. As John Friedman observed in 1981, once European myths of 

primordialism and monstrousness were attached to real peoples in colonized Atlantic space 

through such composite colonial categories as The Indian, The Savage, and The Cannibal, 

European belief in the existence of half-human wild men went into decline. Columbus’ 

journals stated that he took the Taínos’ first sign-descriptions of the Canima, Caniba, or 

Caribe for creatures from medieval geography and sailors’ legends: man-eating Cyclopes or 

                                                 
78 Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston and 

New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 13-45; Francesca Lardici, ed., A Synoptic Edition of the Log of 

Columbus’ First Voyage (Brepols, 1999), 50 (“come from the sky”), throughout; J.M. Cohen ed., trans., The 

Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 80 (“one ground to another”), 

134-35 (Taíno as “good”), throughout; Cioacchino Triolo, Luciano F. Farino trans., Christopher Columbus’ 

Discoveries in the testimonials of Diego Alvarez Chanca and Andrés Bernáldez (Rome, 1992); Yáñez Pinzón 

(“like Scythians”) cited in Peter Martyr’s First Decade, cited in Dickason, The Myth of the Savage, 32-35; 

Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 52-118; Nicolas Wéy-Gómez, Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed 

South to the Indies (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008), 211-26 (“lazy to the greatest degree”) and 

throughout. 



 

87 

 

India’s dog-headed Cynocephali. Dismissing these as a mark of the Indians’ superstition, 

Columbus and Doctor Chança later wrote with horror of encountering the villages of the 

man-eaters. Though no direct anthropophagy was witnessed, they reported finding human 

bones hung like ancestral relics—which, Neil Whitehead noted, were often mistaken 

subsequently as evidence of cannibal feasts; some animal’s neckbone boiling in a pot; and 

captives from other islands, including three Taíno boys captured and castrated “as we do to 

capons or pigs which we want to fatten and make tender.” The detail of boys castrated to 

improve their taste is redolent of both nightmares of gustatory cannibalism and contemporary 

European sailors’ fears of emasculation in Muslim captivity; it is echoed nowhere else in 

even the most lurid accounts of man-eating in the Americas. Yet Columbus and Chança were 

certain that these physically-human yet culturally-monstrous beings were the Caribes or 

Caníbales they had been warned of; in their decision that other peoples who resisted by 

fleeing into the woods or fighting them with bows and arrows must also be Caribs or 

Cannibals, they linked Indian resistance with stigmatized violence. But conquering the 

Caribs should be easy, Columbus wrote in his March 1493 letter of relation to the 

Sovereigns: the Caribs were not necessary “bold” or “courageous” but only seemed that way 

because the Taínos were cowards. Tellingly, upon his return in spring 1493 his suggested 

returns on investment included “as many slaves as Their Majesties order to make,” as well as 

gold, spices, and cotton.79 

                                                 
79 Friedman, The Monstrous Races; Frank Lestringant, Rosemary Morris trans., Cannibals: The Discovery and 

Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 

1997 [1994]), 15-49 (“like capons”); Whitehead, Empyre of Guiana, 103. On European anxieties regarding 

captivity, castration, and male rape in the Islamic Mediterranean, see Lisa B. Voigt, Writing Captivity in the 

Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds 

(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 40-50, and Sophie Rose Arjana, Muslims in the 

Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2015), 1-83; Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 13-45; Greenblatt, 



 

88 

 

From the wreck of the Santa María Columbus had fashioned La Navidad, a small fort 

on Hispañola, and left a garrison there when he sailed back to Spain in the spring of 1493. 

Upon his return in November 1493 he found several sailors killed and La Navidad in ruins; 

evidently, the Taínos were not as helpless or docile as he had assumed. This Second Voyage 

was marked by Columbus’ first trans-Atlantic shipments of enslaved Indians he labelled as 

cannibals, “a people very savage and suitable for the purpose” of chattel slavery to pay the 

colony’s expenses. By the time of the Third Voyage (1498-1500), as the Indians rebelled 

against a Spanish colonial regime that worked them to death for gold, Columbus griped how 

misunderstood he was in a letter to the crown prince’s governess Doña Juana: he was no 

governor of a settled land, like Sicily, but a captain sent to conquer a “warlike and numerous” 

people “with customs and beliefs very different from ours [.]” Mention of the Indians’ 

villages and hamlets were absent as Columbus likened them to bandits, rebels, or wandering 

primitives: “a people, living in highlands and mountains, having no settled dwellings, and 

apart from us [.]” When the colonists also revolted against Columbus and his brothers, the 

Crown stripped them of their authority and put them on trial in 1500 on charges stemming 

from abuse of power and ignoring Isabella’s “neat legal distinction” between trading in 

foreign slaves and enslaving the Crown’s subjects. But the designations of suspected 

cannibals as fit subjects for conquest, and vice versa, was continued by his successors, who 

met labour shortages by declaring occupants of uncolonized islands as Caribs. Crown jurists 

concurred, issuing rulings from 1503 to 1506 legitimizing the “ransom” by Spanish colonists 

of Indians enslaved and owned by other Indians, the enslavement of Indians captured in just 

wars, and the enslavement of cannibals for their crimes against God and nature. Combined 

                                                 
Marvelous Possessions, 52-118; Wéy-Gómez, Tropics of Empire, 221-26, 425-26 (the carta-relación of 4 March 

1493). 



 

89 

 

with the as-yet burgeoning southern European trade in Muslim and African slaves, this 

marked the birth of the American caste system, as denounced by Capuchin and abolitionist 

Epifanio de Moirans in 1782: “[Europeans] seize the lands of the natives of the Indies once 

they have killed them or enslaved them, and they also expel the Blacks from their own lands 

and reduce them to the perpetual slavery of someone shipped to America or transported to 

Europe.”80 

Binary opposition and savagism are not solely the preserve of Europeans, and early 

modern and 20th century accounts indicate a mutual or overlapping legibility in Iberians’ and 

indigenous peoples’ Savagisms. In 16th-century Brazil, Tupí-speaking coastal peoples told 

Portuguese explorers of the barbarous Tapuya or Tapuia of the interior, who lacked manioc 

agriculture and hammocks and slept on the ground. An etymology of Tapuia as simply 

“westerner” or “enemy” suggests that the category is “little more than a negative image of 

the Tupi,” but gave rise to a persistent, dyadic Brazilian historiographical myth contrasting 

the coastal Tupí and interior Tapuia as “good” and “bad” Indians; the former were valorous, 

only ate enemies for revenge, and had vanished after helping the early settlers, while the 

Tapuya, identified as Brazil’s Amazonian Indian enemy of the moment, were brutal 

primitives who ate human flesh for food. Such distinctions were also found in 20th-century 

fieldwork among the Mehinaku, one of ten allied villages in the Xingu headwaters region of 

Mato Grosso state, where Thomas Gregor describes a shared Xinguano culture which bridges 

                                                 
80 Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 13-45 (24: “very savage and suitable”), 40-42, 148 (Moirans); on Moirans as 

early abolitionist, see Liliana Obregón, entry “Colonial Critics of Slavery,” 158-161, in Kwame Anthony 

Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African & African American 

Experience, second edition, volume 1 (Oxford University Press, 2004). Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 52-

118, 66 (“warlike and numerous… apart from us”); Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise & Decline of the People 

Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992), 144-161; “COLUMBUS, 

CHRISTOPHER: Columbus in Spain,” in Silvio E. Bedini, ed., The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, 

volume 1 (Simon and Schuster, 1992), 187-98 (197: “neat legal distinction”); Wéy-Gómez, Tropics of Empire. 



 

90 

 

a divide of four separate language families through intermarriage, trade, manioc and corn 

agriculture, and a shared self-definition as possessors of empathy and compassion, imagined 

as absent among Brazilians and the non-Xinguano indigenous peoples who periodically 

raided Xinguano villages. Gregor’s informants distinguished between themselves as peaceful 

people who wear annatto, channel intravillage tensions into wrestling matches, and avoid 

foods which incite anger and aggression, while non-Xinguanos lack self-control: “He kills 

his own kin. War for him is a festival.” Mehinaku informants elaborated on how these 

peoples used rancid lard in place of annatto, ate vermin, slept on the ground, and defecated in 

their drinking water.81  

When Iberians interacted with state societies with imperial ideologies, cross-cultural 

similarities were even greater. Sixteenth-century Spanish authorities readily accepted the 

Nahuatl ethnonym Chichimeca for the seminomadic peoples of the northern deserts, who the 

town-dwelling farmers of Central Mexico described as their primitive antitheses: eating raw 

or vile foods, wearing pelts or nude in lieu of textiles, and warring constantly. In 1970s 

Columbia Michael Taussig noted how the Spanish infieles (pagans) and the Quechuan word 

auca, for non-Quechuan-speakers who defied the Incas’ sacred order, could be 

                                                 
81 On Tapuya / Tapuia, see Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London: 

John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 42-63, and John M. Monteiro, “The Heathen Castes of Sixteenth-

Century Portuguese America: Unity, Diversity, and the Invention of the Brazilian Indians,” in The Hispanic 

American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (November 2000), 697-719. Gregor notes a limit to Xinguano 

pacifism: in the 1960s the Txicão, a Carib-speaking people, initiated contact by raiding Xinguano villages; 

Xinguanos from several villages responded by joining forces with a Brazilian to launch devastating 

counterattacks. Killings by Xinguano warriors and deaths by epidemic disease led the Txicão to sue for peace 

and settle among the Xinguanos. “In explaining this departure from the normal pattern of peacefulness, my 

informants emphasized that the Txicao had attacked first and that they would attack again unless destroyed. 

Moreover, the moral gulf between the wild Indians and the Xinguano made it permissible.” Thomas Gregor, 

“Uneasy peace: intertribal relations in Brazil’s Upper Xingu,” in Jonathan Haas, ed., The Anthropology of War 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105-124; Gregor notes that the stereotypes against non-

Xinguanos were softening in the 1990s in Thomas Gregor and Clayton A. Robarchek, “Two Paths to Peace: 

Semai and Mehinaku Nonviolence,” in Thomas Gregor ed., A Natural History of Peace (Nashville and London: 

Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 159-188. 



 

91 

 

synonymously used by Colombians to invoke a collage of Quechuan and European 

stereotypes about the wild Putumayo lowlanders: that such people could see in the dark or 

transform into jaguars, practiced sorcery and cannibalism, did not eat salt, and were still 

unaware of Christ or the Spanish language. Yet, notes Taussig, shamans in Colombia’s 

lowlands consider the Afro-Colombians of the Pacific as the true sorcerers. “As my good 

friend Orfir says, heaving with laughter, wherever you go, the great brujos are elsewhere.”82 

The Americas of the European imagination at their most ambivalent mixed themes of 

a land resembling an earthly paradise with weird peoples from a bygone age; as in Amerigo 

Vespucci’s 1503 description of long-lived Brazilians who went to war for human meat, these 

themes were easily repackaged within the ancient Savagist myth of the man-eating horde . In 

the half-century of conquests that followed the Columbian encounter, European fantasies 

regarding the New World were further embroidered in their idealized and demonized 

extremes; by the time of the Valladolid debate (1550-51), a written exchange between two 

experts on matters of Americana, theology, and the law, these fantasies had been elevated to 

the status of institutionalized knowledge. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who 

had lived in the Americas since arriving in the Caribbean in 1502 and had served as bishop of 

Chiapas in 1545-46, could cite his own experience to authenticate claims which, to many 

Europeans and most of his fellow colonists, seemed unbelievable: that the indigenous 

peoples of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru served as living exemplars of such Christian 

virtues as communitarianism, gentleness, generosity, asceticism and selflessness. The 

existence of indigenous civilizations in Mexico and Peru, i.e., hierarchical, sedentary urban-

agrarian societies with aristocracies, central government, codes of law and forms of writing, 

                                                 
82 Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, 44-45, 94-100, 230-36, 152-54, 171-187, 378-91. 



 

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clearly indicated that Indians possessed reason, which meant their inevitable conversion to 

Christianity and transformation into Spanish subjects could be performed by persuasion 

rather than conquest. His opponent, the theologian and legalist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, had 

never been to the New World, but could draw on an already broad corpus of conquest, 

ethnographic, and travel literature to argue the opposite position: that Indians were 

Europeans’ moral and civilizational inferiors, and reducing them to serfdom was no crime.83 

To dismantle the stigmata of the Indian warrior as encountered in the Caribbean, 

Mexico, and Brazil, Las Casas attempted to reread culturally-idiosyncratic violence in 

universalist terms of unconscious Christianity, while attacking the right of conquest by 

infantilizing Indians as unworthy foes. In his Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 

Las Casas had described their warfare in the pre- and post-contact period as “no more deadly 

than our jousting, or than many European children’s games”; even the weapons of the Inca, 

who Las Casas and his peers considered the most advanced American civilization, were “a 

joke.” If comparison to European norms was meant to make Indian warfare nonthreatening 

                                                 
83 Friedman, The Monstrous Races; Viviana Díaz Balsera, “On Barbarism, Demons, and Natural Reason: Las 

Casas’ Rhetoric of Human Sacrifices in Pre-Hispanic Mexico,” in Santa Arias and Eyda M. Merediz ed., 

Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (New York: The Modern Language 

Association of America, 2008), 159-166; Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biography 

(Cambridge University Press, 2012), 43-46, 82-86, 234-38, 342-86; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: 

The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 119-

145; On the Indians as unworthy opponents and citations from Las Casas’ Brief History, see Hernán Cortés, 

Anthony Pagden ed., trans., Letters from Mexico (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001 [1986, 

1971]), lxi-lxvi; Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven and London: Yale 

University Press, 1993), 69-89; Anthony Pagden, 93-95, in “Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings 

of Bartolomé de las Casas,” in Stephen Greenblatt ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley, CA: University of 

California Press, 1993), 85-100; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 72-100; John-Pau Rubiés review of Daniel Castro, 

Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas, indigenous rights, and ecclesiastical imperialism (Durham 

and London: Duke University Press, 2007), in Journal of Ecclesiastical History vol. 58, no. 4 (2007), 767-68; 

on the general consensus of contemporary theologians on the justifications of the conquests, see Etienne Grisel, 

“The Beginnings of International Law and General Public Law Doctrine: Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indiis 

prior,” 305-25, and Lewis Hanke, “The Theological Significance of the Discovery of America,” 363-74, in 

Fredi Chiapelli ed., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, Vol. 1 of 2 (Berkeley, 

LA, London: University of California press, 1976). 



 

93 

 

and almost childish, Las Casas’ analysis of cannibalism and human sacrifice was intended to 

challenge Europeans’ sense of adequacy in their own religious practice. Alluding to Christian 

exegesis of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) and Greek, Roman, and Biblical myths and 

accounts of human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism among the Greeks, Romans, Celts, 

Carthaginians, and other peoples, Las Casas proposed that human sacrifice was typical of a 

universal, albeit regrettable, stage in human history. Through natural reason, pagans, i.e. 

those as yet unaware of Christianity, intuitively grasped that human beings were made in the 

divine image, but had not yet been informed that the Crucifixion and the Eucharist had 

superseded and supplanted all forms of sacrifice and related ritual meals, especially human. 

Las Casas pointed to acts of devoted self-abasement found by missionaries in societies across 

the Iberian Americas as further evidence of the Indians’ religiosity. Acts like fasting, praying 

and singing, bathing in cold water, and self-flagellation seemed legible per contemporary 

Christian asceticism and penitence. Such knowledge offered trans-Atlantic benefits: 

Europeans could reform their Christian practice by taking example from such virtuous 

pagans, while the Indians’ energies could and should be redirected to true religion by 

missionaries and conversion.84 

Las Casas’ critique of Christianity as practiced in Europe went further in his inversion 

of colonial victim and aggressor: the Spanish colonists, not the Indians, were the true 

barbarians, who had illegally invaded American lands and killed thousands by forced labour, 

                                                 
84 Díaz Balsera, “On Barbarism, Demons, and Natural Reason,” 159-166; Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas, 43-

46, 82-86, 234-38, 342-86; Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 119-145; On the Indians as unworthy opponents 

and citations from Las Casas’ Brief History, see Pagden, Letters from Mexico, lxi-lxvi; Pagden, European 

Encounters with the New World, 69-89; Pagden, “Ius et Factum” in Greenblatt ed., New World Encounters, 85-

100; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 72-100; Rubiés review of Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire; Grisel, “The 

Beginnings of International Law” and Hanke, “The Theological Significance of the Discovery of America,” 

Chiapelli ed., First Images of America. 



 

94 

 

starvation, enslavement, and mass executions. Las Casas damned the conquistadores by 

comparison to “Mohammedans,” Europeans’ fantasy image of Muslims as a barbarous, 

schismatic horde: followers of a false prophet who had invented a bogus version of 

Christianity to gain wealth and power, “Mohammedans” in turn invoked their false religion 

to cynically justify conquest and self-aggrandizement. Las Casas further damned 

conquistadores with comparison to fierce beasts: wolves, tigers, lions, bulls, dogs, and 

dragons. In believing that Muslims were diabolical heretics and that Christians should 

crusade against them, Las Casas and Sepúlveda shared common ground; where they 

disagreed was on whether Reconquista arguments could be used to justify conquests in the 

Americas, as Sepúlveda argued. In Las Casas’ view, Muslims were clear aggressors, 

“heretics who seize our lands, persecute Christians and work for the destruction of our faith,” 

while in the Indies, the situation was reversed, and Iberian Catholics were the aggressors. 

Spreading Christianity by conquest, as Sepúlveda proposed, was to evangelize by the 

“Mohammedan method,” i.e., “with death and terror,” which made the conquistadores’ 

actions “worse than the assaults mounted by the Turk in his attempt to destroy Christendom.” 

To accuse other Europeans of being white savages, or worse than savages, had a certain 

rhetorical sting, but in reifying the validity of the savage as a category of analysis it proved 

problematic, as shall be noted later in this thesis.85 

Las Casas’ and Sepúlveda also shared a belief that modern humans, in isolation and 

poverty, could degenerate to a pre-social, primordial state of being. Later in the 1550s, per 

                                                 
85 Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 119-200; on Muslim stereotypes and Islamophobia in the late medieval and 

early modern world, see Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 1-83; Jerry Toner, Homer’s Turk: How 

Classics Shaped Ideas of the East (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2013), 49-70; Tomaž 

Mastnak, “Europe and the Muslims: The Permanent Crusade?,” in Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells eds., 

The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 205-248 

(217-18: “Mohammedan method… destroy Christendom”). 



 

95 

 

Thomas Aquinas’ 12th century definition of the barbarian simpliciter, Las Casas wrote in 

Apologética Historia of rare but extant groups of humans who lived without law, justice, 

commerce, marriage, friendships, or society itself. Scattered in the woods and mountains, 

such wild men were “savage, ferocious, slow-witted, and alien to all reason” due to a barren 

environment or “impious or perverse understanding.” Like the natural slave of Aristotelian 

theory, they had to be forcibly brought to civilization for their own good, or at least to 

prevent them preying on others. Towards the end of his life, Las Casas proposed a mission to 

the Chichimecs, who he and other Spanish colonists imagined as New World incarnations of 

the barbarian simpliciter. Las Casas also noted missionizing them would also serve imperial 

purposes: in 1546 vast silverlodes had been discovered at Zacatecas in the Chichimecs’ 

country, and converting and settling the Chichimecs “would also facilitate reaching Florida 

which is very close.” So, while Las Casas certainly critiqued the excesses of Spanish 

imperialism, he was not a critic of imperialism per se.86  

As Las Casas attempted to separate at least some Indians from dark fantasies of ogre-

like wild men, Sepúlveda derided the idea that Indians were Europeans’ equals in anything: 

Indians were to the Spaniards, wrote Sepúlveda, as children are to adults, as females are to 

males, “almost as monkeys are to men.” Sepúlveda also deployed animal comparisons by 

scoffing that Indian handicrafts proved nothing, since even birds and spiders make nests and 

webs, and rhetorically asked what the existence of “some manner of community living” 

proved, “except that they are not bears or monkeys and that they are not completely devoid 

of reason?” In one of his most damning passages, Sepúlveda vilified the Indians by 

                                                 
86 Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 119-200; Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas, 441-49 (“would also facilitate 

reaching Florida”); Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 13-75, 102-111; bulls, dragons, etc., see Peter Hulme, “Tales 

of distinction: European ethnography and the Caribbean,” in Schwartz ed., Implicit Understandings, 157-197. 



 

96 

 

combining the 16th century myth of the conquistadores with the ancient myths of the Golden 

Age and the cannibal Scythians: 

And do not think that before the arrival of the Christians they were living in quiet and the 

Saturnian peace of the poets. On the contrary they were making war continuously and 

ferociously against each other with such rage that they considered their victory worthless if 

they did not satisfy their monstrous hunger with the flesh of their enemies, an inhumanity 

which in them is so much more monstrous since they are so distant from the unconquered and 

wild Scythians, who also fed on human flesh, for these Indians are so cowardly and timid, 

that they scarcely withstand the appearance of our soldiers and many thousands of them have 

given ground, fleeing like women before a very few Spaniards who did not even number a 

hundred.
87 

All the paradoxical imagery of the Indian as illegitimate combatant is present here: ferocious 

yet cowardly, monstrous yet easily defeated by a much smaller number of Europeans. Here 

also is a rhetorical device which will recur throughout this thesis, which I call the Sepúlvedan 

false dilemma: invoking and ridiculing the most idealized European fantasy of Indians to 

claim that the most depraved nightmare images must therefore be true. If so, victory by any 

means necessary is putatively justifiable. Richard Slotkin has referred to this as the logic of 

massacre, “the expectation that a people defined as savage will inevitably commit atrocities: 

acts of violence so extreme that they seem to violate the laws of nature.”88   

Skull-cups, cannibal feasts, and the logic of massacre 

                                                 
87 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Demócrates Segundo o de las Justas causas de la Guerra contra los indios, edited 

by Ángel Losada (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Francisco de Vitoria, 

1951), p. 35, cited in Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas: A biography (Cambridge University Press, 

2012), 360. On Sepúlveda at Valladolid, see Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 72-100; Friedman, The Monstrous 

Races, 197-207; Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 109-118; Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas, 43-46, 82-86, 

234-38, 342-86. 
88 “To achieve victory in such a war, [the civilized] are entitled and indeed required to use any and all means, 

including massacre, terrorism, and torture.” Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 112-14. 



 

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 In 1519, Alonso Álvarez de Pineda sailed up the Pánuco River with 270 men to 

establish the second Spanish settlement on the Atlantic coast of continental North America, 

almost 500 miles north of Hernán Cortés’ Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. In January 1520, 

Pineda and all but 60 of these colonists were killed in an uprising by the Mayan-speaking 

indigenes, who the Spanish knew by their Nahuatl name of Huastecas. The Spanish survivors 

fled to Vera Cruz in a supply ship and were impressed into Cortés’ army, marching to retake 

Tenochtitlán after La Noche Triste the previous June. In his Second Letter to Charles V 

(dated 30 October, 1520), Cortés only alluded in passing to the uprising, and in his Third 

Letter (dated 15 May, 1522) to its aftermath, presenting himself as rescuing Francisco de 

Garay’s lost colonists from certain death at the hands of the Indians. In 1522 Cortés, his 

lieutenant Gonzalo de Sandoval, 50 horsemen, 100 crossbowmen and arquebusiers with 4 

artillery pieces, and two Mexican lords leading 30,000 warriors left Tenochtitlán to 

reconquer the Pánuco region; here, in his own words (the Fourth Letter, dated 15 October, 

1524), they captured “some four hundred lords and chieftains,” and, after having extracted 

confessions of involvement or complicity in the killing of conquistadores, had them “burnt in 

punishment.” As Anthony Pagden notes, Cortés, who founded Villa de Santiesteban del 

Puerto on the Pánuco by the end of 1522, may have instigated the uprising to deny his rivals’ 

settlement of the region; two other conquistadores, García de Pilar and Alonso Perez, later 

reported that the Huastec chieftains had protested on the way to execution that Cortés had 

ordered them to act thusly.89 

                                                 
89 Pagden, Letters from Mexico, xxi-xxxii, 95, 157-62, 309-313, 501 n. 12, n. 13, 504-05 n.44; Robert S. 

Weddle, entries “Garay, Francisco de,” “Camargo, Diego de,” and “Alvarez de Pineda, Alonso,” in Handbook 

of Texas Online.  



 

98 

 

 In the Fourth Letter, Cortés’ portrayed his predecessors as undisciplined brutes and 

the Huastecas as rebellious savages. Garay’s colonists had scattered inland “in bands of three 

and six in several different directions” and preyed on the Huastecs, “taking their women and 

supplies by force.” The Huastecs, he assured Charles V, were “so turbulent” that in 

precolonial times they had “never let an occasion for rebellion pass.” In reconquering the 

region and securing a good port at the mouth of the Pánuco, he had done good work. 

Furthermore, he had rescued Garay’s colonists from a dreadful fate, in which another piece 

of cranial skin approximates the role of a scalp:  

…our journey was of great benefit, for shortly afterwards a ship with many people and 

supplies aboard [the Garay expedition of 1523] was forced onto that coast. If the land had not 

been at peace, the crew would all have perished like those from the previous ship, the skins of 

whose faces we found in the native oratories [temples], preserved in such a fashion that many 

of them could still be recognized.90 

The detail of the flayed faces was repeated in the accounts of Francisco López de Gómara 

(1553), Bernal Díaz del Castillo (written between 1555 and 1584, posthumously published 

1632), and Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (1601), with an added and grisly detail: that the 

conquistadores’ faces were recognizable as Europeans since their hair and beards were intact. 

Gómara repeated Cortés’ assertion that Garay’s men “had no discipline,” committed robbery 

and rape, and “wandered about like vagabonds”; infuriated, the Huastecs rose up, “and within 

a short time had killed and eaten four hundred Spaniards.” In a deserted town, Cortés’ forces 

found the weapons and clothing of Garay’s forces hanging as votive trophies in the temples, 

“and their faces, flayed and tanned and still wearing their beards, fastened to the walls, a 

mournful sight, for some of them could be recognized. It was evident that the men of Pánuco 

                                                 
90 Pagden trans., Letters, 296-97, my italics. 



 

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were as fierce and cruel as the Mexicans had said [.]” Gómara repeated the allegation of 

cannibalism, that the Huastecs “ate the Spaniards they had killed, and even hung their skins 

in the temples as mementoes or votive offerings.” In Historia General de las Indias Gómara 

links the putative ferocity of the Huastecs, who he calls “bravos and butchers” (my 

translation); their sacrifice and eating of the conquistadores, and making trophies of their 

skins; and “their cruel religion, or their religious cruelty” (my translation). Bernal Díaz 

reported that Sandoval’s forces, entering a temple, found “two faces which had been flayed, 

and the skin tanned like skin for gloves, the beards were left on, and they had been placed as 

offerings upon one of the altars.” He added, “Sandoval and all his soldiers were moved to 

pity by all this and it grieved them greatly.” In his Historia General, Herrara’s version of the 

discovery of the clothes, weapons, and preserved skins as trophies in the temples “moved 

their friends to tears” (my translation) and confirmed that the Huastecs were “so brave, and 

cruel” even by Mexican standards (my translation).91 

                                                 
91 Lesley Byrd Simpson trans., ed., Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by his Secretary Francisco López de 

Gómara (University of California Press, 1964), Chapters 153-156, pp. 305-312; Bernal Díaz, Alfred Percival 

Maudslay’s translation, cited in Erik Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 51-52; Gómara, chapter XLVII: “Pánuco” (my italics): 

“Quiso rescatar en Panuco, mas no le dejaron los de aquel río, que son valientes y carniceros, antes lo 

maltrataron en Chila, comiéndose los españoles que mataron, y aun los desollaron y pusieron los cueros, 

después de bien curtidos, en los templos por memoria y ufanía. […] y mataron los indios cuatrocientos 

españoles de aquéllos, muchos de los cuales fueron sacrificados y comidos, y sus cueros puestos por los 

templos, curtidos o embutidos; que tal es la cruel religión de aquéllos, o la religiosa crueldad.”—in Historia 

General de las Indias (1552); Herrera, Decada III, Libro III, from Capitulo XVIII: “Que Diego Velazquez 

quiere yr (sic) contra Cortes, y Francisco de Garay armaua (sic) para yr a Pánuco, y Hernando Cortes yr a esta 

provincia, con exercito, y la pacifico” (my italics): “Durmieron aquella noche en un lugar sin gente, en cuyos 

templos hallaron colgados los vestidos, y armas de los Castellanos de Garay, y las caras con barbas desolladas, 

curtidos los cueros, y pegados por las paredes, y algunos fueron conocidos, que movieron a lagrymas a sus 

amigos: y biése hechó de ver que (q con acento) los Indios de Panuco, eran tan bravos, y crueles, como lo auian 

(sic) significado los Mexicanos, que los probaban en la guerra, que muy de ordinario tenían con ellos.” Antonio 

de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas, y Tierre firme del mar 

Oceano. (Escrita por Antonio de Herrera, Coronista mayor de su Magestad de las indias, y su Coronista de 

Castilla. Decada Tercera.) en la Emplenta Real, edición de 1601. 



 

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 Invasion becomes self-defense; Indian resistance becomes savage war; massacre and 

disproportionate revenge are claimed as justified. In early 1520, conquistadores marching 

inland from Vera Cruz to relieve the Iberians and their allies besieged within Tenochtitlán 

were ambushed near Texcoco. According to Cortés’ Third Letter, they later found, inside the 

temples, the tanned hides of five horses “and much clothing and other things belonging to the 

Spaniards” hung from the walls as trophies and votive offerings. During the final taking of 

Tenochtitlán in 1522, Cortés had “climbed that high tower which is close to the market, and 

there I found, as in other such towers, the heads of Christians as offerings to their idols, and 

also the heads of our Tascaltecan allies, for between them and the [Aztecs] there is a most 

ancient and bitter feud.” Díaz wrote with no small amount of outrage and horror, at least 35 

years later, of what happened to those conquistadores who had not escaped during La Noche 

Triste: 

…with stone knives they sawed open their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts and 

offered them to the idols that were there, and they kicked the bodies down the steps, and 

Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off the arms and feet and flayed the skin off the 

faces, and prepared it afterwards like glove leather with the beards on, and kept those for the 

festivals when they celebrated drunken orgies, and the flesh they ate in chilmole. [After the 

victory, Cuauhtemoc] sent to all the towns of our allies and friends and to their relations, the 

hands and feet of our soldiers and the flayed faces with the beards, and the heads of the 

horses that they had killed, and he sent word that more than half of us were dead and he 

would soon finish us off.92 

Earlier in his text, Díaz justified the Cholula Massacre (1519) as a pre-emptive strike: their 

allies, the people of Cempoala, had assured them that the Cholulans were planning to betray 

them. Unmentioned is the possibility that the Cholulans manipulated them into massacring 

                                                 
92 Cortés, Pagden trans., Third Letter, 256; Bernal Díaz, Davíd Carrasco ed., trans., The History of the Conquest 

of New Spain (University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 287-288, my italics. 



 

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the Cempoalans; Díaz assures his readers that the Cholulans “had already prepared the pots 

with salt and peppers and tomatoes.” Furthermore, “prisons of thick wooden beams which we 

found in the city, which were full of Indians and boys being fattened” for sacrifice and 

eating, implying that such people are so inhuman that they cannot be trusted.93  

After the victory, the spoils. In the case of the Pánuco campaign, Cortés wrote of the 

conquistadores finding a graffito in charcoal on the wall of a Huastec house, reading “Here 

the unhappy Juan Yuste was held prisoner.” Cortés called this “Surely a sight fit to break the 

hearts of all who saw it.” Indian hubris then met Spanish nemesis: Sandoval and the allied 

Indians who then seized the town “took many women and children as slaves.” Gómara writes 

that the punitive expedition recouped the losses of 12 horses in the mountains en route to 

Pánuco by selling 200 Huastecs into slavery; later, when Nuño de Guzmán was made 

governor of Pánuco in 1527, notes Gómara, he and his eighty men “castigated these Indians 

for their sins, and made many of them slaves” (my translation).94 

In 1549, Las Casas’ reports of successes in the peaceful conversion of Mayans in his 

bishopric of Chiapa (1543-46) had won over Crown support for a Dominican mission to 

evangelise La Florida, already ravaged repeatedly by slave-hunters and a graveyard for the 

expeditions of Juan Ponce de León (1514 and 1521), Pánfilo de Narváez (1528), and 

                                                 
93 Cortés, Pagden trans., Third Letter, 183-85; Díaz, Carrasco trans., 135-44 (on Cholula), on cannibalism and 

Mexican religion as synonymous: 6, 7, 81, 91, 103, 135, 140, 144, 171, 178, 181. 
94 On 200 slaves for 12 horses, see Simpson trans., ed., The Life of the Conqueror, 305-12; on Gúzman’s 

retribution, see Gómara, Historia General, XLVII, “Pánuco”: “Nuño de Guzmán fue también a Panuco por 

gobernador el año de 1527; llevó dos o tres navíos y ochenta hombres; el cual castigó aquellos indios de sus 

pecados, haciendo muchos esclavos.” “[I]ndigenous self-defence was itself seen as invasion”—in Patrick 

Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an 

Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 1999), 25-29; see also Lestringant on the reverse-

colonialism theme in Cannibals, 137-43; Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and 

the Disillusioning of a Generation, revised edition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007 [1995]), 

1-53, 5 (“how few of us”), 39 (“total annihilation”), 40 (“flipped history on its head”); Richard Slotkin, 

Gunfighter Nation.   



 

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Hernando de Soto (1539-43); these conquistadores had, in the later words of Dávila Padilla, 

“made the name of Christians loathsome with their cruelties, and the law of Christ suspicious 

for the infidels” (my translation). Even the promulgator of the mission, Luís Cáncer de 

Barbastro, who was granted 800 ducats of royal funding with which to purchase ten tons of 

trade goods as incentive for friendly relations with the Indians, could not quite believe his 

good fortune: “All Seville is surprised at this undertaking,” noted Cáncer in a letter shortly 

before departure; “those who most fear God approve of it; others think that we are going to 

the slaughter-house.” Going ashore in the Tampa Bay area in late May or early June 1549, 

friar Cáncer, along with friar Diego Peñalosa de Tolosa and a Dominican lay brother known 

only as Fuentes were beaten to death with clubs. According to Gómara (1552), the other 

expeditionaries were then informed by Johan or Juan Muñoz, a former page of Soto who had 

been held captive by the Indians for several years, “how the Indians put the skins of the heads 

of the friars with their crowns in a temple”.95 The incident was reported in Peter Martyr’s 

                                                 
95 Dávila Padilla: “haciendo con sus crueldades aborrecible el nombre de Christianos, y sospechosa para los 

infieles la ley de Christo,” in Book 1, Chapter 53, Fray Augustín Dávila Padilla, Historia de la Fundación y 

Discurso de la provincia, de Santiago de Mexico de la orden de predicadores: por las vidas de sus varones 

insignes y casos Notables de Nueva España, second edition (Brussels, 1625), 177-78; digitized by Google, 

Ghent University, 9 November 2010; My translation (my italics) of “Entonces se vino a la nave uno que fue 

paje de Hernando Soto, el cual contaba cómo los indios pusieron los cueros de las cabezas de los frailes con sus 

coronas en un templo, y que cerca de allí hay hombres que comen carbón.” –in Gómara, Historia General, 

Chapter 65, “The Discovery of Florida”. On general background and the 1549 martyrdoms: Lawrence A. 

Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., Edward C. Moore eds., The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of 

Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539 - 1543, Vol. I (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama 

Press, 1993); Margaret F. Pickett and Dwayne D. Pickett, The European Struggle to Settle North America: 

Colonizing Attempts by England, France, and Spain, 1521-1608 (McFarland, 2011); Jace Weaver, The Red 

Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000 – 1927 (Chapel Hill, NC: University 

of North Carolina Press, 2014), 54-62, 139; Erik R. Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural 

Encounters, 1492-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 107; Audrey Horning, Ireland 

in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the Virginian Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina 

Press, 2013), 109. On the expansive yet vague geographical sweep of La Florida, the present-day Southeastern 

United States from East Texas to the Florida peninsula and north to Newfoundland, see Charlotte M. Gradie, 

“The Powhatans in the Context of the Spanish Empire,” in Helen C. Rountree ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 

1500-1722 (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 154-172; Clayton, Bartolome de 

las Casas, 255-69, 285-341, and Hubert Howe Bancroft, ed., History of the Pacific States of North America vol. 

II: Central America, vol. II, 1530-1800 (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Company, 1883), 356-57.  



 

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Decadas anthology, and from here was transmitted into English via Richard Eden’s 1555 

translation: 

…[the Indians] caryed hym [Cáncer] away with three other of his companyons and dyd eate 

them, whereby they suffered martyrdome for the fayth of Chryst. […] There came of late 

from that shyppe, one that had byn the page of Ferdinando de Soto, who declared that the 

Indians hanged up the skynnes with the heades and crownes of the sayd fryers in one of theyr 

temples.96 

The English slave trader John Hawkins’ 1565 account of his travels along coastal North 

America, reprinted in Hakluyt, repeats a variation of this story as evidence that the as-yet-

unconquered Floridians were “of more savage and fierce nature, and more valiant than any of 

the rest”: “of their cruelty mention is made in the booke of the Decades [Peter Martyr], of a 

frier [sic], who taking upon them to persuade the people to subjection, was by them taken, 

and his skin cruelly pulled over his eares, and his flesh eaten.”97 

Subsequent descriptions of the Tampa Bay martyrdoms by Las Casas’ fellow Dominicans 

would show two major trends: replacing scalping with images of cannibals drinking from 

skulls, and offering post facto rationalizations for these actions as rational, if bizarre. P. 

Alonso Hernandez, in Historia eclesiástica de Nuestros Tiempos (1611), says only that the 

victorious Indians “danced and made a festival in honour of their gods for delivering them 

their enemies, the Spaniards” (my translation). Antonio de Remesal, in Historia… de Chyapa 

y Guatemala (1619), explained that the Indians believed the Dominicans to be spies and so, 

after slaying them, brought them to their great Cacique, “so that he might look at the form of 

                                                 
96 From Edward Arber ed., The first Three English books on America. [?1511] – 1555 A.D., Being chiefly 

Translations, Compilations, &c., by RICHARD EDEN, from the Writings, Maps, &c., of Pietro Martire, of 

Anghiera, Sebastian Munster, the Cosmographer, Sebastian Cabot, of Bristol, With Extracts, &c., from the 

Works of other Spanish, Italian, and German Writers of the Time (Birmingham, 1885), 346. 
97 From “The Voyage Made by M. John Hawkins Esquire, 1565,” in Henry S. Burrage ed., Early English and 

French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534- 1608 (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1959 [1906]) pg. 119. 



 

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their habits and crowns, to understand that they offered him the heads more or less for his 

pleasure.” The Cacique, on the contrary, was very displeased—Remesal states that he had 

wanted to converse with the priests personally—and “to commemorate the memory of their 

deaths ordered them skinned, and their skins to be nailed to the walls of his house, and the 

heads stuffed with cotton and hung from a tree and they ate the flesh at a great banquet, after 

much dancing and celebrating.” Remesal added that Soto’s unnamed page had seen the walls 

of the cacique’s house “decorated with the skins of the priests, by the habits which they 

displayed, by the crowns which they had made into the stuffed skins of which they made the 

skulls into vessels for drinking” (my translation, my emphases). Dávila Padilla’s account, a 

full 70 years after the events it describes, has reworked them further per the hagiographical 

genre: Muñoz explains that God, in His mercy, has permitted him to live among the Indians 

completely unmolested, giving him perfect understanding of their language and thus allowing 

him to explain the fates of the missionaries. Rather than having them scalped, flayed, or 

cannibalized, “they cut off the heads of the three, and took them to present to the lord the 

great Cacique, who was in the land, and drank with the skulls in vengeance on their enemies: 

it was in this exercise that they dealt with the heads” (my translation, my italics). Yet Padilla 

notes that the Indians, driven from their villages into the hills and forests by conquistadores, 

had a legitimate grievance—which, unfortunately, fell on the missionaries.98 

                                                 
98 P. Alonzo Fernandez, Historia eclesiástica de Nuestros Tiempos (Impressos del Rey, 1611); Fray Antonio de 

Remesal, Historia de la prouincia de S. Vicente de Chyapa y Guatemala de la orden de nro glorioso padre 

Sancto Domingo: escriuense juntamente los principios de las demás prouincias desda religión de las yndias 

occidentales, y la secular de la gouernacion de Guatemala… (por Francisco de Angulo, 1619), From 

Complutense University of Madrid, digitized 21 Nov. 2009. Hubert Howe Bancroft’s translation of Remesal 

(my italics): the cacique “caused the skins of the victims to be stripped off and stretched upon the walls of his 

house, while their heads were stuffed with cotton and suspended from a tree.”—in History of the Pacific States 

of North America vol. II: Central America, vol. II, 1530-1800 (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Company, 

1883), 356-57; Fray Augustín Dávila Padilla, Historia de la Fundación y Discurso de la provincia, de Santiago 

de Mexico de la orden de predicadores: por las vidas de sus varones insignes y casos Notables de Nueva 

España. Por el Maestro FRAY AUGUSTIN DAVILA PADILLA. Al Principe de España DON FELIPE nuestro 



 

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Similar amendations appeared in the martyrdoms of two Jesuits in the Chesapeake Bay in 

February 1571. In 1570, on the orders of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, governor of Cuba, eight 

Jesuits led by fathers Juan Bautista de Segura and Luís de Quirós were sent to missionize the 

Bahía de Santa María (Chesapeake Bay) and the surrounding land of Ajacán, as part of a plan 

to seize the Strait of Anián, believed by Spanish geographers to be the route to the Pacific. 

The expedition’s guide, assistant, and interpreter was to be a youth from a high-ranking 

Virginia Algonquian group, possibly Paspahegh, who had been groomed as an elite 

intermediary since 1561, but the young man who had left his people as Paquiquineo and 

returned as Don Luís, godson of the viceroy Luís de Velasco, was not as pliable or undivided 

in his loyalties as the Jesuits seemed to believe. Sent with two Dominican friars and 37 

soldiers from Cuba to colonize Ajacán in 1566, he had scuppered the expedition by 

pretending not to know the route into the Bay. During the 1570 mission, he scandalized the 

Jesuits by returning to his brother’s village some 20 miles away, taking multiple wives, and 

trying to reclaim his hereditary rank, suggesting the attack February 1571 may have been a 

decisive test of his loyalties. In August 1572, Menéndez’s punitive expedition recovered the 

catechist, Alonso de Olmos, who had been living among the Indians, and hanged eight or 

nine Paspahegh men from the yardarm in retribution, but Don Luís was never seen again.99 

Erik Seeman notes a tendency towards “increasingly baroque” details of the martyrdoms. 

The earliest account, by the Jesuit Juan Rogel, describes Don Luís personally killing Father 

                                                 
señor. Edición segunda. EN BRUSSELAS. En casa de IVAN DE MEERBEQUE, MDCXXV [1625]. (Digitized 

by Google, Ghent University, 9 November 2010), pp. 177-189. 
99 Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln and London: 

University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 2, 90-97; Gradie, “The Powhatans in the Context of the Spanish Empire”; 

Helen C. Rountree and E. Randolph Turner III, Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their 

Predecessors (University Press of Florida, 2002), 51-53; Margaret Holmes Williamson, Powhatan Lords of Life 

and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Lincoln & London: University of 

Nebraska Press, 2003), 143-44; Seeman, Death in the New World, 58-64. 



 

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Quirós with an arrow, then the other two Jesuits, then leading “a large group” of Indians into 

the Jesuit village and killing Father Segura with an axe. But he ordered the Jesuits to be 

buried without posthumous mutilation, and took no trophies from their bodies. In the 1600 

account of Father Carrera, Don Luis had left the priests “all naked and cut to pieces,” but 

“wept copiously over them” and called them martyrs. In a 1610 account, the Indians ordered 

the priests to bless themselves before killing them, and then behaved like Scythians: 

“Fashioning their skulls into cups, [the Indians] waved them about in their drunken feasts.” 

The continued importance of the skull-cup, paired with drunkenness, as a sign of primitive 

cruelty recurs as late as Andrés Pérez de Ribas’ 1645 account of a martyrdom in the modern 

Mexican state of Sinaloa, which Ribas pairs with specifically North American imageries of 

scalping and dismemberment. In 1594, a Chichimec holy man named Nacabeba blamed 

disease epidemics on Jesuit baptisms and led a raiding party which killed the Jesuit Gonzalo 

de Tapia. Ribas begins by describing the Chichimecas as “beasts more ferocious than the 

lions and bears whose jaws David and Sampson had disjointed,” citing as evidence their 

“scalping their enemies and cutting off their heads,” feet, and arms in ways which 

“resembled multitudes of demons in Hell”. Ribas describes how Nacabeba and nine 

Chichimecs ambushed and slew Father Tapia with axes and clubs, and then cut off his head 

and left arm; because he had used that arm to say Mass, they attempted to roast it on a 

barbecue, implying, as Jorge Cañizares-Esgurra notes, an intention to mock the Eucharist and 

principle of transubstantiation. But God stymied the man-eaters: the arm’s flesh did not roast, 

and they contented themselves by flaying it and stuffing it with straw, then donning the 

priest’s stolen vestments and “dr[inking] wine from the skull of that holy head” during “a 



 

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great victory celebration,” accompanied by “dances, drunkenness, and superstition” (Reff et. 

al. translation).100  

Epilogue: comparative barbarisms 

 Worn out from three years of constant war, the adelantado Hernando de Soto died of 

fever on the west bank of the Mississippi in May 1542. According to the testimony of an 

anonymous Portuguese knight known as ‘The Gentleman of Elvas,’ the conquistadores 

feared the consequences if Soto’s claim to be an immortal son of the Sun was disproven. 

Disinterring his body, they wrapped it in blankets weighed down with sand, and after 

nightfall sunk his corpse into the middle of the Mississippi. Inca Garcilaso tells a slightly 

different story. The Indians had already rejected the conquistadores’ pretensions to godhood 

and had vowed to treat these brigands and “wandering thieves” as European rulers would: to 

kill them, dismember them, impale their decapitated heads, and use the trees as gibbets to 

hang their quartered bodies and limbs. For fear of the adelantado’s posthumous dishonour, 

his men disinterred him by night, placed him in a coffin made from the hollow bole of an 

oak, and sunk this improvised coffin beneath the Mississippi. This was, writes The Inca, 

“similar in almost all respects to those which the Goths, who were ancestors of the Spaniards, 

gave one thousand one hundred and thirty-one years before” to their king Alaric, who died of 

fever in Calabria following the sack of Rome in 410.101  

                                                 
100 Seeman, Death in the New World, 58-64; Carrera’s account cited from Clifford M. Lewis, S.J. and Albert J. 

Loomie, S.J., trans. and ed., The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570-1572 (Chapel Hill: University of 

North Carolina, 1953), 136, in Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 90-97. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan 

Conquistadores: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550 – 1770 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 91-93, 

111; Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford trans., History of the 

Triumphs of Our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World (Tucson: The 

University of Arizona Press, 1999), Chapter VII, 124-27. 
101 James Alexander Robertson trans., “True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Hernando De Soto 

& Certain Portuguese Gentlemen During the Discovery of the Province of Florida. Now newly set forth by a 



 

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Garcilaso’s out-of-left-field comparison between the conquistadores and the 

Visigoths had two potential meanings. On one hand, the Goths were a warrior people who 

had battled Huns, Romans, and rival German tribes and carved out a kingdom for themselves 

in southern France and Spain. Many of the noble families of Spain could trace their descent 

to Gothic landowners, though this was contested; according to the Romanized-Gothic 

historian Jordanes’ 6th century Getica, the Goths had originated in the Baltic before moving 

south into Poland and Romania, and rediscovery of Jordanes in the 1430s sparked an 

international debate between Spanish and Swedish historians as to who were more worthy 

heirs. But the Goths were also barbarian destroyers; antique sources had lumped them 

together with other trans-Danubian Europeans as “Scythians,” with all the wild opprobrium 

that that implied.102  

To clarify his intentions to his readers, The Inca called Alaric a “famous prince” 

whose people who had performed “heroic feats,” and in case they weren’t aware of the pagan 

splendour of Alaric’s funeral as written by Jordanes, he repeated it “that the similarity may 

be seen more clearly”. After the Gothic king’s death, his weeping followers diverted the 

Busento River, interred him with the richest spoils of the sack of Rome, and then returned the 

waters to their natural flow—after killing the slaves, so his burial place would remain secret 

for all time. On the surface, Inca Garcilaso’s reference to the warlike “Scythian” Goths 

                                                 
Gentleman of Elvas,” 138, in Lawrence A. Clayton et. al. eds., The De Soto Chronicles Volume I, 19-219; 

Varner and Varner trans., Florida of the Inca, 494-96, 501-06, 553. 
102 Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 501-06; Franklin Daniel Scott, Sweden: The Nation’s History 

(Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 11, 115; Arne Søby Christiansen, Cassiodorus Jordanes and the 

History of the Goths: Studies in a Migration Myth (Museum Tusculanum Press: University of Copenhagen, 

2002), 1-21; In Jordanes’ Origins and Deeds of the Goths (AD 551), the burial of Alaric beneath a diverted 

river (XXX.158) and the burial of Attila on the Hungarian plain (XLIX.258) share the same traits: the graves of 

both are heaped with the spoils of decades of war, and the diggers are executed so they cannot reveal the burial 

place. See also Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians 

(Oxford University Press, 2006), 341-42, 351-60.  



 

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reminded his patriotic Iberian readers of their long history of martial glory. Taken from 

another angle, though, a critique of Spanish imperialism emerges: what difference was there, 

really, between armed nobodies from Extremadura and other Iberian backwaters who raped, 

pillaged, mutilated, and enslaved the peoples of the New World, and those ancient 

freebooters from beyond the Danube who had drunk from their enemies’ skulls, used their 

scalps as napkins, and burned down the Eternal City? 



 

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Chapter Two: “A Trophy of their Victory”: 16th and 17th century accounts of scalping  

No one is forced into war by ignorance; nor, if he thinks he will gain from it, is he 

kept out of it by fear. The fact is that one side thinks that the profits to be won 

outweigh the risks to be incurred, and the other side is ready to face danger rather 

than accept an immediate loss. –Thucydides (ca. 404 B.C.), IV.4.59103 

Introduction: an emerging Indian-war paradigm in early North America 

The approaches of a dozen different authors and illustrators towards scalping in the 

16th and 17th centuries, namely, Jacques Cartier, Agustín Dávila Padilla, Ulrich Schmiedel, 

René Goulaine de Laudonniére, Marc Lescarbot, Samuel de Champlain, John Smith, Gabriel 

Sagard, André Thévet, Jacques le Moyne des Morgues, Theodor de Bry, and Harmen 

Mayndertsz van den Bogaert, are examined in this survey chapter. A broad consensus 

sketched the outline of a North American paradigm of warfare, in which scalps were a sign 

of achieved victory and vengeance. While European warfare held the seizure of land (failing 

that, movable property like livestock and specie) as its primary goal, North American warfare 

was aimed at satisfying feuds and taking prisoners; the ability to make war and the right to go 

to war was widely held among the male population of indigenous communities, and 

participated in to varying degrees by the women and younger members of the community; 

indigenous warfare was ‘irregular’ by European definition, preferencing ambush, stratagem, 

and deceit over pitched field battles, and with considerable free agency retained by individual 

war leaders to recruit for expeditions and by their followers to join or withdraw at will.  

That North American indigenous warfare differed in distinct ways from the prevailing 

norm in Europe required a battery of interpretive strategies Neil Whitehead summarizes as 

                                                 
103 Thucydides, Rex Warner trans., History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin Books: London and New York, 

1972 [1954]), 299. 



 

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mimesis and alterity: stressing the similarities or differences, real and imagined, between 

European and indigenous North American methods, goals, definitions, etc., which is to say 

the in/commensurability between the two. Analogy was one tool of similarity, as when 

medieval Christians assumed that Muslims worshipped Mohammad in the same way that 

Christians worshipped Christ, as were the paired processes of attachment and detachment: 

removing a concept from its original context, or physically removing an object from the 

cultural matrix in which it initially bore meanings, and conceptually or physically likening it 

to a new set of meanings or an alien cultural context. As Anthony Pagden notes, the 

ethnographies resulting from this process could reveal little more than what Europeans 

wanted to believe. Such a process led Oviedo, a Spanish historian particularly bigoted 

towards Indians, to declare that since the Taínos practiced polygamy as the ancient Greeks 

described the Thracians, their neighbours northwards in the Balkans, it followed that the 

repulsive practices Greeks attributed to the Thracians, such as sacrificing foreign visitors to 

the gods and holding banquets where children were cannibalized, must be practiced by 16th 

century Taínos. Anthony Pagden notes that such actions render the original indigenous ideas 

and practices unintelligible to their original actors; as noted in Chapter 1, such Savagist 

processes would have rendered these Greek conclusions unintelligible to Thracians of the 5th 

century BC as well. Such acts of decontextualization, notes Peter Mason, create the Exotic, a 

sign of an opaque Other which is really an illusion or pseudo-Other. But if the similarities 

created in these processes were not, in fact, real, they could at least provide a bridge to 

cooperation, in the same way that imagined and real incommensurabilities could exacerbate 

tensions and mutual suspicions.104 

                                                 
104 On analogy, see Edward Said, Orientalism, 53-59; Whitehead introduction, The Discoverie of the Large, 

Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh, 1-110; Pagden, European Encounters with the New 



 

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Prologue: Misinformation and myths-in-formation in the Atlantic world 

 In the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, European explorers in North America 

described, in text and illustration, their encounters with the outré customs of the Indians, 

including the taking and displaying of scalps. While this chapter focuses on dissecting the 

meanings that early modern Europeans derived from or applied to these encounters, a 

prefatory comment should be made regarding the ideas that convinced Europeans to venture 

into unfamiliar Atlantic spaces, particularly the idea of encounter itself. Nervous explorers, 

and nervous investors in colonial ventures, could take heart from the myths which arose out 

of the Iberian encounter: the myth of Indians who imagined Europeans to be gods, at least at 

first glance, and the conquistador myth which promised that wealthy, centralized indigenous 

empires could be easily conquered by relatively small armies of Europeans. These myths cast 

a long shadow: Sir Francis Drake, writing of his encounter with indigenous Californians in 

1579, described “signifying unto them we were no Gods, but men.” Alas, despite his best 

efforts, “nothing could perswade them, nor remove that opinion which they had conceived of 

us, that wee should be gods.”105 

 In 1633 the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune recorded a story of first contact between the French 

and the Innu, told him by a convert named Pierre Pastedechouan, in which the prevailing 

tones were not the worshipful awe of the white-god fantasy but monstrousness and dread. 

                                                 
World, 17-49; Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins 

University Press, 1998), 1-41, 64-89, 147-64. 
105 “Sir Francis Drake on the California coast, 1579” an excerpt from The World Encompassed by Sir Francis 

Drake, carefully Collected out of the notes of Master Francis Fletcher, Preacher in this Imployment, and divers 

others his followers (London, 1628), in Henry S. Burrage ed., Early English and French Voyages, chiefly from 

Hakluyt, 1534-1608 (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1906 [1959], 159-160. 



 

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Pierre described a story, often told by his grandmother, of how four canoes of Innu paddled 

out to welcome the strangers to their village, which fizzled since neither side could 

understand the other. The French gave them a barrel of biscuit, which the Innu dumped into 

the ocean upon returning to shore. The all-male European crew wearing cuirasses, eating 

hardtack and drinking wine gave first impressions of the French as “prodigious and horrible” 

creatures who “were dressed in iron, ate bones, and drank blood,” or “ate wood and drank 

blood.” The wooden ship offered the Innu a name for these unprecedented people, which Le 

Jeune transcribed as ouemichtigouchiou, “a man who works in wood, or who is in a canoe or 

vessel of wood.” Other stories removed the sting of ontological uncertainty with prophecy 

narratives that placed Europeans on the previously-unknown edges of an indigenous 

universe, as when Black Hawk described a mutual first contact between the Sauk and the 

French in his 1833 autobiography. After his great-grandfather, Thunder, had dreamed for 

four years that he would meet a white man, the Great Spirit had directed him to take his two 

brothers and travel east to a designated spot. Here they met a self-identified son of the King 

of France who took Thunder by the hand, welcomed him into his tent, and told him that he, 

too, had been guided in his dreams for four years: the Great Spirit had directed him to come 

to this very spot to meet a nation who had never yet seen a white man.106 

 Both Europeans and indigenous peoples tried to reconcile the unprecedented other 

with pre-existing narratives, frameworks, and predictive words, a process Judith Binney 

referred to as plereomatic history and which John Sutton Lutz notes is well-attested, as 

                                                 
106 Thwaites, Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents vol. 5, 119-121, cited in Colin G. Calloway ed., The World 

Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (Boston and New York: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 1994), 

33; Black Hawk, J. Gerald Kennedy ed., Life of Black Hawk or Mà-ka- tai-me- she-kià- kiàk, Dictated by 

Himself (New York: Penguin Books, 2008 [1833]), 1; Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native 

American West Before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 213.  



 

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“intertextuality,” in European accounts of first contacts. In the anxiety of these encounters 

with the unknown, the possibility that these other people were monstrous offered some 

consolation to both Europeans and indigenous peoples, if only because such categories of 

analysis would render them familiar, and therefore understandable. These reference points 

were congruent, but not identical. A legend in Puerto Rico, recorded in Benzoni’s Historia 

del Novo Mondo (1565), that a conquistador named Diego Salcedo was drowned by a 

Boricua cacique to empirically disprove Spanish claims of divinity, is probably not true—as 

it reifies the myth that Indians took Europeans for gods in the first place—but points to 

indisputable historical trends. After initial uncertainty, indigenous North Americans seem to 

have determined that Europeans were just strange, shaggy humans with useful trade goods, 

and their ethnonyms for Europeans reflect this: the Mohawks called the Dutch assirioni 

(makers of cloth) or charistooni (ironsmiths); the French were called agnonha (people of 

iron) by the Hurons and mistogoche (wooden boats) by the Innu. Osage histories of the late 

17th century recall the first two French traders as I’n-Shta-Heh (heavy eyebrows) whose 

obsequious attentions to buffalo robes reminded them of camp dogs fawning during 

butchering and whose whistling unnerved them, “since only ghosts whistled.”107 

                                                 
107 John Sutton Lutz, ed., Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact (Vancouver: UBC press, 

2007): Lutz, “Introduction: Myth Understandings; Or, First Contact, Over and Over Again,” 1-14, and “First 

Contact As A Spiritual Performance: Encounters on the North American West Coast,” 30-45, Judith Binney, 

“When the White Kawau Flies,” 140-159. The “narrative embodiments” of myth, notes Peter Nabokov, show 

“responsive and malleable” qualities: “if myths are to remain relevant and recited, they must be susceptible to 

internal tinkerings and updatings.” See Peter Nabokov, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History 

(Cambridge University Press, 2002), 91-92 (“narrative embodiments… tinkerings and updatings”), and 

throughout; on ethnonyms, see Denys Delâge, Jane Brierley trans., Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in 

Northeastern North America, 1600-64 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993), 128, Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 

263-64; Diego Salcedo in Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 23; Coll Thrush, “Vancouver the Cannibal: Cuisine, 

Encounter, and the Dilemma of Difference on the. Northwest Coast, 1774–1808,” in Ethnohistory Volume 58, 

Issue 1 (Winter 2011), 1-35; Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: about Captain Cook, for example 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 127, 177-89; Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, 19-36. For general 

background on indigenous historiography and oral histories, see Nancy Shoemaker ed., Clearing a Path: 

Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), introduction (vii-

xiii), Julie Cruikshank, “Oral History, Narrative Strategies, and Native American Historiography: Perspectives 



 

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 Europeans, on the other hand, envisioned indigenous peoples as Golden Agers, man-

eaters, or wild men, encapsulated in terms like “savage” and “cannibal,” with associated 

imageries of stigmatized and primordial violence involving cruel dismemberment. The 

Savagist myths at the heart of the denial of coeval status found new expression and strength 

in the burgeoning social sciences of the Renaissance, which paired the discovery of the 

Americas with the rediscovery of the Classical world through widening literacy and the 

printing press. Reprints of such ancient writers as Herodotus, Livy, Ovid, Pliny, Strabo, 

Tacitus, and others, in Latin or in modern Spanish, German, Italian, French and English, 

were paired with fanciful illustrations of the ancient barbarians described within. National 

ancestors like Britons, Germanic tribes, Gauls, and Celtiberians were increasingly depicted in 

the same visual language as the peoples of the New World: heroically nude, wearing animal 

pelts, painted and tattooed. Meanwhile, neoclassical conventions of heroic nudity were being 

applied to indigenous Americans, reinforcing a simple and lateral comparison between the 

peoples of contemporary America and the Europeans of centuries past. For some European 

writers, description of primitive peoples past and present was inseparable from broader 

questions of human origins and human nature: had human beings declined from the autarkic 

conditions of the Golden Age to the violent acquisitiveness of the present, a Saturnian myth 

signalled artistically by happy, physically-idealized people frolicking in lush, blossoming 

landscapes? Or was the Promethean myth of an incremental climb from a bestial state, 

visually expressed by placing ragged humans in tattered pelts against rocky and barren 

landscapes, more accurate? Was exotic American violence to be interpreted as lamentable, 

                                                 
from the Yukon Territory, Canada,” 3-28; Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial 

Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2005), 127-210. 



 

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but understandable signs of primordial valour, or evidence of human wretchedness in the 

absence of the state?108 

 In Europe, deployment of Golden Age and Savagist myths onto peoples in the 

Atlantic was by no means new. The myth of the Isles of the Blessed, where Saturn and the 

conditions of the Golden Age still reigned, were identified by Greek and Roman geographers 

with the Canary Islands; by reporting spontaneously-generated crops, grapevines, and fruit 

trees on the Canaries, St. Isidore of Seville’s 8th-century account had continued this tradition 

into the Christian era. While the peoples of the Canaries, named Guanches during the 14th-

century Iberian conquest, were subdivided between stratified agrarian societies and 

egalitarian hunter-gatherers, the latter prevailed in late medieval accounts and artistic 

depictions. Alluding to Ovid’s attribution of the decline from the Golden Age to the Iron Age 

to “destructive iron and harmful gold” in Metamorphoses 1.150-57, Boccaccio’s De Canaria 

(1341) described four Guanches taken captive to Lisbon as totally ignorant of precious 

metals and swords, yet “very intelligent,” egalitarian, “cheerful and lively and quite sociable 

– more so than many Spaniards are.” Petrarch agreed they were morally superior to civilized 

Europeans yet declared them “little better than beasts.” Felix Hemmerlin, a canon of Zurich, 

claimed pirates had described how Guanches “were wrapped in raw hides, howled like dogs, 

had flat faces like monkeys, and ate raw food,” as well as having sex in public, holding 

                                                 
108 Fredrik Svanberg, Decolonizing the Viking Age volume 1 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 

2003), 11-52; Peter Burke, “America and the Rewriting of World History,” in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, 

ed.,America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina 

press, 1995), 33-51; William Sturtevant, “First Visual Images of Native America,” Hayden White, “The Noble 

Savage theme as Fetish,” and Elliott, “Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact?,” in Chiapelli ed., 

First Images of America; Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: the Iconography of Human Origins (Sutton 

Publishing, Limited: United Kingdom, 1998); Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit, trans. Melanie Hersey, The 

Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory (Blackwell Publishing: 2005 [2001]), 1-39; Bruce G. Trigger, Natives 

and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University 

Press, 1985), 9-56.  



 

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women in common, and giving birth like “other brute beasts.” Hemmerlin disapprovingly 

cited Ovid to draw comparisons to that touchstone of barbarism, Scythia, “where men live in 

a beastly and cruel fashion, deeply differing from the way of life of all men.” But as a 

Dominican, he also tried to extemporize for topoi of barbarism taken at face value, 

suggesting that the Guanches’ holding women in common was simply primitive communism 

taken too far.109 

 In October 1589, the Spanish sea captain Francisco de Cuéllar wrote an account of his 

experiences while shipwrecked in the North Atlantic in 1588. There he had found “savages” 

whose “custom” was “to live as the brute beasts” among “very rugged” mountains: 

They live in huts made of straw… They cover themselves with “mantas” [blankets, cloaks] 

and wear their hair down to their eyes… The chief inclination of these people, is to be 

robbers, and to plunder each other… They have therefore, no other remedy but to withdraw 

themselves to the mountains, with their women and cattle; for they possess no other property, 

nor more moveables nor clothing. They sleep upon the ground, on rushes, newly cut and full 

                                                 
109 Beyond the division between hierarchical agrarian societies and egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies which 

Iberians would later see in Mesoamerica and Andean South America, other interesting parallels between the 

Guanches and indigenous peoples encountered in the 16th century present themselves: animal and sometimes 

child sacrifice was offered to volcanoes, and members of the elite were mummified as in Guanajuato and Peru. 

Earlier descriptions of Guanches, as in the accounts of Muhammad al-Idrisi, a 12th-century geographer 

employed by the Kingdom of Sicily, and of Spanish and Portuguese explorers in 1341, contain word-for-word 

similarities between Columbus’ description of the Indians’ physical beauty, athleticism, and physiognomy, 

particularly the description of their skin as “reddish-brown,” a point noted here by Fernández-Armesto and 

Peter Hulme. See Alfredo Mederos Martín, “Sacrificios de niños y sustitorios de ovicapridos al dios Sol šmš en 

el litoral atlántico norteafricano,” in Byrsa: Arte, Cultura e Archeologia del Mediterraneo Punico, 19-20, 2011 

(Lugano, Switzerland: Agorà & Co., 2013), 79-127; for general background, see Felipe Fernández-

Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-

1492 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 223-251; on mummification, see Thomas 

Hodgkin, “On the Ancient Inhabitants of the Canary Islands,” in The Journal of the Ethnological Society of 

London (1848-1856), Volume 1 (1848), 167-181; James K. Coleman, “Boccaccio’s Humanistic Ethnography 

(De Canaria),” in Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr eds., Boccaccio: A Critical 

Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 265-71; Peter Hulme, 

“Tales of Distinction: European Ethnography and the Caribbean,” in Stuart B. Schwartz ed., Implicit 

Understandings, 157-197. 



 

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of water and ice… The most of the women are very beautiful, but badly dressed… In short, in 

this Kingdom there is neither justice nor right, and everybody does what he pleases.110 

These pastoral nomads beyond civilization were Gaelic Irish cattleherders and tenant 

farmers, subjects of a longstanding defamatory trend founded in Strabo’s assertion (1st 

century AD) that the Irish were more wild than the Britons, habitual practitioners of 

cannibalism and incest. The 12th century Welsh-Norman Geraldus Cambrensis had described 

the Irish as wandering pastoralists living “like beasts,” and similar traditions among the 

English and Scots Lowlanders coloured Gaelic-speaking Scots highlanders in similar terms 

of pastoralism, brigandage, and degeneracy. During a stay in Dublin and Armagh in 1517, 

Francesco Chiericati, papal nuncio to England, repeated Strabo’s calumny word-for-word: “I 

have heard that in places farther north people are more uncivilized, going about nude, living 

in mountain caves and eating raw meat.”111  

In the Elizabethan era, the image of the Scythians was used to depict the Irish both as 

rootless nomads and unhinged man-eaters. William Harrison, in The Description of Britain 

(1587), called them “the most Scithian-like and barbarous nation,” identified them with the 

Anthropophagi, and claimed they “used to feed on the buttocks of [boys] and women’s paps, 

as delicate dishes.” In A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), Edmund Spenser 

proposed that Scythians were the direct ancestors of the people of western Ireland, not Gauls 

and Britons as in the south and east; hence their “Scythian barbarisme” and “licensious 

barbarisme.” Fynes Moryson (1617) accused Irish herdsmen of “delighting in this roguish 

                                                 
110 Audrey Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the Virginian Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC: 

University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Cuellar, Moryson, Spencer, and Chiericati cited 31-35, 92 (Cuéllar’s 

experiences indicate the political disunity of the Irish north: “he was welcomed by O’Rourkes, rejected by the 

O’Cahans, and alternatively housed and robbed by Irish peasants.”). 
111 Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea, 31-35; Strabo, Geography, Book IV, Chapter 5.4; Geraldus 

Cambrensis cited in Seymour Phillips, “The outer world of the European Middle Ages,” in Schwartz, Implicit 

Understandings, 23-63; Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders, 3-116. 



 

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life,” “free from the hand of justice” to commit robberies and depredations. These were not 

new ideas (see Chapter 1) but the lexicon of barbarism was shifting westwards, as indicated 

by Cuellar’s use of the Ibero-American neologism salvajes (savages) to describe Irish 

primitivism. Where salvaje went, caníbal was not far behind: in 1612 Sir John Davies, the 

Attorney General of Ireland, disparaged the Irish as “little better than cannibals, who do hunt 

one another.” By 1649, pro-Commonwealth newspaper editorials were describing Irish rebels 

not only as “bloud-quaffing cannibals,” but also as “more bruitish than the Indians.”112  

 What were such trans-Atlantic encounters like from the other side of the frontier? In 

Mexico, a proliferation of Nahuatl accounts a generation after the Conquest describe their 

ancestors’ initial shocked and awed descriptions of galleons, metal armour, gunpowder, 

mastiffs and war horses, and their subsequent sufferings at the hands of capricious and cruel 

conquistadores. Camilla Townsend astutely notes that teotl (plural teteu’), the Nahuatl term 

which the Spanish glossed as teules or “gods,” is ambivalent, referring literally to an other-

than-human being which can, in context, be a deity, a demon, or a god-impersonator who 

embodies a representation of the deity they’re slated to be sacrificed to. In Townsend’s 

analysis, calling the conquistadores teteu’ was meant to characterize them as “capricious 

immortals” and “bizarre sorcerers,” not awe-inspiring objects of worship. Bernal Díaz 

unwittingly alludes to this in boasting of how the Cholula massacre struck fear into their 

Indian enemies: “if we had a reputation for valour before, from now on they took us for 

                                                 
112 Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea, 31-35; Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide 

and Extermination From Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 169-212; 

Rafael M. Girón Pascual, “El Capitán Francisco de Cuéllar antes y después de la jornada de Inglaterra,” in 

Antonio Jiménez Estrella and Julián J. Lozano Navarro eds., Actas de la XI Reunión Científica de la Fundación 

Española de Historia Moderna , Comunicaciones, Volumen II (Granada, 2010), 1051-59; William Harrison, 

“bloud-quaffing cannibals,” and “more bruitish than the Indians” cited in Ted Motohashi, “The Discourse of 

Cannibalism in Early Modern Travel Writing,” in Steven H. Clark ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial 

Theory in Transit (New York and London: Zed Books, 1999), 83-99. 



 

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sorcerers.” Nahuatl sources, in addition to describing such massacres as at Cholula or Pedro 

de Alvarado’s May 1520 “massacre of the dancers” at a festival of Huitzilopochtli at the 

Great Temple, as unprovoked preemptive strikes, suggest in text and illustration their own 

Savagist perception of the conquistadores’ exotic, inexplicable behaviour. In text and art, the 

unprecedented capacity of Spanish swords to lop off heads and limbs recurs, and the Spanish 

seizure of gold, to pay the soldiers and the king’s royal fifth, becomes obsessive and bestial: 

“They picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys; […] they hungered like pigs for that 

gold.” That the Nahuas called Alvarado Tonatiuh, like Huitzilopochtli one of the divine 

incarnations of the sun, also suggests the demonic rather than the divine: in Nahua thought 

the Sun in his various incarnations was a ferocious and implacable warrior.113 

 Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, royal treasurer and chief constable for Pánfilo de 

Narváez’s 1527 expedition to colonize the mainland of La Florida, experienced something of 

the subjectivities of the other side of the frontier in his nine-year odyssey from shipwreck in 

coastal Texas to his eventual overland return to Mexico City. Through a series of inversions 

of the usual Indian-conquistador binaries—“it is the conquistadores who eat each other, 

undergo a complete loss of material civilization, suffer a political and ethical breakdown, and 

depend on Indian knowledge for survival,” notes José Rabasa—Cabeza de Vaca’s fortunes 

shift from slaveowning Spanish hidalgo to owned slave of the Indians, from Indian-slaying 

                                                 
113 “like monkeys…hungered like pigs”: Miguel León-Portilla, English translator Lysander Kemp, Nahuatl 

translator Ángel María Garibay K., The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: 

Beacon Press, 2006 [1961]), 51, ; On swords, see John F. Guilmartin, Jr., “The Cutting Edge: An Analysis of 

the Spanish Invasion and Overthrow of the Inca Empire, 1532-1539,” in Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena 

Adorno, eds., Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: 

University of California Press, 1991), 40-69, and Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, 142-43; 

Townsend, “Burying the White Gods”, 659-87; Inga Clendinnen, ““Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortés and 

the Conquest of Mexico,” in Stephen Greenblatt ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley, CA: University of 

California Press, 1993), 12-47.  



 

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conquistador to Indian-saving folk healer, and, in his own estimation at least, from a killer to 

an evangelist. These reversals he attributes to the Indians themselves in a standoff between 

Diego de Guzmán and his slave-hunting conquistadores, and Cabeza de Vaca and his three 

remaining companions, in the Río Yaqui region in 1536:  

[The Indians said that] we [i.e., Cabeza de Vaca and companions] came from where the sun 

rose, and they [Guzmán’s slave hunters] from where it set; and that we cured the sick, and 

that they killed those who were well; and that we came naked and barefoot, and that they 

went about dressed and on horses and with lances; and that we did not covet anything but 

rather, everything they gave us we later returned and remained with nothing, and that the 

others had no objective but to steal everything they found.114 

Considering that Guzmán’s forces were the first other Europeans that Cabeza de Vaca and 

his companions had seen since 1527, a reading of his account in reverse chronological order 

reveals a Spanish presence that becomes more unreal and monstrous the further in time and 

space we go. In 1536, in the Río Yaqui region, their meeting with Guzmán followed an 

encounter with the aftermath of one of his slaving expeditions three years prior: afraid to 

return to their villages and cornfields, the locals, emaciated and reduced to eating roots and 

bark, told the four travellers that half their men and all the women and boys had been carried 

off. In a village in Sonora around Christmas 1535, they saw relics of Spanish weapons of war 

threaded on an Indian man’s necklace: an iron horseshoe nail and the iron buckle of a 

swordbelt. Long before any Iberians were seen, Cabeza de Vaca relates hearing many 

references to them as as hijos del sol (sons of the sun) and gente del cielo (people of the sky, 

                                                 
114 Rolena Adorno and Charles Patrick Pautz’s translation, cited in Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 119-26; 

Rolena Adorno, “The Navigation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios,” in Greenblatt ed., New World 

Encounters 48-84; “saludadores” in Rolena Adorno, Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short 

Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), 56-63; José Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: 

The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Durham and 

London: Duke University Press, 2000), 31-83; Donald E. Chipman, entry "Cabeza De Vaca, Alvar Nunez," in 

Handbook of Texas Online. 



 

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or people of the heavens); as Rolena Adorno notes, this does not necessarily imply 

endorsement of the “white god” myth, at least on the Indians’ part, but only that such 

unprecedented and odd people might well have come from another world, like the rampaging 

extraterrestrials of 20th-century science fiction.115 

 At the furthest geographical and temporal remove in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, during 

the winter of 1534-35 on the Texas side of the Río Grande’s “big bend,” Cabeza de Vaca was 

told by their hosts the Avavares of being visited, or attacked, by what sounds like a demonic 

personification of Europeans’ contradictory messages and actions: promising eternal life 

while maiming and killing. The Avavares, related Cabeza de Vaca, simply named this entity 

Mala Cosa, “Evil Thing,” and described it as a short, bearded man who would not accept 

their food if offered, and identified his point of origin by pointing to the earth “and [saying] 

his home was there below.” Appearing without warning, sometimes during Indian 

ceremonies and sometimes dressed as a woman, Mala Cosa’s powers included the ability to 

send a hut into the air and ride it to the ground, but his attacks on the domestic sanctity of 

Indian villages were not restricted to property damage. Breaking through the walls of a 

family’s home, bearing a torch in one hand and a long flint knife in the other, Mala Cosa 

would select and seize a man and cut open his side with his knife. He then pulled out his 

victim’s entrails and cut out a piece to throw into the fire, then selected an arm, lacerated it in 

three places, and severed it at the elbow. He would then pass his hand over the wounded 

parts and restore all as it was before.116  

                                                 
115 Adorno, “The Navigation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios”; Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 119-

26; Chipman, entry "Cabeza De Vaca, Alvar Nunez," in Handbook of Texas Online.  
116 Adorno, “The Navigation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios”; Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 119-

26; Chipman, entry "Cabeza De Vaca, Alvar Nunez," in Handbook of Texas Online. 



 

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 Mala Cosa was so frightening, said the Avavares, that he set onlookers to trembling 

and their hair to stand on end; they had not seen him since 1519 or 1520, but the healers were 

shown scars on the Indians’ bodies which they attested had come from these attacks. And the 

Avavares, like other peoples of Texas in Cabeza de Vaca’s account, were quite capable of 

defending themselves against enemies they understood. While not explicitly mentioning 

scalping, he points the way towards its treatment in 16th century texts with his descriptions of 

Indian warfare as both skillful and cruel. Recalling his service in Italy, then a battleground 

for rival European powers, he says the peoples of the Gulf Coast and Texas “are as astute in 

guarding themselves from their enemies as if they had been reared in Italy in a time of 

continuous war.” He adds, with some vagueness, “Whenever any of these people have 

particular enmity, they snare and kill each other at night, […] and inflict great cruelties on 

one another.” The image of indigenous North American warfare that emerges from the 

authors surveyed in this chapter, like Cabeza de Vaca, was perceived as less like licit 

European warfare, with fanfares and pitched field battles, than the forms of violence the early 

modern state was attempting to proscribe: feuds and vendettas, brigandage, murders, and 

kidnappings. Scalping may not have been specifically on Cabeza de Vaca’s mind, but he and 

other authors surveyed here sketched an intermediate phase in European images of America: 

between the primordial war imagined in the Iberian Americas (see Chapter 1), and the 

scalping paradigm that would emerge in British North America.117 

                                                 
117 José Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier, 31-83, “reversals of the stock images” (33-35), 

“stock New World images” (52), on cannibalism (“the Indians embody European values” 63, 78-80), 

“resistance has no place” (80); Adorno, “The Navigation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios”; Chipman, 

entry "Cabeza De Vaca, Alvar Nunez”; Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 119-26; Chapter Twenty-Four 

(“About the Customs of the Indians of that Land”), 85-86, in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1555 edition), 

Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández trans., The Account: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación 

(Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 1993), 85-86. “From the time of first European contact with American 

Indians, Europeans had viewed Native Americans as peculiarly warlike people. Europeans were fascinated and 



 

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Accounts of North American scalping and warfare in the 16th and 17th centuries 

 In the tradition of Herodotus’ express purpose to examine the praiseworthy deeds of 

both Greeks and barbarians during the Persian Wars, The Inca set out to demonstrate that, 

just as the Inca lords he claimed descent from matrilineally had had their own glorious 

military heritage before the Spanish conquest, so too were the Indians of Florida worthy foes 

and valiant adversaries. Early in his account of the Soto expedition to conquer North 

America’s Southeast, La Florida del Inca (1605), he banishes the spectre of the cannibal 

warrior by noting the revulsion Cabeza de Vaca reported when the Indians discovered the 

shipwrecked conquistadores’ starvation cannibalism. While he couldn’t rule out the 

possibility that cannibalism occurred somewhere else in North America, “for Florida is so 

broad and long that there is space within it for anything to happen,” he could safely conclude 

that the peoples of “the provinces our Governor discovered […] abominate this practice.” 

Describing the first battles between the Soto expedition and the peoples of Florida, he 

explained to his readers that he saw no contradiction in describing Florida’s Indian warriors 

as knights or cavaliers (lit. ‘caballeros’) though they had no horses, “since in Spain this term 

implies a nobleman and since there is a nobility among the Indians”. To emphasize the 

Floridians’ martial prowess and pride in terms readily legible to a contemporary Spanish-

language audience while also reminding his readers of his mestizaje, The Inca used the 

Quechua term ‘curaca’ to denote the leaders of Floridian polities, rather than the Caribbean 

loanword ‘cacique’: both, noted The Inca, signified “lord of vassals,” but “since I am a 

Peruvian Indian […], I feel it my privilege to introduce into this work certain words of my 

                                                 
terrorized by aspects of warfare they associated with Indians, including raids, scalping, torture, giving captives 

no quarter, and attacking in winter. Europeans associated these forms of warfare with those of their ancestors, as 

characteristics of “primitive” peoples for whom warfare was sport or the product of feuds.” Gallay, The Indian 

Slave Trade, 172. 



 

125 

 

own language so as to make it clear that I am a native of Peru and not of some other land.” 

As with his clear distinctions regarding the inapplicability of cannibal-warrior imagery to 

Florida, The Inca sets out to remind his readers that considerable difference exists under the 

umbrella term “Indian.”118  

With this in mind, The Inca sets out to demonstrate to his readers that the Indians are 

rational human beings like themselves. His summation of the nature of war in the American 

Southeast, in its familiar and alien dimensions, comes fairly late in the text, after describing 

the Soto expedition’s having become involved or enlisted in the wars of one indigenous 

polity against another in their odyssey from Tampa Bay to the Mississippi. Since “almost all 

of the provinces that these Spaniards traversed were at war with each other,” notes The Inca, 

a synthesis of the commonalities that made Southeastern warfare unique “would be 

appropriate”: 

One should know that this was not a conflict of force against force with an organized army or 

with pitched battles, except in rare instances, or a conflict instigated by the lust and ambition 

of some lords to seize the estates of others. Their struggle was one of ambush and subtlety in 

which they attacked each other on fishing or hunting trips and in their fields and along their 

roads wherever they could find an enemy off guard. And those whom they seized on such 

occasions, they held as slaves, some in perpetual bondage with one foot maimed, as we have 

seen them in certain provinces, and some as prisoners to be ransomed and exchanged. But the 

hostility among these Indians amounted to no more than the harm they inflicted upon their 

persons with deaths, wounds, or shackles, for they made no attempt to seize estates. If 

                                                 
118 Varner and Varner trans., Florida of the Inca, 15-16 (“abominate this practice”), 62 (“nobility among the 

Indians”), 95 (“since I am a Peruvian Indian”); Juan Marechal, “The New World from Within: The Inca 

Garcilaso,” in Fredi Chiapelli ed., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, Vol. 1 of 

2 ( Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1976), 57-61; José Rabasa and Jehudah Abarbanel, “ 

“Porque Soy Indio: Subjectivity in La Florida del Inca,” in Poetics Today, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 1995), 79-

108; Lee Dowling, “La Florida del Inca: Garcilaso’s Literary Sources,” 98-154, and José Rabasa, “The 

Representation of Violence in the Soto Narratives,” 380-409, in Patricia K. Galloway ed., The Hernando de 

Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast (Lincoln and London: University 

of Nebraska Press, 2005 [1997]). 



 

126 

 

sometimes the battle were more heated, they went so far as to burn towns and devastate 

fields, but as soon as the conquerors had inflicted the desired damage, they regathered in their 

own lands without attempting to take possession of the lands of others. It appears, therefore, 

that their enmity and hatred spring primarily from a desire for ostentation, or in other words a 

wish to show their valor and strength of spirit and to gain experience in military science 

rather than from a desire to obtain the property and estate of another. The prisoners, they 

easily ransom simply by a system of exchange, and then all return to their ambushes. This 

warfare, they now look upon as the natural order of things and, as a result, regardless of 

where they are found, are always provided with arms, for in no place are they secure from 

enemies.119 

While the Indians did not make war for the land itself as Europeans did, Inca Garcilaso noted 

another sign of victory besides prisoners: “the scalp is a symbol which among all Indians 

signifies a great victory and vengeance for injuries.” Considering the implication of 

“vengeance for injuries,” his description of the Apalachees, already devastated by previous 

conquistador armies in their lands, can make sense within a chivalric Renaissance framework 

of a warrior’s universal right to vengeance. And The Inca does remind us, with brutal 

succinctness, of previous offenses against the Floridians by Soto’s predecessors. A ruler in 

the Florida peninsula named Hirrihigua, he tells us, whose mother had “been cast to the 

dogs” by Narváez’s followers, remembered the cruelties of the Narváez expedition “each 

time that he attempted to blow his nose and failed to find it”.120 

For the most part, The Inca renders the violence of the American Southeast 

transparently legible for a contemporary European audience, and highlights the rationality of 

the Southeastern Indians in universalist terms. The curacas label the conquistadores as 

bandits, robbers, and vagabonds, and signify this by ordering their subjects to quarter and 

                                                 
119 Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 487-88 (my italics). 
120 Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 437 (“scalp is a symbol”), 68 (“blow his nose”). 



 

127 

 

dismember the conquistadores’ bodies, hang their limbs from trees in lieu of gibbets, and 

decapitate them—in other words, to act as rightful lords in Europe would to criminals and 

rebels. Hearing of the Soto expedition’s approach, Hirrihigua retreats into the forest and tasks 

his vassals with bringing him the Iberians’ heads in the European fashion—not their scalps. 

Another Floridian lord’s violence is even more consistent with contemporary European 

practice: he lets the Spanish know he has ordered his followers “to bring me two Christian 

heads weekly,” and during the 20 days it took to pass through his territory, “not a single 

Spaniard who strayed so much as a hundred yards from the camp escaped being shot and 

beheaded at once,” with other conquistadores suffering posthumous exhumation, 

dismemberment, and display. The Spanish were warned that the Apalachees, who spent the 

winter of 1539-40 waylaying, killing, and scalping conquistadores (see Chapter 1), “would 

shoot them with arrows, quarter, burn and destroy them.”121  

Several episodes in the Inca’s text erode the certainty of the conquistador myth that a 

small group of horsemen, bearing modern European arms and armour, can easily defeat and 

dominate thousands of Indians. For instance, after the curaca of Ocali had submitted to Soto 

and agreed to have his vassals build a bridge over a river for them, more than five hundred of 

his subjects fired “a sprinkling of arrows” at the curaca and Soto from the safety of the other 

side of the river, promising “you thieves, vagabonds and foreign immigrants” that they would 

not see the bridge built “with our hands”; when asked how he could permit this, the curaca 

abashedly replied that many of his subjects “no longer looked upon him with respect” for 

conceding to the Iberians. The Inca describes Indian bows as powerful enough to put arrows 

                                                 
121 Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 68 (“receive the heads of these Castilians”), 118-20 (“two Christian 

heads weekly… shot and beheaded”) 175 (“quarter, burn, and destroy them”). 



 

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through Spanish chainmail or through a horse’s ribcage; in the heat of battle, Indian archers 

were able to kill conquistadores by aiming for their unarmoured eyes and faces at Mabila, 

and for their unarmoured legs at Chicaza. The Indians’ local knowledge also becomes 

weaponized to nullify the mounted conquistadores’ advantages: ambushes are laid for the 

conquistadores in the swamps, while Plains peoples at the western extreme of their 

wanderings use buffalo-hunting techniques against the horsemen. The Tula people skewer 

Soto’s remaining horses with their lances, while the people of what The Inca calls “the 

Province of Herdsmen” (provincia de los Vaqueros) crept on hands and knees into the camp 

at night, as though stalking game, to shoot horses and conquistadores.122  

The conquistadores’ invocations of the white god myth, particularly Soto’s claim to 

be a son of the Sun, receives a similarly dim reception. The curaca of Quigualtanqui replies 

he would believe that when Soto dried up the Mississippi; another cacique, Vitachuco, 

declared them “sons of the devil” rather than “our gods, the Sun and the Moon”, noting that 

if they really were as virtuous as they claimed to be, they would have stayed in their own 

country in peace “sowing the land and raising cattle” rather than “ma[king] highwaymen, 

adulterers, and murderers of themselves”. Even the possibility of reverse-colonialism is 

attributed by The Inca to the survivor Juan Coles, who recalled that during the escape by boat 

down the Mississippi a gigantic Indian warrior, “tall as a Philistine,” assured the fleeing 

conquistadores that if his people could build ships like theirs, “we would follow you to your 

own land and conquer it, for we too are men like yourselves.” Soto concedes that all this may 

                                                 
122 Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 59-60 (arrows through horses), 122-23 (“sprinkling of arrows… 

respect”), 234-36 (arrows through chainmail), 352-58 (battle of Mauvila / Mobile), 377 (of 47 conquistadores 

killed in the battle, 18 shot with arrows through their unarmoured eyes or mouths), 415 (arrows and “harpoons” 

aimed at unarmoured thighs and legs at Chicaza), 454-66 (Tula, buffalo-hunters); swamp ambushes (103-05, 

175-81). 



 

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fly in the face of his readers’ expectations, “For in general [Indians] are looked upon as a 

simple folk without reason or understanding who in both peace and war differ very little from 

beasts.”123 

Scalps and scalping, when discussed by The Inca, are placed in the context of 

indigenous warfare at its most vengeful and internecine, where the Spanish win the support 

of one indigenous polity by offering military assistance against another: marching with the 

captain Patofa of Cofaqui against the neighbouring polity of Cofachiqui, and siding with the 

town of Casquin against the town of Capaha. In each case, the Soto expedition’s involvement 

decides a stalemated contest, and the victors express their pent-up vengeance by sacking their 

enemies’ towns and temples, which Soto characterizes as “sepulchres,” looting the burial 

goods of pearls and fine furs, and desecrating the aristocrats’ interred remains. As well as 

sacking the temples and burial sites, the victors also scalp their enemies: Patofa and his eight 

thousand warriors, writes The Inca, killed everyone they captured in their attacks on the 

villages of the Cofachiquis, and “took the scalps from the ears up with admirable skill and 

dexterity” so that the elderly and infirm curaca of Cofaqui, who had delegated Patofa to act 

in his stead, “should see with his own eyes the vengeance they had wrought on his enemies 

for the injuries he had received […] in sum they did everything they could think of that might 

injure their enemies and satisfy their own thirst for vengeance.” While the Cofaquis had 

taken no prisoners in their destruction of the Cofachiquis’ towns, the Casquins were more 

selective in their attack on Capaha: after slaying the town’s male defenders, “more than a 

hundred and fifty in all,” looting the town, and capturing the women and children, “they 

                                                 
123 Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 134-35 (Vitachuco), 157-61 (“differ very little from beasts”), 495-96 

(Quigualtanqui), 595 (“Philistine,” “men like yourselves”). 



 

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removed the scalps of these men to take to their land as an evidence of triumph, for the scalp 

is a symbol which among all Indians signifies a great victory and vengeance for injuries.” 

While not explicitly stated by El Inca, his readers might have drawn an implicit comparison 

to the sectarian wars of contemporary Europe in which Protestant and Catholic armies and 

mobs desecrated and destroyed each other’s sacred sites, tombs, and graveyards. Scalping, 

however, marked such immoderate vengeance as specifically North American.124 

An early reference to scalping from present-day Canada appears in Jacques Cartier’s 

account of his second voyage (1535-36). A leader named Donnacona, whose sons Cartier had 

kidnapped to train as interpreters when returning to France from his first voyage in 1534, 

showed Cartier Lawrence at their village of Stadacona “the skins of five men's heads, 

stretched on hoops, like parchment (les peaulx de cinq testes d'hommes, estandues sus des 

boys, comme peaulx de parchemin)” and explained them to belong to “Toudamans,” enemies 

from the south “who waged war continually against his people.” Cartier writes that 

Donnacona explained that the Toudamans had inflicted a great defeat on the Stadaconans two 

years previously, surprising their fortified camp and slaying 200 men, women and children 

setting out on a war expedition against the Toudamans. Only five of the Stadaconans had 

survived, and “they still continued to complain bitterly” about this defeat, “making clear to us 

that they would have vengeance for the same.” Bruce Trigger has observed that Donnacona 

was probably asking Cartier for a military alliance, but Cartier was as uninterested in this as 

he was in the report of the Hochelagans, another Iroquoian people he met further downriver, 

of their enemies up the Ottawa River whom they called Agojuda, who wore armour of “cords 

                                                 
124 Varner and Varner, Florida of the Inca, 13-14 (“They do have temples but they use them as sepulchres and 

not as houses of prayer”), 292-96 (war of Cofaqui against Cofachiqui), 437 (“signifies a great victory and 

vengeance for injuries”). 



 

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and wood, laced and plaited together,” and whose tribes were continually at war with each 

other. His ethnography was curt and dismissive: the Stadaconans and Hochelagans had “no 

belief in God that amounts to anything,” “live with almost everything in common, much like 

the Brazilians,” “go clothed in beasts’ skins, and rather miserably,” ate their meat and fish 

“quite raw, merely smoking it,” and were “more indifferent to the cold than beasts.” In short, 

they had so little culture of their own that “they could easily be moulded in the way one 

would wish.”125 

Cartier did draw critical distinctions in terms of sociocultural life. Though he 

considered the Stadaconans and Hochelagans poor, the former so poor that nothing they 

owned was “above the value of five sous, their canoes and fishing-nets excepted,” he did 

note that they lived in settled villages and had agriculture, growing tobacco, “melons” (i.e., 

squash) and “corn like pease, the same as in Brazil, which they eat in place of bread.” This he 

deemed an improvement over the nomadic, “wild and savage folk” he had met in 1534 on the 

barren, rocky coastland he dubbed “the land God gave to Cain,” where “I did not see one 

cart-load of earth”; they were themselves outclassed, in his estimation, by the people he had 

met at Chaleur Bay, who approached the French in canoes holding pelts on the end of sticks 

and speaking what 20th-century researchers identify as a Basque trade pidgin. The 

Hochelagans, further downriver from the Stadaconans, also had more valuable material 

                                                 
125 “the skins of five men’s heads”: Axtell and Sturtevant’s translation, “The Unkindest Cut,” 456; H.P. Biggar, 

in the 1924 bilingual edition, cites the French text from the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris for “les peaulx de 

cinq testes d’hommes” (177-78) in H.P. Biggar, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: F.A. Acland, Printer 

to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1924). Citations otherwise from Ramsay Cook ed., H.P. Biggar trans., 

The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 65 (Agojuda), 67-71 

(Toudamans, “skin of five men’s heads,” “no belief in God that amounts to anything”); Bruce Trigger, Children 

of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University 

Press, 1987 [1976]), 183-201, 246-56; Bruce Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” 

Reconsidered (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987 [1985]), 129-35, 172-83.  



 

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culture in the form of esnoguy or wampum made from musselshells, which he believed was 

procured in a typically bizarre and violent American way: by making incisions in the thighs 

and buttocks of an executed criminal or prisoner of war, submerging the corpse into a 

waterway where the shellfish lived, and then extracting the mussels from the wounds. 

Deciding that the material wealth of the indigenous societies he encountered was correlated 

to the geographical distance of the journey upriver and into the continent, the sight of worked 

Great Lakes copper created in Cartier’s mind the idea that a version of Mexico or Peru, as 

advanced in comparison to the Hochelagans as he believed them to be to the coastal peoples, 

must exist upriver in the country they called the Saguenay. His visions of a “kingdom of the 

Saguenay,” who “go clothed and dressed in woollens like ourselves” and live in “many 

towns and peoples composed of honest folk who possess great store of gold and copper,” 

were fed by Donnacona, who by this point probably sought to rid themselves of the French, 

and his sons Taignoagny and Domagaya, whose time in France had stripped them of any 

illusions about what Europeans expected to find in the Americas.126 

The Tristán de Luna y Arellano expedition to colonize the Southeast (1559-60) also 

witnessed scalping in the context of vengeful indigenous warfare, as reported by the 

expedition’s chaplain, Fray Domingo de la Anunciación, and as recorded by Fray Agustín 

Dávila Padilla in Historia de la Fundación… (1625). The expedition had planned to establish 

a colony at Coosa (Coça), partly because of its description in La Florida del Inca as 

agriculturally wealthy and densely populated, and the Coosans, according to Anunciación, 

placed the price of their allegiance as a request for Spanish assistance against a neighbouring 

                                                 
126 Cook and Biggar, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 9-10 (“wild and savage… land God gave to Cain”), 62 

(esnoguy), 67-71 (ethnography), 82 (Kingdom of the Saguenay). On Basque trade pidgin, see Erik R. Seeman, 

Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 

Press, 2010), 107.  



 

133 

 

polity, the Napochies. Anunciación, according to Padilla, was quite taken by the Coosans’ 

military discipline, including an equal-arm-cross marching formation which he compared to 

that of the Biblical Israelites. Once at the abandoned Napochie village, however, he was 

struck by another display of their martial customs: on a tall wooden pillar in the town square 

they found many Coosas’ scalps (cabellos, “hair locks”). “It was the custom of the Indians to 

flay the head of the enemy dead, and to hang the resulting skin and locks (pellejo y cabellos) 

insultingly on that pole. There were many dead, and the pole was covered with locks.” The 

Coosans, much angered at “this evidence of affront” and reminder of “all the previous 

injuries” done to them, cut down the pole, and carried off the scalps (los cabellos) in order to 

bury them with proper ceremony.” The Coosans, writes Dávila Padilla, were “like raging 

lions” (leones rabiosos) at this sight, linking the Savagist comparison of purportedly wild 

men to wild animals with the by-now-rote description of Indian warriors as raging and 

vengeful.127 

“The [Timucuan] kings make wars among themselves, always by surprise attack,” 

wrote René Goulaine de Laudonnière in his 1586 memoir of the French attempt to colonize 

Florida (near present-day Jacksonville) in the 1560s:  

They kill every male enemy they can. Then they cut the skin off their heads to preserve the 

hair, and carry this back on their triumphant homeward journeys. They spare the enemy 

women and children, feed them, and retain them permanently among themselves. 

                                                 
127 “Flay the head of the enemy dead”: Axtell and Sturtevant’s translation of Historia de la fundacion y discurso 

de la Prouincia de Santiago de Mexico (Madrid, 1596), 260, in “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented 

Scalping,” 457; Charles Hudson, “A Spanish-Coosa Alliance in Sixteenth-Century North Georgia,” in The 

Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. 72, No. 4 (Winter 1988), 599-626; on the disputed historicity of Dávila 

Padilla’s account and its constant invocation of the miraculous, see Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500-

1700 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 145; Patricia Galloway, “Agustin Davila 

Padilla’s Fabulous History of the Luna Expedition: Ideology in Two Centuries,” in Practicing Ethnohistory: 

Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 78-96; 

Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 131; “leones rabiosos” in Dávila Padilla, 1625 edition, 214. 



 

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In the scalp dances that commemorated victory, “They even make the old women dance 

while holding the enemy scalps in their hands” and praising the Sun, to whom “the honour of 

victory” was attributed. Laudonnière sabotaged the colony’s future by attempting to become 

trading partners of their neighbour Satouriona’s enemies, the Thimogona, instead of heeding 

his request for French gunmen to join him in a joint campaign against them. Accordingly, 

Laudonnière’s account dwells on the purportedly vengeful and implacable nature of the 

Timucuans. After one of his officers attempted to cover their delegation to Thimogona’s 

people by claiming it an unsuccessful raid, a vassal of Satouriona’s named Molona showed 

his displeasure at a victory feast by ordering a cupbearer to inflict a non-fatal knife wound on 

one of his guests, who turned out to be one of Molona’s sons. Every time an expedition 

returned from the Thimogona country without “the scalps of their enemies” or “some 

prisoner,” explained Molona, his ancestors’ injuries at their hands should be “renew[ed]” and 

“lamented afresh,” and “the best loved of all his children should be struck by the same 

weapon by which his ancestors had been killed.” A few weeks later, Satouriona set out 

against the Thimogona; they launched a surprise attack on a Thimogona village and “cut the 

enemy to pieces, excepting women and little children. […] When it was accomplished, the 

aggressors took the heads of their slain enemies and cut the hair off, taking a piece of skull 

with each scalp.” They also returned with 24 prisoners, of whom Satouriona kept 13 for 

himself and distributed the rest among his 10 chiefs, and bearing “the scalps at the top of 

their spears” which were set, crowned with magnolia, outside Satouriona’s house. 

Laudonnière then marched against Satouriona’s house with 20 arquebusiers and demanded 



 

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that Satouriona, on whose land Fort Caroline had been built and who supplied food and 

labour to the colony, turn over his prisoners to the French.128 

 This was the penultimate insult; the final insult was when the French began lending 

military assistance to another of Satouriona’s enemies, Outina, in late 1564 and the spring of 

1565. Thirty French soldiers under a Captain D’Ottigni marched with an expedition of 300 

Timucuan archers accompanied by their bearers (Laudonnière calls them “women, young 

boys, and hermaphrodites”) against another leader, Potavou. Close to his village, they 

surprised three men fishing; two of them escaped while the third was shot with arrows “and 

scalped by our Indians,” who cut off his arms and “preserv[ed] his scalp” for the victory 

dance. Outina, afraid that the escaped fishermen would alert Potavou to their presence, asked 

his jarua or diviner whether they should continue or retreat; the jarua replied that it was best 

to retreat and that Potavou, was waiting for him with at least 2,000 men. D’Ottigni then 

demanded a guide so that he and his 30 men could attack the Potavou, and Outina followed. 

Laudonnière notes that they met the enemy “at the exact place where the magician had said 

they would be,” and that Outina would have been defeated if not for the advantage of 

firearms. Having killed a large number of Potavou’s soldiers and routed the rest, Outina “was 

contented for the time being” and withdrew. This “greatly disgusted” d’Ottigni, “who had 

wanted nothing more than going on to complete victory.”129 

                                                 
128 Laudonnière, Charles E. Bennett ed., trans., Three Voyages (Gainesville, FL: the University Presses of 

Florida, 1975), 9-16 (“wars among themselves”), 76-82 (Molona and vindictiveness), 80-88 (Satouriona and 

conflict over slaves and scalps); Axtell and Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut,” 457-58; Margaret F. Dickett and 

Dwayne F. Dickett, The European Struggle to Settle North America: Colonizing Attempts by England, France 

and Spain, 1521-1608 (McFarland, 2011), 84-97; Laura Fishman, “Old World Images Encounter New World 

Reality: Rene Laudonnière and the Timucuans of Florida,” in The Sixteenth Century Journal vol. 26, no. 3 

(Autumn 1995), 547-559; Dickason, Myth of the Savage, 192-202.  
129 Laudonnière, Three Voyages, 117-120. 



 

136 

 

 The short-lived Huguenot colony, wiped out in a sectarian massacre by Pedro 

Menéndez de Avilés with the guidance of Satouriona and other Timucuan leaders alienated 

by Laudonniére’s policies, was also depicted in a now-obscure collection of text and sketches 

by another expeditionary member, Jacques le Moyne de Morgues. Those illustrations were 

the basis for a series of engravings, still widely-reprinted in scholarly and popular works on 

the early Americas, in Theodor de Bry’s 1591 Latin translation of le Moyne’s account. De 

Bry’s depictions of heroically nude Timucuans recycled themes which were by this point 

standard Americana: in one engraving, Timucuans worship a monument placed by an earlier 

explorer in their territory; in another, a newborn baby is sacrificed in honour of a Timucuan 

chief. Of importance for this chapter are de Bry’s illustrations of war and hunting. De Bry’s 

depictions of both juxtapose the familiar and praiseworthy with brutal exotica. In Plate XIII 

Outina, his warriors, and Captain D’Ottigni’s arquebusiers form an orderly square formation 

against a vast army of Potavou’s followers, and Plate XIV, “Order of March Observed by 

Outina on a Military Expedition,” presents Indian warfare in a visually-familiar fashion. Plate 

XV, “How Outina’s Men Treated the Slain of the Enemy”, furthers the connection drawn 

between scalping, which le Moyne had said was performed “with pieces of reed sharper than 

any steel blade,” and inventive mutilation: the victorious warriors have already scalped and 

cut the limbs off of a dead enemy and are inserting an arrow into the corpse’s anus. The 

depictions of Timucuan hunters follow suit: Plate XXV, “Hunting Deer,” shows hunters 

dressed in deerskins stalking their unaware prey while drinking at a river, a matter of finesse 

and wit; the next plate, “Killing Crocodiles”, is a matter of naked force, as six nude 



 

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Timucuan hunters shove a sharpened log like a battering ram down a huge alligator’s 

throat.130 

A related reading of North Americans’ lifestyle as equally defined by war and 

hunting was conveyed in André Thévet’s discussions and illustrations of the peoples of 

Florida and Canada in Les Singularitez de la France antarctique (1557), La Cosmographie 

universelle d’André Thévét, cosmographe du roy (1575), and Vrais Pourtraicts et vies des 

hommes illustres... (1584). Synthesizing the works of other authors on the Americas, Thévet 

added his own authorial-editorial touches to explain the differences between the already-

discovered peoples of the equatorial Americas, such as Brazilians and Mexicans, and the 

more-recently-encountered North Americans. One way Thévet expressed this was visually, 

through the civilized-savage juxtaposition of textile clothing versus hides and pelts. In 1584’s 

Vrais Pourtraicts, Thévet depicts Montezuma wearing clothes and accoutrements which are 

more refined creations of human culture: a Mexican circular shield adorned with 

featherwork, a robe of woven cotton or linen knotted over his left shoulder in a Classical 

fashion, and a crown. The Timucuan leader Satouriona, by contrast, sports a full fur coat with 

sleeves to the wrists, and the skin of a large cat as a hood with its clawed paws knotted 

around his neck in the fashion of Hercules’ lion pelt, with a perfunctory American feather 

bonnet tucked on top of his cap. The peoples so far encountered north of Mexico, both the 

Floridians and the Canadians, wear “the skins of wild animals” to protect themselves against 

the cold, to which Thévet attributes “the statement of certain ignoramuses that the savages 

                                                 
130 Axtell and Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut,” 457-58; Plate VIII, “The Natives of Florida Worship the 

Column Erected by the Commander on his First Voyage”; Plate XXXIV, “First-Born Children Sacrificed to the 

Chief with Solemn Ceremonies”; Plate XIII, “Outina, With the Help of the French, Gains a Victory over His 

Enemy Potanou”; Plate XV, “How Outina’s Men Treated the Slain of the Enemy”; Plate XXV, “Hunting Deer”; 

Plate XXIV, “Killing Crocodiles” –  from https://www.floridamemory.com/collections/debry/ , accessed 13 

October 2012, 5:11 pm PST. 

https://www.floridamemory.com/collections/debry/


 

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had fur.” While Thévet considers the people of Canada as having almost no material or 

religious culture to speak of, besides vague veneration of the heavenly bodies, he makes this 

anthropology of defiency a positive thing: while some Canadians are idolatrous, they do not 

perform the idolatrous human sacrifices of the Floridians and Mexicans, or have dietary 

“superstitions” like Jews and Muslims.  While “these Canadians, who are the fiercest known 

people and who have no arts or trades whatsoever, are always occupied in warring with some 

of their neighbours,” they are “rather good people and gracious if you do not irritate them,” 

certainly more praiseworthy than the Floridians, who he considers cruel and idolatrous. The 

Canadians are also more advanced than the Brazilians by wearing fur and leather clothing, 

while the Brazilians go about naked in the manner of “the first condition of the human race”; 

for reference, Thévet explains that the ancient French were nearly as savage as contemporary 

Brazilians and went about “almost naked” when “Hercules of Libya” first discovered them. 

Unlike the Brazilians, Thévet’s Canadians do not eat their defeated enemies—they scalp 

them instead.131  

In his description of Canadian warfare in 1557’s Singularitez, wars begin when “the 

Agohanna (which means like king or lord)” commands his vassals to ready their fighting men 

and prepare provisions for an expedition. Marching four-by-four to the tune of drums and 

deerbone flutes and bearing ensigns made of birch branches and adorned with swans’ and 

other birds’ feathers, they fight with bows, clubs, spears, shields, and bearskin helmets. That 

stone and wooden weapons were as legitimate as those of iron and steel Thévet explained by 

                                                 
131 André Thévet, Roger Schlesinger and Arthur P. Stabler eds., trans., André Thévét’s North America: A 

Sixteenth-Century View (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 11 (“certain 

ignoramuses”), 11-12 (“Hercules of Libya”… “first condition of the human race”), 13 (“superstitious nation of 

the Turks”), 23 (“Turks, Arabs … superstitious people”), 38 (“fiercest known people), 138 (“skins of wild 

animals”). On the accuracy of Thévet’s claims of travels in the Americas, see Tom Conley, “Thevet Revisits 

Guanabara,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 4, November 2000, 753-781.  



 

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pointing to precedent of their use in the Old World in ancient texts: the Bible, Herodotus, 

Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Justinian. Unlike the bloodthirsty peoples of South America, who 

make war for enjoyment, the Canadians only go to war “to avenge a wrong received”, and 

Thevet suggests the deep winter snows act as a natural barrier to more expeditions. “True, if 

they capture some of their enemies or are otherwise victorious, they skin their head and face 

and lay them out in a circle to dry. Then they carry them to their country, showing them 

proudly as a symbol of victory to their friends, wives, and old men, who in their weak old 

age can no longer carry the burden.” In 1575’s Cosmographie Universelle, Thévet added an 

illustration of Canadians at war. Their king, wielding what looks like a sledgehammer, is 

carried on the shoulders of bearers as a mark of his rank and status. Two musicians carry a 

drum of hide stretched on an oval wooden hoop the size of a dressing mirror while a third 

beats a marching rhythm with two deer femurs. Ghoulishly, the drum is echoed visually by a 

smaller oval wooden hoop on which is stretched the dried face of an enemy; in the 

background, ten similar hoops of dried faces hang from trees, testament to past victories.132 

Like Theodor de Bry, Thévet also notes a connection between warfare and hunting in 

the life of indigenous North Americans, explained through humoral and climactic-determinist 

theory. All northern peoples, wrote Thévet, were made “courageous” to varying degrees by 

the inclosure of their body heat through thick clothing, “which therefore renders them robust 

and valiant: for the strength and virtue of all parts of the body depend on this natural 

warmth.” Southerners, which Lestringant notes could include Iberians and Italians as well as 

Brazilians in French polemics, were “the contrary,” writes Thévet: hot equatorial air drew out 

                                                 
132 Schlesinger and Stabler, Andre Thévét’s North America, 14-19 (“skin their head and face”), 44 (Thévet’s 

illustration of Canadians at war).  



 

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and “dissipated” their internal body heat, making them morally incontinent and cowardly. 

Thus Thévet’s engraving of native Canadians, wearing fur robes and toques and with 

snowshoes on their feet, hunting wild beasts in the winter snow. A deer hunter is in the 

background, while in the foreground three hunters target a wild boar with spears and a bow, 

one of the hunters killing the boar by shoving a spear down its throat in the same manner as 

de Bry’s alligator-hunters. Thévet also attributed such scenes, which he considered endemic 

to Canada, to climactic determinism: as proven by “the beautiful pelts” brought from 

perpetually-cold northern regions, fierce wild beasts “abound more in northern regions 

(except lions, tigers, elephants, rignoseros [sic])” than elsewhere. Wild men were typically 

depicted in battle with wild animals, like bears and bulls, and strange conflicts between 

northern savages and wild beasts had been a recurrent subtheme of European geography (see 

Chapter 1).133 

The explanation of indigenous Canadian warfare by analogy to Rome’s enemies 

across the Alps was continued and extended by the French lawyer Marc Lescarbot in his 

account of his year in Acadia, Nova Francia (1606). The ‘Acadians’ he describes, probably 

Mi’kmaq and Maliseet, did not make war for land, but “as Alexander the Great did make it, 

that they may say I have beaten you, or else for revenge in remembrance of some injury 

received.” Their unwillingness to forgive or forget past injuries was “the greatest vice that I 

find in them,” wrote Lescarbot, but also excusable “because they do nothing but that which 

ourselves do also.” While in attacks on their enemies they slew as many of the male 

defenders as they could lay hands on, “They also use humanity and mercy towards their 

                                                 
133 Schlesinger and Stabler, Andre Thévét’s North America, 9-10 (“robust and valiant”), 58 (“beautiful pelts”); 

Lestringant, Cannibals, 86-93. On climactic-determinist theories on northerners, see Isaac, Invention of Racism 

in Classical Antiquity, 55-168; Snowden Jr., Before Color Prejudice, 85-87.  



 

141 

 

enemies’ wives and little children” by taking them captive “for to serve them” per the 

“ancient right of servitude.” In describing the Acadians’ war customs, he took great pains to 

rule out the possibility of anthropophagy and human sacrifice: their war and victory dances, 

which he called Tabagies, were not cannibal bacchanalias, but a show of joy and 

thanksgiving, like the Israelites’ songs of praise after the death of King Sisera (Judges 4-5) or 

David’s triumph over Goliath (I Samuel 18:6-7), and served an educational purpose for the 

young, like the civic dances of the ancient Spartans. Cartier’s report of seeing preserved 

scalps, for instance, didn’t necessarily mean that the Stadaconans had sacrificed those men (a 

possible allusion to the flayed-face stories of Cortés), but that, like the “ancient Gauls,” they 

had “set them up in or without their cabins as a trophy, which is usual through all the West 

Indies.” Lescarbot reminded his readers that the ancient Gauls, who the French then and now 

considered as national ancestors, had been reported by various Greek and Roman authors, 

particularly Polybius, Caesar, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Ammianus Marcellinus, to 

decapitate their enemies and preserve their heads as trophies: “Our ancient Gauls did make 

no less trophies with the heads of their enemies than our savages.”134 

Going one step further, Lescarbot invoked the ancient symbol of barbarism, the 

gilded skull-cup, by reminding his readers that one of the Gallic tribes, the Boii, had been 

reported in Strabo’s Geography (III.3) to gild their enemies’ skulls and use them “in sacred 

things and holy solemnities. If any man thinketh this strange,” he interjected, as they might 

find strange the idea that the Acadians bite their enemies’ scalps during victory dances to 

show their rage, he should consider the report of Blaise de Vigenère, French scholar and 

                                                 
134 Marc Lescarbot, trans. P. Erondelle, Nova Francia: A Description of Acadia, 1606 (New York and London: 

Harper & Brothers, 1928), 168 (Gallic head trophies) 196-97 (head-taking among national ancestors of the 

French), 235-37 (Biblical (Judges V, 1 Samuel 18:6-7) and classical parallels), 264 (“ancient right of 

servitude”), 307-15. 



 

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diplomat, of events on the Hungarian frontier between Christian Europe and the Ottoman 

Empire: 

he saith that in the year 1566, being near Jauarin [Győr], they did lick the blood of the Turks’ 

heads which they brought to the Emperor Maximilian; which goeth beyond the barbarousness 

that might be objected to our savages. 

Yea, I must tell you that they have more humanity than many Christians, who within 

these hundred years have committed in divers occurrences, upon women and children, 

cruelties more than brutish, whereof the histories be full; and our savages do extend their 

mercy to these two sorts of creatures. 

The Acadians gain no material benefit from their moral superiority to Europeans, however, 

and their life is harder than that of soldiers “coming forth out of tents and pavilions”. Their 

manner of making war, by travelling over great distances to take their enemy by surprise, 

“keepeth them in perpetual fear,” and “at the least noise in the world,” like a moose passing 

through the forest, “they take an alarm.”135 

 In Des Sauvages, ou Voyage de Samuel Champlain de Brouage… (1604), Samuel de 

Champlain gave his account of such a victory ceremony which he had attended, as part of a 

French delegation to their North Atlantic allies in 1603. Prior to the arrival of the French 

delegation, a combined force of a thousand warriors from the Algonquin, Innu 

(“Montagnais”) and Maliseet (“Etchemins”) had met an Iroquois expedition at the mouth of 

the Iroquois River (later, the Richelieu River) and killed about 100 of their enemies, “whose 

                                                 
135 Lescarbot, Nova Francia, 307-15; on ‘Javarin,’ see: Entry “Gewer, Javarinum, called by the Inhabitants 

Raab; by the Germans Javarin, Giavarino; is a small, but very strong City, the Capital of a County in the Lower 

Hungary, and a Bishops See, under the Archbishop of Gran. It stands five miles from Comora to the West, 

where the Raab and the Rabnitz fall into the Danube. This City is called Gewer by the Hungarians.” – in 

Edmund Bohun, A Geographical Dictionary, Representing the Present and Ancient Names of all the Countries, 

Provinces, Remarkable Cities […] of the whole World (London: Charles Brome, 1688), GE to GH (no 

pagination). Listed as “Raab, Javarin, Györ, Jaurinum” in Denis Diderot and Fortuné Barthélemy de Félice, 

Encyclopédia ou Dictionnaire Universel Raisonné des connoissances humaines, Volume 36, ‘R’ (Yverdon, 

Switzerland, 1774), page 2.  



 

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scalps they cut off.” Champlain had little faith in the ability of France’s allies to fight the 

Iroquois—he characterized their wars as “altogether by surprises,” since otherwise they 

would be “too much in dread” of a numerically-superior foe—and the French, through their 

interpreter, reiterated the goals of their king: to trade with them, to populate their country 

with French colonists, “and to make peace with their enemies (who are the Iroquois) or send 

forces to vanquish them.” After listening with attentive and total silence, the Innu leader 

Anadabijou carefully and politely replied “that he was well content that His said Majesty 

should people their country, and make war on their enemies,” sidestepping entirely the 

proposal that the French king could or should establish peace between them and their 

longstanding enemies. Following the feast, they began to dance, “taking in their hands ... the 

scalps [testes, lit. “heads”] of their enemies, which hung behind them”. The Algonquins’ 

victory ceremony was much the same, except that their women, who danced with the scalps, 

stripped down to their jewellery, while their leader Tessouat, who “sat between two poles, on 

which hung the scalps [testes] of their enemies,” periodically stood up to exhort his 

assembled allies, presumably including the French, “See how we rejoice for the victory 

which we have obtained over our enemies; ye must do the like, that we may be satisfied.” 

Champlain’s literary response is to add a long, griping passage on the Indians’ perceived 

faults—the “one evil quality in them, which is, that they are given to revenge,” and their way 

of life as godless and lawless, “like brute beasts.”136 

 In 1606, Champlain sailed south as part of a trading expedition to the Wampanoag at 

Cape Cod. French sailors in the previous year had alienated the Wampanoag with their 

                                                 
136 H.P. Biggar et. al., The Works of Samuel de Champlain in Six Volumes, Vol. I (Toronto: the Champlain 

Society, 1922), 100-107; Annie Nettleton Bourne trans., Edward Gaylord Bourne ed., Algonquians, Hurons and 

Iroquois: Champlain Explores America, 1603-1616 (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia: Brook House Press, 2000 [New 

York: A.S. Barnes, 1906]), ix-xiii; Axtell and Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut,” 458.  



 

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behaviour, and the 1606 expedition followed suit, first attempting to intimidate them, then 

shooting two Wampanoag for theft. In retaliation, the Wampanoag ambushed and slew some 

French sailors. The French decided to make a show of punishment by capturing some 

Wampanoag and taking them back to Acadia to grind grain at Port-Royal; when the capture 

attempt failed, the French killed six or seven Wampanoag with their swords. They returned to 

Port Royal with four or five dead, four wounded, but Champlain noted that their Maliseet 

guide and interpreter Secoudon “was much pleased and well satisfied at having made this 

voyage with us, and carried off some scalps of the Indians (quelques testes des sauvages) 

who had been killed at Misfortune harbour.”137 

 Champlain’s later account of joining an Innu-Algonquin-Huron excursion into 

Iroquoia in the summer of 1609 drew further linkage between scalping, torture, and 

anthropophagy in the European perception of North American warfare. Champlain described 

elements of their military customs as sensible and praiseworthy, for instance, the allies’ 

tripartite division of their forces into scouts, a main body of troops, and hunters scattered 

behind the advance to provision them; their ability to palisade the landward side of their 

riverbank campsites “in less than two hours”; the captains drilling their followers on their 

battle formations in advance of the battle itself; and their use of parched cornmeal as a 

premade ration for when they entered enemy territory, to be mixed with water and eaten cold 

to avoid giving away their positions with woodsmoke. On the journey south Champlain had 

                                                 
137 My thanks to Kilroy Abney (UBC) for bringing this incident to my attention. Samuel de Champlain, Henry 

Percival Biggar et al., The works of Samuel de Champlain, Volume I (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1922), 325, 

353-54, 420-28, 431-36; Marc Lescarbot, Henry Percival Biggar, and W. L. Grant, History of New 

France, Volume I (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1907), 277; Marc Lescarbot, Henry Percival Biggar, and W. L. 

Grant, History of New France, Volume II (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1911), 332-38; on the identification of 

agriculturalist New England Algonquians (French “Armouchiqouis”) as most likely Wampanoag, see Kathleen 

Joan Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 

1996), 25-26. 



 

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only two complaints: that the Indians didn’t post sentries at night, and employed Shaking 

Tent diviners (who he considered charlatans) to obtain any intelligence that escaped their 

scouts. After the battle with the Iroquois, another point of difference between Champlain and 

his allies became apparent: of the ten or twelve Iroquois taken prisoner, the allies selected 

one to execute by torture on the spot. As Bruce Trigger and other commentators have pointed 

out, Champlain’s objections were not to torture per se, as meted out in contemporary Europe 

for “treason, heresy, or sexual deviancy,” but for the torture of a prisoner of war and the 

anthropophagous elements of trying to force other prisoners to eat the dead man’s heart. 

Champlain also reported scalping as an element of the Iroquois’ execution by torture: “they 

flayed the top of his head and poured hot gum on his crown,” and after his posthumous 

dismemberment they retained “the skin of his head (la peau de la teste)” with those of other 

Iroquois slain in the battle. Bringing these scalps back to Tadoussac for a victory ceremony, 

Champlain noted that they gifted him with two of the scalps and two sets of Iroquois 

weapons to bring back to the French king. Describing the aftermath of a battle in 1610, 

Champlain noted that “These savages scalped the heads of their dead enemies, as they are 

accustomed to do, as a trophy of their victory, and took them away.” In 1611, Champlain 

described a scenario consistent with a coalescing European trope of indigenous American 

warriors as immoderately vengeful. The Huron leadership had been unsuccessful in 

persuading a small nine-man war party from setting out on an expedition into Iroquoia, since 

they feared its leader, who had been captured, tortured, and escaped from the Iroquois three 

times already, would lead them deep into enemy territory to certain death. Champlain was 

asked to intervene as a final persuading voice, but this Huron Ahab was undeterred: showing 

Champlain his scars and missing fingers, he said he could not live “without killing his 



 

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enemies and having his revenge.” As predicted, none of them ever returned from their 

doomed mission.138 

 Gabriel Sagard, a Recollet missionary who travelled up the St. Lawrence to the Huron 

country in 1623-24, later summarized the war customs and lifestyle of the Huron and 

Algonquians as revealing “the wretchedness of human nature, tainted at the source, deprived 

of the training of the faith, destitute of morality”. This portrait was not uniformly damning, 

and there were elements of Huron and Algonquian society that he considered exemplary and 

worth consideration for Europeans. He praised their self-control, which granted them more 

patience than most Frenchmen had, their “very kindly and polite” manner, and their quick 

wits, being “not so gross and dull as we in France suppose.” They built houses for the 

homeless, showed reverence for graveyards and the dead which “surpass[ed] the piety of 

Christians,” and avoided wet-nurses. In regards to warfare, he did think them “kind and 

merciful in victory towards the wives and little children of their enemies” for saving their 

lives, “although these remain prisoners and serve them.” He also favourably noted that 

warparties fed themselves with their own provisions of dried cornmeal, rather than 

plundering the countryside as European armies did. Like previous authors, he preferred 

sedentary urban-agrarian life, like that of the Huron, over seasonal movement between 

campsites and food sources like the Innu: “I consider the Hurons and other sedentary tribes 

as the aristocracy, the Algonquin peoples the townspeople,” and the Innu and ‘Canadians’ 

“the villagers and poor people of the country.” This was more or less the end of the list. 

Some of the faults he found among the Indians were those that a literate, well-educated 

                                                 
138 Bourne and Bourne, Champlain Explores America, 91-109; Axtell and Sturtevant, “Unkindest Cut,” 458-59; 

Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 246-330 (254: “treason, heresy, or sexual deviancy”).  



 

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European would have found among European peasants, like open belching, breaking wind in 

canoes, or wiping their hands on their dogs while eating. He faulted their past and present 

lack of Christianity and certain aspects of their culture: that they did not explicitly 

compliment each other, hired diviners to ascertain the whereabouts of stolen property, and 

were in his estimation “addicted” to revenge and “lying.”139 

 What horrified Sagard was the prosecution of warfare, which he considered “properly 

speaking, nothing but surprise and treachery” intended “to take revenge for some slight 

wrong or unpleasantness,” and the fate of prisoners. Every year in the spring, and throughout 

the summer, 500 to 600 Huron men scattered through the Iroquois country in bands of 5 or 6, 

lying low by day and “prowl[ing] about” by night to seize captives, even from the villages 

themselves, to bring back to the Huron country “to put them to death over a slow fire”. Those 

they couldn’t carry off they slew on the spot with arrows or warclubs and “carr[ied] away the 

head; and if they are too much encumbered with these they are content to take the scalps with 

the hair on them, which they call Onontsira, tan them, and put them away for trophies, and in 

time of war set them on the palisades of their town fastened to the end of a long pole.” He did 

note that women, girls, and children were usually spared from execution in the villages, and 

children were adopted as “substitutes”; but those not taken prisoner they “[put] to death on 

the spot, and take away the heads or the hairy scalp.” Like Champlain, Sagard mentioned 

scalping in the context of execution by torture: “and then they strip off all the skin of the 

                                                 
139 Gabriel Sagard, H.H. Langton trans., Sagard’s Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons (New York: 

Greenwood Press, 1968 [1939]), 15-17 (“wretchedness of human nature”), 64 (“kindly and polite”), 139 

(“aristocracy… as we in France”), 68-69 (“surpass the piety of Christians”), 140 (“kind and merciful… 

prisoners… addicted”), 152-66 (war and execution); Axtell and Sturtevant, “Unkindest Cut,” 459-60.  



 

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head with the hair, and afterwards apply fire to it and hot ashes, or they drop upon it melted 

gum of a certain kind.”140 

 Two final references to scalping must be considered before we conclude this chapter. 

Ulrich Schmiedel, a Bavarian mercenary who served across South America from 1534 to 

1554, took exception with Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his tenure as governor 

of the Río de la Plata region, from 1540-44. Schmiedel wasn’t the only one to take exception 

to Cabeza de Vaca—his attempts to regulate the behaviour of other Iberians in the region and 

curtail labour abuses towards the Guaraní had led to his being expelled from South America 

in chains in 1545. In this case, Schmiedel disagreed with Cabeza de Vaca’s claim in his 1555 

account of his governorship, Comentarios, that the Indians of the region in question 

decapitated their enemies for trophies. Schmiedel laid out an alternate explanation in his 

memoir, which appeared in a 1567 German anthology of American voyages: 

Mark you, now, what he does further with the man’s head, and to what use he puts it, namely, 

if he has any opportunity for so doing, after a skirmish. He takes off the skin with all the hair 

over the ears, then he fills the head out and leaves it to become hard; afterwards he puts this 

hard and dry skin on a little hoop as a souvenir, in the same way as here in Germany a knight 

or commander puts a scutcheon in the churches.
141 

                                                 
140 Langton, Sagard’s Long Journey, 148-166; Axtell and Sturtevant, “Unkindest Cut,” 459-60.  
141 Ulrich Schmidel, “Voyage of Ulrich Schmidt [sic] To the Rivers La Plata and Paraguai [sic],” 1567, in Luis 

L. Dominguez ed., trans., The Conquest of the River Plate, 1535-1555 (London: the Hakluyt Society, 1891), 55; 

Gene Rhea Tucker, “The Discovery of Germany in America: Hans Staden, Ulrich Schmidel, and the 

Construction of a German Identity”, in Traversea: Journal of Transatlantic History Vol. 1 (2011), 26-45. Georg 

Friederici took note of this in his 1906 study of scalping: “In the meantime it was discovered by the German 

Ulrich Schmiedel that scalping was also a tradition of the South American Indians, while the secretary of 

Cabeza de Vaca was inadequately informed and in the same or similar circumstances spoke only of cutting off 

the entire head. This most likely refers to the Guaycurú-Mbayá who, along with all the Chaco tribes, first 

removed the head and afterwards scalped it.” Georg Friederici, Anastasia M. Griffin, “Georg Friederici’s 

Scalping and Similar Warfare Customs in America with a Critical Introduction,” M.A. thesis, Department of 

Germanic and Slavic Languages and Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder (Proquest: UMI Dissertations 

Publishing, 2008), 25. On Cabeza de Vaca in South America, see Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern 

Frontier, 31-83; Chipman, “Cabeza de Vaca”.  



 

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Another comparison between American scalping and European chivalry was made in the 

account of Harmen Mayndertsz van den Bogaert, the surgeon of the Dutch fur trading post of 

Fort Orange, of his journey into the Mohawk and Oneida country in the winter of 1634-35. 

At the palisaded Oneida village, which he calls a “castle,” at Oriskany Creek, he saw a single 

scalp (lock) hanging from the smaller east gate, while atop the main village gate “three 

wooden images carved like men, and with them… three scalps [locken] fluttering in the 

wind, that they had taken from their foes as a token of the truth of their victory.”142 

Conclusions: White gods in Virginia 

 The Spanish royal historian Oviedo, in relaying the account of Rodrigo Ranjel, Soto’s 

personal secretary and a survivor of the expedition, makes some pertinent editorial asides 

castigating Hernando de Soto and his “deluded” soldiers for wandering “from bad to worse” 

through a land he had never seen before, and where three other adelantados “more expert 

than he,” Juan Ponce, Garay, and Narváez, had been defeated. Oviedo was no Las Casas—he 

considered Indians to be congenitally stupid and immoral—but Soto’s excesses drew Oviedo 

to rebuke him as continuing the bad policies of his teachers. He deemed him “instructed in 

the school” of Pedrarías de Ávila “in the dissipation and devastation of the Indians of 

[Panama], graduate in the killing of the natives of Nicaragua and canonized in Peru, 

according to the Order of the Pizarros.” Returning to Spain from the Indies laden with gold 

from the conquest of the Incas, Soto had returned to the “hellish” Indies “to spill human 

blood, not content with that already spilled”. He thought, wrote Oviedo, that the knowledge 

                                                 
142 Bogaert cited in Axtell and Sturtevant, “Unkindest Cut,” 460; Dean Snow, Charles Gehring, William Starna 

eds., In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives about a Native People (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 

1996), 8. 



 

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of Panama and Peru “sufficed to know how to govern here on the coast of the North, and he 

deluded himself, as this history will relate.”143  

 By 1607, notes Audrey Horning, indigenous peoples in the North Atlantic “had 

amassed a considerable amount of knowledge about Europeans, certainly in comparison with 

what [European] colonists knew about them.” If Indians in the contact zone had had any 

doubts about Europeans’ status as humans, they had long been disillusioned, while 

Europeans were still peddling comforting stories to themselves about animal-like or childlike 

wild men. Richard Hakluyt, a major British proponent of American colonies and an early 

investor in the Virginia Company, used his armchair knowledge of the Americas to help 

draw up the 1606 Instructions for the colonists, which blended sensible observations about 

former failed ventures with endorsement of myths of savage Indians and white gods. The 

colonists’ objectives in Virginia, which included prospecting for minerals and looking for the 

northwest passage to the Pacific, were to be performed while preventing attacks by rival 

powers by sea— “that you not be surprized [sic] as the French were in Florida by Melindus 

[Governor Menéndez], and the Spaniard in the same place by the French”—and bracing for 

the inevitable hostilities that would break out. Surveyors were to be equipped with 

compasses, for instance, so they could find their way back to the colony if abandoned in 

“great woods or desert” by Indian guides, as the Coronado expedition (1540-42) had been in 

the Southwest. The day of disaster should be postponed as much as possible by colonists’ 

                                                 
143 “Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto” by Rodrigo Rangel, drawn from 

Historia general y natural de las Indias by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1557), John E. Worth 

trans., in Clayton et. al. ed., The De Soto Chronicles volume 1, 273 (“and he deluded himself”), 289-90 (“Order 

of the Pizarros”); on Oviedo, see José Rabasa, “The Representation of Violence in the Soto Narratives,” 380-

408, in Galloway, Soto Expedition (2006); on Soto, see James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and 

Biographical Study of the first Conquerors of Peru (Austin, TX, and London: University of Texas Press, 1972), 

190-201.  



 

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taking “great care not to offend the naturals, if you can eschew it” and trading for food before 

the Indians “perceive you mean to plant among them.” Indians were never to be permitted to 

handle firearms, for instance, and only the keenest marksmen were to fire guns in the 

Indians’ presence. They were also enjoined to conceal any kind of sickness among the 

colonists and to hide the bodies of the dead, because “if they perceive that [they] are but 

common men, […] they will make many adventures upon you.”144 

 As Neil Whitehead observed, “first contact” scenarios “vastly over-privileg[e] the 

colonisers’ moment of ‘first contact’.” In the case of Virginia, these fantasies of a 1607 first 

encounter overlooked a history of European incursions into the Chesapeake and along the 

Atlantic seaboard going back to the early 16th century (see Chapter 3), including the failed 

Ajacán colony (see Chapter 1) and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Roanoke colony 

of the 1580s. How and why the Virginia colony succeeded where its precursors had failed, by 

the incidental pioneering of a new form of British colonialism which would pave the way 

towards extirpationist warfare and scalp bounties, is the focus of the next chapter.145 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                 
144 Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000 – 1927 

(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 54-62, 139; Audrey Horning, Ireland in the 

Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the Virginian Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 

2013), 101-09; on Coronado, see Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 133-142; on the Virginia Company’s 

instructions, see Margaret F. Pickett and Dwayne D. Pickett, The European Struggle to Settle North America: 

Colonizing Attempts by England, France, and Spain, 1521-1608 (McFarland, 2011), 129-130. 
145 Whitehead, introduction, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter 

Ralegh, 97-110.  



 

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Chapter Three: Towards scalp-hunting: Settler colonialism and extirpationist warfare 

in Northeastern North America, 1585 – 1623 

Their warres are far less bloudy, and devouring then the cruell Warres of Europe; 

and seldome twenty slaine in a pitcht field […] the Conquerour ventures into the 

thickest, and brings away the Head of his Enemy.  

–Roger Williams, Key Into the Language of America (1643)146 

Introduction 

 This chapter specifically focuses on foundational violent interactions between British 

colonists and indigenous peoples in eastern North America, from the failed Roanoke colony 

to the Virginia massacre of 1622, and the distinctively British attitude towards indigenous 

neighbours and land use which emerges, in Chapter 4, as the scalping paradigm. Following a 

prologue, my first section, “The mourning-war complex: violence in eastern North America,” 

summarizes the way in which warfare was defined and prosecuted in eastern North America 

at the time of the contact period, and the underlying logic by which indigenous polities in the 

contact zone operated in wartime. My second section, “Mourning-war and total war: regimes 

of violence in early America, 1585-1676,” notes the incommensurable differences in how 

Europeans and indigenous North Americans waged war, and how these differences fed 

British colonists’ belief that Indians were enemies better exterminated. My third section, 

“From middle ground to settler colonialism,” surveys how a British pattern of colonization, 

involving mass migration and annexation of indigenous land for farming and cash-cropping, 

rapidly developed in Virginia and precluded the “middle ground” relations Richard White 

notes in other times and places in North America. My fourth section, “Virginia, from landfall 

                                                 
146 James Hammond Trumbull ed., Key Into the Language of America (1643), in The Complete Writings of 

Roger Williams Volume One (New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1963), 204; cited in Alfred A. Cave, The 

Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 39. 



 

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to massacre to vengeance, 1607 to 1622,” describes how settler-colonialism and a winner-

takes-all approach to indigenous land ownership were answered by the Virgnia massacre of 

1622, which in turn justified campaigns of unconventional war against indigenous 

Virginians. My epilogue, “peeces of ther heades,” notes an early expression of this sentiment 

in what may or may not be an early case of dark mimesis: colonists scalping Indians. 

Prologue  

On the night of 26 June, 1675, soldiers marching from Boston to fight King 

Philip’s147 Wampanoags witnessed a lunar eclipse. While this event was noted in two 

contemporary chronicles of the war, Cotton Mather’s A Brief History of the Warr with the 

Indians in New-England (Boston, 1676) and William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles 

with the Indians (Boston, 1677), only Hubbard thought the omens the soldiers noticed were 

worth reporting: “that in the Centre of the Moon they discerned an unusual black Spot, not a 

little resembling the Scalp of an Indian: As some others not long before, imagined they saw 

the Form of an Indian Bow, accounting that likewise ominous.” That the bow and the scalp 

were metonymic symbols of the Indian warrior for late-17th-century New England colonists 

is not terribly surprising, but Hubbard had to remind his readers that the bow was already 

more reflective of myth than historical reality: due to the wide acceptance of early flintlocks 

among New England’s Algonquian neighbours by the 1670s, “the Mischief following was 

                                                 
147 My use of ‘Philip’ over ‘Metacom’ follows Jill Lepore’s observation that the latter only became standard in 

Anglo-American historiography in the mid-19th century “when white playwrights, poets, and novelists sought to 

make the war sound more authentically, and romantically, Indian” – by contrast, the historical figure signed 

documents with a ‘P,’ with scribes adding ‘alias Metacom’ “probably to accommodate the colonists, who were 

meticulous record-keepers.” Per Algonquian naming conventions he would not have returned to the name of his 

childhood as an adult, and if he took a different name during the war (“one small, uncorroborated bit of 

evidence suggests that he may have been renamed “Wewesawamit””) his followers, per another Algonquian 

rule, would not have used the name of a sachem after his death. See Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King 

Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), xix-xxi. 



 

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done by Guns, not by Bows.” As for scalping itself, New Englanders still seemed to require 

precise explanations, as in William Harris’ convoluted report that 

some of the men of Swansy wear kild, And theyr heads (to Say) the Sculpes (that is) the skin 

& hayre of the top or crowne of the head flead of[f], as they use of all they kill (if they have 

time) to cut it rounde: & tear it of[f]; & carry away.
148 

Harris was not the only English commentator to openly liken scalping to flaying; nor was he 

the only Puritan to draw a very specific Biblical-typological comparison in explaining scalps 

as “Sure signes of whome they have kild of both cects [sexes]; as formerlly foreskins of 

males.” Given the Puritans’ typological readings of their indigenous neighbours as 

Canaanites and Philistines, themselves as latter-day Israelites, and Puritan theologians’ 

relegation of the Books of the Maccabees to apocrypha, they made do with a very loose 

Biblical precedent for scalping: Saul’s attempt to rid himself of David (1 Samuel 18:25-27) 

by setting Michal’s dowry at 100 Philistine foreskins. When suggesting, in 1675, that neutral 

indigenous peoples be offered rewards for the scalps of warriors from King Philip’s coalition, 

Connecticut’s Lieutenant-Governor William Leete also drew this connection by suggesting 

the colony “purchase so many foreskins of these Philistines now in hostility.”149 

                                                 
148 Lepore, The Name of War, 21-23, footnote 103; William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the 

Indians in New-England, from the first Planting thereof to the present Time (Boston, 1677) cited in Samuel G. 

Drake ed., The History of the Indian Wars in New England, Volume I (Clearfield, 2002 [1865]), 67-68, n.115 on 

Mather’s citation of the eclipse, minus omens, in Brief History volume I, 55-56. “How the Author could let this 

Occasion slip for indulging in Remarks upon supernatural Occurrences,” wonders Drake, “it is not easy to 

imagine.” Earlier, in a dedicatory bit of verse Hubbard places himself in the literature alongside Roger 

Williams, the missionary and translator of indigenous languages: “Their grand Apostle writes of their Return; 

William’s their Language; Hubbard how they burn, / Rob, Kill and Roast, Lead Captive, Slay, Blaspheme; / Of 

English Valour too he makes his Theme” (24). 
149 Harris, A Rhode Islander Reports on King Philip’s War (“sure signes… formerlly foreskins”) cited in 

Lepore, The Name of War, n. 103; Leete cited in Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 

1675-1815 (University College London Press, 1998), 71.  



 

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 Early modern colonialism had “no accepted models,” notes Audrey Horning, and 

given its “often chaotic and haphazard” nature, “disaster was a frequent outcome.” Horning 

points out how the British colonies of northeastern North America, based on secondhand 

information regarding the Iberian colonies, vacillated between “an instilled, if naïve, belief” 

in their ability to reshape indigenous societies through trade and religious conversion, and an 

exaggerated sense of their capacity to exert power over them, as summarized in Hakluyt’s 

boasting 1587 prediction for the Roanoke colony: “One hundred men will doe more nowe 

among the naked and unarmed people in Virginiea, then one thousande were able then to doe 

in Irelande against that armed and warlike nation.” In addition to Elizabethan Britain’s 

conquests in Ireland, British proponents of New World colonialism considered the Spanish 

both as a model to emulate and as a “negative paradigm” to avoid, though a hazy 

understanding of Spanish colonialism complicated this. In 1612 William Strachey stipulated 

that “noe Spanish Intention shalbe entertained by us to roote out the Naturalls as the 

Spaniards have done in Hispaniola and other parts,” while outlining a plan to co-opt the 

weroances, the hereditary chiefs of Virginia, into the upper echelons of British colonial 

society “as free burghers and Cittizens” and isolating and destroying the indigenous priests – 

which was precisely what the Spanish had unsuccessfully attempted in the Caribbean and had 

successfully implemented on the mainland.150 

 Many early modern rivals of Spain imagined the mass killings of indigenous peoples 

in Iberian America as the end goal of Spanish colonialism, rather than a failure of its policy 

                                                 
150 Audrey Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC: 

University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 3 (“no accepted models”), 77 (“armed and warlike nation”); Ben 

Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 213-48, 214 (“negative paradigm”), 221 (“root out the naturalls”); Jorge Cañizares-

Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadores: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550 – 1770 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 

Press, 2006); “murtherers of soules” in Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 69. 



 

156 

 

of subordination and enserfdom through the deadly synergy of forced labour, warfare, 

malnutrition, stressed immune systems, and new epidemic diseases. While from a very early 

period, voices from the British colonies decried this “Black Legend” of Spanish colonialism, 

those same colonies would soon far outstrip Iberian precedent in destructiveness to 

indigenous societies, following up mass killings and acts of ethnic cleansing with 

repopulation by immigration and forced migration. It is in this context that the first ad hoc 

wartime bounties for indigenous scalps and other body parts, the genesis of Euro-American 

scalp bounties, appear in eastern North America in the mid-17th century.  

In the context of Kieft’s War (1640-45), a five-year series of conflicts between New 

Netherland and its indigenous neighbours, the hiring of New England mercenaries as Indian 

fighters reflected a long and close relationship between England and the Netherlands: 

Protestant, maritime, North Sea peoples who traded, spoke closely related languages, and 

aided each other militarily against the Habsburg Spanish Empire. Until the late 1630s, the 

norm of the New Netherland colony (1614-1667) was a fur trade situation of limited 

European settlement in enclaves; Dutch territorial presence and the freebooting actions of 

Dutch traders were contested, countered, and hemmed in by such indigenous neighbours as 

the Pequots, the Lenape-Munsees (or “Delawares”), and the Mohawks. This was upset by a 

bid for a settler-colonial paradigm by the directors of the West India Company (henceforth 

WIC) in the late 1630s and early 1640s: as the value of Indians’ wampum, pelts, and corn 

declined, the WIC directors proposed to imitate the successful British example of 

stockbreeding, agrarianism, and cash-cropping on annexed Indian land, enabled by mass 

migration. When the “zero-sum contest” of settler colonialism pushed New Amsterdam’s 

neighbours and allies to declare war, governor Willem Kieft further imitated British 



 

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precedent by offering bounties to allied sachemships for enemy Indians’ heads and scalps, as 

well as prisoners; by encouraging the actions of Dutch vigilantes; and by hiring, at great 

expense, a company of New England mercenaries led by Pequot War veteran John Underhill 

to wage a winter war of attrition. In the shared Euro-American frontier of the Long Island 

Sound, and the broader trans-Atlantic imbrications of the Dutch and the British colonies, 

Kieft’s War was a laboratory for the total war and mass migration policies that would 

become standard in Anglo-America. 

The mourning-war complex: violence in eastern North America 

 Accounts of exotic American violence heavily tinged the Virginia Company’s 

Instructions penned by Hakluyt and many of the colonists’ operational assumptions (see 

Chapter 2), and John Smith’s accounts appear to be particularly informed by Mesoamerican 

details. Moctezuma seems to loom behind his first impressions of Wahunsenecawh, the 

Powhatan Confederacy’s paramount chief whom the Virginians simply called “Powhatan” 

per conventions of the peerage; Smith calls him an “emperor” possessing “majestie” who 

metes out “very terrible and tyrannous” punishments to enemies of the state. Smith also 

misinterpreted a Powhatan puberty rite, the Huskanaw, as a literal child sacrifice, and took 

his generous diet of venison and corn while in Powhatan captivity as a sign he was being 

fattened up for some sacrificial feast. But Smith also described violence less similar to these 

fantasy composite scenes and more consistent with a style of warfare widely described by 

Europeans in northeastern and Atlantic North America. In early 1608, Wahunsenecawh 

ordered a surprise attack against an enemy village, Payankatank, on a night when “divers of 

his men” were guests in the village. Other Powhatan warriors surrounded Payankatank by 

night, “and at the houre appointed, they all fell to the spoile, 24 men they slewe, the long 



 

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haire of the one side of their heades with the skinne cased off with shels or reeds, they 

brought away.” The weroance, and the women and children, were brought as captives to 

Wahunsenecawh, who “became his prisoners, and doe him service.” The scalps were strung 

on two lines suspended between trees at Wahunsenecawh’s capital, his village of 

Werewocomoco, he “shewing them to the English men that then came unto them at his 

appointment, […] supposed to halfe conquer them by this spectacle of his terrible crueltie.” 

Henry Spelman, a British runaway who lived among the Powhatans, reported seeing 

criminals executed for such crimes as murder, robbery and infanticide scalped before their 

deaths: “Then cam the officer to thos that should dye, and with a shell cut of[f] ther long 

locke, which they weare on the leaft side of ther heade, and hangeth that on a bowe before 

the Kings house.” Contemporary European artists consistently depicted Powhatan warriors 

growing their hair long on the left side of their heads and shaving the right side so as not to 

tangle in their bowstrings, which presented some challenges for the artist when engraving a 

scene of John Smith seizing a rival, the weroance Opechancanough, by the scalplock and 

levelling a pistol at his chest to demand he fill a boat with corn. He compromised by drawing 

a long braid draped over the weroance’s neck and dangling from his right shoulder, so Smith 

could seize it with his left hand and draw his pistol with his right.151 

                                                 
151 John Smith, A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia… 

(1608), in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631) in three volumes, 

Vol. 1 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 65 (“emperor… majestie”); 

Margaret Holmes Williamson, Powhatan Lords of Life and Death, 47-72; Lemay, Did Pocahontas Save 

Captain John Smith? ; Payankatank, scalping, and “terrible crueltie” in A Map of Virginia, With a Description 

of the Countrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion (1612), in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The 

Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631) in three volumes, Vol. 1 (Chapel Hill and London: 

University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 175; Spelman cited in Margaret Holmes Williamson, Powhatan 

Lords of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Lincoln & London: 

University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 138-48; on hair of Powhatan warriors, see Chaplin, Subject Matters, 79-

115.  



 

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 The scalplock, a circular patch of hair that the warrior grew long, styled, and adorned 

amidst a plucked or shaven head, was observed by European explorers from the St. Lawrence 

corridor to Mesoamerica, indicating an underlying martial philosophy beneath shocked 

European impressions of American violence as characterized by sacrifice, dismemberment, 

and anthropophagy (Chapter 1). In the frontispiece illustration of the Codex Mendoza (1542), 

a history of Tenochtitlán from its founding to the conquest, nine seated lords attired as 

warriors encircle the divine event of the city’s founding, wearing their hair in the temillotl 

(“pillar of stone”) hairstyle signalling prior martial achievement. Below, the artist depicts 

Tenochtitlán’s foundational victories over Colhuacan and Tenayuca with the standard glyph 

of triumph: each city’s central temple afire, flames billowing from beneath its collapsing 

roof. The artist further metonymized these victories by adding, beneath each burning-temple 

glyph, a victorious Aztec warrior seizing an enemy by the head with his shield hand; behind 

the shields, suggests Davíd Carrasco, each victor may be seizing his enemy’s temillotl, 

equivalent in Nahua thought “to capturing the tonally, one of the essences or souls of the 

person.” As the post-conquest missionary-ethnographers would discover, the scalp-lock was 

a potent sign of the warrior’s prowess in both Nahua and Mayan societies. Before the 

Spanish conquest, the captor of a sacrificial victim received status and social promotion for 

his battlefield feat, and afterwards was given the shorn scalplock and femur as trophies to 

publicly display in his home; among the Aztecs, certain moral crimes were punished by law 

with a humiliating public beating, then burning the warrior’s piochtli (scalplock) down to the 

skin to prevent its regrowth. Its importance seems to have survived the Conquest: following 



 

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riots in 1692, authorities in Mexico City proscribed the wearing of the piochtli for its 

connections to surviving “secret ceremonials.”152 

  The scalplock as a physical token of victory, and more importantly the prestige 

gained from taking enemies as prisoners, was also present among the Algonquian, Iroquoian, 

Siouan, and Muskogean societies of the Atlantic contact zone, in what present-day historians, 

ethnohistorians, and anthropologists refer to as the mourning-war complex, summarized by 

Bret Rushforth as “low-level endemic warfare punctuated by periods of heightened 

violence.” A set of common rituals, practices, and definitions of war and diplomacy broadly 

shared from the St. Lawrence corridor to Florida and westwards to the Great Lakes and 

Mississippian midcontinent, the mourning-war complex’s primary concern was the 

regulation of grief, vengeance, and violence by the corporate unit of the clan, i.e., an 

extended family who shared an other-than-human being as a “totem,” a literal or symbolic 

common ancestor. A family member’s death by homicide, accident, or disease—and the 

latter two, if attributed to sorcery, also constituted homicide—threatened the equilibrium of 

village life by disordering relatives’ minds with grief, and weakened the corporate body’s 

ability to maintain itself in a world of enemies. If an allied clan or broader nation were 

deemed responsible for the death, the killer’s clan could offer to restore peace by paying an 

indemnity in trade and luxury goods, known as “covering the dead”; if this was refused, or if 

the killers were from a clan or nation with which the aggrieved were already at war, 

                                                 
152 Davíd Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (Boston: 

Beacon Press, 1999), 23-26; Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-

1570, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1987]), 179-80, Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: 

An Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 96-97, 117-18, 140-47, 262; Clendinnen, ““Fierce and 

Unnatural Cruelty’” in Greenblatt ed., New World Encounters, 12-47. The 1692 proscriptions also banned the 

making of octli or pulque – see Daniel G. Brinton, Nagualism: A Study in Native American Folk-Lore and 

History (Philadelphia: MacCalla and Company, 1894), 32. 



 

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volunteers led a revenge raid to inflict a reciprocal injury on the guilty party by killing or 

capturing one or more members of his or her clan. Raids against enemies, or former allies 

turned enemies, could redress a slight to the honour of the clan or broader alliance network; 

in cases where certain clans or confederations had a noted advantage in strength over others, 

raids and the threat of further violence could establish or restore vassalage relationships, 

expressed through kinship metaphors, with the more powerful group as the “elder brother” to 

an unruly, yet subordinate, “younger brother.” While some collective material or economic 

benefits could accrue from tribute levied on defeated enemy polities and the unfree labour 

extracted from captives held in slavery, the greater motivating factor was the nonmaterial 

desiderata of personal and collective prestige, revenge for past wrongs, and humiliation of 

the enemy—in Gleach’s summary, “to right a wrong, to correct improper actions; [...] a 

means of restoring justice and teaching proper behaviour.” As Neil Whitehead and Beth 

Conklin observe of indigenous Amazonian warfare from the contact period to the 20th 

century, the stakes in such a system of conflict and captivity were and are intensely personal, 

and embedded within social relationships, when compared to the impersonal and market-

driven violence of the early modern European nation-state—but, as Lestringant, Whitehead, 

and Conklin point out, are familiar or at least recognizable to early modern Europeans within 

the contexts of the chivalric tradition, which the state was attempting to co-opt, and feud and 

vendetta, which the state was trying to stamp out.153 

                                                 
153 On mourning-war, see Thomas S. Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical 

Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in War,” in Anthropologica Vol. 34, No. 1 (1992), 3-20; Gleach, 

Powhatan’s World, 22-69 (51: “to right a wrong…”); Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and 

Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 3-71; ); 

Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance”; Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’; 

Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 69-75; Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” in 

William and Mary Quarterly 40.4 (1983), 528–59; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The 

Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill & London: University of 



 

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North Carolina Press, 1992), 31-38, 58-74. On totems and kinship networks, see Heidi Bohaker, 

““Nindoodemag”: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1701,” 

in The William and Mary Quarterly Third Series, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Jan. 2006), 23-52, esp. 31-38. Among the 

Arikaras and Pawnees in the 19th century, men who survived scalping were both disgraced and considered 

liminal figures neither living nor dead, made to live as hermits outside the village, while in folklore, the 

character Scalped Man serves functions of both a trickster figure and a Wild Man who has other-than-human 

power, which he can bestow on worthy individuals for success in medicine and war—see Douglas R. Parks, 

“An Historical Character Mythologized: The Scalped Man in Arikara and Pawnee Folklore,” in Douglas H. 

Ubelaker and Herman J. Viola eds., Plains Indian Studies: A Collection of Essays in Honor of John C. Ewers 

and Waldo R. Wedel (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 47-58. On continuities of the 

scalplock in warfare in the American Southwest, Southeast, midcontinent and Northeast in the pre- and post-

contact period, see Linda Cordell, “Indigenous Farmers,” 201-266, and Bruce Smith, “Agricultural Chiefdoms 

of the Eastern Woodlands,” 267-324, in Bruce Trigger ed., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the 

Americas volume 1: North America, Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert P. Mensforth, “Warfare 

and Trophy Taking in the Archaic Period,” 110-138, in Olaf H. Prufer, Sara E. Pedde, and Richard S. Meindl 

eds., Archaic Transitions in Ohio & Kentucky Prehistory (Kent & London: The Kent State University Press, 

2001); Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza eds., North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual 

Violence (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona press, 2007), see: Polly Schaafsma, “Documenting Conflict in the 

Prehistoric Pueblo Southwest,” 114-128, Thomas E. Emerson, “Cahokia and the Evidence for Late Pre-

Columbian War in the North American Midcontinent,” David H. Dye and Adam King, 129-148, “Desecrating 

the Sacred Ancestor Temples: Chiefly Conflict and Violence in the American Southeast,” 160-181, George R. 

Milner, “Warfare, Population, and Food Production in Prehistoric Eastern North America,” 182-201, Patricia 

M. Lambert, “The Osteological Evidence for Indigenous Warfare in North America,” 202-221, Chacon and 

Mendoza’s “Introduction,” 3-10, and conclusion, “Ethical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding 

Indigenous Warfare and Violence in North America,” 222-232; Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye eds., The 

Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians (New York: Springer Science + 

Business Media, 2007), see: Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, “Introduction to Human Trophy Taking: An 

Ancient and Widespread Practice,” 5-31, Polly Schaafsma, “Head Trophies and Scalping: Images in Southwest 

Rock Art,” 90-123, Douglas W. Oswley et. al., “Human Finger and Hand Bone Necklaces from the Plains and 

Great Basin,” 124-166, Mark F. Seeman, “Predatory War and Hopewell Trophies,” 167-189, Ron Williamson, 

““Otinontsiskiaj ondaon” (“The House of Cut-Off Heads”): The History and Archaeology of Northern 

Iroquoian Trophy Taking,” 190-221, Robert P. Mensforth, “Human Trophy Taking in Eastern North America 

During the Archaic Period: The Relationship to Warfare and Social Complexity,” 222-277, James Brown and 

David H. Dye, “Severed Heads and Sacred Scalplocks: Mississippian Iconographic Trophies,” 278-298, Keith 

P. Jacobi, “Disabling the Dead: Human Trophy Taking in the Prehistoric Southeast,” 299-338, Nancy A. Ross-

Stallings, “Trophy Taking in the Central and Lower Mississippi Valley,” 339-370. On the distinctions between 

material and nonmaterial desiderata in rationalizing war and conflict, and the distinctions between European 

and indigenous American violence in the early modern Atlantic, see Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking 

about Religion after September 11, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006 [2003]), 93-95 

and throughout; Beth A. Conklin, Consuming Grief: Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society 

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 1-24; Neil L. Whitehead, “Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of 

Cannibalism,” in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (November 2000), 721-51; Hans 

Staden, Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier trans., Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of 

Cannibal Captivity in Brazil (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), xv-civ, esp. lxvii, xcv; Jeppe 

Büchert Netterstrøm and Bjørn Poulsen, eds., Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aarhus, Denmark: 

Aarhus University Press, 2007); Richard van Dülmen, Elisabeth Neu trans., Theatre of Horror: Crime and 

Punishment in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, UK: Polity Press, 1990 [1985]); Simon Harrison, Dark 

Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), 39-

47; Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk, 235-37, 244, 306 (note 44); Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory 

Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 17-24; Regina Janes, 

Losing our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 

2005), 36-70. On cross-cultural reading of indigenous warfare per the European chivalric tradition, see 

Lestringant, Cannibals, 1-12, 81-93. 



 

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 As the whole point of mourning-war raids was to redress deaths within the raiders’ 

community, leaders aimed to avoid deaths or injuries among their warparty. Prefiguring, as 

Thomas Abler notes, the tactics of stealth and infiltration used by modern commando units, 

raiders quietly entered enemy territory. An illustration accompanying Jesuit missionary 

Pierre-Joseph Chaumonot’s 1666 report on the Iroquois succinctly and visually summarizes 

their goals: two Iroquois warriors return from a raid, the foremost bearing a pole from which 

two scalps are suspended; the second, with a musket slung over his shoulder, holds the 

halters of an enemy prisoner. War parties who returned from enemy territory unharmed were 

praised for bringing back live captives or physical proofs of slain enemies, such as scalps, 

heads, hands, or feet; those confirmed by their peers to have shown strength, fortitude, 

skillful leadership, and cleverness earned the right to commemorate their triumphs with new 

names, tattoos, and etchings on their war clubs.154 

 Like the theatrical executions of the early modern European state, the performative 

ferocity of mourning-war violence also expressed and set boundaries on the limits of possible 

violence: one person, or a few people, were killed horribly to warn that the same could be 

done to others. Close readings of the mourning-war complex’s symbols and metaphorical 

language indicates both a system which prioritized the forced incorporation of enemy 

prisoners into the captor’s body politic, and a cluster of metaphors with which young men 

                                                 
154 “Report on the nine Iroquois families, with totems, 1666,” FR CAOM COL C11A 2 fol. 263-269; Thanks to 

my colleague Dylan Burrows for providing me with a PDF of Father Chaumonot’s sketch and its 

bibliographical information. On Father Chaumonot’s report and its context, see Linda Gregerson and Susan 

Juster, Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 

2013), 117-19. Rountree and Turner III, Before and After Jamestown, 27, 108; Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 47-

50, 130; Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape,” 3-20; Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 3-71; 

Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance”; Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’; 

Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 69-75; Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” 528–59; Richter, 

The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 31-38, 58-74; Starna, “Northern Iroquoian Slavery”; Reséndez, The Other 

Slavery, 172-95; Rivaya-Martínez, “A Different Look at Native American Depopulation.”  



 

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psyched themselves up for war. Before setting out on expedition, eastern North American 

war leaders feasted their volunteers on dog’s meat, a symbolically-dense meal, since 

damaging and weakening enemy communities by killing and kidnapping was metaphorized 

as “eating” the enemy, and enslaved enemies were derogatorily referred to as “dogs” who 

lived at the whim of their masters; like domestic animals, slaves were personal property of 

the captor and his immediate family, not collectively-held clan property. Masked beneath 

faces painted red for war and black for death and mourning, warparties tried to convince the 

enemy—and, ultimately, themselves—that they were terrifying and merciless. If several 

prisoners were taken after a battle, skirmish, or ambush, those too weak for the forced march 

back to their captors’ country would be summarily executed, with perhaps one prisoner 

theatrically killed as a warning. Among some, but not all, ethnocultural groups who practiced 

the mourning-war complex, the victors might ritually consume blood or body parts of 

enemies slain on the battlefield, or after their executions, to show triumph and to make literal 

their vow to “eat” the enemy. Warriors might publicly boast of the joy of eating a foe, as 

when Innu converts agitated their Jesuit in 1636 by describing the taste of Iroquois enemies 

“as they would praise the flesh of a deer or a moose”; but during the Seven Years’ War, some 

perceptive French and British counterparts noted the sense of distaste and obligation that 

underlay ritual anthropophagy. Stephen Brumwell writes that a few French officers observed 

young warriors vomiting after these rites; “It is solely through bravado & to harden their 

hearts that they sometimes consume such food,” concluded Captain Pierre Pouchot, France’s 

commandant of Fort Niagara. The fur trader Alexander Henry the Elder, taken under the 

protection of Ojibway friends during the sack of Michilimackinac in 1763, drew a similar 

conclusion in sketching scenes from Pontiac’s Rebellion. Wenniway, Henry’s friend and 



 

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ostensible captor, ransomed him to another friend, Wawatam, who told Henry to stay in the 

sanctuary of his wigwam while he attended an execution of British prisoners; Wawatam 

returned resignedly nibbling a roasted British hand. He “did not appear to relish the repast,” 

but justified it on the grounds of utility and tradition: such a “war feast” was customary, and 

“inspired the warriors with courage in the attack.”155 

Those taken captive faced a harrowing journey back to their enemy’s country, with 

their chances of escape reduced by sleep deprivation, a bare minimum of food and water, 

restraint with ropes and halters, and injuries calculated to cause pain yet minimally impede 

their ability to walk and run: bruising blows to the torso, knife cuts to the shoulders or face, 

and such injuries to the hands as pulling-out of fingernails or the severing of a finger joint, or 

entire digit. Just as their captors’ performative ferocity was double-edged, aimed both at their 

enemies but also themselves, the expected behaviour of captives was intended both to steel 

their resolve and inflame their captors: when threatened with death and reminded of their 

people’s past offenses, captives responded with bluff humour, stoicism, and the self-mastery 

they had been taught since early childhood, singing and reminding their captors of the 

inevitability of revenge. Once in their captors’ villages, enemy prisoners were subjected to 

what Europeans likened to a form of military discipline known as “running the gauntlet,” 

after which the fates of the individual captives were decided by elders from bereaved 

                                                 
155 “a deer or a moose”: Jesuit Relations 10: 225 (1636) cited in Evan Haefeli, “Kieft’s War and the Cultures of 

Violence in Colonial America,” 21, in Michael A. Bellisles ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in 

American History (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 17-40; red as colour of war: 

Williamson, Powhatan Lords, 40-46; “It is solely through bravado” in Brumwell, White Devil, 92-93; “did not 

appear to relish” in Alexander Henry the Elder, Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, 

Between the Years 1760 and 1776 (New York: I. Riley, 1809), 85-105; Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 47-50, 130; 

Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape,” 3-20; Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 3-71; Rushforth, 

“Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance”; Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’; Trigger, 

Children of Aataentsic, 69-75; Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” 528–59; Richter, The 

Ordeal of the Longhouse, 31-38, 58-74; Starna, “Northern Iroquoian Slavery”. 



 

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families, clan mothers, civil chiefs, and other authorities. On the sliding scale of severity 

determined by age and sex, the fate of older men, especially men known or recognized as 

veteran war leaders and national enemies, was almost invariably the worst: over the course of 

several hours, villagers took turns reducing their most hated enemy, with blades and fire, to 

burnt flesh and charred bones. The fates of children and adolescents, particularly children 

young enough to adopt a new national identity, were on the opposite end of the spectrum: 

adoptees given the names of lost relatives were thought in a sense to be their reincarnations, a 

concept translated by French missionaries with the verb ressusciter, which could mean both 

revival and resurrection. Captives not hateful enough to be executed or young enough to be 

adopted were simply living bodies who filled in demographic gaps—they “replaced” the 

dead, which French translators glossed as remplacer, but were held under perpetual scrutiny. 

Though they, like real adoptees, were assigned the names of dead relatives, their position in 

the bonds of fictive kinship were that of the “dogs” mentioned above: slaves given less food 

or rest than other people, subjected to unpleasant or humiliating physical work, and liable to 

be physically abused if insubordinate, or killed if caught trying to escape. Enslaved women, 

assigned as secondary wives and concubines, could face the threat of sexual violence from 

captors, while young men were often traded further from the borders of their country as gifts 

to their captors’ allies. Compared to the productive and reproductive labour of adopted or 

enslaved captives, scalps or other enemy body parts were a decidedly secondary prize.156 

                                                 
156 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 3-71; Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance”; on 

ressusciter and remplacer, see Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’”, 784 n. 23, 785; Trigger, Children 

of Aataentsic, 69-75; Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience”; Richter, The Ordeal of the 

Longhouse, 31-38, 58-74; Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism, and Rape”; Starna, “Northern Iroquoian 

Slavery”; Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 172-95. 



 

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Death by torture understandably terrified early modern Europeans, and other worst-

case scenarios of the mourning-war complex, particularly what appear to be its two states of 

exception, were also subjected to polemical treatment from the contact period onwards (see 

the captivity-narratives discussion in Chapter 5). Euro-Americans, particularly Anglo-

Americans, who sought to justify large-scale killings and their deliberate killing of Indian 

children and women seized on cases where white children or women were killed, or such 

large-scale killings as the Virginia Uprising of 1622, or the Tuscaroras’ sack of New Bern in 

1711, as post facto justification. But the false equivalence posited in this model, often paired 

with a claim that Indians hated whites as categorically and universally as whites hated 

Indians, disappears upon closer investigation. In Frederic Gleach’s analysis, given that the 

purpose of mourning-war violence was to compel enemies to correct their ways, such large-

scale attacks as occurred in 1622 or 1711—both of which strained the organizational and 

manpower possibilities of Powhatan and Tuscarora society to their limits—were last-ditch 

attempts to force intransigent and bothersome outsiders to accept indigenous terms of 

engagement; in Rountree and Turner’s words, Powhatan attacks on English trading partners 

signified “loss of patience with newcomers who did not know how to behave.” In both cases, 

these attacks followed Indian leaders’ repeated requests, all ignored, that European colonists 

stop building settlements deep within their territory. In both cases, these exemplary 

massacres were one-off events not followed by subsequent large-scale attacks; and, in the 

1711 case, the Tuscaroras almost immediately tried to negotiate new terms of trade (see 

Chapter Four). If only to obtain European trade goods and weapons, indigenous leaders 



 

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wanted continued coexistence, not the ethnic cleansing or racialized serfdom Europeans 

intended for Indians.157 

Given the mourning-war complex’s preference for adopting children, and the relative 

ease of overpowering and transporting children over adults, the killing of children by raiders 

also constituted a state of exception or exigency: the cries of a child could give away their 

position while in enemy territory; the same is true of female captives, whose potential as 

childbearers made them much more preferable candidates for adoption than males. As noted 

by Richard White and Ian Steele, even in the context of the balkanized Pennsylvania and 

Ohio frontier of the mid-18th century, indigenous peoples who had been at war with Anglo-

Americans for decades and, in the case of refugees like the Shawnees and Lenape-Munsees 

(or “Delawares”), had been driven to the Ohio Valley by white encroachment, still continued 

to adopt white captives, including teenage boys and adult men, into their villages. Ian Steele, 

in his study of Shawnee raids between 1754 and 1765, notes that “the Shawnees’ propensity 

for taking captives was not eroded by years of war in which their English-speaking enemies 

took no Shawnee prisoners at all.” This could be a point of pride, as some Lenape-Munsees 

chastised Moravian ambassador Christian Frederick Post in 1758: “We love you more than 

you love us; for when we take any prisoners from you, we treat them as our own children.” A 

broader point must be observed: while Europeans from the beginning of the contact period 

defined Indians as somehow categorically different, and innately inferior, to themselves, the 

reverse was very rare—as when Tenskwatawa, brother of Tecumseh, categorically ruled that 

                                                 
157 Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 22-60; Rountree and Turner, Before and After Jamestown, 123 (“loss of 

patience”) 



 

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while Indians, the French, the Spanish, and the British were fully human, only white 

Americans were “scum of the great waters” spawned from malicious underwater beings.158  

In the conflicts which followed, Indians and Europeans would discover another rift in 

their cultures’ attitudes towards war: even the most hostile European eyewitnesses noted that 

indigenous war parties in eastern North America did not rape or sexually abuse female 

captives in raids or on the road back to the village, and the sexual violence that did happen 

was both restricted to certain classes of enslaved women and long antedated war parties’ 

return from the battlefield. Early modern British or French observers, from a cultural 

tradition which officially disapproved of rape but quietly condoned it as an inevitable evil of 

war, could only interpret this asymmetry in sexual violence as evidencing some kind of 

cultural pathology among Indians: unusual discipline, weak libido, or a putative bloodlust. 

Twentieth-century anthropologists and ethnohistorians have focused on a broad North 

American pattern of war parties’ ritual abstinence and how, in the context of the mourning-

war complex, the later incorporation of female captives into kin networks might turn sexual 

assault into retroactive incest. As Thomas Abler notes, the question is implicitly Eurocentric: 

“I am not certain that we should assume it is “natural” to rape [.]”159 

                                                 
158 On violence and adoption, see Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 227-36; White, The Middle 

Ground, 387-95; “It is particularly revealing” (11-12) in Ian K. Steele, “The Shawnees and the English: 

Captives and War, 1753-1765,” 1-24, in Daniel P. Barr ed., The Boundaries Between Us: Natives and 

Newcomers Along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750-1850 (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State 

University Press, 2006), 1-24; “we love you more than you love us” cited in Colin Calloway ed., The World 

Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (Boston and New York: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 1994), 

43, 77 n. 3. 133. On Tenskwatawa, see Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven, 94-105, 264-70; Green, “The 

Expansion of European Colonization to the Mississippi Valley, 1780-1880,” 493-95; Lewis and Dobrowolski, 

“Native American Prophet Religions,” 495-515.  
159 Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape,” 13-15 (13: cites Hugo Grotius, Law of War and Peace 

(1625): rape of women should not be permitted, though “you may read in many places that the raping of women 

in time of war is permissible”); Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 3-71. On European theories of male Indians’ or 

European creoles’ impotence or physical enervation, see Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World, 3-34, 111-22, 

275-84, 402-17. In a scorched-earth campaign against the Onondagas during the American Revolution, Colonel 

Goose van Schaick’s forces apparently committed widespread rape of Iroquois women—despite a prior warning 



 

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“[A]lmost no one in eighteenth-century America or England,” writes Peter Silver, 

“seems to have realized that Indian war was designed by its practitioners to be precisely as 

terrifying as they found it.” In some cases, Indian warriors did manage to successfully 

communicate their frustration and contempt for Anglo-Americans through what Gleach calls 

“the violent application of irony.” In a mourning-war context, this appears in the arch 

sarcasm, faux-friendliness, and black humour expressed between captives and captors; in the 

case of frontier war with British colonists, Indians mocked Anglo-Americans’ insatiable 

desire for Indian land and its resources. During the Jamestown colony’s winter of 1609-10, 

the “Starving Time” of famine and disease which only 100 of 220 colonists survived, Captain 

John Smith sent groups of colonists out of the fort to sponge from the Indians’ food supplies. 

One of these bands, led by Captain John Martin, established winter quarters on an island at 

the falls of the James River after the Nansemonds had denied them permission to settle there. 

After a Nansemond counterattack, and after receiving news that two of their messengers had 

been killed by torture, Captain Martin’s band retaliated by sacking the sepulchers of the 

Nansemond weroances, stripping the pearls and copper left as burial goods. Shortly 

thereafter, George Percy wrote that Lt. John Sicklemore “and divers others were found also 

slain with their mouths stopped full of [corn] bread.” To Percy, this message was partially 

legible: it was “done as it seemeth in contempt and scorn that others might expect the like 

when they should come to seek bread and relief amongst them.” In the 1622 Uprising, British 

colonists were killed with their own hoes, hatchets, and shovels, other hand tools—the same 

                                                 
by General James Clinton to Schaick that “Bad as the savages are, they never violate the chastity of any women, 

their prisoners” and that “it will be well to take measures to prevent such a stain on our army.” The Onondagas 

filed angry complaints with the American government immediately after the raid; in 1816 an Onondaga chief, 

Teyoninhokarawen, wrote that van Schaick’s soldiers had treated their female prisoners “with the most 

shameful Barbarity.” See Barbara Alice Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America (Lincoln and 

London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 30-33, 90. 



 

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ones which they lectured the Indians to adopt while using those same tools to push them off 

their own land. In the 1670s, during King Philip’s War, land-hungry British farmers buried 

up to their necks were taunted, “let us now see how you will grow when Planted into the 

Ground.” In 1791, after a coalition of Ohio peoples inflicted the United States’ largest 

historic defeat at Indian hands, Arthur St. Clair’s slain soldiers were found to have sod 

stuffed in their mouths, “satisfying in death their lust for Indian land.” As late as the Dakota 

Uprising of 1862, such a display of “violent irony” was applied to Andrew Myrick, the trader 

and storekeeper at Minnesota’s Redwood and Yellow Medicine agencies, who on two 

occasions publicly refused Dakota requests for food aid by telling them to “eat grass”; on the 

morning of 18 August, a warparty including his former Dakota brother-in-law riddled him 

with arrows, finished him off with an old scythe, and stuffed his mouth with grass.160 

As with so much else in this thesis, the above discussion of the mourning-war 

complex has focused on worst-case scenarios, which Bret Rushforth notes served, in their 

extremity, as a deterrent, “because war councils knew that they risked their own people’s 

enslavement each time they authorized a raid.” Shared rituals and implements of diplomacy 

and conflict resolution, such as calumet pipes and wampum belts, offered ways to regulate, 

mediate, and forestall violence. Rather than coercive force, which the leaders of egalitarian 

societies did not possess the right to, collective responsibility among clan members offered 

ways to shame and punish leaders of unauthorized raids: the malefactor’s clan was 

responsible for “covering the dead,” and he was then indebted to pay back his relatives. To 

“raise up the dead” by offering a slave from another nation, to replace or requicken a dead 

                                                 
160 Seeman, Death in the New World, 86-101; Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 56-59; Gleach, Powhatan’s 

World, 22-60, 130 (“violent application of irony”); Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 69-75; White, The Middle 

Ground, 454-55 (“satisfying in death”); Lepore, The Name of War; Gary Clayton Anderson, Little Crow: 

Spokesman for the Sioux (St. Paul, Minnesota: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986), 120-143. 



 

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relative as the bereaved saw fit, was also a potent gift, especially if the captive was of a 

nation both parties already disliked; returning a prisoner or adoptee to their own people was 

the most powerful gesture of goodwill. While Europeans imagined Indians as warlike and 

driven by their passions, indigenous people considered themselves as rational, logical, and 

peaceable, as a Lenape-Munsee diplomat spelled out at a 1668 peace conference in 

Burlington, New Jersey. He observed that wartime was as miserable for Indians as it was for 

Europeans: “we are only skin and bones, […] we are always in fear, […] we hide in holes 

and corners; we are minded to live at peace.” Addressing the post-1622 Anglo-American 

narrative of Indians as sneaks and pre-emptive massacrists, he stated plainly that if “at any 

time” his people wanted war with the English, “we will let you know of it, and the reasons 

why we make war with you”; if the English “make us satisfaction” for the inciting “injury 

done us, […] then we will not make war on you.” All he asked was that the English do the 

same: “if you intend at any time to make war on us, we would have you let us know of it and 

the reason”; if the Lenape-Munsee did not make satisfaction, “then you may make war on us, 

otherwise you ought not to do it”.161  

 In short, scalps and scalping, while having their own importance as trophies and 

tokens of victory, were almost incidental to this to this paradigm of warfare, which makes its 

later centrality in Anglo-American thought rather peculiar. A few basic observations could be 

made here as to commonalities between indigenous North American and European violence 

                                                 
161 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 3-71, 103 (“because war councils…”); Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and 

the Limits of Alliance”; Rushforth, “ ‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’; Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, 69-75; 

Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience”; Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 31-38, 58-74; 

Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 129-150; Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism, and Rape”; Starna, 

“Northern Iroquoian Slavery”; Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 172-95; White, The Middle Ground, 77 (““to raise 

up the dead” […] or “to cover the dead””); J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott eds., Specimen Chapters 

of the History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1882), 33 (“we are only skin and bones… 

ought not to do it”, my italics).  



 

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in the early modern Atlantic. Both drew culturally-specific distinctions between licit and 

illicit forms of violence, e.g., between execution and murder. Both considered their own 

forms of violence as normative, even aesthetic in some ways, while considering the other’s as 

peculiar and immoral in ways that ultimately prolonged and exacerbated conflicts. Both early 

modern Indians and Europeans deemed some internal and external enemies fit to be relegated 

to enslavement and other forms of social death, to be subjected to perpetual harrying in states 

of exception or states of siege, or publicly executed in scenes which Richard van Dülmen has 

aptly described as “theatres of horror,” acts reflecting Achille Mbembe’s concept of 

necropolitics as the ultimate expression of sovereignty, “the power and the capacity to dictate 

who may live and who must die.” Most important for the purposes of this thesis are 

violence’s function as communicative action, its nature as transgressive act, and its related 

need for imbued or imputed meanings to elevate an act of violence to a socially-constructive 

act, or to denigrate it as an action justifying a retributive or recompensatory act of violence in 

turn. “All human action is both symbolic and technical,” states Bruce Lincoln: “that is, it 

simultaneously communicates something and accomplishes something.” But what happens 

when communications are, across a cross-cultural divide, illegible?162 

                                                 
162 “Culture is coercive and obligatory. People think and act in the terms presented by their culture because their 

culture provides the only way individuals have to think, speak, and act in a way that is intelligible to their 

peers.” –see Henry S. Sharp, Loon: Memory, Meaning, and Reality in a Northern Dene Community (Lincoln 

and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 177. Achille Mbembe, Libby Meintjes trans.,“Necropolitics,” 

in Public Culture Volume 15, Issue 1 (Winter 2003), 11-40; Renato Rosaldo, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” 

in Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 1-24; Neil L. Whitehead, 

Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 

245-48; “Every society is adept at looking past its own forms of violence, and reserving its outrage for the 

violence of others.” – Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 190; “if combat is not quite as cultural as cricket, its 

brutalities are nonetheless rulebound.” – Inga Clendinnen, ““Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty””, 24; “both 

symbolic and technical,” see Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 90; Bruce Lincoln, Religion, Empire, and Torture: The 

Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago 

Press, 2007), esp. 83-96; “Introduction: Violent imaginaries and violent practices,” 1-24, and Bettina E. 

Schmidt, “The Interpretation of Violent Worldviews: Cannibalism and other violent images of the Caribbean,” 



 

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Mourning-war and total war: regimes of violence in early America, 1585-1676 

As European and indigenous societies from Virginia to New England came into 

contact and into conflict in the first quarter of the 17th century, the sort of expedient 

misunderstandings which Richard White identifies in the interior in the later 17th century 

pointed the way towards short-lived middle grounds. In Virginia in December 1607, John 

Smith was imprisoned by a Powhatan Confederacy war party and held in captivity until 

January 1608. In his account relayed in A True Relaycion (1608) he initially attributed his 

survival, at least in part, to overawing his counterpart Opechancanough with a compass, a 

detail Philip Barbour notes he borrowed from Thomas Harriot’s 1588 account of Virginia. 

But Smith also described how Powhatan, “with a lowd oration,” “proclaimed me a 

werowances of Powhatan, and that all his subjects should so esteeme us, and no man account 

us strangers nor Paspaheghans, but Powhatans [.]” Twentieth century scholars interpret this 

as an act by Wahunsenecawh to subordinate the strangers by either recognizing Smith as an 

English weroance, a civil chief of a hereditary line, or deeming him the functional equivalent 

of one.163  

Smith seems to have endorsed this, at least tacitly, in 1612’s A Map of Virginia, 

noting that in times of war, “the Werowances, women and children they put not to death but 

keepe them Captives.” In The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Smith presented a scene 

of his being threatened with execution, spared, and given a new name and title, in which the 

                                                 
76-96, in Bettina E. Schmidt and Ingo W. Schröder, Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (Routledge: London 

and New York, 2001), 76-96. 
163 Rountree and Turner, Before and After Jamestown; Gleach, Powhatan’s World; Williamson, Powhatan 

Lords; Barbour, Three Worlds; Barbour, Complete Works of; Fausz, “Opechancanough”; Margaret Holmes 

Williamson, Powhatan Lords of Life and Death, 47-72; J.A. Leo Lemay, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John 

Smith? (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1992). 



 

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Powhatans’ actions were legible via universalist terms of mercantile self-interest and royal 

power. In the ruler’s presence a crowd armed with clubs placed Smith’s head against two 

anvil-stones “to beate out his braines”; Wahunsenecawh’s 11-year-old daughter Matoaka, 

better known by her nickname or child’s name, Pocahontas, interposed; “whereat the 

Emperour was contented he should liue to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and 

copper [.]” As instances of adolescents making foreign-policy decisions are as conspicuously 

absent in the North American ethnographic record as they are in late medieval Europe, this 

was probably a prearranged scene of ritual mercy, a point Smith drives further when 

describing an event two days later. Powhatan, wearing black bodypaint, declared in front of a 

crowd of 200 “as blacke as himselfe” that Smith would be returned to Jamestown in 

exchange for two cannons and a grindstone, “for which he would give him the Country of 

Capahowosick,” a village near his capital, Werewocomoco, and “for ever esteeme him as his 

sonne Nantaquoud.” If Smith’s description of events is accurate, the Powhatans had decided 

to rerender the English as trading partners, with Smith instated as a middleman—an English 

weroance.164 

 In northeastern North America, various underwater goods such as shell and Great 

Lakes copper had ritual power and significance, and cross-cultural exchanges of European 

metalwares could be informed by their categorization as prestige goods. In the case of the 

stratified Powhatan society of coastal Virginia, shell and copper prestige goods, including the 

mass-produced tin and copper ornaments and hawk’s-bells that British colonists traded for 

corn and food, cemented the power of chiefly lineages, a distinction lost on British observers 

                                                 
164 Rountree and Turner, Before and After Jamestown; Gleach, Powhatan’s World; Williamson, Powhatan 

Lords; Barbour, Three Worlds; Barbour, Complete Works of; Fausz, “Opechancanough”; Margaret Holmes 

Williamson, Powhatan Lords of Life and Death, 47-72; Lemay, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? 



 

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who imagined the Powhatans as overgrown children fascinated by cheap gewgaws, in 

Smith’s words “such trash.” In the conflicts that arose as the New Netherland colony was 

established at New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island and at Fort Nassau on the Hudson River 

in the 1610s, another marine trade good with ritual significance came to prominence in cross-

cultural encounters: wampum, made from certain species of shellfish and used ritually in 

exchanges between potentially hostile peoples to absorb or dampen anger and other hostile, 

negative emotions. In diplomacy, strings of wampum sealed peace treaties and alliances and 

could be used to ransom captives, as the Hontom brothers Willem and Hans, and a trader 

named Jaques Elekes or Jacob Eelkens, discovered in the spring of 1620 when they received 

it as ransom for kidnapped Indians. Employees of the Netherlands’ West India Company 

soon discovered that wampum was widely accepted in the interior, offering a hybrid role as a 

medium of exchange in the fur trade and a form of ersatz currency for Europeans in the 

northeast: much lighter than iron and copper kettles and other metalwares, and more valuable 

than duffel cloth. Having learned that the Pequots controlled the production of wampum on 

the Long Island Sound, in 1622 Eelkens kidnapped a Pequot sachem to extort a fortune in 

wampum. Subsequent relations were not uniformly violent, and Dutch-Pequot relations were 

mutually-profitable from the early 1620s to the mid-1630s: Dutch trade provided iron and 

steel awls and drills, which allowed the mass production of wampum. The Pequots also 

extended their tributary network throughout the Connecticut River valley and throughout 

eastern Long Island, which furnished additional wampum, through its ritual use in vassalage: 

conquered sachemships gave wampum as a sign of their subordination but also of fealty, as 

their sovereigns were obligated to protect them. I had initially assumed that firearms would 

have played a role in this extension of Pequot power, but as Brian Given points out, as late as 



 

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1637 the Pequots were estimated by contemporary New Englanders to have no more than 16 

guns, and while there are plentiful references to Pequot use of bows and arrows in the Pequot 

War, there are no references to their using firearms.165 

 Relations with the Mohawks, focused on Fort Nassau and its successor Fort Orange 

on the Hudson River, sprang from similarly violent encounters, but the tenuousness of Dutch 

presence in the interior is less of a “middle ground” than what Kathleen DuVal models as a 

“native ground” where indigenous peoples dictated terms to Europeans rather than 

compromising. In 1622, for reasons unknown, Hans Hontom kidnapped a Mohawk chief and, 

after the ransom had been paid, killed him sadistically by emasculation. In 1626, two years 

into the Mohawks’ four-year war (1624-28) to subjugate the Mahicans of the Hudson Valley 

and bar them from trading for guns at Fort Orange, the Dutch attempted to intervene on the 

Mahicans’ behalf by dispatching the fort’s commander, Daniel Van Krieckenbeeck, and six 

traders bearing firearms to join a Mahican raid into Mohawk territory. Krieckenbeeck and 

three traders were killed, a fourth was “well roasted” and ritually eaten, and the triumphant 

Mohawks brought home a Dutch arm and leg to signify their victory. Fort Orange being only 

80 miles from their homeland, the Mohawks were strongly motivated to seal it off from 

Algonquian enemies like the Mahicans or the French-allied Innu and Algonquin to secure a 

source of firearms and trade goods for themselves, a state of affairs they managed to impose 

on the Dutch by 1628. In 1633, when Hans Hontom was appointed as the fort’s commander, 

                                                 
165 Cave, The Pequot War, 13-68, notes that white wampum was made from two species of whelks, Busycon 

carica and Busycon canaliculatum, while purple wampum was carved from a coloured spot on Mercenaria 

mercenaria , a species of hard-shelled clam (51); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, 

Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Richard 

Drinnon, Facing West: the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of 

Minnesota Press, 1980), 33-61; Brian J. Given, A Most Pernicious Thing: Gun Trading and Native Warfare in 

the Early Contact Period (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 49-56. 



 

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the Mohawks made their displeasure plain by besieging Fort Orange, slaughtering the WIC 

company director’s cattle on his nearby estate of Rensselaerswyck, and burning the company 

yacht at anchor.166 

 In the later 1610s in Virginia and the 1630s in New England and New Amsterdam, 

British and Dutch colonists began turning their attention away from the products of 

indigenous land produced through indigenous labour, and towards acquiring indigenous land 

itself as a saleable commodity, or a source of saleable commodities to be produced by 

Europeans, free or indentured European labourers, and enslaved Indians and Africans. In this 

turn towards colonial policies of driving Indians off their lands by force, obtaining land 

through conquest or questionable legal methods, and repopulation through mass migration, 

we see a turn towards what a recent branch of scholarship calls settler colonialism: “a 

winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement.” 

Whereas the dominant model of Iberian and French colonialism in the 16th through 18th 

centuries was the partial assimilation of indigenous peoples via civilizing missions which 

would Hispanicize or Gallicize Indians into functionally ersatz Europeans within a casta 

hierarchy obsessed with the intergenerational “breeding-out” of indigeneity among mestizos, 

the dominant model of colonialism in British North America, and less successfully in New 

Amsterdam, was a system of expansionist agrarianism which displaced indigenous peoples 

                                                 
166 The crisis was only averted after Hontom was killed in an unrelated brawl. Kathleen DuVal, The Native 

Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 

2006); William Nelson Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois 

Confederacy (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 269-70; Bruce Trigger, Children of Aataentsic: A History 

of the Huron People to 1660 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 463-67; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike 

Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press, 1999), 14-40; Andrew 

Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2015), 

85-164; Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 33, 17-40; Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 206-209; Steele, Warpaths, 114; 

Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered, 260-281, 309-315.  



 

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and, through mass migration, rendered their presence and labour “superfluous.” The cultural 

implications of settler-colonial theory regarding the construction of European identity in the 

New World—summarized by Kevin Bruyneel as the dispossession of indigenous people and 

the subsequent appropriation of their iconography to manufacture an “indigenous” Euro-

American identity—will be dealt with in later chapters. For the purposes of this chapter, I 

would like to note the relevance of Lorenzo Veracini’s observation that settler societies are 

“traumatised societies par excellence,” insofar as many of those early colonists willing to kill 

to take possession of a new land, and to stay permanently, have already been driven out of 

their own homelands for a variety of reasons (e.g., sectarian violence, dispossession, ethnic 

cleansing, deportation, enslavement) and may reenact the violence inflicted on them onto 

those they see as existential threats to their future survival.167 

 In London in 1617, a counsellor and relative of Wahunsenecawh known as 

Uttamatomakkin or Tocomoco expressed his surprise to John Smith: he had not yet had 

audience with the King or even been introduced to him, despite having brought him gifts 

from America. When Smith explained that he had, in fact, already seen James I from across a 

crowded room, “Then he replyed very sadly, You gaue Powhatan a white Dog, 

which Powhatan fed as himselfe, but your King gaue me nothing, and I am better than 

your white Dog.” In an insurrectionary 1642 speech calling to drive the land-grabbing 

                                                 
167 “Winner-take-all-project” (207-08) and “superfluous” (163) in Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the 

Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: 

Cassell, 1999); “traumatized societies par excellence” (75) in Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A 

Theoretical Overview (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); see also Maya Mikdashi, “What is Settler Colonialism? (for 

Leo Delano Ames Jr.)”, 30, in American Indian Culture and Research Journal vol. 37, issue 2 (2013), 23-34; 

Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization 

(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); on the deployment of indigenous iconography 

and Euro-American myths of benign or inevitable dispossession in the present day, see Kevin Bruyneel, “Race, 

Colonialism and the Politics of Indian Sports Names and Mascots: The Washington Football Team Case,” in 

Native American and Indigenous Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2016), pp. 1-24. 



 

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English out of the Long Island Sound in favour of the mercantilist Dutch, the Narragansett 

sachem Miantonomo explained the absolute, impersonal, and unreciprocal authority of the 

British monarch: even “if you would send him 100,000 fathom of wampum, he would not 

give you a knife for it, nor thank you.” A middle-ground relationship could not exist for long 

in conjunction with a settler-colonial paradigm of continual immigration and annexation of 

land for colonists’ exclusive use.168 

 In July 1585, during the early days of the Roanoke colony (1585-86), Sir Richard 

Grenville retaliated for the suspected theft of a silver cup by sacking Aquascogoc: “we burnt, 

and spoyled their corne, and Towne, all the people being fledde.” The friendliness of a local 

leader, Wingina, had made settlement at Roanoke seem possible, but by 1586 the indigenous 

people of the region had moved further inland and stopped paying tribute in food to English 

settlers, while Wingina signalled his changing attitude towards the newcomers by taking a 

new name, Pemisapan. As relations became mutually hostile, the governor Ralph Lane 

became convinced of a plot to destroy them which he dubbed “the conspiracy of Pemisapan,” 

and led a surprise attack on Pemisapan’s village on 1 June 1586. Lane later described the 

Indians’ deaths in terms which confirmed his certainty of their plot: “Pemisapan’s chief men 

and himself, had by the mercy of God for our deliverance, that which they had purposed for 

us.” Severely wounded, Pemisapan fled into the forest with Edward Nugent, “an Irish man 

serving me,” in hot pursuit; after a lengthy absence, Nugent returned from the woods “with 

                                                 
168 “Your king gave me nothing” in John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virgina, New-England, and the 

Summer Isles (London: 1624), 123; Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of 

Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 70-78; Miantonomo cited in Lipman, “A 

Meanes to Knitt Them Togeather,” 26-27. 



 

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Pemisapans head in his hand.” Lane, upon returning to Roanoke, impaled Pemisapan’s head 

on a pole, “the traditional English postmortem mutilation for treason.”169  

 Lane’s sign of mastery was empty: two weeks later, the colony was abandoned save 

for a 15-man garrison. A successive attempt to colonize Roanoke in 1587 only escaped total 

disaster through the ministrations of Manteo, a Carolina Algonquian who served as the 

expedition’s interpreter and negotiator, and John White’s description of events within the 

first six days of landfall on Roanoke Island invert Hakluyt’s boastful prediction of an easy 

victory over a “naked and unarmed” people. The fifteen soldiers left behind in 1586 were 

nowhere to be seen, and human bones were taken to be “one of those fifteen, which the 

Savages had slaine long before.” A few days later, the body of colonist George Howe was 

found in a tidal marsh, riddled with arrows and with his head bashed in. White attributed the 

killing to “divers Savages” who had crossed from the mainland, either to reconnoiter the 

English or to hunt deer, and had discovered Howe in the water looking for crabs “alone, 

almost naked, without any weapon, save only a small forked stick [.]” They “shotte at him in 

the water,” and after having “slaine him with their wooden swordes, beat his head in peeces,” 

before returning to the mainland. The colonists, including White, launched a surprise attack 

“so early that it was yet dark” on the village they thought responsible, only to find that they 

had accidentally attacked their allies the Croatoan.170 

                                                 
169 David B. Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 (UNC Press Books, 1985), 55-

150; Lee Miller, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (Arcade Publishing, 2000), 61-79, 97-135; 

Michael Leroy Oberg, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians (University of 

Pennsylvania Press, 2013), esp. 31-101; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 213-48; Seeman, Death in the New World, 66-

77; Weaver, Red Atlantic, 138-42; Horning, Ireland, 121-25. 
170 Kathleen Donegan, Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Philadelphia: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 21-68; Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 55-150; Miller, Roanoke, 61-79, 

97-135 (131: “so early that it was yet dark”); Oberg, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, 31-115 (115: “head 

in peeces”); Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 213-48; Seeman, Death in the New World, 66-77; Weaver, Red Atlantic, 

138-42; Horning, Ireland, 121-25. 



 

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 In European – indigenous alliances, each party could be unnerved by the other’s 

actions against mutual enemies. At its 1621 founding the Plymouth colony established good 

relations and a treaty of mutual defense with its neighbours the Wampanoags, who had been 

particularly hard-hit by a coastal plague in 1618-19 and needed strong allies to maintain their 

independence against other, more-intact sachemships in the interior. In 1623, the 

Wampanoag sachem Massasoit warned Plymouth of a broad Indian conspiracy against them 

involving several sachemships but orchestrated primarily by the Massachusett, rivals of the 

Wampanoag who had escaped the epidemic relatively unharmed. They also stated that the 

Massachusett were about to attack the settlement of Wessagusset, which Bernard Bailyn 

characterizes as a rough outpost which had antagonized the Massachusett throughout the 

winter of 1622-23: when, for instance, one of the men stationed there was caught stealing the 

Massachusetts’ seed corn, his fellows hanged him “to give the Indians content.” Early in 

1623 Plymouth dispatched Captain Miles Standish, a 36-year-old veteran of the Netherlands 

wars, to lead soldiers to Wessagusett, where they lured eight of the chief Massachusett 

warriors one by one into a blockhouse and stabbed them to death. Standish returned with the 

head of “the bloody and bold villain” Wituwamat, “the chiefest of them,” and impaled it atop 

Plymouth’s blockhouse, where it was publicly displayed for almost a year; when Massasoit 

came to visit Plymouth, Standish greeted him by hanging a linen cloth soaked with 

Massachusett blood from the fort. An observation by Thomas Morton, an Indian trader 

banished from New England for his Anglicanism and excessively-friendly relations with the 

Indians, points interestingly towards the later ethnonym “Big Knives” which would later be 

bestowed on Anglo-American frontiersmen: after Wessagusett, Morton wrote that 



 

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Algonquians began calling the English “Wotowequenage, which in their language signifies 

stabbers or Cutthroats.”171 

 Collisions between Algonquian and British rituals and definitions of licit violence 

continued during and after the Pequot War (1636-38) and King Philip’s War (1675-76). In 

October 1639 in Quinnipiac (later New Haven), “an Indian, called Messatunck, alias 

Nepaupuck,” was arrested and charged with murder for actions he had supposedly committed 

during the Pequot War: slaying a Mr. Finch in the attack on Wethersfield, complicity in 

killing three Englishmen in a shallop on the Connecticut, having “captivated one of Mr. 

Swain’s daughters,” and showing the Pequot sachem Sassacus the severed hands of 

Englishmen he had slain. The suspect, who had initially denied that he was Nepaupuck, 

confessed to be him, and resolved to meet his end in mourning-war fashion: he “boasted that 

he was a great captain” who had killed Finch “and had his hands in other English blood. He 

said he knew he must die and was not afraid of it, but laid his neck to the mantle-tree of the 

chimney,” and expressed a willingness to die by beheading or in any way save immolation, 

as “fire was God, and God was angry with him, therefore he would not fall into his hands.” 

He was beheaded on the following day and his severed head impaled in the town square. In 

July 1676, the Mohegans asked a Narragansett prisoner given them by the English whether 

he had enjoyed the war, to which he replied that he “found it as sweet, as the English Men 

did their Sugar.” The prisoner, who Jill Lepore suggests may have been a Narragansett 

stonemason known as Stonewall John, then boasted that he had killed nineteen Englishmen 

                                                 
171 Axtell and Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut,” 463-64; Chaplin, Subject Matter, 36-75; Lipman, “A Meanes to 

Knitt Them Togeather,” 8; Cave, The Pequot War, 46-47; Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Conflict 

of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 339-340; Alden T. Vaughan, ““Expulsion of 

the Salvages”: English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622,” 82, in The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 

35, No. 1 (January 1978), 57-84; Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of 

Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 90-105. 



 

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during the war and killed a Mohegan to make an even twenty. William Hubbard, who Lepore 

notes took all this at face value, damned him as an “unsensible and hard-hearted Monster.”172  

 While the scalp was the visible symbol of a broader mourning-war system, the 

severed heads British colonists impaled on poles represented a hierarchical European system 

of warfare aimed at reinforcing the power of the monarchy and, in the early modern period, 

an increasingly-expanding state. While not all members of European fighting forces were 

military specialists, and could include a significant proportion of conscripts, peasants pressed 

into service by their lords, militias, and other volunteers, military campaigns against external 

and internal enemies were led and directed by a full-time warrior aristocracy. In those 

campaigns, both lords and commoners fed themselves and recouped their expenses by 

plundering the enemy, and towns and cities which refused surrender during sieges were 

subjected to merciless looting as punishment if the walls fell. The torture and public 

execution of enemies of the state, such as rebel leaders and heretics, were performed by a 

small group of professional executioners whose wages were supplemented by the sale of 

mementoes and body parts from the condemned which, notes Beth Conklin, could be treated 

as market commodities, as in August 1676 following the death of King Philip. After the 

ranger captain Benjamin Church ordered his “old Indian executioner” to quarter and suspend 

Philip’s body from trees, he then gifted the ranger who had fired the fatal shot, a Christian 

convert or “Praying Indian” named John Alderman, with Philip’s head and his scarred right 

hand, which bore distinctive marks from an exploding pistol. Philip’s wampum belt, bow, 

                                                 
172 On Nepaupuck’s trial, see Cave, Pequot War, 162-63; Jon C. Blue, The Case of the Piglet’s 

Paternity: Trials from the New Haven Colony, 1639-1663 (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 26-32; Benjamin 

Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Ecclesiastical, Volume I (Hartford, Hudson & 

Goodwin, 1797), 112, and Leonard Bacon, Thirteen Historical Discourses, on the completion of Two Hundred 

Years, from the beginning of the first church in New Haven (New York: Gould, Newman & Saxton, 1849), 339-

344. 



 

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war club, and other personal effects were doled out among prominent New Englanders as 

trophies, and his head was purchased from Alderman to be impaled on a pole and displayed 

at Plymouth for Thanksgiving. But Alderman retained Philip’s hand, which he reportedly 

preserved in a bucket of rum, and earned “many a penny” for showing it to gentlemen. Pre-

existing trends in European warfare suggest, but do not fully explain, the later instatement of 

scalp bounties.173 

Virginia, from landfall to massacre to vengeance, 1607 to 1622 

In May of 1607, the Virginia Company made first landfall at Cape Henry at the 

southern mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Returning to the boats around dusk, Captain 

Christopher Newport’s party of 30 men were, in the words of Captain John Smith, “assaulted 

by 5 Salvages; who hurt two of the English very dangerously.” On the first night at the 

Jamestown settlement site, Paspahegh messengers announced well after midnight that their 

weroance, whose village was on the mainland adjacent to the Jamestown peninsula, would 

shortly arrive with a “fat deer.” Instead he arrived with one hundred warriors, and a battle 

nearly began when an Englishman struck an Indian he accused of stealing a hatchet. After a 

few days of attempts to gain access to Jamestown under the guise of delivering venison, two 

hundred Paspahegh warriors attacked the as-yet unfortified site on 27 May. A boy and a man 

were killed and 10 were wounded with arrows; if not for cannonfire from the three ships 

anchored in harbour, wrote Smith, “our men had all beene slaine [.]” While the villages 

                                                 
173 On public executions and warfare in early modern Europe, see Conklin, Consuming Grief, 5-13 ; Harrison, 

Dark Trophies, 39-47; Janes, Losing Our Heads, 36-70; van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror, 1-73; Lauro Martines, 

Furies: War in Europe, 1450-1700 (New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). On King Philip’s War, 

Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675-1815, 57-82; Grenier, First Way of War, 16-52; Steele, 

Warpaths, 103-07; Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New 

England Indians (Lanham, New York, London: Madison Books, 1991); Richter, Facing East from Indian 

Country, 90-105; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 236-41; Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness, 38-69. 



 

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closest to Jamestown were waylaying colonists found outside the fort, villages further away 

like the Arrohattoc and Pamunkey began trading with them. As violence had failed to 

dislodge this new wave of Europeans, the leaders of the Powhatan Confederacy accepted 

trade while considering their options.174 

British consideration of the Indians was scattered, but fear and contempt were 

powerful trends from the beginning. William Strachey was an early advocate for contempt, 

imagining the Indians as a reflection of what the British might still be like if the Romans had 

never come to Britain: 

We might yet have lyved overgrowne Satyrs, rude and untutred, wandring in the woodes, and 

dwelling in Caves, and hunting for our dynners… prostituting our daughters to straungers, 

sacrificing our Children to our Idolls. 

In place of this Savagist fantasy, the Indians had to be civilized by force, an act Strachey 

likened to a father beating his child “to bringe him to goodnes.” Gabriel Archer, more 

apprehensive, summarized their “skirmishes” as “violent, cruel and full of celerity; they use a 

tree to defend them in fight, and having shot an enemy that he fall, they maul him with a 

short wooden sword.” In December 1607, Opechancanough’s war party preceded the capture 

of John Smith by executing a luckless member of John Smith’s foraging expedition named 

George Cassen. Smith described his death as that of an archetypal “malefactour”: tied to a 

tree, “his executioner,” using knives of sharpened cane or musselshell, cut off his fingers and 

toes and threw them into a fire, “then doth he proceed with shels and reeds to case the skinne 

                                                 
174 Barbour, Three Worlds of Captain John Smith, 122-57; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 213-48; Rountree and 

Turner, Before and After Jamestown; Gleach, Powhatan’s World; Williamson, Powhatan Lords.  



 

187 

 

from his head and face” before disemboweling him and setting fire to the tree—“Thus 

themselves reported they executed George Cassen.”175 

 The pseudo-conquistador fantasy of the early years of the Jamestown colony, in 

which the colonists would buy or demand food from the Indians while they searched for 

minerals in the Piedmont, turned towards forced requisitions as the corn-to-copper exchange 

rate plummeted from a surfeit of cheap English trade goods. In January 1609, Smith and 

other Jamestown leaders began raiding and intimidating Powhatan villages, particularly 

Opechancanough’s village of Pamunkey and even Werewocomoco itself. Governor George 

Percy, in his “Trewe Relacyon,” wrote of dispatching Captain William West during the 

famine winter of 1609-10 to obtain corn from the Patawomecks, which he did, through 

“some harshe and Crewell dealing by Cutteinge of[f] towe of [the] Salvages heads and other 

extremetyes.” Other colonists were sent out to survive by esconcing themselves in Indian 

villages or camping alongside shellfish deposits, in defiance of Wahunsenecawh’s 

instructions that Smith was to limit his people’s presence to Jamestown; Smith even founded 

a settlement very close to Werewocomoco at the falls of the James River. Other colonists 

defected: as late as 1612, the Spanish ambassador to England informed Madrid that 40 to 50 

men were now living with Indian women outside of Jamestown.176 

 After Smith’s return to England in October 1609, mutual hostility reached a new level 

after July 1610, when new governor Sir Thomas Gates and his compatriot Sir Thomas West, 

                                                 
175 Gabriel Archer, in A relatyon of the Discovery of our River… (1607), in Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 45; 

Smith cited in Philip L. Barbour ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606-1609 (Cambridge: 

Hakluyt Society, 1969), 91; “to bringe him to goodnes” cited in Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The 

Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 74-75; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 213-

48; Rountree and Turner, Before and After Jamestown; Williamson, Powhatan Lords. 
176  Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 213-48; Rountree and Turner, Before and After Jamestown; Williamson, Powhatan 

Lords; Gleach, Powhatan’s World. 



 

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the Lord De La Warr, imposed martial law on the colony and inaugurated a campaign of total 

war against the Powhatans. Alongside the “casual labourers, rural vagrants, and urban 

drifters” who had travelled with De La Warr from Britain were “a large contingent” of 

perhaps 150 “old soldiers,” seasoned and hardened in the conquest of Ireland and the wars 

against Spain in the Netherlands, whom Hakluyt described as “hammerours” sent to 

“prepare” the Indians for “our preachers’ hands.” While De la Warr, Gates, and Sir Thomas 

Dale imposed a “draconian” code within the walls of Jamestown and the bounds of English 

settlement, meting out hanging, burning, staking, shooting, and breaking on the wheel for 

various criminal and moral offenses, the “hammerours” set out per the Virginia Company’s 

revised instructions: to obtain the Indians’ corn and labour through force, as “they will never 

feede you but for feare.” Furthermore, “in case of necessity, or conveniency, we pronounce it 

not crueltie nor breache of Charity to deale more sharpely with them.” Gates set out to 

reinforce the cultural divide by ordering Wahunsenecawh to return any fugitives among his 

people and the various firearms they had reportedly acquired; his response, that “we should 

depart his country, or confine ourselves to Jamestown only,” was ignored.177 

 George Percy and a body of 70 troops enacted an exemplary massacre in 1610 against 

the Paspaheghs, Jamestown’s long-suffering neighbours, when they refused to turn over an 

English runaway. Percy records that they “put some fifteen or sixteen to the sword”—

historian Ian Steele tallies the total dead as over 65—then cut down the cornfields, burned the 

village, took the “queen and her children” as prisoners, then killed them, a clear violation of 

Powhatan rules regarding weroance lineages. Four other punitive expeditions, including one 

                                                 
177 Barbour, Three Worlds of Captain John Smith, 122-57; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 213-48; Bailyn, The 

Barbarous Years; Rountree and Turner, Before and After Jamestown; Gleach, Powhatan’s World; Williamson, 

Powhatan Lords; on “hammerours,” see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (London and 

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 62-71; 



 

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to Powhatan’s village, were made in 1610 alone. The Powhatan point of view was further 

expressed in a victory song William Strachey recorded after three or four Englishmen were 

killed, and a sailor and a boy taken prisoner. This “scornefull song” mocked the British for 

being so well armed with guns, swords, and axes which now belonged to the Indians, and an 

aspects of the refrain, “Whe, whe,” onomatopoeically mocked the “lamentation our people 

made”—or, as Joyce Chaplin suggests, the shrieks of English captives during torture. Either 

way, the Powhatans appear to have expressed their disgust with a people so free with killing 

but so lacking in self-control.178 

 In the context of early modern European warfare, the scope and scale of British 

violence against the Powhatans followed partly from established practice and partly from 

recent experience. Many members of the Virginia Company had participated directly or 

indirectly in the conquest of Ireland, where the western half of the island was subjugated in 

scorched-earth campaigns which destroyed villages, forts, holy sites, fields, granaries, herds, 

and houses, then hunted displaced peasants or simply deprived them of food and shelter in 

the most inclement months; as the Lord Deputy of Ireland put it, “A Million swords will not 

do them so much harm as one winter’s famine.” This war had a certain xenophobic edge, as 

noted in Chapter 2: as well as the longstanding belief that the Irish were savages, sectarian 

and political designations made them thrice-damned as barbarians, rebels, and Papists. But, 

as Audrey Horning points out, comparison between Ireland and Virginia should not be 

pushed too far: English and Scottish settlers in Ireland coexisted with Irish neighbours, a 

                                                 
178 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 221; Vaughan, “Expulsion of the Salvages,” 67-68; Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 

66-68; George Percy, A Trewe Relacyon…, 271-72, cited in Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Geneaological 

Magazine 3 (4), 1922, 259-82, in Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 78-79; Steele, Warpaths, 37-49; Rountree, 

Powhatan Foreign Policy, 183; Grenier, First Way of War, 21-52; Chaplin, Subject Matter, 256-69; “scornefull 

song” and Strachey’s transcribed lyrics with translation in Daniel K. Richter, Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle 

for Eastern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 13-14. 



 

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shared legal code and culture facilitated communications, and the Irish nobility could be co-

opted into the British ruling class, none of which applied to Anglo-Powhatan relations. And 

where British colonists and soldiers in Ireland could travel back to England in a very short 

span of time, the same could not be said of the journey across the Atlantic, which essentially 

marooned them in a New World.179  

 The First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609-14 or 1610-14) ended in 1614 when Matoaka, 

captured by the British, was married to John Rolfe and christened Rebecca. But the seeds for 

future conflict—no pun intended—were sown by Rolfe’s introduction of “Orinoco tobacco” 

(Nicotiana tabacum). The old, pseudo-conquistador strategy of English rule over Indian 

farmers and labourers, who would ultimately extract and refine whatever saleable 

commodities the colonists eventually discovered, was replaced by a settler-colonial strategy 

of turning the land itself, particularly the fertile riparian soil which the Indians farmed and 

fished, into a saleable commodity for the cash-cropping of tobacco by petty criminals and the 

urban poor who would otherwise, in Hakluyt’s words, “be devoured by the gallows.” But 

these two incompatible strategies were pursued simultaneously between 1614 and 1622. 

While Powhatans were employed in English agricultural and artisanal labour and Protestant 

missions, including the kidnapping of children, were extended, the colony annexed thousands 

of acres of Powhatan land—“essentially the entire James River drainage in the coastal plain,” 

notes Gleach. As Powhatan labourers were steadily pushed off the land with which they fed 

themselves, legal reforms opened up Virginia to further investment and immigration. The 

headright system of 1618 pointed the way to Virginia’s future tobacco-planter oligarchy by 

                                                 
179 “one winter’s famine”: Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 169-212; Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea, 17-176; 

Bailyn, The Barbarous Years. 



 

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granting 50 acres of Virginian land to every immigrant who paid their own passage and 

stayed for at least 3 years, while giving 50 acres to entrepreneurs for each indentured 

servant’s passage they paid for.180 

 In 1618, Wahunsenecawh died and was succeeded by Opechancanough, whose 

publicly conciliatory attitude was taken at face value by British colonists. As Fausz observes, 

during his tenure the Powhatans were acquiring increasing numbers of firearms and 

becoming keen marksmen, as evidenced by the occasional shooting of a colonist; since, to 

the English, such one-off killings were not considered warfare, the colonists were blissfully 

unaware of the depth of actual Powhatan hostility against them. In 1621, Opechancanough 

took a new name, Mangopeesomon, and denied a report by the weroance of Accomac that he 

was planning a massive attack against the Virginia Colony, to be signalled by the reinterment 

of Wahunsenecawh’s bones. Mangopeesomon also insisted that the shooting of a holy man 

known as Jack of the Feathers, who was out of favour in Powhatan politics at that time 

anyways, would not imperil the peace. And so, on the early morning of March 22, 1622, 

Powhatan hired hands, employees, and neighbours appeared as they did every morning at the 

houses, farms, and tobacco plantations of the newly-established western settlements, “with 

Deer, Turkies, Fish, Furres, and other provisions, to sell, and trucke with us, for glasse, 

beades, and other trifles,” wrote the company secretary, Edward Waterhouse:  

yea in some places, [they] sate downe at Breakfast with our people at their tables, whom 

immediately with their owne tooles and weapons, eyther laid downe, or standing in their 

houses, they basely and barbarously murthered, not sparing eyther age or sexe, man, woman 

                                                 
180 Rountree, Powhatan Foreign Policy, 183-87; Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 100; Horning, Ireland, 156-176; 

Gleach, Powhatan’s World; Vaughan, “Expulsion of the Salvages”; Steele, Warpaths, 37-49; Grenier, First 

Way of War, 21-52. 



 

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or childe: so sodaine in their cruell execution, that few or none discerned the weapon or blow 

that brought them to destruction.
181 

The Powhatan Confederacy’s strike against the Virginia colony had been carefully planned 

and timed for maximum psychological impact to literally unsettle the colonists, particularly 

their sense of security and their convictions of religious superiority over the Indians. Not 

only were the colonists’ winter food supplies at their lowest point before spring planting, but 

22 March that year fell between Ash Wednesday and Easter, the significance of which in the 

Christian calendar had long been drummed into the Powhatans by British missionaries. 

While Gleach notes that the oldest and most easterly settlements “emerged unscathed,” the 

western settlements recently established deep in Powhatan territory were hit hardest, and 

some were wiped off the map. Out of a total settler population of 1,240, over 320 were killed, 

and their bodies mutilated to show the Powhatans’ anger. Analysis of the skeleton of one 

colonist, found by archaeologists at the Martin’s Hundred plantation, showed he was killed 

by a blow to the forehead with an iron spade, then had the back of his head crushed by a club, 

and a portion of his scalp cut off on the left side of his head in the Powhatan fashion.182 

After killing a quarter of the colony’s population, the Powhatans stopped, and no 

further attacks, beyond skirmishes or one-off killings, followed. Despite an apocryphal story 

which claimed that a loyal Powhatan domestic servant had saved Jamestown by informing 

his masters of the plot, Jamestown itself was never even approached by war parties. As the 

Powhatans obtained valuable trade goods and firearms from Jamestown, which they used 

                                                 
181 Waterhouse cited in Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea, 170-71, 285-86 (Opechancanough / 

Mangopeesomon’s preparations for the attack); Fausz, “Opechancanough”; Rountree and Turner, Before and 

After Jamestown; 
182 Gleach, Powhatan’s World; Seeman, Death in the New World, 86-101; Fausz, “Opechancanough”; Rountree 

and Turner, Before and After Jamestown. 



 

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against their Siouian Piedmont enemies to the west, containment of the Virginia colony was 

their purpose, not extirpation. While no mention of scalping appears to have been made in 

text or images depicting the 1622 attack, all the narratives scalping would later encapsulate 

were present: colonists’ accounts dwelt at great length on its unexpected and, in their minds, 

unprovoked nature, on the ingratitude and treachery of the Indians, and on their 

dismemberment of the colonists’ bodies which evidenced their irrational ferocity. Anglo-

American perceptions of the attack as an anarchic, reverse-colonial invasion of their 

domestic space by the Indians are captured visually in Matthäus Merian’s 1628 engraving 

Indian Massacre of 1622, derived from an earlier illustration in Theodor de Bry’s America 

for a Dutch anthology published in Leyden.183  

Michael Householder observes that this engraving denotes “an important shift in 

colonial British-American ideology that occurred between Jamestown and Mystic.” Early 

descriptions of violent encounters with indigenous people by George Best, Ralph Lane, John 

Smith, and others, had focused on the material causes for the violence of armed British 

soldiers and adventurers against Indians, e.g., property theft, exposure of a conspiracy, or 

general recalcitrance. But by emphasizing the helplessness and unpreparedness of those 

killed by the Powhatans, the British were encouraged “to imagine themselves as victims 

first.” In Merian’s foreground, loincloth-clad Indian warriors armed with knives and mace-

shaped clubs, many sporting North American-style roached haircuts, a few with Brazilian-

style feather bonnets and one wearing an entire bird as headgear, attack unarmed colonists at 

a set breakfast table and in the streets of what is meant to be Jamestown, while in the 

                                                 
183 Gleach, Powhatan’s World; Seeman, Death in the New World, 86-101; Fausz, “Opechancanough”; Rountree 

and Turner, Before and After Jamestown; Michael Householder, Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: 

Narratives of Encounter (Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 177-198. 



 

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background canoes packed with more warriors arrive from the Chesapeake Bay. The 

juxtaposition between peaceful English industriousness and warlike Indian savagery is made 

plain in the far right foreground, where an Indian warrior wielding a butcher knife is about to 

stab an Englishman in the back; the man, trimming wood with a broadaxe and preoccupied, 

is totally unaware of the Hell that has swallowed Jamestown. In the mid-left, a weeping 

mother and her baby lie on the ground pleading for mercy as an Indian warrior readies a two-

handed blow with an enormous wooden mace. To the right, another woman and her child are 

being stabbed by another warrior with a gigantic butcher knife; between them, an Indian 

warrior drags a man by the arm, perhaps to dismember him.184 

Working themselves into a fury over the Indians’ ingratitude towards them, Virginia 

Company directors and colonists dehumanized their enemy by Savagist comparisons to 

animals and called for their total annihilation: all Powhatans were now an obstacle to the 

development of Virginia. “[N]ow they feare we may beat them out of their dens,” wrote John 

Smith in 1622, “which Lions and Tygers would not admit but by force.” While even fierce 

beasts, as in the fable of Androcles and the lion, could feel gratitude, the Powhatans were 

“more fell than Lyons or Dragons,” wrote Edward Waterhouse in Relation of the Barbarous 

Massacre (1622); they had “not only put off humanity, but put on a worse and more then 

unnatural bruitishnesse” as evidenced by their treatment of the dead colonists. They “fell 

after againe upon the dead, making as well as they could, a fresh murder, defacing, dragging, 

and mangling the dead carkasses into many pieces, and carrying some parts away in derision, 

with base and bruitish triumph.” Waterhouse presented the death of Captain George Thorpe, 

                                                 
184 Householder, Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery, 177-198, “as victims first” (187), “shared 

cultural identity” (198); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbours. 



 

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a prominent colonist and landowner, as typical of their ingratitude towards their benefactors:  

his killers were a “viperous brood” who “cruelly and fiercely, out of devilish malice, did so 

many barbarous despites and foul scorns after to his dead corpse, as are unbefitting to be 

heard by any civil ear”. The poet, Christopher Brooke, more succinctly called the Indians 

“the very dregs, garbage, and spawne of Earth.”185 

From the level of Company directorship downwards, a perverse joy at no longer 

having to show any kind of restraint towards the Indians was openly expressed. The colony’s 

governor and council ruled in 1622 that “wee hold nothinge unjuste, that may tend to their 

ruine, (except breach of faith).” “Our hands which before were tied with gentlenesse and 

faire usage,” wrote Waterhouse in A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in 

Virginia (1622), “are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Savages, not 

untying the Knot, but cutting it”; colonists “may now by right of Warre, and law of Nations, 

invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us.” Gifted a vast haul of 

military surplus from the Crown, e.g., swords, halberds, armour, firearms and a few cannons 

from the Tower of London, the directors of the Virginia Company wrote their deputies in 

August 1622 to wage “a perpetuall warre without peace or truce” against the Indians. 

Punitive expeditions set out from Jamestown to harry the Indians per the instructions issued 

by the Company’s directors in August 1622: 

surprisinge them in their habitations, intercepting them in theire hunting, burninge theire 

Townes, demolishing theire Temples, destroyinge theire Canoes, plucking upp theire weares, 

                                                 
185 Vaughan, “Expulsion of the Salvages,” 58, 76-78 (“burning theire Townes”); Captain John Smith, “An 

abstract of Letters sent from the Collony in New England, July 16. 1622,” cited in Barbour, ed., The Complete 

Works of Captain John Smith Vol 1., 415, 431-441; “dregs” in Horning, Ireland in the Virginian Sea, 285-86: 

“viperous brood” cited in Kingsbury ed., Records of the Virginia Company vol. III, 551-52. 



 

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carying away theire Corne, and depriving them of whatsoever may yeeld them succor or 

relief. 

As in the Irish wars, the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622-32) targeted an elusive foe 

indirectly by destroying food and shelter. Summer attacks were timed to destroy the growing 

corn when it was too late in the year to replant, while towns and stored food were burned in 

winter to drive Powhatans into the cold. John Grenier observes that the colony’s military 

rosters for 1623 denote 80 of the 180 men fit for military service as assigned to “carrying 

corn”: their sole task in these attacks was to destroy cornfields. In a special company of 60 

Indian-fighters created by the Virginia Council in 1624, twenty-four were “employed only in 

the Cutting down of Corn [.]”186  

The premise that the Indians had intended genocide against the English informed a 

further Company decree in October 1622, specifying that their “sharp revenge uppon the 

bloody miscreantes” should extend “even to the measure that they intended against us, the 

rooting them out from being longer a people uppon the face of the Earth.” Bernard Bailyn 

has observed that the ferocity of 17th-century European campaigns against Indians only had 

precedent in the states of exception in European warfare: “the merciless slaughter and 

devastation reserved for conquered towns and cities that refused to surrender when sieged; 

domestic rebels who openly challenged established regimes; or heretics whose radical 

doctrines threatened to destroy the stability of civil society.” Informed by the Iberian 

precedent of using mastiffs as weapons of terror in the Caribbean, Mesoamerica and Florida, 

and perhaps following the dehumanization of Indians to its logical conclusion, colonists’ 

                                                 
186 Grenier, First Way of War, (23: George Wyatt), 23-24 (corn); Vaughan, ““Expulsion of the Salvages”, 57-

84; William S. Powell (47-48), “Aftermath of the Massacre: The First Indian War, 1622-1632,” in The Virginia 

Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January 1958), 44-75; “wee holde nothinge unjust” in 

Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 222. 



 

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demands for vengeance began to include explicit calls to hunt the Indians. In A 

Declaration… Waterhouse proposed that in driving the Indians westward into the Piedmont 

and “animating and abetting their enemies against them,” the colonists should hunt them like 

animals, riding them down with horses and mastiffs to “seaze” them. The settlers’ “Game,” 

wrote George Wyatt to his son Francis, the governor of Virginia, “are the fierce and wild 

Savages haunting the Deserts and woods,” some of whom should be “taken in Nets and Toils 

alive, reserved to be made tame” and enslaved, while “the most bloody” should “be rendered 

to due revenge of blood and cruelty”. Captain John Martin’s “The Manner Howe to Bringe 

the Indians into Subjection” (December 1622) drew similar, slightly less genocidal 

conclusions: since “holy writt” precluded the total annihilation of the Indians and since their 

souls could be saved, they should be converted to Christianity and put to work clearing the 

forest for settlers and hunting bears and wolves.187 

Conclusion: “parte of ther heades” 

In a letter dated 9 June, 1623, an English merchant and Jamestown colonist named 

Edward Bennett informed his brother Robert, after cataloguing their family business ventures 

on both sides of the Atlantic, that “Newse I have not anye worthe the wryting but onlye this”. 

What follows is a violent and, for the purposes of this thesis, infuriatingly cryptic story. On 

22 May, 1623, a Captain Daniel Tucker had led 12 men up the Chesapeake River to negotiate 

terms with the Keskiack Indians regarding peace between them and the Virginia colonists 

                                                 
187 George Wyatt cited in Grenier, First Way of War, 23. On the use of dogs as weapons against Indians and the 

conquistadores’ aperrear as a precedent, Captain John Smith’s Generall History notes that the Indians were 

startled by the settlers’ mastiffs, and that the settlers castrated their fiercer dogs to win the Indians’ goodwill and 

reduce their aggression—cited in Vaughan, “ “Expulsion of the Salvages”, 57-84; Edward Waterhouse 

suggested mastiffs to “seaze” them, cited in William S. Powell (47-48), “Aftermath of the Massacre: The First 

Indian War, 1622-1632,” in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January 1958), 

44-75. On states of exception in European warfare, see Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 497-500. 



 

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and the return of British hostages. Tucker, however, had poisoned the wine with which the 

Keskiacks would toast their armistice. “yt is thought some tooe hundred weare poisoned,” 

wrote Edward, and on the way back to the colony Tucker’s men “killed som 50 more and 

brought hom parte of ther heades.” This, Bennett opined,  

wilbe a great desmayinge to the blodye infidelles. We purpose god willinge after we have 

wedid our Tobaco and cornne with the helpe of Captn Smythe and otheres to goe upon the 

Waresquokes and Nansemomes [Nansemonds] to cute downe ther corne and put them to the 

sorde. God sende us vyctrie, as we macke no question god asistinge.
188  

Bennett’s letter never elaborates on which “pieces of their heads” Captain Tucker and his 

men took, and the backers of the Virginia Company condemned Tucker’s betrayal of the 

Keskiacks and censured the doctor who had provided the captain with the poison.189 

 Virginia would not be the last Anglo-American frontier where Indians were openly 

compared to dangerous animals, where poisoned food or drink were used to kill them in the 

manner of wolves, or where the use of attack dogs to “seaze” them would be at least 

proposed if not acted upon. In Virginia, whose tobacco economy had made it the prototypical 

British settler-colonial colony by the 1620s, the first stabs at extirpationist warfare had been 

taken. As shall be seen in Chapter 4, when combined with the attempted cross-cultural 

communication of ad hoc body-part bounties in the Pequot War and Kieft’s War, the stage 

was set for scalp hunting and dark colonial mimesis of Indian warriors’ imagined savagery to 

metastasize into a new, distinct form of Anglo-American colonial violence.

                                                 
188 “Robert Bennett. A Letter to Edward Bennett, 9 June, 1623,” in Susan Myra Kingsbury ed., Records of the 

Virginia Company Volume IV (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), 221-22, cited and 

analysed in Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Harvard University Press, 2005), 62-71. 
189 Rountree and Turner, in Before and After Jamestown: “The colony’s governor later denied that it happened. 

Meanwhile, the colony’s backers, the Virginia Company of London, censured the doctor at Jamestown for 

having provided the poison” (175, note 2); Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 169-248; Horning, Ireland in the Virginian 

Sea, 3-176, 271-368. 



 

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Chapter Four: “A Pound of Flesh”: Slavery and scalp bounties in Anglo-American 

frontier warfare, 1636 to 1725 

The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,  

Is dearly bought: ‘tis mine and I will have it. 

–Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1594), Act 4, Scene 1 

Upon the Indian skins they carv’d their name.  

–Benjamin Tompson, New-England’s Crisis (1676)190 

Prologue: the scalping chaplain 

 In November 1724 John Lovewell II, the son of a ranger in Captain Benjamin 

Church’s company during King Philip’s War, petitioned the Massachusetts General 

Assembly alongside Joshua Farnwell and Jonathan Robbins for funds to lead 40 to 50 

volunteers into Maine for an expedition against the Abenakis, “in order to kill and destroy 

their enemy Indians, provided they can meet with Encouragement suitable.” The Assembly 

negotiated their asking price of 5 shillings a day downwards to 2s6d per day, but offered 

piecework: £100 for each male Indian’s scalp they returned to Boston. Their first expedition 

returned with the scalps of a man and a young boy, for which they received £200 on top of 

their daily wages. Lovewell and his rangers entered Boston in triumph after their second 

expedition in February 1725, proudly displaying ten Abenaki 10 scalps hooped and displayed 

on poles; for this they received £1,000 from the public treasury, plus £7 each for the 

Abenakis’ French-manufactured guns. New England supporters claimed they must have 

forestalled some French plot: “some attempt against the Frontiers of New Hampshire was 

prevented,” eulogized Thomas Symmes in his 1725 sermon “Lovewell Lamented.” By 

contrast, in the 1780s Ecuadorian encyclopedist Antonio de Alcedo referenced the incident 

                                                 
190 James Frothingham Hunnewell ed., Early American Poetry: New-England’s Crisis by Benjamin Tompson 

(Boston: the Club of Odd Volumes, 1894), 10-21. 



 

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damningly: “The English boast of this stain on humanity, and they attack the cruelties of the 

Spaniards in America, which certainly occurred but did not reach that level of barbarism.”191 

In the spring of 1725, Lovewell and a small party of 47 men, many of whom were 

Boston town-dwellers unfamiliar with ranging, set out against the Abenaki village of 

Pequawket. Ambushed by a much larger force of 100 warriors, Lovewell was killed in the 

first volley, and only 12 of the party returned to Massachusetts. The defeat of Captain 

Lovewell’s scalp hunters became a borderland ballad, “The Song of Lovewell’s Fight,” 

hailing the “worthy Captain Lovewell” and “his valiant soldiers,” who served “his country 

and his King” against the “rebel Indians.” Prefiguring Custer’s last stand, the balladeers 

rewrote events to transform Lovewell into a canny wilderness fighter who figured out the 

Indians’ ambush immediately (“This rogue is to decoy us, I very plainly see”). Interestingly, 

the roll call of heroic scalp-lifters included a priest: 

Our worthy Captain Lovewell, among them there did die;  

They killed Lieutenant Robbins, and wounded good young Frye, 

Who was our English chaplain: he many Indians slew, 

And some of them he scalped, while bullets round him flew.
192 

Scalping was so publicly acceptable in frontier society by the 1720s that Lovewell wore a 

wig fashioned from Indian scalps, and the company chaplain Jonathan Frye, a 1723 graduate 

of Harvard College, was no less adept than his secular peers: he took his fatal wound after 

                                                 
191 Grenier, First Way of War, 47-52; Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 180-222; Axtell, Natives and 

Newcomers, 273. Antonio de Alcedo, Diccionario geográfico-histórico de las Indias Occidentales o América, 

volume 2 (Madrid, 1787), cited in David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of 

Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 49-50, n. 165. 
192 Older accounts stylize Pequawket as “Pigwacket.” A complete reprint of “The Song of Lovewell’s Fight,” 

cited as “from the valuable Historical Collections of Farmer and Moore,” is included in the Appendix of Samuel 

G. Drake’s 1829 reprint (Exeter, NH: J&B Williams, 1829) of Thomas Church, Esq., The History of Philip’s 

War, commonly called the Great Indian War, of 1675 and 1676. Also, of the French and Indian Wars at the 

Eastward in 1689, 1690, 1692, 1696, and 1704 (first edition Boston 1716, second edition Newport 1772), 330-

335. See also Grenier, First Way of War, 47-52; Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 180-222.  



 

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scalping two Abenakis. His fiancée elegized him as “that young student, Mr. Frye, / Who in 

his blooming youth did die, …/ A comely youth and pious too.” Other New Englanders 

seemed to see no contradiction in a man of the cloth scalping people; the town built on the 

site of Peqwauket was named ‘Fryeburg.’193 

 My first section, “Extirpationist genesis, 1636 – 1676,” surveys general patterns of 

European warfare against indigenous North Americans, and how and why the British 

colonies came to favour extirpation to a much greater degree than Dutch, French, and 

Spanish competitors, in the Pequot War, Kieft’s War, and King Philip’s War. Where the first 

section looks at war in the northeastern colonies, my second section, “The rise and fall of the 

British Indian slave trade, 1660 to 1717,” studies the British colonies of the Southeast from 

the foundation of the Carolina colony to the Tuscarora War and Yamasee War. In both 

theatres, British colonists paid allied Indians for prisoners to enslave and offered bounties for 

body parts, increasingly favouring scalps. My epilogue, “The Ranger tradition and the myth 

of the Indian hunter,” points to the beginnings of a distinct British North American military 

tradition which would provide the seedbed for the myth of the Indian hunter and dark 

mimesis. 

Exirpationist genesis, 1636 – 1676 

                                                 
193 “The Mournful Elegy on Mr. Jonathan Frye, 1725” cited in Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, ibid. 

See also Drake ed., The History of Philip’s War, 330-335; Axtell and Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut,” 451-

472; As ‘Lovell’s Fight,’ the defeat at Peqwauket had a long literary afterlife in New England: it inspired the 

13-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s first published poem, “The Battle of Lovell’s Pond” (1820) and 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story of two survivors of the defeat, “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832), published in 

his collection Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). “Captain John Lovewell not only paraded scalps through the 

streets of Boson, he also wore a wig made of Indian scalps”: Colin Calloway, Dawnland Encounters, 167, 268 

n.20 citing James Axtell, “Scalping: The Ethnohistory of a Moral Question” in the European and the Indian: 

Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 207-41. 



 

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 The use of scorched-earth tactics and the commodification of indigenous bodies, live 

or dead, in frontier warfare were not unique to the British North American colonies but 

general practice of Europeans following Iberian precedent. On New Spain’s northern 

borderlands in the present-day American Southwest such a pattern was set during the 

Chichimec wars (1546-1590): mounted troops salaried by the Crown rode from the presidios, 

which combined the functions of garrison, fortress, and prison, to join allied Indians to seek 

and destroy enemy villages. But the viceroyalty could or would not pay wages in full, and the 

most direct way for presidial soldiers to supplement their income was to sell prisoners of war 

into slavery, or retain them within the presidio as sweatshop labour under multi-year 

sentences of hard labour. As J.H. Elliott observes, “self-financing warfare guaranteed its own 

prolongation”; in 1587 Viceroy Marqués de Villamanrique determined that the slave trade 

was driving the Chichimec wars, as presidial troops attacked Chichimec bands uninvolved 

with or at peace with Spain to provoke retaliations and obtain captives. European campaigns 

of property destruction were also levied by New France in its wars with the Iroquois 

Confederacy in the second half of the 17th century, with the incursions of the Carignan-

Salières regiment into Iroquoia in the 1660s and subsequent campaigns in the late 1680s 

through 1690s; as will be seen later in this chapter, New France also waged for-profit warfare 

in the form of its 18th-century slave trade, offered scalp bounties, and in the case of the 

Natchez Wars fought at least one extirpationist war where agricultural land and settler-

colonial considerations were the motivating factors.194 

                                                 
194 On the Carignan-Salieres regiment and French campaigns into Iroquoia, see Richter, The Ordeal of the 

Longhouse, 98-102; Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 283-89. On for-profit warfare on New Spain’s northern 

frontier, see Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 196-217; J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and 

Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 59-64; Bret Blosser, 

““By the Force of Their Lives and the Spilling of Blood”: Flechero Service and Political Leverage on a Nueva 

Galicia Frontier,” 289-316, in Matthew and Oudijk eds., Indian Conquistadors, 289-316.  



 

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But to a greater extent than either, the British colonies in this period of study 

instituted a distinct Anglo-American paradigm of warfare. Large-scale wars of extirpation, 

depopulation, and ethnic cleansing were combined with mass resettlement and large-scale 

land speculation. In the period of study I outline the process by which the cross-cultural 

pidgin of a trade in captives and, specifically, ad hoc scalp bounties, was pioneered in 

northeastern North America alongside British and Dutch settler-colonial colonies in the 

Pequot War (1636-38), Kieft’s War (1640-45), and King Philip’s War (1675-76). 

While the Pequot War (1636-38) saw joint participation between New England 

colonists, the Narragansetts, and the Mohegans against the Pequots, only the New Englanders 

sought to commit genocide against even the name “Pequot.” Through the early 1630s the 

Pequots’ monopoly over Dutch trade goods was being increasingly challenged by the 

Narragansetts, the region’s second sachemship in terms of wealth and power; the Mohegans, 

a restive tributary sachemship; and the Dutch, who sought break the Pequots’ monopoly and 

instate free trade. Accordingly, Pequot-Dutch relations grew increasingly hostile, culminating 

in the Dutch kidnapping the Pequots’ grand sachem Tatobem and delivering of his corpse 

upon payment of ransom; consequently, the Pequots turned towards New England. After 

neighbouring sachemships blamed the 1633 deaths of two piratical English traders, Captains 

John Stone and John Norton, on the Pequots, in 1634 the Pequots paid generous indemnities 

to Massachusetts Bay of wampum, pelts, and land cessions in the Connecticut Valley in 

exchange for New England’s intervention to re-establish peace with the Mohegans and 



 

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Narragansetts. But the prospect of expanding the new Connecticut colony (est. March 1636) 

at the Pequots’ expense preempted trade and coexistence.195  

A casus belli was provided in July 1636 when an unsavory trader, John Oldham, was 

killed at Block Island by the Niantics, a tributary sachemship of the Narragansetts. The 

Narragansetts saw an opportunity, and their influential sachem Miantonomo told the New 

Englanders that the Pequots had put the Niantics up to it and had offered asylum to the 

killers. From Boston, the Massachusetts Bay colony authorities dispatched Captains John 

Endecott and John Underhill to obtain vengeance against the Niantics and issue their 

government’s exorbitant demands to the Pequots. After killing 15 people, burning wigwams, 

and despoiling granaries and cornfields on Block Island, Captains John Endecott and John 

Underhill led their Boston troops to the Pequots’ major fortified town, where a “grave 

senior” heard their demands: an indemnity of a thousand fathoms of wampum, child 

hostages, and the surrender of the killers of Stone and Norton. How sincere these demands 

were is an open question. In 1639 the Dutch navigator David de Vries, asking an Indian 

warrior near the mouth of the Connecticut how he’d come by his flamboyant scarlet mantle, 

was told “He had some time ago killed one Captain Stone, with his people, in a bark, from 

whom he had obtained these clothes.”196 

 At Block Island and at Pequot Town, the heavily-armoured British soldiers proved 

unsuccessful at engaging an unarmoured, agile foe in combat. While Endecott claimed two 

                                                 
195 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Lipman, “Knitt,” 14-15; Cave, The Pequot War, 60-121; Drinnon, Facing 

West, 33-61; Jennings, The Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90-105; Steele, 

Warpaths, 91-92. 
196 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Lipman, “Knitt,” 14-15; Cave, The Pequot War, 60-121; Drinnon, Facing 

West, 33-61; Jennings, The Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90-105; Steele, 

Warpaths, 91-92. 



 

205 

 

Pequots slain in the fight at Pequot Town, Captain John Mason scoffed at Endecott’s results 

as “only one Indian slain and some Wigwams burnt,” which “inraged” the Pequots “against 

the English.” Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, the engineer and commander of Fort Saybrook on 

the mouth of the Connecticut River, credited allied Indian participation as decisive: “The 

Bay-men killed not a man, save that one Kichomiquim, an Indian Sachem of the Bay, killed a 

Pequit; and thus began the war between the Indians and us in these parts.” The disparity in 

their fighting styles was not lost on the Pequots: according to Massachusetts’ governor 

William Bradford, they proposed a Pequot-Narragansett alliance against the New Englanders, 

pointing out that “the English were minded to destroy all Indians” and that the Narragansetts 

“did but make way for their own overthrow” by helping them. Their counter-proposal was a 

guerrilla war against the settlers, to “fire their houses, kill their cattle, and lie in ambush for 

them,” which could be easily done “without any or little danger to themselves”; the British 

would “either be starved or be forced to forsake the country.”197  

Roger Williams, a Puritan exile living among the Narragansetts, persuaded them to 

ally with the New Englanders, and both parties began working towards a modus vivendi 

between English and Algonquian ways of war. In 1636 Narragansett representatives at 

Plymouth agreed to the terms of a treaty to deny haven to any Pequots, to put to death or 

deliver to the English any Indians guilty of killing Englishmen or runaway English servants 

living among the Narragansetts, and to furnish guides for English expeditions against the 

Pequots. One of these guides, a Massachusett warrior named Cutshamakin, then ambushed, 

slew, and scalped a Pequot man in a swamp; having “flayed off the skin of his head,” he sent 

                                                 
197 Winthrop, History of New England vol. 1, 195, and Gardiner, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical 

Society 3: 142, cited in Lipman, “Meanes,” 16-18. 



 

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it to Canonicus, the principal Narraganset sachem, who “presently sent it to all the sachems 

about him” through the Narragansett network of allied and tributary sachemships. When the 

Pequot scalp finally came to Boston, a sort of ad hoc scalp bounty was granted when 

Cutshamakin was rewarded with four fathoms of wampum.198 

 The stark distinctions between European and Algonquian concepts of licit violence 

were also revealed, to each side’s perturbation. When the Puritans and their Narragansett and 

Mohegan allies, surrounded Mystic in May 1637, the Narragansetts and Mohegans’ oft-

quoted assessment of the Puritans’ actions in setting the fortified town on fire and killing 

anyone who escaped the flames—“it is too furious, and slays too many men”—reflected not 

only shock at the scale of killing, but fear for the implications of their complicity in it: in 

mourning-war terms, as Peter Lipman notes, the massacre could “potentially unleash never-

ending cycles of retribution” against them by the Pequot. New Englanders rationalized this as 

self-defense: Philip Vincent invoked the Powhatans’ 1622 attack on Virginia to warn that 

Indians only understood force: “long forebearance, and too much leniency of the English” 

towards the “Virginian Salvages,” had almost destroyed the colony, since “These Barbarians 

(ever treacherous) abuse the goodnesse of those that condescend to their rudenesse and 

imperfections.” The New Englanders “are assured of their peace by killing the Barbarians,” 

i.e., the Pequots, “better than our English Virginians were by being killed by them.”199  

                                                 
198 Winthrop, History of New England vol. 1, 195, and Gardiner, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical 

Society 3: 142, cited in Lipman, “Knitt,” 14-18; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Cave, The Pequot War, 60-

121; Drinnon, Facing West, 33-61; Jennings, The Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian 

Country, 90-105; Steele, Warpaths, 91-92. 
199 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Lipman, “Knitt,” 14-15; Cave, The Pequot War, 60-121; Drinnon, Facing 

West, 33-61 (46: Philip Vincent); Jennings, The Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian 

Country, 90-105; Steele, Warpaths, 91-92. 



 

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A similar rift between the limitations of mourning-war and the scope of total war 

were revealed in an exchange between Sassacus, the Pequot paramount sachem, and Lion 

Gardiner when a Pequot war party raided Fort Saybrook in February 1637. After they “slew 

divers men,” they attempted a parley with Gardiner, whose attempt at vague and 

noncommittal language must have struck the Pequots as cold-blooded and monstrous: 

Then they [the Pequots] said, Have you fought enough? We [Gardiner] said we knew not yet. 

Then they asked if we did use to kill women and children? We said they should see that 

hereafter. So they were silent a small space, and then they said, We are Pequits, and have 

killed Englishmen, and can kill them as mosquetoes, and we will go to Conectecott and kill 

men, women, and children, and we will take away the horses, cows and hogs.
200  

The Pequots replied to Gardiner’s passive-aggression by showing their keen understanding of 

the Puritan mind. The raiders, some dressed in clothes taken from soldiers they had killed, 

taunted the garrison of Fort Saybrook as “like women” and proclaimed that one of their 

warriors, if he killed one more Englishman, “would be equal with God”—a “blasphemous 

speech,” noted Gardiner, that “troubled the hearts of the soldiers.” Pequot raids in the 

Connecticut Valley in April killed thirty settlers but still showed the selectivity and 

limitations of mourning-war. In the raid on Wethersfield (see Chapter 3), two sisters were 

taken captive and later returned unharmed, through Dutch intermediaries, to Gardiner at 

Saybrook for a ransom; their Pequot captors had assumed they would know how to make 

gunpowder. A Boston merchant named Tilly, who in defiance of Gardiner’s orders went 

ashore, was a grown man and therefore liable to different treatment: seized by Pequot 

                                                 
200 “Gardener’s Narrative,” Orr ed., History of the Pequot War, 131-32.  



 

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warriors in sight of the fort, Gardiner later learned “by relation” that his captors had “tied 

him to a stake” and “flayed,” which probably means burned, “his skin off.”201  

For both the New Englanders and the Mohegans and Narragansetts, the scope of 

destruction inflicted upon the Pequots at Mystic and the surety of Pequot retaliation informed 

subsequent events of summer and fall. A steadily-expanding network of sachemships bought 

allegiance with New England with a harvest of Pequot prisoners and body parts: scalps, 

heads, hands and feet. Prior to Mystic, both Roger Williams and Uncas, sachem of the 

Mohegans, had made gestures towards such an exchange. Williams had written letters to 

other New Englanders explaining the Indians’ customs of reciprocal gifting and the exchange 

of body parts as tokens of alliance and friendship; during the war, he “dutifully” passed three 

Pequot hands from the Narragansetts to the Boston authorities; Uncas had shown his 

friendship by appearing at Saybrook with a captive Pequot named Kiswas and four or five 

Pequots’ “heads”—which, per the contextual nature of this term in 17th-century English, 

could mean entire heads or simply the scalps—for which Gardiner gave him 15 yards of 

trade-cloth. Shortly thereafter, a party of Narragansetts entered Boston with “forty fathom of 

wampum and a Pequod’s hand,” for which the governor gifted them four coats.202  

Others engaged in the trade out of fear. Wyandanch, the sachem of the Montauks of 

Long Island, visited Saybrook three days after Mystic asking whether the English were 

“angry with all Indians.” When Gardiner set the price of trade and alliance as the heads of 

                                                 
201 Cave, Pequot War, 43; Lipman, “Knitt”; “Underhill’s Narrative,” in Orr ed., History of the Pequot War, 61, 

66-67; “Gardener’s Narrative,” 134-35. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Drinnon, Facing West, 33-61 (46: 

Philip Vincent); Jennings, The Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90-105; Steele, 

Warpaths, 91-92 
202 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Lipman, “Knitt”; Cave, The Pequot War, 60-121; Drinnon, Facing West, 

33-61 (46: Philip Vincent); Jennings, The Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90-

105; Steele, Warpaths, 91-92. 



 

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Pequot asylum-seekers, and those of any Indians who had killed Englishmen, Wyandanch 

sent 12 Pequot heads to Saybrook shortly thereafter, for which Gardiner gifted him with trade 

goods. Subsequently, the Montauks killed so many refugees that Pequots began avoiding 

Long Island altogether. Sassacus and his followers sought asylum among the Mohawks, 

offering a generous incentive of wampum, but were outbid by the Narragansetts, and in 

August, several Connecticut traders brought to Boston “part of the skin and lock of hair of 

Sassacus and his brother and five other Pequot sachems, who, being fled to the Mohawk for 

shelter, with their women, were by them surprised and slain, with twenty of their best men.” 

Some of these “heads” were also taken by New Englanders on at least one occasion: in his 

“true Relation,” Philip Vincent praised the accomplishment of “Francis Waine-wright,” a 

“sturdy youth of new Ipswich” and “servant of one Alexander Knight” who, “going forth, 

somewhat rashly, to pursue the Salvages,” had expended all his powder and shot, then “so 

bestirred himselfe” with the spent arquebus as a blunt instrument “that hee brought two of 

their heads to the armie.” At a certain point, New Englanders stopped counting. When Mason 

crowed that “The Pequots [had] now become a Prey to all Indians,” he noted that their heads 

“came almost daily to Winsor, or Hartford.” John Winthrop made an offhand remark about 

“still many Pequods’ heads and hands [coming] from Long Island and other places.”203 

 Surviving Pequots were relentlessly pursued through woods and swamps, some 

survivors gifted to Narragansett and Mohegan allies, and a larger number sold into slavery in 

the Caribbean. In June 1638, Israel Stoughton and William Trask’s militiamen collected 

some 200 Pequot prisoners from the Mohegans and Narragansetts. The latter, perhaps to 

                                                 
203 Vincent, “true Relation,” 14-15; Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 503 (“dutifully”); Salisbury, “Native People and 

European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763,” 406-07; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Lipman, 

“Knitt”; Cave, The Pequot War, 60-121; Drinnon, Facing West, 33-61 (46: Philip Vincent); Jennings, The 

Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90-105; Steele, Warpaths, 91-92. 



 

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assuage their consciences, suggested to the New Englanders that the Pequot prisoners should 

“(as they say is their generall Custome) be used kindly, have howses and goods and fields 

given them”; instead, the New Englanders drowned and decapitated the men and sold the 

women and children. John Mason, surrounding 200 starving Pequots in a swamp with his 40 

New Englanders, wrote that he was “loath to kill Women and Children” and therefore 

“spared” the 180 women and children while putting 20 old men to the sword. The terms of 

the Treaty of Hartford (September 1638) went even further: New England’s allies were to 

render up any Pequots still at large, “or take of[f] their heads,” while these survivors were not 

only banned from returning to their villages, which had been given to John Mason’s veterans 

to torch and resettle, but were banned from even using their tribal name. By renaming the 

Pequot River as the Thames and Pequot Town, their capital, as New London, the name 

“Pequot” was to be wiped from existence, decrees which were rescinded by 1640.204  

By 1642, the Pequots’ prediction that the New Englanders would turn against the 

Narragansetts came to pass. Miantonomo, now the leading sachem, reportedly gave a speech 

on Long Island in 1642 calling for a pan-Indian uprising against British colonists. Warning 

they must be “all Indians as the English are, and say brother to one another; […] otherwise 

we shall be all gone shortly,” Miantonomo proposed the uprising be signalled in traditional 

mourning-war fashion: he “would kill an Englishman & send his heade & hands to Longe 

Iland,” and the Indians of Long Island and neighbouring New Netherland would do the same 

as “a meanes to knit them togeather.” In 1643, the commissioners of the United Colonies of 

                                                 
204 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Lipman, “Knitt”; Cave, The Pequot War, 60-121; Drinnon, Facing West, 

33-61 (46: Philip Vincent); Jennings, The Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90-

105; Steele, Warpaths, 91-92. On the Pequot War’s intent of physical and cultural genocide, see Madley, 

“Reexamining the American Genocide Debate,” 120-26. 



 

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New England decreed that Uncas had their permission to kill Miantonomo, who was then 

assassinated by Uncas’ brother.205 

 In outlining large-scale British settlement’s existential threat to Algonquian 

economies, Miantonomo included the actions of Old World livestock as well as their owners: 

while British farmers scythed down the grass and cut down the trees which sheltered and fed 

deer, turkeys, and black bears, “their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our 

clam banks, and we shall all be starved.” While indigenous peoples of the northeast certainly 

did manage their landscapes’ carrying-capacity for game animals through seasonal burnings, 

Gardiner’s quotation completely elides Algonquian agriculture and the threat British 

livestock posed it. As noted by Virginia DeJohn Anderson, from the Chesapeake to New 

England a “penumbra” of untended or feral cattle, horses and swine extended several miles 

beyond the boundaries of almost every British town and settlement, rampaging through 

Indians’ unfenced cornfields and gardens. Pigs were the single most numerous animal, and 

the most dangerous and destructive, accustomed to foraging and fending for themselves; 

Indians told Roger Williams that two pregnant sows had been observed driving a wolf from a 

deer carcass. These aggressive, rooting swine raided fields, gardens, and clam-beds and dug 

into storage pits and granaries; Williams noted that Northeastern Indians considered pigs the 

“most hatefull” of all English livestock for their depredations and “their filthy disposition, 

[…] and they call them filthy cut-throats &c.”206 

                                                 
205 Miantonomo’s speech, and context on New England land use pre- and post-contact, reprinted in William 

Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 

1983), 162-63; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 227-30; Lipman, “Knitt”; Cave, The Pequot War, 60-121; Drinnon, 

Facing West, 33-61 (46: Philip Vincent); Jennings, The Invasion of America; Richter, Facing East from Indian 

Country, 90-105; Steele, Warpaths, 91-92. 
206 Cronon, Changes in the Land, 162-63; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic 

Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford University Press, 2004), 210-46 (221: “Beyond the official 

borders of nearly every New England town or Chesapeake plantation lay a penumbra of land, often several 



 

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 As the backers of the New Netherland colony increasingly invested in settlement and 

intensive agriculture in New Amsterdam, settler-colonial wars would erupt along the Dutch 

frontiers as well. In the 1620s New Amsterdam had enjoyed profitable trade relations with its 

neighbours on the Long Island Sound, many of whom – Canarsees, Siwanoys, Rockaways, 

Tappans, and others—were speakers of related languages later known to British colonists as 

“Delawares,” referred to here as Lenape-Munsee. During the 1630s, the colony’s 

landholdings were extended under the directorship of Wouter van Twiller (1633-38) through 

purchases from Lenape-Munsee sachems, sowing seeds of future conflict: Algonquians 

considered themselves to be selling usufruct rights, not the land itself. In 1638, the ruling 

‘Lords Nineteen’ of the Netherlands decided to invest in populating New Netherland and 

developing its economy, particularly the agricultural sector; under Twiller’s successor, 

Willem Kieft (1638-47), New Amsterdam’s population of free migrants, indentured servants, 

and African and Indian slaves doubled in his first five years in office. The garrison also 

increased, presenting problems of its own: having few opportunities to supplement their 

incomes legitimately, many of the WIC’s salaried soldiers and mercenaries were punished 

for contraband trade and theft. In wartime, they also had incentive to plunder pelts and 

wampum from Indian villages, even in direct violation of their orders.207  

                                                 
miles wide, that livestock effectively claimed as their own.”); Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of 

America (London: Gregory Dexter, 1643), 106-07 (“filthy cut-throats”), 165-66 (“two English swine, big with 

Pig, past by, assaulted the Wolfe, drove him from his prey, and devoured so much of that poore Deere, as they 

both surfeited and dyed that night.”) 
207 On the Lenapes and Munsees, see Jean R. Soderlund, Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before 

William Penn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 1-35, and Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 

5-13. “Delaware” is rendered as “Lenape,” “Munsee,” or “Lenape-Munsee” in the text of this thesis, unless in 

quotation from a primary source. See also Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14-40; Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; 

Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164; Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, Warpaths, 115-16; Kiernan, 

Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter Feast, 286-90. 



 

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As in the British colonies, the transition between the older trade relationship and a 

new agrarian-annexationist relationship was riddled with contradictions. WIC traders 

continued to seek corn, pelts, and wampum while New Amsterdam’s farms, ranches, and 

agricultural estates expanded at the expense of Indians’ fields, woods, and fishing grounds, 

including the wampum-producing shellfish beds not claimed as spoils of the Pequot War by 

Massachusetts and Connecticut. The contradictions are captured by two policy decisions of 

1639: the WIC company ended its fur trade monopoly, allowing formerly-unlicensed trappers 

known as bosch-lopers to openly, rather than covertly, compete with Indians for the 

remaining beaver population, while Kieft began demanding New Amsterdam’s neighbours 

pay tributes of wampum, corn, and pelts. Expansion of the colony had increased the 

operational costs of fortification and paying wages to its 60-man garrison; Kieft rationalized 

this tribute as a fee for defending New Amsterdam’s neighbours from their northern enemies, 

the Mahicans and Mohawks. David de Vries recorded a Tappan sachem’s displeasure with 

the kind of people who “come to live in this country without being invited by them, and now 

wish to compel them to give him their corn for nothing.”208 

The first hostilities in the five years of off-and-on conflict known as Kieft’s War 

(1640-45) began when Cors Pietersen’s WIC yacht approached a village of the Raritans, a 

Munsee subgroup, to trade. Pietersen had been charged with robbing a Raritan man in 1638, 

and the signal for a Raritan war party to try to seize the yacht was a Raritan warrior striking 

Pietersen across the face with a handful of squirrel pelts in a show of violent irony. The 

attack was broken off when the Dutch readied their firearms; shortly thereafter, it was 

                                                 
208 Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier, 105-07 (on wampum), 85-164; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 22-23 (on 

wampum), 14-40; Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, Warpaths, 115-16; 

Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter Feast, 286-90. 



 

214 

 

reported that Raritans had killed pigs—for which David de Vries, among other colonists, 

blamed soldiers of the garrison—and burned down a slave’s house on Staten Island. Kieft 

dispatched the company secretary Cornelis van Tienhoven with 70 to 100 soldiers and armed 

sailors; if the Raritans did not provide “satisfaction,” Tienhoven’s orders were to burn their 

cornfields and loot the village. After killing three or four Raritans, Tienhoven’s men took the 

sachem’s brother, who owed Tienhoven large outstanding debts, as a hostage; while 

returning to New Amsterdam, one of the soldiers tortured the sachem’s brother by applying 

“a piece of split wood” to his genitals, and Kieft hastily returned him to the Raritans with an 

indemnity in wampum. The Raritans waited to avenge this insult until June 1641, when a 

raiding party attacked Kieft’s farm on Staten Island, killing four of his servants and torching 

the property. An Indian WIC employee served as intermediary for their declaration of war, in 

which they denied responsibility for killing the pigs in 1640 but announced that now, since 

they had reciprocally killed one colonist for every Raritan killed by Tienhoven’s soldiers, 

“[the Dutch] would now come to fight them on account of [their] men,” since they “had 

before come and treated [the Raritans] badly on account of the swine.” What the Raritans 

found most insulting, suggests Evan Haefeli, was “the message that a pig’s life was as 

significant as a Raritan’s.”209 

 Offering bounties of ten fathoms of wampum for a Raritan’s head—which, given the 

ambiguities of 17th century Dutch as well as English, could also mean “scalp”—and twenty 

                                                 
209 Bailyn, in The Barbarous Years (218), gives a different version of events: “…when his [Kieft’s] tax collector 

attempted to seize one village’s corn supplies and load them aboard his yacht, he was attacked by the local 

sachem and slashed across the face with a hunting knife. His vessel was attacked, and his party barely made it 

back alive to New Amsterdam.” The numbers of Tienhoven’s expedition are variously given as 70 (Lipman), 80 

(Bailyn), “eighty-odd” (Burrows and Wallace) or 100 (Delâge). See Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14-40; 

Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164; Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, 

Warpaths, 115-16; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter Feast, 286-90. 



 

215 

 

fathoms for live captives from “any of the Indians who have most barbarously murdered our 

people,” Kieft commissioned the Raritans’ neighbours and rivals from other Lenape-Munsee 

sachemships, or from other Algonquians of the region such as the Wappinger Confederacy, 

to resolve the conflict using mourning-war tactics: the exemplary killing of a few Raritans, to 

demonstrate their ability to kill a much larger number. During the summer of 1641, a war 

party from Long Island “voluntary killed [sic]” some Raritans; in November, Pieter de Vries 

reports that Pacham, a sachem of the Wappinger subgroup the Tankitekes, entered Fort 

Amsterdam “in great triumph” bearing a hand on a stick. It purportedly belonged to the 

leader of the Staten Island raid, and Pacham declared “that he had taken revenge for our sake, 

because he loved [the Dutch], who were his best friends.” In Evan Haefeli’s analysis, Kieft’s 

response showed an understanding both of the military limitations of a settler-colonial 

system, in which a few military specialists were to protect widely-dispersed settlements, and 

of the importance of indigenous allies in resolving such a conflict: “planters and farmers and 

other remote settlers,” he wrote in explanation of his decision, “stand in great danger of life 

and property, which we under the circumstances, on account of the density of the forest and 

the small number of men, cannot prevent.” After Pacham’s triumph, no further attacks on 

colonists were reported, and the Raritans made peace with New Netherland later in the 

year.210 

In other cases, New Amsterdam rejected adjudication on mourning-war principles. In 

August 1641 New Amsterdam and the Wecquaesgeeks, a member of the Wappinger 

Confederacy, came into conflict when an elderly wheelwright named Claes Smits, who lived 

                                                 
210 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14-40; Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164; 

Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, Warpaths, 115-16; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter 

Feast, 286-90. 



 

216 

 

alone on Manhattan Island, was killed and “decapitated”—either literally beheaded, or 

scalped— by a Wecquaesgeek man. When told to turn over his killer, the Wecquaesgeeks 

refused, and the heated language of the negotiations suggests deeper anti-Dutch tension. A 

Wecquaesgeek sachem justified Smits’ murder on the grounds that his Wecquaesgeek killer 

had resolved the outstanding, unavenged murder of his uncle by three Dutchmen 21 years 

prior; he also reportedly said “he was sorry that twenty Christians had not been murdered.” 

Kieft then proposed to his governing council that they should “ruin the entire village” in 

retaliation; most agreed to this, so long as they waited until after the harvest and autumn corn 

trade had been concluded. Kieft waited until March 1642 to dispatch 80 soldiers to attack the 

Wecquaesgeeks’ village by night, an attack called off when the soldiers got lost in the woods 

due to an incompetent guide. In the morning, when the Wecquaesgeeks found the soldiers’ 

tracks in the snow, they promptly sued for peace, but again a refusal or incomprehension of 

mourning-war principles stymied negotiations: Tienhoven granted peace on the impossible 

condition that they either deliver the murderer or kill him themselves, which the 

Wecquaesgeek leaders, whose authority rested on persuasion and not coercion, had no right 

to do, and could not have done without starting a feud in their own village. Later in the spring 

of 1642, a colonist thatching a roof was killed with an arrow by a member of the Hackensack 

(a Lenape-Munsee subgroup). The Hackensacks were the first to respond, asking Peter de 

Vries to mediate their payment of 100 to 200 fathoms of wampum as compensation to the 

thatcher’s widow. Kieft again made the impossible, fruitless demand that the sachems turn 

over the killer to New Netherland. The 1642 killing had happened so soon after 

Miantonomo’s call for rebellion that Kieft believed it was some part of the conspiracy, and a 



 

217 

 

broad and increasing paranoia among New Netherland settlers regarding their indigenous 

neighbours would have deadlier consequences.211 

After gun-armed raiders, variously identified as either Mahicans or Mohawks, 

descended from the north in February 1643, several hundred Lenape-Munsees fled to New 

Amsterdam seeking refuge. On February 24, three colonists led by Marijn Adriaensen 

petitioned Kieft for permission to avenge Smits and the thatcher by attacking the refugees 

encamped at Pavonia and Corlaer’s Hook, whom God had “delivered […] into our hands.” 

The massacres that followed on the night of February 25 were an act of joint participation by 

armed citizen volunteers and WIC troops: Adriaensen led a mob to attack the camp at 

Corlaer’s Hook, while a German mercenary named Sergeant Rodolff led the garrison to 

attack Pavonia. By morning, 120 Indians were dead, over 80 heads were publicly displayed 

in the streets of New Amsterdam, and 30 prisoners had been sold into slavery. Other Dutch 

colonists were emboldened by this: two days after the massacres, Long Island colonists asked 

permission to “ruin and conquer” the Indians “from time to time,” and when Kieft denied 

them permission they attacked a Canarsee village anyways, shooting three people while 

stealing winter stores of corn. Soon, reprisals by Canarsees and other Lenape-Munsee 

sachemships had driven Dutch settlers behind the walls of New Amsterdam as farms went up 

in smoke, and public ire turned against Kieft and Adriaensen, who had already led two 

further expeditions against the Indians.212 

                                                 
211 According to Peter de Vries, he had met the Hackensack before the killing, stumbling home to get his bow 

and arrows; the Hackensack claimed the Dutchman had plied him with brandy and then stolen his beaver coat. 

In Jochem Kuyter’s version of events, the Hackensack had been taunted by a colonist before firing off his bow, 

and “was not considered very sensible by the Indians themselves.” Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14-40; 

Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164; Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, 

Warpaths, 114-18; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter Feast, 286-90. 
212 The northern raiders are variously identified in the literature as Mohawks or Mahicans; given the Mohawks’ 

monopolization of the gun trade at Fort Orange after 1628, I think the former is more likely, but need additional 



 

218 

 

What Kieft and Adriaensen had thought they would achieve by massacring refugees 

who they had offered shelter to, or how they rationalized themselves as having the moral 

high ground in this situation, is unclear to me, but consistent with a pattern of European 

cognitive dissonance vis-à-vis frontier war which we will see recur throughout this thesis: 

indigenous warriors are perceived contradictorily as both bloodthirsty, implacable, and 

vindictive, but also as cowards who only understand the use of force. When put in dialogue 

with an unspoken or articulated European awareness of their shortcomings in prosecuting 

war on the Indians’ terms, the counter-argument that Indians must be defeated by any means 

necessary gains strength, particularly when bolstered by real or perceived victimhood at 

Indians’ hands and the need to recover national or personal pride. Haefeli points out that 

Kieft and other Dutch leaders often wrote of Indians “scoffing” at or mocking them, as when 

they made impossible demands—which, in early modern Algonquian culture, was a way to 

chide naughty children or particularly-obtuse adults out of public misbehaviour, but to early 

modern European sensibilities was an insult little less stinging than the stereotypical glove-

to-the-face, which must be answered bloodily.213   

Either way, by the spring of 1643 the New Netherland colony, which could count 

between 200 to 250 male colonists able to bear arms as well as their garrison, faced the 

majority of the Lenape-Munsee sachemships and an estimated 1,500 warriors. Further, the 

                                                 
research before I can rule out the Mahicans. The literature also agrees that the Wecquaesgeeks were the asylum-

seekers, but adds other peoples against whom the Dutch had grievances: Hackensacks (Burrows and Wallace, 

Lipman) and Raritans (Delage). Given the Lenapes’ and Munsees’ participation in the anti-Dutch coalition of 

1643-45, it seems logical that at least some members of those groups would have been victimized as well in the 

February killings, but for the moment I have to be noncommittal. See Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14-40; 

Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164; Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, 

Warpaths, 114-18; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter Feast, 286-90. 
213 Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Benjamin Madley observes a pattern in 19th-century settler-colonial wars, 

where a settler population outmatched at guerrilla warfare decides to opt for a “final solution” which often 

inflames the situation and sparks further conflict, in “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910.” 



 

219 

 

training of European soldiers and militia for siege and field battles, and their equipment with 

armour and cumbersome early firearms, made them particularly ill-suited to fight the sort of 

hit-and-run raiding warfare Algonquians practiced. Through the mediation of Pieter de Vries, 

Kieft concluded peace in March with the Canarsee sachem Penhawitz, or “One-Eye,” 

through whom Kieft negotiated peace in April with the sachems of the Hackensacks, 

Tappans, and Wecquaesgeeks. But Kieft’s gifts were insufficient for the sachems to buy off 

their aggrieved subjects by covering the dead, making this peace decidedly fragile, while the 

greater portion of the Lenapes remained at war. In August, the Wappinger Confederacy 

joined the anti-Dutch coalition, first plundering WIC ships for beaver pelts and trade goods, 

then attacking Dutch settlements, killing men and capturing women and children. Through 

neutral sachemships, New Netherland’s enemies sent a message: there could be no peace 

until Kieft was removed from power.214  

Kieft and his governing council decided to outsource the war to specialists. To fight 

their enemies on their own terms, the “Long Island savages” would be commissioned “to 

secure the heads of the [hostile] savages” while Captain John Underhill was commissioned to 

reprise his role in the Pequot War by a campaign of total destruction. Captain Underhill, who 

spoke Dutch fluently from his years fighting in the Netherlands and had settled as a 

landowner in New Amsterdam with his Dutch wife, would command a combined force of 

150 Dutch and New England mercenaries whom Kieft had hired for a staggering sum of 

25,000 guilders. The scope and scale of the destruction is suggested by an allegation by 

internal critic Jochem Kuyter that Kieft had, essentially, ordered Underhill to perform home 

                                                 
214 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14-40; Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164; 

Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, Warpaths, 114-18; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter 

Feast, 286-90. 



 

220 

 

invasions in Indian villages: as swords would be too unwieldy inside wigwams, Kieft had 

equipped them at his own expense with custom-made combat knives, prefiguring the short-

sword-sized bowie knives of the later Southeastern frontier. Setting out in October 1643 after 

the harvest, Underhill’s forces stripped the stored corn from abandoned Tankiteke and 

Wecquaesgeek villages before razing them. In February 1644, they killed about 120 

Canarsees in two separate attacks, suffering only one dead and three wounded, which 

suggests, notes Haefeli, “that the Indians were not expecting to be attacked”. In March, they 

surrounded a village in the hills outside Stamford, set it ablaze, and shot and stabbed anyone 

who escaped, inflicted an estimated 500 to 700 casualties. The Wappingers declared an end 

to hostilities after this massacre, but the Lenape-Munsee remained at war. In April, seven 

Long Island Indians, either Rockaways or Canarsees, were accused of killing hogs and taken 

prisoner, and turned over to Underhill’s men, who killed them in a succession of gruesome 

ways. Per the early modern British conflation of scalping with flaying, it is worth noting in 

this context that the mercenaries’ torture of the last of their seven captives included cutting 

off strips of his skin with their knives—a gruesome act of improvised torture which points 

towards the posthumous mutilations of the 18th century (see Chapter 5).215 

 In the spring of 1645, a Long Island sachem brought “a head and hands of the enemy” 

to New Amsterdam. Throughout the spring and summer, the intervention of the Mahicans 

and Mohawks on the side of the Dutch brought an end to the war by August. “Once again,” 

states Evan Haefeli, “sachems had brought the peace that Kieft was unable to secure for 

himself,” though exhaustion through campaigns of attrition and terror obviously played a part 

                                                 
215 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14-40; Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164; 

Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, Warpaths, 114-18; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter 

Feast, 286-90. 



 

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as well. If the conclusions drawn from the Pequot War and Kieft’s War were that attrition by 

mass killings and starvation could end Indian wars, nobody seems to have observed that 

those wars became inevitable when settler-colonial land annexations, in combination with an 

overweening and spiteful attitude towards Indians, made such wars a matter of eventuality – 

or that early massacres intended to forestall future hostilities or intimidate the Indians rarely, 

if ever, had any effect but the opposite.216 

During the 40 years that followed the end of the Pequot War and the outbreak of 

King Philip’s War (1675-76), British colonists steadily encroached on their Algonquian 

neighbours’ lands, resources, and ways of life. In 1648, a law passed by the Massachusetts 

government which banned the sale of firearms and powder to Indians also stipulated “no 

Indian shall at any time powaw, or performe outward worship to their false gods; or to the 

devil in any part of our Jurisdiction” under penalty of a £5 fine, a ban extended to New York 

and Long Island in 1664. In 1653, the Narragansetts told Roger Williams that they feared to 

be “forced from their religion, and for not changing their religion, be invaded by war.” In that 

same year, a New England woman was charged, found guilty, and executed for worshipping 

the “gods” of the Indians and having taken as husband an Algonquian other-than-human 

being or manitou known as Hobbamock, whom the Puritans believed to be Satan himself.217 

                                                 
216 Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 14-40; Haefeli, “Kieft’s War,” 17-40; Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164; 

Bailyn, Barbarous Years, 215-223; Steele, Warpaths, 115-16; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 234-36; Delâge, Bitter 

Feast, 286-90. 
217 Lepore, The Name of War; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 236-41; on the “Hobbamock” case see Slotkin, 

Regeneration through Violence, 116-145. The charge of marriage and sexual intercourse between a Puritan 

woman and the Devil in the form of Hobbamock is consistent with early modern European belief on the nature 

of the relationship between heretics, witches, and Satan—see Stephens, Demon Lovers, and Cohn, Europe’s 

Inner Demons; on the sense of the conquest of the Americas as a literal war against Satan see Cañizares-

Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadores, 1-82. This sense of divine mission was reflected in the seal of the 

Massachusetts Bay colony in which a stereotypical Indian archer, wearing leaves for clothing, alludes to Paul’s 

vision of a pagan Macedonian begging for Christianity (Acts 16:9) by saying “Come over and help us.” This 

allusion was further mirrored in Massachusetts Bay’s relationship with the Wampanoags and the choice of 



 

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But most conflicts were comparatively mundane and based around constant tensions 

with an ever-growing settler population. In the 1660s, New England Algonquians suffered 

two major blows to their sovereignty. First, they lost previous outside sources of support 

against the British as the Dutch surrendered New Netherland in 1664 and the Iroquois 

League, after the Carignan-Salieres incursions, adopted an official position of neutrality vis-

à-vis the French and British colonies. Second, the value of wampum, pelts, and corn 

plummeted as the New England fur trade collapsed, as imported silver currency rendered 

wampum obsolete, and the New England colonies became self-sufficient in food production 

through agriculture, fishing, and stockbreeding. Land was now the only commodity 

Algonquians possessed that New Englanders wanted, and they began taking it through 

treaties of dubious legality, land claimed in lieu of payment for outstanding debts, and 

seizure of land from Indians convicted of crimes. Unfenced livestock prowled into lands the 

Indians still possessed, and in 1675, summoned to Plymouth to answer for the murder of 

John Sassamon, the Wampanoag sachem Philip described a litany of “intractable problems 

involving sovereignty, land, and animals.”218 

Between 1667 and 1671, Philip was summoned to Plymouth three times to answer 

charges of a conspiracy against the English. In 1671 armed Wampanoags paraded through 

Swansea, an offshoot settlement of a village “notorious” for trespassing cattle on confiscated 

land deep in Wampanoag territory, on the doorstep of Philip’s own village on the Mt. Hope 

peninsula; for this, Philip was made to pay various indemnities, up to and including further 

land cessions around his own village. When John Sassamon, a Massachusett interpreter and 

                                                 
famous Macedonian baptismal names, Alexander and Philip, for Massasoit’s descendants and successors: see 

Lepore, The Name of War. 
218 Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 116-145; Lepore, The Name of War; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 236-

41; Lepore, The Name of War; “intractable problems” in DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 239-40.  



 

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minister who had fought under John Underhill in the Pequot War, was found murdered in 

January 1675, Plymouth unilaterally accused, tried, condemned, and executed three of 

Philip’s chief advisors for the murder. The Wampanoags raided Swansea a few weeks later 

on 8 June, and the same soldiers who saw a vision of an Indian warrior’s bow and scalp in 

the eclipse en route to Philip’s town (see Chapter 3) were greeted with another unexpected 

spectacle: eight impaled English heads in the abandoned village. For the first time in New 

England’s history, Algonquians in King Philip’s coalition of Wampanoags, Narragansetts, 

Nipmucks, and Pocumtucks wedded the theatrical violence of mourning-war to an emulation 

of European-style total war, inflicting large-scale casualties and widespread property 

destruction. This was met by a military performance by the United Colonies (Massachusetts 

Bay, Plymouth, and Connecticut) defined by, in Guy Chet’s words, “inexperience and 

amateurism.” The previous generation of Elizabethan-era professional soldiers were, by 

1675, either moribund from age or dead, and New Englanders’ militia training in volley-fire 

and line-marching tactics were ill-suited for wilderness warfare. Algonquians, on the other 

hand, had been familiarizing themselves with the use, maintenance, and repair of firearms 

since the 1640s, particularly snaphaunces, an early flintlock which offered significant 

advantages of mobility and ease of use over the matchlock. At the tactical level, James David 

Drake describes a “coherent and effective military strategy” of keeping the colonists on the 

defensive with surprise raids by small parties of warriors, which New Englanders 

pejoratively called “skulking”—“like Wolves, and other Beasts of Prey,” wrote Nathaniel 

Saltonstall— while focusing on large-scale attacks on towns.219 

                                                 
219 James David Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 (University of Massachusetts 

Press, 1999), 86 (“coherent and effective”), 57-167; Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness; Lepore, The 

Name of War; Seeman, Death in the New World, 175-77; Malone, The Skulking Way of War, 42-98.  



 

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 Daniel Richter observes that of some 90 New England towns, over 50 were attacked 

and at least 12 destroyed during King Philip’s War, and Jill Lepore gives a figure of 25 towns 

out of 50 destroyed by the war’s end. The cattle, horses, and swine who had invaded Indians’ 

fields and granaries were butchered, maimed, or locked in barns and burned alive, while 

houses and outbuildings were torched. Even the idea of “plantation” was mocked when some 

warriors buried New England prisoners up to their necks, taunting “let us now see how you 

will grow when Planted into the Ground.” Graves were dug up and the dead were decapitated 

and exposed; colonists slain in attacks were posthumously mutilated and their bodies left in 

the roads to be stumbled upon by their neighbours. In revenge for decades of English 

belittling of the manitous and Algonquian religious rites, Bibles were torn up and the 

colonists’ religion insulted. An attack on Rhode Island in June 1675 combined elements of 

all of the above: English forces found some “newly burned” houses, a torn-up Bible with its 

pages scattered “in Hatred of our Religion,” and two or three miles up the road “some Heads, 

Scalps, and Hands […] stuck upon Poles near the Highway, in that barbarous and inhuman 

Manner bidding us Defiance.”220 

To win the war, the United Colonies needed Indian allies, but a general fear and 

loathing for Indians prolonged and exacerbated the conflict. When a Wampanoag sachemship 

near Dartmouth, a month into the war, offered to surrender to the Plymouth Colony through 

the negotiation of Benjamin Church, his superiors overrode his promises of good conduct and 

sold these Wampanoags into Caribbean slavery. Offers by members of Christian convert 

communities known as “Praying Indians” to scout for and fight alongside the English was 

                                                 
220 Drake, King Philip’s War, 57-167; Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness; Lepore, The Name of War; 

Seeman, Death in the New World, 175-77; Malone, The Skulking Way of War, 42-98; on violent irony see 

Gleach, Powhatan’s World, 47-50. 



 

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rejected due to a belief that they were “preying Indians” whose Christianity was a façade to 

conceal murders and robberies. Over the objections of Thomas Danforth and Daniel Gookin, 

many Praying Indians were interned on Deer Island and other barren islands in Boston 

Harbour from autumn 1675 to the late spring of 1676, where at least half of them died from 

hunger, disease, and exposure, and others were seized by slave traders and sold abroad; 

Praying Indians not interned were attacked by neighbouring British settlers. As Indian 

refugees fled north to Abenaki country in 1675, Massachusetts colonists began demanding 

they relinquish their firearms as a show of good faith. When a boatload of English sailors 

deliberately drowned the wife and children of a Sokoki Abenaki sachem by ramming their 

canoe, Abenaki bands went to war with Massachusetts and began migrating northwards 

towards New France.221 

Another step towards prototypical scalp bounties was taken early in the war when the 

Narragansetts, still the single largest sachemship in New England and able to field 3,500 

warriors, sent 100 warriors as allies to Connecticut on the terms 

That for every Indians Head-Skin they brought, they should have a Coat, (i.e. two Yards of 

Trucking Cloth, worth five Shillings per Yard here) and for every one they bring alive two 

Coats; for King Philips Head, Twenty Coats, and if taken alive, Forty Coats: These went out, 

and returned in Fourteen Days Time, bringing with them about Eighteen Heads in all.
222   

                                                 
221 On conflict with the Abenaki, see: Entry “Squando (sometimes: Squanto)” in Dan L. Thrapp, in 

Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography Volume III, P-Z (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 

1988), 1350; Entry “Abenaki Wars” in Tucker ed., in The Encyclopedia of the North American Indian Wars, 

1607-1890 […] Volume 1 (A to L), 3; Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North 

America, 1600 – 1763,” 418-21; Drake, King Philip’s War, 57-167; Chet, Conquering the American 

Wilderness; Lepore, The Name of War; Seeman, Death in the New World, 175-77; Malone, The Skulking Way of 

War, 42-98. 
222 Narratives of the Indian Wars, 35; Drake, King Philip’s War, 57-167; Chet, Conquering the American 

Wilderness; Lepore, The Name of War; Seeman, Death in the New World, 175-77; Malone, The Skulking Way of 

War, 42-98. 



 

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Georg Friederici also reports that Connecticut soldiers were offered a bounty of 30 shillings 

per “head” against the 10-shilling value of the Indians’ bounties. As will be noted here and in 

Chapter 5, the bounties paid out to Europeans were typically higher than those paid to 

indigenous allies and were typically paid in cash rather than in equivalent trade goods. In 

part, this was because scalp bounties were meant to bolster the morale of Europeans, and 

because indigenous warriors, who supplied themselves and had military experience, were 

seen as potentially cost-effective mercenaries. Note also that the value offered for a prisoner 

was double that of a “head-skin” or scalp which suggests, in addition to reflecting mourning-

war’s martial philosophy, that a preferred goal for the New Englanders from the outset was 

selling Indian prisoners into slavery.223 

Connecticut fielded indigenous allies earlier in the war than either of its rivals, and in 

larger numbers. But the Narragansetts were made into enemies in September 1675, after a 

supply train guarded by United Colonies troops was ambushed and routed by Indians at 

Muddy Brook outside Deerfield, Massachusetts, the Commissioners of the United Colonies 

decided that the Narragansetts had sheltered the attackers and were “deeply accessory in the 

present bloody outrages.” Overturning their prior arrangement to pay the Narragansetts for 

scalps and prisoners, in November 1675 Massachusetts outsourced the job to a volunteer 

company, many of whom were convicted pirates; tasked with “destroying the enemy,” they 

were permitted to reward themselves by selling or enslaving their captives. Their leader, a 

Jamaican privateer named Captain Samuel Moseley, had already spent the month of October 

attacking neutral villages and Praying Indians, and been censured by the Massachusetts 

                                                 
223 Friederici, “Scalping in America,” 433-36; Drake, King Philip’s War, 57-167; Chet, Conquering the 

American Wilderness; Lepore, The Name of War; Seeman, Death in the New World, 175-77; Malone, The 

Skulking Way of War, 42-98. 



 

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General Court for destroying a New Hampshire Indian village in defiance of express orders 

not to. A sense of Moseley’s attitude is given in his postscript to a self-justifying letter of 

October 1675, describing his interrogation of an elderly Indian woman who, after she had 

outlived her usefulness by answering his questions, he had “torn to peeces by Doggs”.224 

 In the Great Swamp Fight of 19 December, 1675, Connecticut brought 150 Mohegans 

and Pequots as scouts and infantry for the 1,000-strong United Colonies force that attacked 

the Narragansetts’ main fortified town, whose defenses had been modernized by the 

Narragansett stonemason, Stonewall John. As at Mystic and Stamford, New Englanders 

circled the village, fired the wigwams, and shot anyone who escaped. In addition to inflicting 

300 casualties, attrition killed a greater number: Captain Benjamin Church said Narragansetts 

later told him that “nearly a third” of their population “were killed by the English and by the 

cold that night.” Andrew Lipman observes that this victory brought the war’s “single biggest 

haul” of prisoners to be sold into slavery. But it was also a Pyrrhic victory revealing the New 

Englanders’ amateurism. Having run out of provisions, the United Colonies troops deprived 

themselves of shelter and food by burning the village, leaving the survivors to eat their horses 

and endure a frigid night march which killed 20 and left others unable to campaign for the 

rest of the season. At some point “amateurism” became inseparable from “incompetence.”225 

 As in Kieft’s War, the combination of scorched-earth tactics and destruction of 

indigenous property, and the intercession of indigenous allies from outside the conflict and 

former combatants turned reluctant allies, turned the tide against Philip’s coalition. During 

the winter and spring of 1675-76 United Colonies forces harried Indian villages, with 

                                                 
224 Drake, King Philip’s War, 57-167; Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness; Lepore, The Name of War; 

Seeman, Death in the New World, 175-77; Malone, The Skulking Way of War, 42-98. 
225 On the semiotics of the eclipse: Drake, King Philip’s War, 73-74, 93; Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 85-164.  



 

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particular attention paid to food stores and their ability to maintain their guns: killing 

blacksmiths, carrying off tools, and throwing anvils and pigs of lead into swamps and rivers. 

In January 1676, the intercession of New York’s governor Edmund Andros brought the 

Mohawks into the fray. The possibilities of allied Indians in conjunction with New 

Englanders was shown in March of 1676, when Benjamin Church led a joint British-and-

Indian ranger force into the Nipmuck country where they inflicted some small victories, 

which John Grenier credits as having “inaugurated the American ranger tradition.” In the 

spring of 1676 New England began recruiting Praying Indians, and former combatants 

seeking amnesty after the winter attrition campaign, placing the price of their freedom as the 

heads and scalps of those Indians still at war. Alliance was shown through acts of mimesis, or 

cross-cultural pidgin, like the quartering of King Philip, the trade in heads and scalps, and the 

exchange of prisoners. When Canonchet, a Narragansett sachem and one of the most 

successful raiders of New England towns during the spring offensive of 1676, was captured 

by Connecticut soldiers and Mohegans in April, his execution in Stonington, Connecticut 

through drawing and quartering provided a way for Connecticut’s allies—Mohegans, 

Pequots, and a band of Narragansetts led by a sachem named Ninnicroft—to show their 

commitment. According to one account, “the Pequods shot him, the Mohegans cut off his 

Head and quartered his Body, and Ninnicrofts Men made the Fire and burned his Quarters”; 

then Ninnicroft and his followers presented Canonchet’s head to the Council at Hartford, “as 

a Token of their Love and Fidelity.”226 

                                                 
226 Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects Unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in 

Colonial New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 [2005]), 202-04; Lepore, The Name of War, 

173-80; Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675-1815 (University College London 

Press, 1998), 57-82; Grenier, First Way of War, 16-52; Steele, Warpaths, 103-07; Patrick M. Malone, The 

Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Lanham, New York, London: 



 

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The rise and fall of the British Indian slave trade, 1660 to 1717 

 When offered as financial incentive for private citizens and proxies among allied 

indigenous groups to benefit from the targeted destruction of specific Indian third parties, 

slave hunting served a similar, though not identical, function as scalp bounties. While scalp 

bounties were only intermittently offered throughout King Philip’s War, particularly by 

Connecticut and particularly towards the war’s end, all members of the United Colonies 

aimed from the outset to sell Indian prisoners into slavery at home or abroad into the 

Caribbean. Thousands of Algonquians, observes Andrew Lipman, were sold into the Atlantic 

at an average price of 3 pounds sterling each, not all of them prisoners of King Philip’s war: 

some were Praying Indians scooped up from internment in Boston Harbour, while others 

were domestic servants kidnapped from colonists’ homes. As Jill Lepore points out, the 

Puritan claim that Philip’s coalition deserved enslavement as punishment for treason had a 

flimsy legal basis, since British law punished treason and rebellion with execution, while if 

the “rebel” Indians were sovereign peoples, they could not be consigned so easily to chattel 

slavery. As elsewhere in the North American colonies, the niceties of the law rarely impeded 

the potential profitability of the Indian slave trade.227  

 While British-indigenous relations were not uniformly hostile at all times and in an 

all places in the Southeast, Neil Salisbury marks two defining, incompatible trends in those 

relationships from the 1660s to 1715: in peacetime, British traders purchased allied Indians’ 

                                                 
Madison Books, 1991); Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90-105; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 236-41; 

Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness, 38-69. 
227 Lipman, Saltwater Frontier, 217-222; Seeman, Death in the New World, 175-77; Weaver, The Red Atlantic, 

57-62; Lepore, The Name of War, throughout, on slavery, 153-166; Starkey, European and Native American 

Warfare, 1675-1815, 57-82; Grenier, First Way of War, 16-52; Steele, Warpaths, 103-07; Malone, The Skulking 

Way of War; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 90-105; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 236-41; Chet, 

Conquering the American Wilderness, 38-69.  



 

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deerskins and captive enemies for trade goods, particularly firearms, while at the same time 

an increasing settler population extended its reach into indigenous land of both allies and 

enemies by private purchase, squatting, and trespassing. By the time of the Third Anglo-

Powhatan War (1644-46), Ian K. Steele observes that selling Indian captives into slavery was 

already “routine” in Virginian frontier warfare. In 1666, when Virginia’s governor William 

Berkeley dispatched Rappahannock County militia to settle disputes between squatters and 

“northern Indians” such as the Nansemonds and Rappahannocks, he advised “I think it is 

necessary to Destroy all these Northern Indians,” suggesting to offset the costs of the 

expedition by selling “the women and children” into slavery. Paul Kelton notes that though 

indigenous slavery on Chesapeake tobacco plantations is poorly documented prior to its 

enshrinement in law in 1682, all the evidence indicates that the trade was substantial; nor was 

it restricted to Indians defeated and captured in war by Virginians. In 1662, Virginians began 

purchasing prisoners of war from Indian trading partners, technically illegal since they hadn’t 

been taken directly by the English themselves in war, so their designation in the records as 

indentured servants served as a legal fiction which benefited the burgeoning industry.228 

 In Carolina, founded in 1663 but not populated by British settlers until 1670, the 

Indian slave trade played a foundational role. Early Carolina, particularly the southern part of 

the colony, was influenced from the beginning by the established Caribbean colonies and 

their existing systems of racialized, large-scale slavery, particularly by a group of Anglo-

Barbadian deerhide merchants known as the “Goose Creek men.” In 1670, the Goose Creek 

traders offered the Westos, a people of uncertain ethnolinguistic identity who Neil Salisbury 

                                                 
228 Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

1994), 49; “destroy all these northern Indians” in Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 222; Paul Kelton, Epidemics and 

Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska 

Press, 2007); Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763”.  



 

231 

 

suggests were Eries displaced from the Great Lakes during the Beaver Wars, up to 15 trade 

muskets for every captive child or woman of an enemy community they brought in, as well 

as manufactured goods and rum; they then resold these captives into the Caribbean, to 

Virginia tobacco plantations, or within Carolina to their own cash-cropping ventures of rice 

and indigo. Resold for 5 to 10 pounds sterling and sometimes more, the Indian slaves went to 

Virginia tobacco plantations and to the Goose Creek men’s burgeoning cash-cropping of rice 

and indigo. Soon, notes David La Vere, Carolina was importing more slaves, both from the 

American Southeast and the African Atlantic slave trade, than any other British colony, even 

Virginia. By the end of the 1670s, the fate of the Westos also set a precedent within the 

Southeastern slave trade, for middlemen who had outlived their usefulness. In 1679, on the 

grounds that English settlers had been caught in the crossfire during the Westos’ slaving raids 

against coastal Cusabos, Carolina declared joint war against the Westos with the 

“Savannahs” or Shawnees, a people of the Savannah River to th south who had formerly 

been among the Westos’ targets for slave raids. Georg Friederici’s 1906 assertion that “In 

1680, scalp bounties were offered in South Carolina” could well have been the case for the 

last remaining Westos, though my more recent sources make no mention of it. Alongside 

other Savannah River peoples like the Yuchis and the Yamasees, the latter a heterogeneous 

coalition of Savannah River peoples and Guale and Apalachee refugees from Spanish 

Florida, the once-powerful Westos were devoured by the Carolina slave trade, reduced by 

captivities and killings “to an estimated fifty people.”229 

                                                 
229 Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement ; David H. Corkran, The Creek Frontier, 1540-1783 (University of 

Oklahoma Press, 2016), 43-60; James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World, 8-91; Daniel H. Usner Jr., American 

Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 

47-55; Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 313-331; Ramsey, The Yamasee War, 34-53; J.R. McNeill, Mosquito 

Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 15- 60, 



 

232 

 

 But these grim middle-ground relations of mutual benefit from the slave trade were 

restricted largely to a wealthy few; the dominant model of Anglo-American and Indian 

relations in the Southeast, as in New England, remained a settler-colonial model of land 

annexation or attempts at same, and a broader and collective hatred of Indians. These, and a 

desire to expand and democratize slaveowner status in Virginia, turned incidents on the 

Virginia frontier into Bacon’s Rebellion (1676). In 1675, a frontier conflict between a 

Virginia planter named Thomas Mathew and an Algonquian people, the Doegs, led to a cycle 

of reprisals which culminated with Virginia militia mistakenly attacking and killing several 

members of the well-armed and hitherto-uninvolved Susquehannocks. In April of 1676, after 

nearly 300 colonists had been killed in revenge and after the House of Burgesses had offered 

a reward of one matchcoat or 20 arms’ lengths of tobacco for each Indian prisoner, Nathaniel 

Bacon offered to lead volunteers against the Susquehannocks, promising war “against all 

Indians in generall”—deliberately and systematically targeting the tributaries and allies of 

Governor Bacon and his cronies. Bacon’s rebels were fighting the Virginia government and 

planter oligarchy’s reluctance to open up western land and the wealth they gained from the 

Indian trade, including their illegal sale of weapons to Indians. But this also comprised a 

genocidal crusade against all Indians. Bacon’s rebels shot Susquehannock and Doeg chiefs 

when they came to parley and, in one instance, Bacon hired the Occaneechees to capture 

Susquehannocks for him, executed the prisoners, then killed most of the Occaneechees. The 

refusal to distinguish between friend and foe indicates the extirpationist spirit that preceded 

the widespread institutionalization of scalp bounties on the Southeastern frontier.230  

                                                 
195-234; Robin Beck, Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence, 181-202; Salisbury, “Native People and 

European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763”. 
230 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 223-24; Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement; Grenier, First Way of War 16-52 (40: 

“one matchcoat”); Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism, Native America, and the 



 

233 

 

Governor Berkeley sided with the rebels by legalising widespread Indian slavery. 

Paul Kelton suggests that the Westos, and not Virginia’s planter gentry, may have been the 

example that Nathaniel Bacon and his rebels envisioned for themselves in their demands to 

expand the slaveowning franchise among white Virginians. In Kiernan’s words, Berkeley 

tried to “ride the rebel tiger” by publicly agreeing in writing in 1676 that Indians “generally 

conspired against us in all the western parts of America,” and were “now all our enemies.” 

To placate the rebels he ruled in 1676 that any Indians who left their towns without English 

permission were considered enemies; that Virginia troops would “have the benefit of all 

plunder either Indians or otherwise”; and that “all Indians taken in warr” would be 

automatically enslaved. Though Bacon died of disease in 1676 and Berkeley was recalled to 

England after the rebels burned Jamestown, legal reforms continued to extend slaveowning 

among white Virginians, ruling that soldiers could buy and sell slaves among themselves 

(1679); removing all restrictions on trade (1680, 1691); and declaring all Indians eligible to 

be sold into slavery, regardless of treaty, political affiliation, or conversion to Christianity 

before or after enslavement (1682).231 

In 1680, following the annihilation of the Westos, the Lords Proprietor of the 

Carolina colony ruled slaves could only be imported from communities at least 200 miles 

beyond the limits of British settlement, and Charles Town’s trading network soon cris-

crossed the Southeast, spreading what Paul Kelton and others call a “deadly synergy” of 

warfare, firearms, and disease. Targeted while tending their fields or hunting, communities 

                                                 
First American Frontiers, 1585-1685 (Cornell University Press, 2003), 189-193; Steele,Warpaths, 49-57; 

Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 135-37; Richter, Facing East, 105-08; Merrell, The Indians’ New World, 

8-91. 
231 Grenier, First Way of War, 16-52; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 59-64; Kiernan, Blood and Soil; 

Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement. 



 

234 

 

attacked by slavers retreated into walled settlements, where malnutrition and stressed 

immune systems left the survivors liable to illnesses, including virgin soil epidemics of Old 

World diseases. The killing of men and the targeting of children and women for resale 

hindered the recovery of pre-war populations, while slave-raiding peoples found that they 

had struck a devil’s bargain: more of them died in battle, captives were sold off rather than 

adopted, and the fate of those who reneged on their debts to British merchants was an 

omnipresent fear. Following the Great Southeastern Smallpox Epidemic of 1696, which 

burned along the Southeastern trade networks of Carolina and Virginia, the slave trade 

became a source of diminishing returns and a trigger for conflicts. In 1707, the migration of 

Shawnees to Maryland and Virginia under pressure from Catawba raiders and recently-

established Apalachee villages on the Savannah was taken by the South Carolina government 

as a “Savannah Revolt” instigated by rival traders out of Virginia. After a trader reported that 

Shawnees had killed “several Christians,” South Carolina sent Catawbas under Carolinian 

leadership to attack the “Deserted Shawnees”; when these Shawnees retaliated by attacking 

the “Northwards Indians” or Catawbas and other Siouians of the Piedmont, Carolina loaned 

the Piedmont peoples fifty muskets with flints, ammunition, and gunpowder, informing them 

that anyone who delivered a Shawnee scalp could keep his gun.232 

In the early 1700s, settler-colonial conflicts brewed between colonists in northern 

Carolina and their indigenous neighbours: the Tuscaroras, an Iroquoian people who had 

enjoyed a middleman trading relationship since the decline of the Powhatan Confederacy in 

the 1650s, and smaller Algonquian vassal polities like the Neuses and Corees, who relied on 

                                                 
232 Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade, 209-212; La Vere, Tuscarora War, 16, 18-68; Kelton, Epidemics and 

Enslavement. 



 

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the Tuscaroras for protection against the Iroquois and the English. In 1710, a Tuscarora 

leader named Hancock who headed their anti-British faction had already appealed to the 

Iroquois Confederacy and the government of Pennsylvania, sending wampum belts through 

Seneca and Shawnee intermediaries asking for guarantees of help against Carolina slavers. In 

the spring of 1711 the Surveyor-General of North Carolina settled 300 refugees from the 

Germanies and Switzerland at New Bern, dangerously close to Hancock’s Town; in 

September Hancock led a coalition of Tuscarora and Algonquian warriors which wiped out 

New Bern in an early-morning attack, killing 120 of the refugees and attacking and killing 

other white Carolinians outside New Bern. Like the 1622 Virginia massacre, the Tuscaroras’ 

exemplary 1711 attack was not followed up by others, and Hancock’s subsequent attempts to 

secure an agreement from the captive Surveyor-General to continue trade but not expand 

North Carolina landholdings further without “due warning” indicates that the Tuscaroras 

wanted continued coexistence. As in 1620s Virginia, the response from Carolina was a 

campaign of total war.233 

In the subsequent Tuscarora War (1711-13), Virginia and Carolina offered scalp and 

prisoner bounties to militiamen and allied Indians. Virginia sent no troops, but Virginia’s 

Lieutenant-Governor offered £20 per scalp to British colonists, while uninvolved Tuscaroras 

on Virginia’s frontier were offered a bounty of 6 blankets apiece (a total value of about 40 

shillings) for the scalps of Hancock’s warriors, and market prices for enslaved women and 

children. South Carolina234 dispatched British militias and officers leading larger collections 

of “warlike Indians” from allied nations, like Colonel John Barnwell and his allies of the 

                                                 
233 Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade, 209-212; La Vere, Tuscarora War, 16, 18-68. 
234 North and South Carolina separated in 1712.  



 

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1712 campaign, a Catawba named Captain Jack and a Piedmont leader known as Captain 

Bull. Fighting for scalps and prisoners also offered a way to tally the dead: Barnwell’s forces 

recorded 52 scalps and 30 captives after victory at Torhunta in 1712, while Col. James 

Moore Jr.’s victory at Neoheroka in the spring of 1713 was measured in 392 Indian prisoners 

and 192 scalps. Scalps and prisoners were also exchanged as gifts and tokens of alliance: 

Tom Blount, the pro-English Tuscarora leader, had “about thirty scalps” delivered to South 

Carolina, and personally delivered eight captives to North Carolina’s acting-governor 

Thomas Pollock, who gave Blount £10 for each and resold them into the Caribbean. But for 

the British colonies, the ultimate goal was extirpation. During the course of the war, at least 

1,000 or 1,200 Tuscaroras were sold into slavery, and the number may have been as high as 

1,800 or 2,000. In 1712, the North Carolina government chided Barnwell for a negotiated 

truce with Hancock’s Tuscaroras, urging him instead to exterminate them, per the “laudable 

custom of South Carolina.”235 

Scalp and slave bounties were paired again in the Yamasee War (1715-17), the final 

spasm of the Southeastern slave trade consuming itself. Relations between the Yamasees and 

Carolina had been declining since the Yamasees had begun trying to restore their population 

by placing a moratorium on war expeditions and adopting their captives. Various actions by 

Carolina colonists were readily legible to the Yamasees as ominous and signs of enmity: 

Anglican missionaries began kidnapping mixed-race Yamasee children for religious 

instruction; the trader Alexander Long hired Cherokee mercenaries from the interior to wipe 

out Chestowee, a Yuchi town, to recoup an outstanding debt he claimed against them in May 

1714; in early 1715, when total Indian debt to South Carolina was estimated at £50,000, a 

                                                 
235 Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade; La Vere, Tuscarora War, 16, 18-68. 



 

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census of Southeastern Indians was interpreted as a literal headcount. On the night of 14 

May, 1715, Indian agent Thomas Nairne promised the Yamasee headmen that South Carolina 

meant them no ill will; as soon as he retired for the evening, his abrasive, arrogant 

counterpart agent John Wright privately promised, in insulting language and with 

unmistakeably coarse hand gestures, that South Carolina would hang the Yamasees’ four 

principal micos (headmen) and sell their women and children into Caribbean slavery. Killing 

most of the delegates, the Yamasees led a coalition of “virtually every nation in the South,” 

in what Salisbury calls the most extensive pan-Indian uprising “yet in colonial North 

America” against South Carolina, in which the most determined fighters were the “Southern 

Indians” most heavily in debt to the Carolina traders: the Yamasees, Yuchis, Shawnees, 

Apalachicolas, Apalachees, and Lower Creeks. Within the war’s first few months, most of 

Carolina’s plantation districts were torched, and several hundred Creek and Apalachee 

warriors came within a few miles of Charles Town in August 1715.236 

As in Bacon’s Rebellion and King Philip’s War, undifferentiated fear and hatred for 

Indians led the colonists to make counterproductive decisions in the war’s first year. That the 

colonists dreaded the Yamasees and their allies is indicated by South Carolina governor 

Charles Craven’s public description of them in the Commons’ House of Assembly as 

“monsters of man kind” and, privately, a colonist’s letter of that summer which demonstrates 

                                                 
236 Wright’s insult was transcribed by a captured English boy using watered gunpowder for ink, taking dictation 

from a Yamasee headman known as the Huspaw King: after Nairne had gone, Wright threatened “that the white 

men would come and [fetch] [illegible] the Yamasees in one night,” hang the four principal headmen, enslave 

the rest, and sell all of them into foreign slavery, “for he said that the men of the Yamasees were like women, 

and shew’d his hands one to the other” – in other words, Wright drove his point across with an obscene vaginal 

hand gesture, which “vex’d the great Warrier’s [sic].” In Ramsey, The Yamasee War, esp. 1-54, 227-28; Doris 

B. Fisher, entry “Yamasee War” (811-812) in Alan Gallay ed., Colonial Wars of North America, 1512 – 1763: 

An Encyclopedia (Routledge: 2015 [1996]); McNeill, Mosquito Empires; La Vere, The Tuscarora War; 

Ramsey, The Yamasee War, 1-53; Beck, Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence, 181-202; Kelton, Epidemics 

and Enslavement; Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade. 



 

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how scalping had become a metonym for colonists’ anxieties of Indian torture by the early 

18th century. Lion Gardiner, in his memoirs 20 years after the Pequot War, had not even 

mentioned scalping in his prayer to be spared the horrors of Indian torture: “not to have a 

sharp stake… thrust into my fundament and to have my skin flaid of[f] by piecemeale and cut 

in pieces and bits and my flesh rosted and thrust down my throat as thes[e] people have 

done.” A colonist’s letter from the summer of 1715, by contrast, uses the “scalped and [x]” 

formulation standard in Anglo-American horror stories from the 18th century onwards: he 

wrote how he dreaded not just being “massacred by savages” but “perhaps… being rosted in 

slow fires, scalp’d and strick with lightwood, and other inexpressible tortures.” In early, 

critical battles that halted the first Yamasee offensives, Indian warriors from several of the 

“settlement” nations that lived in the shadow of larger Carolina coastal towns fought 

alongside white colonists and armed African slaves, but by mid-July had gone over to the 

Yamasees, “alienated by the growing anti-Indian rhetoric of white Carolinians.”237 

Walter Hixson describes the Carolina counterattack as “a boomerang of 

indiscriminate violence replete with massacres fueled by scalp bounties,” while offering no 

further explication in text or footnotes—perhaps Yamasee scalps were redeemed for 

outstanding bounties offered in Virginia during the Tuscarora War. As in earlier wars, the 

intervention of indigenous allies on the side of the colonists, with incentives of scalp and 

prisoner bounties to appeal to Indian allies and Europeans, turned the tide against the 

Yamasees’ coalition. In June, South Carolina obtained the assistance of the Mohawks and 

Senecas against the northerly, less-determined members of the Yamasee coalition: the 

                                                 
237 Craven, and colonist’s letter, cited in Ramsey, The Yamasee War; Lion Gardiner cited in Bailyn, The 

Barbarous Years, 501. 



 

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Piedmont Siouians, Catawbas, Upper Creeks, Cheraws, and Choctaws. As the Great Peace of 

1701 prevented the Iroquois from warring with France’s allies in the Great Lakes and 

interior, fighting Carolina’s Siouian and Muskogean enemies would offer the Iroquois 

captives and war honours, and possible scalp and slave bounties, without jeopardizing 

diplomatic relations; in conjunction with casualties inflicted on them by Carolina militiamen, 

these Yamasee allies dropped out of the war by the end of the summer. Military assistance 

was also offered to Tom Blount’s Tuscaroras, whose incentives included not just scalp and 

slave bounties but the redemption of captive Tuscaroras in South Carolina and among the 

Southern Indians. The entry of the remote, numerous Cherokees on the British side in 1716 

served to tie up the Creeks for the remainder of the war, while their raids via the Tennessee 

River intimidated New France and compelled several smaller nations in Louisiana to come to 

terms with the English. By 1717, the Creeks, Chickasaws, and many Piedmont nations were 

coming to terms with the British as well; the survivors of the Savannah River nations, on the 

other hand, had scattered beyond the reach of the Carolina traders, as refugees among the 

Lower Creeks and into the swamps of southern Georgia, while the remaining Yamasees 

returned to their homelands in Florida to take asylum in St. Augustine.238 

South Carolina land speculators who had been eying the Yamasees’ well-watered 

lands on the Savannah River since 1707, ideal for rice production and cattle-raising, were 

now free to snap them up. Alan Gallay describes the conclusion of the Yamasee War as 

“both an end” to the Indian slave trade “and a beginning” of a new phase of British settler-

colonialism in the Southeast, in which the mass importation of West African slaves would 

                                                 
238 Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism, 38-41; Ramsey, The Yamasee War, esp. 1-54, 227-28; La 

Vere, The Tuscarora War ; Beck, Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence, 181-202; Kelton, Epidemics and 

Enslavement ; Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade; Fisher, “Yamasee War”; Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse; 

Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763”. 



 

240 

 

replace indigenous slave labour on a vastly-expanded plantation system. While the Indian 

slave trade had been vastly destructive to communities and individuals, it had at least placed 

a perverse sort of value on living indigenous bodies. The scalp-hunting system, on the other 

hand, simply paid for dead bodies, and in a way that obscured the verifiability of the victim’s 

identity; this, in turn, presented no hindrance to the enactment of generalized Indian-hating 

among Anglo-American frontiersmen.239 

Conclusion: the ranger tradition and the myth of the Indian hunter 

 As noted above and in Chapter 3, one of the major problems for British colonists was 

that their success in replicating a British way of life in the New World, by transforming 

Indians’ mosaic landscapes of cornfields, managed woodlands, and forests into cleared fields, 

towns, and widely-dispersed farms, did little to prepare them for prosecuting war as Indians 

waged it. Scalp and slave bounties went partway towards bolstering the morale of militias 

and volunteers, but were more important in the contracting of military specialists on a 

piecework basis. While allied Indians remained a part of the Anglo-American way of war up 

to the end of the 19th century and beyond, British colonists also began forming specialist 

units of volunteers who tried to emulate or match Indian warriors’ mobility and woodcraft. 

Ian K. Steele dates the origin of ranging in Virginia to 1645 when a force of volunteer 

“rangers,” to be supported by the proceeds of the tobacco economy, were contracted to 

defend the colony for a year. John Grenier proposes an origin point of a distinctive 

Southeastern equestrian ranger tradition, which reached its full and bloody flowering with the 

Kentucky dragoons of the War of 1812 and the Texas Rangers, to Virginia’s war with the 

                                                 
239 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade; McNeill, Mosquito Empires. 



 

241 

 

Susquehannock in 1676. During the conflict, the House of Burgesses enlisted a force of 125 

dragoons to “range” between the headwaters of the Piedmont’s major rivers, though Grenier 

notes that the Mohawks, at Governor Andros’ request, defeated and dispersed the 

Susquehannocks before the rangers’ mettle could be tested. With the Iroquois Confederacy 

declaring neutrality during King William’s War (1688-97), Benjamin Church led mixed 

English and Indian ranger companies into Maine to kill Abenakis and burn their villages on 

four expeditions (1689, 1690, 1692, 1696), during which time the Abenaki Confederacy, 

supported by New France, led retaliatory raids into New England. These raids were 

accompanied by incentives: the plunder of Indian villages, the slave trade in Virginia 

(mentioned above), and head and scalp bounties in Massachusetts. In 1694, notes Benjamin 

Madley, Massachusetts offered a £25 reward for women or children “under the age of 

fourteen years, that shall be killed,” perhaps the first Anglo-American bounty specifically for 

their deaths; in 1694 and 1695, Massachusetts also “offered equal monetary rewards for dead 

victims and living prisoners.” In 1697 Massachusetts offered bounty specifically for scalps of 

men, women, and “every child of the said enemy under the age of ten years.” In 1689, 

Massachusetts offered rangers “whatever Indian plunder falls into their hands [for] their 

own” as well as a scalp bounty of 8 pounds from the public treasury, for which Georg 

Friederici suggests “the successful scalp hunter could just buy himself a horse and a draught 

animal”. Consider, before we continue to Chapter 5 and pick up these threads again, that 

ranger is a 14th-century English term for a gamekeeper who patrolled royal estates to protect 

game populations from poachers and predatory animals. So, in one sense, “ranger” is cognate 



 

242 

 

with a perception of Indian warriors as nascently criminal, and a darker idea of Indians as 

beast-men—not just illegitimate combatants, but beyond humanity.240 

                                                 
240 Steele, Warpaths, 49; Magsigpen and Virginia bounties cited in Grenier, First Way of War, 39 n. 77 (8 

pound scalp bounty, “whatever Indian plunder”);  Friederici, “Scalping in America,” 433-36; Friederici, 

Skalpieren, Griffin trans., 73; Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, 

Historiography, and New Methods,” 114-117. 



 

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Chapter Five: Dark Mimesis: Scalp-hunting from the Seven Years’ War to the War of 

1812 

And comes the sacred spoil from friend or foe 

No marks distinguish, and no man can know.  

–Joel Barlow, The Columbiad (1807), VI.673-74241 

The general strictly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except where the 

enemy are Indians, or Canadians dressed like Indians. –James Wolfe, 1759.242 

Introduction 

By the time of the Seven Years’ War a powerful and self-reinforcing mythology 

regarding the horrors of savage war, Anglo-American victimhood, and the need for 

disproportionate retribution to be taken against Indians had coalesced into the paradigmatic 

ideas of scalping and scalp-hunting. Yet this mythology of the frontier was Janus-faced, as 

the essentialized Indian warrior, the center and target of the mimetic savagery of conquest 

and ethnic cleansing, was paired with his imagined counterpart, the fantasized Indian-slaying 

frontiersman, whom Herman Melville dyspeptically dubbed the “Leatherstocking nemesis.” 

This chapter will sketch the development of the Anglo-American myth of the Indian warrior 

and the Indian hunter in the first half of the 18th century; the ramifications of its enactment 

between the American Revolution and the Jacksonian era; and the elevation of these paired 

myths into American art and literature during the 1820s to 1840s. This chapter will conclude 

with selections from Black Hawk’s 1833 memoir to demonstrate an indigenous rebuttal to 

Anglo-American self-representations. 

                                                 
241 Joel Barlow, The Columbiad: A Poem (Philadelphia: Fry and Kammerer, 1807), 239-40 
242 Seeman, Death in the New World, 264-89; Wright, The Life of Major-General James Wolfe (1864), 531, 

cited in Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (New York and Oxford: 

Berghahn Books, 2012), 39-47. 



 

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Britain was not the only colonizing power to experiment with, or implement, a settler-

colonial system of colonization in North America; in the context of searching for successful 

imperial strategies, 18th-century France experimented as the Dutch had (on New Netherland, 

see Chapter Three) with the scalping paradigm’s system of land annexation, targeted 

destruction of specific ethnocultural groups, and scalp bounties. Despite its general pattern of 

negotiated coexistence with indigenous allies and neighbours in the continental interior, 18th-

century New France entered into a settler-colonial struggle for land in Louisiana, and a 

genocidal war against the Mesquakies, or Fox, on the far-flung northwestern frontier of the 

Pays d’en Haut. In Louisiana, its southern continental frontier, New France obtained land for 

tobacco plantations and its port of New Orleans by offering its allies payments for scalps and 

prisoners from the Chitimachas, Alibamons, and Natchez, groups already decimated by war 

and disease. In the western Great Lakes, the French alternated throughout the first half of the 

18th century between large-scale violence against the Mesquakies, in the form of military 

campaigns and the purchase of Mesquakie captives as slaves, and attempts to bring them into 

their western alliance network, which met violent opposition by western alliessuch as the 

Illinois Confederacy. If the wars in Louisiana and the upper Great Lakes indicate that the 

French, no less than the Spanish or the British, would not hesitate at ethnic cleansing by scalp 

bounties or slave trading to achieve imperial goals, it also demonstrates the particularly 

decentralized and nominal nature of French inland colonialism: the Indian allies who made 

these campaigns possible also renegotiated the terms of their engagement to an overstretched 

Gallic empire. 

Prologue: “white savages” and the Hairbuyer General 



 

245 

 

 On the night of 19 April 1762, as the Seven Years’ War wound down to its end, 

persons unknown approached an Indian village in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, home of 

the influential Lenape-Munsee leader Teedyuscung, the self-proclaimed “King of the 

Delawares.” The intruders locked Teedyuscung in his cabin and burned down the town; 

within two weeks, settlers from the Connecticut-based Susquehanna Company had occupied 

the town site. More than 700 families had been slated to migrate from Connecticut to the 

Wyoming Valley, but after Ohio Valley war parties drove out or killed settlers across the 

northwestern frontier in the next two months, few dared to make the journey. By early 

October, only “thirty or forty stubborn farmers” remained to harvest their corn, confident that 

their blockhouse could protect them. On 15 October, a warparty led by Teedyuscung’s son, 

Captain Bull, proved them wrong, killing 9 men and 1 woman and driving the rest upriver to 

captivity at Wyalusing. A few days later, Pennsylvania provincial troops arrived to find the 

corn still standing, the town in ruins, and the bodies of the 10 posthumously and inventively 

mutilated: not only scalped, but impaled with such metalwares as hinges, awls, and 

pitchforks as well as spears and arrows. This repudiation of the settlers’ ambitions to build 

new homes on the ashes of theirs was read, on the other side of the frontier, simply as Indian 

horror and dubbed the first “Wyoming Massacre.”243  

 On the Pennsylvania frontier, even peaceable interactions had a phobic edge to them; 

when settlers and Indians drank together in taverns or at gatherings, notes Peter Silver, they 

often blustered about their supposed bloody deeds, those already performed and those which 

could be potentially performed. At other times, Indians or settlers dropped in on each other 

                                                 
243 Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 96-97, 160-65, 178-203; Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in 

Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763,” 422-23, 444-45; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 191-213; 

Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 244-48; Fred Anderson, Crucible of War, 529-535. 



 

246 

 

unannounced to issue threats or, if they had a numerical advantage, to commit robberies, 

assaults, or murders. Such was the case on 7 July, 1763, when three Indians declared at a 

tavern and mill in Paxtang Township that an army of 900 Indians were coming to destroy the 

nearby fort, then burn Paxtang and other nearby towns on the Susquehanna River. In 

response, and with the memory of Wyoming and several prior years of conflict on their 

minds, Samuel Murray and three other local men replied with what they thought was a 

reciprocal threat: to scalp them to collect a nonexistent £50 bounty from Governor James 

Hamilton. Two days later, Murray and six other men caught up to the three Indians on the 

road, shot them, scalped them, and presented the scalps to the governor in Philadelphia. 

Claiming they had caught the Indians stealing, they demanded a reward, for which he gave 

them an ad hoc payment of £10 each.244 

 The locals of Paxtang also held deep suspicions regarding an Indian neighbour named 

Toshetaquah, also called Will Sock or Bill Soc. Officially a diplomatic envoy for the British 

government, Pennsylvania settlers were convinced this was a façade to conceal a default 

Indian malevolence, and that Sock had consorted with their enemies and taken part in the 

capturing and killing of Pennsylvanians in the Wyoming Valley raid and elsewhere. Sock did 

not live among these fearful Pennsylvanians, but at a village called Conestoga Manor, made 

up of twenty or so refugee Susquehannocks, Shawnees, and Senecas who had signed a treaty 

with Pennsylvania following the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. In the middle of 

December, Matthew Smith and dozens of other Paxtonians reported seeing dozens of armed 

Indians at Conestoga. Deciding that Will Sock’s treachery had finally been proven, around 

                                                 
244 Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 96-97, 160-65, 178-203; Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in 

Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763,” 422-23, 444-45; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 191-213; 

Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 244-48; White, The Middle Ground.  



 

247 

 

50 mounted vigilantes surrounded the village before dawn, killed and scalped six people they 

caught sleeping, and razed Conestoga Manor. According to a Quaker from Lancaster County 

named David Henderson, the Paxton County vigilantes, referring to themselves as the 

“Hickory Boys,” justified their attack by claiming Will Sock had “green [i.e., untanned] 

white scalps in his poss’n since the last breaking out of the Ind’n trouble.” Henderson called 

this a fabrication “to give a Colour to their enterprise,” and his letter also notes an ominous 

Biblical allusion: “They say their Name is Legion, & they are Many & will stand by one 

another.”245 

 The 14 Conestoga survivors, comprising three married couples and their eight 

children, appealed for government protection, and were placed under guard in a workhouse 

in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. On 27 December, 1763, a regiment of Royal Highlanders and all 

other local authorities stood aside as a well-armed mob from Paxtang, Donegal, and 

Hempfield townships marched into Lancaster, stormed the workhouse, massacred the 

unarmed Conestogas, and then, in actions which bewildered and revolted many 

contemporary British and Anglo-American observers, posthumously mutilated their bodies in 

an approximation of Indian warfare: chopping off their hands and feet, knocking their heads 

in, and scalping them. When news of the “Workhouse Massacre” circulated, 127 Lenape-

Munsee converts to Moravian Christianity already living under government protection in 

Philadelphia, whose new faith’s values included pacifism, asked to take sanctuary in Britain; 

colonial authorities shuttled them between New York and New Jersey until returning them to 

                                                 
245 The Gospel of Mark 5:9: “And [Jesus] asked [the possessed man], What is thy name? And he answered, 

saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.” Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 96-97, 160-65, 178-203; 

Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763,” 422-23, 444-45; 

Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 191-213; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 244-48; White, The Middle 

Ground; Henderson quoted in Jack Brubaker, Massacre of the Conestogas: On the Trail of the Paxton Boys in 

Lancaster County (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2010), 61-67. 



 

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Philadelphia by January 1764. Upon receiving this news, the Hickory Boys began collecting 

volunteers, and in early February 200 armed riders and marchers appeared in Philadelphia, 

tacitly aided or openly supported by “perhaps three quarters” of the city’s population. The 

vigilantes were only prevented from reaching the Moravians by Governor John Penn and 

Benjamin Franklin’s hastily-gathered counter-protest of a thousand residents.246 

 The Hickory Boys insisted that their only intention had been to march the Moravians 

out of Pennsylvania, offered to put up a bond of 10,000 pounds as a sign of their sincerity, 

and agreed to disperse once their statement of grievances was read to the governor and 

distributed in Philadelphia. Their first demand became reality after 50 Moravians died of an 

epidemic while in confinement and gradually returned to the Susquehanna Valley. Their 

second was realized with the publication of “A Declaration and Remonstrance of the 

Distressed and Bleeding Frontier Inhabitants,” in which the Hickory Boys justified their acts 

of ethnic cleansing by rhetorically asking “Whoever proclaimed war with part of a nation, 

and not with the whole?” More alarming to Franklin was the wide support that ungeneralised 

hostility towards Indians enjoyed among Pennsylvanians. Some contemporaries argued that 

the existence of “independent Commonwealths” of Indians was itself not only dangerous, but 

an imposition on the freedoms of “Free-Men and English Subjects.” Others openly defended 

the killing of children as forestalling future retribution, as an anonymous Pennsylvania 

pamphleteer did by alluding to Isaiah 59:5: “out of a SERPENT’S EGG, there should come... 

a fiery flying SERPENT.”247 

                                                 
246 Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 96-97, 160-65, 178-203; Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in 

Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763,” 422-23, 444-45; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 191-213; 

Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 244-48. 
247 Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 96-97, 160-65, 178-203; Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in 

Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763,” 422-23, 444-45; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 191-213; 



 

249 

 

 Franklin’s reply, a 1764 pamphlet entitled A Narrative of the Late Massacres, 

inverted the pieties of the 18th century’s Indian-war narratives—families sundered by 

massacres, pitiless destroyers and posthumous mutilation of the innocent, etc.—in a way that 

shocked a contemporary audience. Franklin began by reminding his readers that the 

Conestogas had done nothing wrong, and that killing them for injuries inflicted by the 

Lenape-Munsees, Shawnees, and Mingoes was comparable to the Dutch avenging a French 

assault by attacking the English, “because they too are White People.” While Indians 

acknowledged European nationalities’ distinctions between themselves, frontiersmen did not 

reciprocate, and Franklin pointed out their bigotry in stating that the “only Crime of these 

poor Wretches seems to have been [their] reddish brown Skin, and black Hair.” Invoking the 

by-now well-established literary conventions of the anti-Indian sublime, in which the details 

of Indian horrors were, in Peter Silver’s words, described in such “rich, hallucinatory detail” 

that they could be “mildly traumatic to read,” Franklin described the slaughter of the 

Conestogas by white frontiersmen as Pennsylvanians were accustomed to thinking of their 

own victimhood, e.g., “All of them were scalped and otherwise horribly mangled.” Franklin 

then rhetorically asked whether settlers had come to America “to learn and practise the 

Manners of Barbarians?” and turned towards his ultimate point: that the frontiersmen had 

proven themselves morally worse than Indians, whose cruelties “they practise against their 

Enemies only, not against their Friends.” Lest anyone had forgotten, the Indians had received 

the first settlers “with Kindness and Hospitality. Behold the Return we have made them!” 

Franklin then listed famous stories of hospitality and gratitude among peoples that 

                                                 
Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 244-48; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 201-213; “independent 

Commonwealths” and “fiery flying serpent” cited in Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the 

Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 191-

203. 



 

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Enlightenment Europeans considered their cultural and moral inferiors: “ancient Heathens,” 

Muslims (“cruel Turks” and “Saracens”), “Popish Spaniards” and “Negroes of Africa.” His 

thundering conclusion was that Anglo-Americans had proven themselves the most brutal and 

ungrateful people on the face of the earth, and that the scalped and murdered Conestogas 

“would have been safe in any Part of the known World, – except in the Neighbourhood of the 

CHRISTIAN WHITE SAVAGES of Peckstang and Donegall!!”248  

 Nearly two decades later, Franklin imputed another sort of white savagery in an 

anonymous work of Revolutionary propaganda which articulated its audience’s fantasies and 

nightmares to unreal perfection. Per the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the British 

government’s diplomatic relations with indigenous polities west of the Appalachians, 

recognition of an Indian territory, and attempts to fence it off from squatters, hunters, and 

land-speculators aggrieved Anglo-American westerners, who felt their government was 

hindering the development of the nation’s economy and the yeoman landowners’ class for 

the benefit of wandering savages; more darkly, the British government could be imagined as 

complicit in Indians’ reprisals against squatters and trespassers, or as the guiding hand behind 

them. Last but not least of the Declaration of Independence’s list of 27 “injuries and 

usurpations” inflicted by George III against them had been the accusation that he “has 

endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose 

known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” 

In 1779, when Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette had compiled a list of British atrocity 

narratives to be illustrated as prints for a children’s book, which Joyce Chaplin describes as 

                                                 
248 Benjamin Franklin, A Narrative of the Late Massacres, in Lancaster County, of a Number of Indians, 

Friends of this Province, By Persons Unknown. With some Observations on the same (Philadelphia, 1764), 12-

27; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 244-47; Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 45-48 (“mildly traumatic to read”), 79-86, 

183-203. 



 

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“a primer for little patriots,” British complicity in scalping and Indian horrors were featured 

prominently.249  

 While Franklin and Lafayette’s primer never got beyond the planning phase, their list 

of 26 outrages and their instructions to the artists survive, indicating the anxieties of Anglo-

American colonial mind. Eight illustrations would depict racialized threats to the safety of 

white families, two of which involved the British “corrupting Negroes” and encouraging 

them to violently rebel. Print 8 would articulate the fear of interracial rape in a slave uprising: 

the “Master & his Sons” of a large house “lying dead” and their black slaves, armed with 

guns and cudgels, “carrying off” the “Wife & Daughters.” In the remaining six of these eight, 

the racialized violations of frontier society were the killing and scalping of “the Frontier 

Farmers and their Families, Women and Children” by Indians, aided and abetted by the 

British. Print 12 would show General Patrick Tonyn, Governor of East Florida, paying cash 

to “his Soldiers & Savages” for “Scalps of the Georgia People.” Events in the Wyoming 

Valley in 1778, when a mixed force of Loyalist rangers and Iroquois defeated a Continental 

army and conducted a scorched-earth campaign against the rebels, warranted two separate 

prints: Print 13 would show “the Commanding Officer at Niagara” paying cash for “the 

Scalps of the Wioming families,” while Print 18 would depict English complicity in a 

cannibal feast: “Prisonners kill’d and Roasted” for “a great festival” of “the Canadian 

indians” on “American flesh,” with “Colonel Buttler an english officer Setting at table.” Print 

                                                 
249 Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York: 

Basic Books, 2006), 271-72; Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 244-251; “Franklin and Lafayette’s List of Prints 

to Illustrate British Cruelties (ca. May 1779),” from the Franklin Papers online (founders.archives.org). 



 

252 

 

14 would show the Secretary of War presenting George III “a Schedule intitled Acct. of 

Scalps. which he receives very graciously.”250 

The idea of British officers shamelessly documenting their war crimes against white, 

Christian subjects of the King, utterly fearless of the reaction from the British general public 

or the Opposition party if such a communique were intercepted, became the seed of 

Franklin’s most grotesque propaganda piece: the anonymously-authored “Supplement to the 

Boston Independent Chronicle” published in April 1782. Purportedly a reprint of a manifest, 

written in plain English and unciphered, attached to a shipment of fur bales intercepted by the 

New England militia en route to Governor Haldimand in Quebec, the foreword by a fictional 

‘Capt. Gerrish’ explained that upon examining the bales, “we were struck with horror to find 

[…] 8 large ones containing SCALPS of our unhappy country-folks” of New York, New 

Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania, “taken in the last three years by the Senneka Indians” and 

sent as a gift to Haldimand for transport to England. The attached message, purportedly from 

a fictional Seneca chief named “Conejogatchie,” interpreted by “the elder Moore, the trader” 

and transcribed by a “James Craufurd,” itemized with pedantic detail the age, sex, and 

manner of death of over 1,000 settlers, supposedly marked on each scalp by a pictographic 

system of “Indian triumphal marks.” Only 43 belonged to soldiers of the Continental army 

killed in “skirmishes” (not, you’ll notice, “battles”), the vast majority belonged to civilian 

farmer families: nearly 400 scalps of young, mature, and old men killed in their houses or 

fields, 18 denoted by a yellow flame icon as “prisoners burnt alive, after being scalped, their 

nails torn out by the roots, and other torments”. Eighty-eight were of women killed by 

                                                 
250 Chaplin, The First Scientific American, 271-72; Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 244-251; “Franklin and 

Lafayette’s List of Prints to Illustrate British Cruelties (ca. May 1779),” from the Franklin Papers online 

(founders.archives.org);  



 

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scalping-knife or tomahawk, 17 of those belonging to old women “knocked down dead, [or 

who] had their brains beat out.” An almost equal number were the scalps of children: 193 

scalps of boys, 211 of girls, and 29 scalps of “little infants… rip’t out of their mothers’ 

bellies” and neatly stowed in a small birchbark box. The whole story was, of course, a hoax, 

but the sort of hoax that its readers wanted to believe.251 

 “they carved their name”: Scalp bounties and mimetic violence, 1689 to 1763 

Guy Chet observes that for colonial administrators, the outsourcing of Indian-fighting 

by offering scalp bounties sidestepped various financial and political hurdles regarding the 

raising of troops. As the politically-problematic draft was rarely invoked in Britain’s 

American colonies, regular troops could only be raised by offering lucrative contracts with 

fixed terms of service. When their limited time in uniform was added to the financial 

problems of paying wages and provisions, administrators griped that these colonial troops 

cost four times as much as full-time soldiers in Britain and Europe. On the other hand, 

irregular companies recruited by ranger captains who, like privateers at sea, had obtained 

letters of marque from the government, were not on the colony’s payroll and, at least in 

theory, were paid only for success. With the average daily wage of a labourer in that era 

“rarely exceeding” 2 shillings a day, scalp and prisoner bounties were quite competitive. In 

1689, Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut offered “eight pounds, per head, for every 

fighting Indian man,” and Connecticut offered scalp bounties in 1704, writes Benjamin 

Madley. In Massachusetts and New Hampshire during Queen Anne’s War (1702-13), 

initially Massachusetts offered £10, or 200 shillings, for “every Scalp of an Indian Enemy 

                                                 
251 Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 244-251; “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle” (1782) in 

Benjamin Franklin and William Temple Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 

Volume I (London: Henry Colburn, 1818), 337-341. 



 

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killed in fight, that is, ten Years of age” or higher, with a £10 bounty on the scalp of a woman 

age 10 or higher, and captured children to be taken to Boston to be sold into slavery. When 

this failed to yield a suitable number of volunteers, the Massachusetts General Assembly 

raised the bounty on each “adult” (however defined) male Indian, capable of bearing arms, to 

£20 per scalp, and eventually to £100.252 

New France, which lacked the dense populations of the British colonies, had much 

better relations with its indigenous neighbours; through them, and its western alliance 

network, they developed a frontier-war style which relied much more heavily on indigenous 

allies and the mourning-war system of captive-taking and scalp-lifting. The first confirmed 

report of this came to British authorities in 1688 with the deposition of Magsigpen, a British-

allied Algonquian known to the English as Graypoole and to the Dutch at Albany as Aert. 

Magsigpen told how he had gone north with a Mohawk war party to raid New France and 

their allies, and on his return had gone to Schaghticoke, a Mahican village on the Hudson 

which sheltered refugees from King Philip’s War. He and a dozen Schaghticokes, while 

hunting, were shadowed on the river by “Eleaven Indians that formerly lived in New 

England, and now in Canada,” who during a parley explained their purpose to avenge the 

“greate mischeife” of the Mohawks in Canada. They had been sent by Denonville himself, 

the Governor-General, and paraphrased his offer: “therefore goe yow revenge the same, 

either on Christians or Indians; kill all what you cann, bring noe prisoners but their scalps, 

and I’le give you tenn beavers for every one of them.” Georg Friederici calculated in 1906 

                                                 
252 Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness, 89-91, states in footnote 80 that volunteers without pay were to 

receive £50 per scalp rather than £10; my notes do not indicate whether this was adjusted upwards as the other 

scalp bounties were during the course of the war. See also Grenier, First Way of War, 16-52; Madley, 

“Reexamining the American Genocide Debate,” 114-117, notes that Massachusetts apparently paid for 208 

Indian scalps between 1703-04, and passed additional scalp bounties throughout Queen Anne’s War: in 1706, 

1709, and 1710. 



 

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that the 1688 value of ten beavers, the fur-trade medium of exchange, would be equivalent to 

a gun purchased in Montreal with 4 pounds of powder and 40 pounds of lead. In 1691 

Denonville’s successor, Frontenac, offered colonists and Indian allies 10 crowns for every 

scalp, 20 crowns for a white male prisoner, and 10 for a white female prisoner; later, either 

due to a glut in the market or moral criticism, the government lowered the prices for scalps 

and prisoners to one crown apiece.253 

 The English precedent of scalp bounties and large-scale slave trading (see Chapter 4) 

also influenced French policy in their Louisiana colony and in the Pays d’en Haut in the early 

18th century. Facing labour shortages in New France beginning in the 1670s and with a 

general monetary and credit crisis from 1700-10 due to a collapsing price of beaver, the 

French purchased thousands of slaves captured in the further west and south in their allies’ 

wars to bolster their domestic economy. In wars with the Alibamons (1702-12), and the 

Chitimachas (1706-18), Louisiana’s governor Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville 

offered allied Indians 10 crowns each for the scalps of “Alabamas” (the generic French term 

for Creeks) and Chitimachas. Elizabeth John, cryptically, noted without explication in 1975 

that “one coarse black scalp lock looked much like another, and some grew upon the heads of 

Frenchmen, particularly some of the métis from Canada.” Being members of the powerful 

                                                 
253 Magsigpen cited in Grenier, First Way of War, 39 n. 77; Colin G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of 

Vermont, 1600-1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman, OK: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 1990), 91-94; “Examination of Magsigpen, An Indian,” in John Romeyn Brodhead, 

Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York; Procured in England, Holland and 

France, Vol. III (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1858), 71-72; Magsigpen was able to identify 10 

of the 11 “northern Indians,” most of whom were members of the Wabanaki Confederacy, one of whom was “a 

Wappenger of Hudson’s River.” On general background see Salisbury, “Eastern North America 1600-1763,” 

422; Steele, Warpaths, 49; Friederici, “Scalping in America,” 433-36; Friederici, Skalpieren, Griffin trans., 73; 

Jean-François Lozier, “Lever des chevelures en Nouvelle-France: la politique française du paiement des scalps” 

in Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française, Vol. 56, No. 4, 2003, p. 513-542. On French colonial policy in 

North America (or the lack thereof), see James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 

1670-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 



 

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Creek Confederacy, the Alabamas could negotiate peace with Bienville by 1712; the isolated 

and unaligned Chitimachas, by contrast, were “decimated” by the war, allowing the 

Louisiana colony to found New Orleans, its capital and its artery to world markets, in 1722 

on land seized from the Chitimachas.254  

Scalp bounties were also deployed by the French in one of their few conflicts waged 

on settler-colonial terms: the Natchez Wars. After Fort Rosalie was erected on Natchez 

territory in 1716, tobacco plantations worked by African slaves followed, and by the early 

1720s French colonists were demanding the Natchez relocate their villages so they could 

expand tobacco production. When war broke out in 1722-23, Bienville offered Natchez scalp 

and prisoner bounties to allied Indians, then sent a punitive expedition of 150 French troops 

to the Natchez capital to extract peace. As the Natchez were one of the few stratified Indian 

societies left in the 18th century Southeast, whose leaders could wield coercive violence 

against disobedient followers, Bienville could compel the Natchez ruler, The Great Sun, to 

accept his peace terms: that several named Natchez rebels were to be executed, and an 

escaped black slave, known for “seditious speeches” against the French, be brought in dead 

or alive. Continued French land acquisitions led to a Natchez revolt in 1729 and the burning 

of Fort Rosalie, while the French were temporarily distracted by a slave revolt in New 

Orleans. After putting down the New Orleans revolt the French set out to, in Gregory 

Waselkov’s terms, “methodically exterminate” the Natchez, most of whom were sold 

through New Orleans into Haitian slavery. Like other southeastern peoples devastated by the 

                                                 
254 Daniel H. Usner, Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories 

(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003 [1998]), 15-32; DuVal, The Native Ground, 63-102; 

Corkran, The Creek Frontier, 1540-1783, 93-115; Elizabeth A.H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: 

The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (College Station: Texas A&M 

University Press, 1975), 199; Gregory A. Waselkov, “Louisiana,” in Alan Gallay ed., Colonial Wars of North 

America, 1512-1763: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2015). 



 

257 

 

disease epidemics, arms races, and slaving wars of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the 

remaining Chitimachas and Natchez had a choice: of joining larger refugee confederacies 

like the Choctaws or Creeks, as the Natchez did, or becoming vassals of French Louisiana 

known as les petites nations, as did the Chitimachas.255  

In the continental interior, between the densely-populated agrarian corridor of the St. 

Lawrence Valley and the Louisiana settlements which offered access to the Caribbean, the 

French did not have the manpower or institutional strength to impose their will on Indians—

or, for that matter, on French settlers and merchants in the interior. Behind France’s claims of 

vast territorial control was a reality of French islands in an Indian sea: military forts, trading 

posts, and such enclaves as the Illinois Country, a center of French farming and fur trading 

settled by coureurs du bois without government permission in the early 18th century. 

Between the Illinois Country and Montreal was the Ohio Country, whose rivers connected 

Louisiana and Illinois to the St. Lawrence corridor but through which the French could only 

travel on sufferance of the peoples living there. After first contact in 1660, coordinated 

military campaigns with indigenous allies were necessary in wars with the Mesquakie of 

Lake Michigan’s western shore, an Algonquian people known to the French after the name of 

their military-specialist Fox clan. Colin Calloway observes that the Mesquakie, who 

controlled the Minnesota and Des Moines trade routes, killed French traders attempting to 

push past them to the Sioux and upper Mississippi markets. Yet French policy wavered, 

writes Brett Rushforth, between war with “les Renards” and the desire to bring them into 

their anti-Iroquois western network of trade and military allies; in 1679, French and 

                                                 
255 Usner, Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 15-32; DuVal, The Native Ground, 63-102; 

Corkran, Creek Frontier, 93-115; John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds, 199; Waselkov, “Louisiana,” in 

Alan Gallay ed., Colonial Wars of North America, 1512-1763. 



 

258 

 

Mesquakie diplomats smoked the calumet, and after the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701 

French officials resumed these attemtps at glasnost. France’s northwesternmost trade and 

military allies, namely the Ojibway, Ottawa, Wyandot, Miami, and Illinois, had no intention 

of being supplanted as middlemen over the eastern trade in firearms and French trade goods; 

from the 1670s to the 1690s, France’s western allies fought the Mesquakie regardless of 

French policy. In the early 18th century, as New France’s population expanded following the 

Great Peace of 1701, New France’s restive allies were joined by a French settler population 

in the interior who also set their own foreign policy—and, like the people in the towns and 

cities of the St. Lawrence corridor, had an inexhaustible appetite for Indian slave labour. The 

In the “Fox Wars” of 1712-16 and 1728-33, the peoples of the Pays d’en Haut sold thousands 

of Mesquakies into French slavery, with French colonists in the Illinois, officers, and fur 

traders as direct beneficiaries or middlemen of the trade; New France’s allies raided 

Mesquakie villages, but French officers and armies brought total war to the interior, killing 

men en masse and razing villages, and a people several thousand strong in the 1710s were 

reduced to a few hundred by the mid-1730s.256 

French traders among the Miami and Illinois also acted independently of their 

government in selling Indian captives into the British Southeastern trade; as late as 1715, 

notes Colin Calloway, one hundred French coureurs de bois left Michilimackinac to become 

slaving middlemen on the Missouri River, buying captives from the far west from French-

allied Indians and ferrying them to South Carolina for resale. The limits of French power 

                                                 
256 James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 

2004), xvii-xxii (“Only war…”), 70-71 (“populationists opposed to immigration”), 420-22 (“preoccupied with 

dynastic…”); Fred Anderson, Crucible of War, 11-21; Richard White, The Middle Ground, 142-185 ; Calloway, 

One Vast Winter Count, 321-24 (322: “resisted French efforts … never experienced before”); Rushforth, 

“Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance”; Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 193-258. 



 

259 

 

appeared again when the British-allied Chickasaws refused to turn over their Natchez 

refugees to the French in the mid-1730s. When Bienville failed to defeat the Chickasaws 

through conventional European warfare, including building a road to drive artillery to their 

main village, he accepted a Quapaw counter-offer: they would send war parties of 30 to 50 

men, and in return the French would pay them for Chickasaw and Natchez scalps and 

prisoners. “[E]ver since they observed how weakly the French made war on the Natchez,” 

Bienville noted wearily in a 1733 letter, “they have held our nation in supreme contempt.”257 

If scalp and slave bounties were not necessarily synonymous with a settler-colonial 

system of land acquisition, neither was Euro-American mimesis of Indians at war. As early 

as Cotton Mather’s denunciation of “half Indianized French, and… half Frenchified Indians” 

in Decennium Luctuosum (1699), British colonists were perturbed by the number of French 

militia and volunteers who, thanks to years of living in Indian villages, were competent to 

join allied Indians in long-distance raids on New England settlements. Like John Butler’s 

Loyalists during the Wyoming campaign and, reportedly, bandits in the West during the 19th 

century (see Chapter 6), French militia and volunteers may have disguised themselves in 

warpaint to commit certain deeds under disguise, or to liberate themselves from the European 

conventions of warfare, as reflected in recurrent themes in 18th-century British accounts 

which cannot simply be ascribed to national and sectarian antipathies. In Reverend John 

Norton’s The Redeemed Captive (1748), his autobiographical account of his capture and 

                                                 
257 Usner, Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley,15-32; DuVal, The Native Ground:, 63-102; 

Corkran, Creek Frontier, 93-115; John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds:, 199; Waselkov, “Louisiana,” 

in Alan Gallay ed., Colonial Wars of North America, 1512-1763. On the slave trade, see Marcel Trudel, George 

Tombs trans., Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 2009 

[1960]); Rushforth, “‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’”; Rushforth, “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of 

Alliance,” 54; Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 3-71; Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 316. 



 

260 

 

captivity by a French-and-indigenous war party in 1746, he states that after French-allied 

Indians scalped a slain Massachusetts colonist and cut off his head and arms,  

A young Frenchman took one of the Arms And flay’d it, roasted the Flesh, and offer’d some 

of it to Daniel Smeed, one of the Prisoners, to eat; but he refused it. The Frenchman dressed 

the Skin of the Arm (as we afterwards heard) and made a Tobacco Pouch of it.
258  

A lieutenant in a Scottish Highland regiment wrote of post-mortem mutilations, “I dare say 

no human creature but an Indian or [French] Canadian would be guilty of such inhumanity as 

to insult a dead body.” Hence Wolfe’s retaliatory orders during the siege of Quebec, in July 

1759: “The general strictly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except where the enemy 

are Indians, or Canadians dressed like Indians.”259 

 Broader Anglo-American detestation of the French for their military alliances with 

Indians informed a persistent Anglo-American myth that Indian campaigns or uprisings 

against them had to be the product of European guidance and tutelage. At first glance this 

belief, that an innately-warlike, vindictive people (as Indians were presumed to be) were also 

unable to plan and execute devastating campaigns against their British enemies, seems 

paradoxical, until one remembers that the Indians of the European imagination were 

irrational and easily overwhelmed by such emotions as vengefulness and sadism. As early as 

Benjamin Tompson’s epic New-Englands Crisis (Boston, 1676), the poet invoked the 

                                                 
258 John Norton, The redeemed captive. Being a narrative of the taking and carrying into captivity the Reverend 

Mr. John Norton… (Boston, 1748), 10, from Evans Early American Imprint Collection (Ann Arbor, Michigan); 

see also Friederici, “Scalping in America,” extract from the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1906, 

in Spittal, ed., Scalping and Torture, 1-16. 
259 Treating this counterpart phenomenon to Anglo-American dark mimesis is, unfortunately, outside the scope 

of this thesis. “such inhumanity”, see Colin Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders (2008), pg. 100; 

on warpaint as disguise for Butler’s Loyalists, see B.A. Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America 

(2005), 9-10, 115; on Wolfe’s order re: scalping, see Wright, The Life of Major-General James Wolfe (1864), 

531 – these sources cited in Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War 

(New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012), 39-47; Cotton Mather cited in Slotkin, Regeneration, 116-145.  



 

261 

 

possibility of a French or Spanish conspiracy behind King Philip’s War by rhetorically 

asking, while outlining possible causes, “Whither some Romish Agent hatcht the plot?” For 

Tompson, at least, the war’s outbreak was no great mystery, as “Indian spirits need / No 

grounds but lust to make a Christian bleed.”260 

 In Tompson’s New-Englands Crisis and Nathaniel Saltonstall’s “A True But Brief 

Account of our Losses…” (1676), the anti-Indian sublime springs fully formed from the 

Anglo-American collective unconscious. Here the foundational fears of Europeans in the 

Americas, of Indian war as reverse-colonial invasion, the destruction of European 

domesticity, cannibalism, and dismemberment, are combined with the particular fixations 

that would fuel Anglo-American nightmares for another 250 years: Indians as child-killers 

who interracially rape white women, flay settlers’ bodies, and scalp them while still living. 

Tompson’s prologue to the war is a Savagist burlesque in which King Philip, a “greazy 

Lout,” addresses his “pagan slaves” in ungrammatical English with pidgin Algonquian words 

thrown in, mixing legitimate causes for war with venal, criminal ones and thus discrediting 

the former. Philip complains that British settlers not only “enjoy the best” land in New 

England and “intend to have the rest” later, but have instituted English codes of law which 

issue whippings for drunkenness and hanging for rape—linking the Anglo-American 

fascination with the image of Indian sexual degeneracy with the corollary idea of the 

indigenous woman as a prisoner of her own society. He promises his barbarian horde that 

war will not only stop further British immigration, but will provide satisfaction in the form of 

material goods (“English coats” and “the richest merchants houses”), cannibalism (“wine to 

                                                 
260 James Frothingham Hunnewell ed., Early American Poetry: New-England’s Crisis by Benjamin Tompson 

(Boston: the Club of Odd Volumes, 1894), “New-Englands Crisis,” 10-21, “A Supplement,” 22-29. 



 

262 

 

drink out of their Captains throats,” i.e., blood), and interracial rape (“Wee’l have their silken 

wives”). This “native swarm,” boiling with “unbridled lust,” rampages through the “border 

towns,” where settlers’ babies are “Snatcht by a pagan hand to lasting rest,” villages are 

torched, and Tompson implies Philip’s “bruitish wolves” feed on human flesh: “What the 

inexorable flames doe spare / More cruel Heathen lug away for fare.” In short: “They strip, 

they bind, they ravish, flea [flay] and roast.”261 

Nathaniel Saltonstall, in describing the “exquisite Torments and most inhumane 

Barbarities” inflicted upon New Englanders, is similarly inventive in describing Indian 

trophies: human-finger necklaces, belts of human skin. If Tompson implied scalping by 

“flea,” Saltonstall explicitly links interracial rape, scalping, and dismemberment: 

…the Heathen rarely giving Quarter to those that they take, but if they were Women, they 

first forced them to satisfie their filthy Lusts and then murdered them, either cutting off the 

Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head of Skin and Hair, and hanging them up as 

Trophies; wearing Men’s Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks and Stripes of their Skins 

which they dresse for Belts. They knockt one Youth of the Head, and laying him for dead, 

they flead (or skulp’d) his Head of Skin and Hair. After which the Boy wonderfully revived, 

and is now recovered, only he hath Nothing but the dry Skull, neither Skin nor Hair on his 

Head.262 

As noted in Chapter 3, Tompson and Saltonstall’s prurient fantasies of interracial rape on the 

battlefield parted ways with reality, though they would remain a central image in savage-war 

narratives for another two centuries. In describing the New Englanders’ revenge Tompson 

                                                 
261 Tompson, “New-Englands Crisis,” 10-21 (“greazy Lout”…“flea and roast” 11-13), “A Supplement,” 22-29. 

“Supplement” adds weirder, more hallucinogenic detail, describing Philip’s warriors “besmear’d with Christian 

Bloud & oild / With fat out of white humane bodyes boil’d,” and wielding gory, bloodstained clubs “Like 

Vulcans anvilling New-Englands brains.” 
262 Gardiner cited in Bailyn, The Barbarous Years, 501; Ramsey, Yamasee War, 159-182, 222-26; Nathaniel 

Saltonstall, “A True but Brief Account of Our Losses Sustained Since This Cruel and Mischievous War Began,” 

97-98, in A New and Further Narrative of the State of New-England, By N.S., 1676, reprinted in Charles H. 

Lincoln ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1952 [1913]), 77-98. 



 

263 

 

also points the way towards the mimetic violence of the 18th century: “Upon the Indian skins 

they carv’d their name.”263 

 One of the earliest cases of such mimetic violence among British colonists occurred 

in March 1697, the final year of King William’s War (1688-97). When an Abenaki war party 

raided Haverhill, Massachusetts, Thomas Duston led seven of his children to shelter at a 

garrison a few miles away, while his wife Hannah, who had given birth to their eighth child a 

week before, was taken captive with her nurse Mary Neff. With 150 miles to go, the raiders 

had no time for two prisoners and a baby on their return trip, and Cotton Mather writes in 

Decennium Luctuosum (1699) that an Abenaki “dashed out the Brains of the Infant, against a 

Tree” a mile from Haverhill. A few days later, the captives were given to a family of 

Catholic Abenakis comprising two men, three women, and seven children, including an 

English boy named Samuel taken in a raid on Massachusetts a year and a half earlier. One 

night, Hannah Duston, Mary Neff, and Samuel crept up on their captors in the dark with 

hatchets and wiped out the whole family, all but an old woman who escaped with wounds 

and a child Duston planned to sell into slavery in Boston, then fled down the Merrimack 

River, returning to Massachusetts with ten scalps. Though Massachusetts’ bounty of 10 

                                                 
263 Tompson, “New Englands Crisis,” 14. Sharon Block cites several sources from the 18th century observing 

the absence of sexual assault of female captives; William Martin, son of Virginia’s agent to the Cherokees, 

Joseph Martin, recalled a story of a “mighty” Cherokee warrior who had attempted “some rudeness” with a 

female prisoner of war in the Revolutionary era but was stopped by his comrades—“This, I believe is the only 

instance I have ever heard of an Indian’s treating a female captive immodestly.” Sharon Block cites multiple 

18th-century sources noting Indian nonaggression towards English women in captivity, though observes that as 

the conceptual category of marital rape did not exist in the 18th century, Anglo-American captives’ forced 

adoption into Indian villages, including being married off without their consent, was not considered “equivalent 

to rape” – in Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North 

Carolina Press, 2006), 210-38. 



 

264 

 

pounds per scalp had been rescinded in 1696, an exception was made, and Hannah Duston 

received a reward of 25 or 50 pounds from the governor.264 

 Events at Norridgewock, an Abenaki village on the Kennebec River, are more 

indicative of the norms of 18th-century Anglo-American mimetic violence. During the three-

year conflict (1722-25) between New England and the Wabanaki Confederacy known 

variously as Dummer’s or Gray Lock’s War, Massachusetts raised ranger companies by 

issuing £60 bounties on Abenaki scalps, later raised to £100 for lack of volunteers, and 

offered an outstanding 1720 bounty of £100 for the death or capture of the Jesuit Sébastien 

Râle. Overlooking their own steady encroachment into Abenaki territory, New Englanders 

believed Râle, the resident missionary at Norridgewock, was the instigating force behind 

Abenaki raids. In the winter of 1721-22 Father Râle narrowly avoided being captured by the 

rangers, who looted his church and house and pinned a note to the door promising to return 

next spring “to relieve Father Râle of his scalp.” In a letter to his brother, Râle disdained 

New Englanders’ abilities at frontier warfare: “[If] they knew there were but twelve men in 

your dwellings, they dare not approach you with one hundred.” He was proven wrong in the 

late summer of 1724, when 200 New England rangers and three Indian guides ascended the 

Kennebec River by boat and sacked Norridgewock in a dawn attack praised by Samuel 

Penhallow, in History of the Indian Wars (1726), as “the greatest Victory we have obtained 

in the three or four last Wars.” The number of casualties inflicted is difficult to assess; the 

rangers returned to Boston with three English boys they found in the village, four Abenaki 

                                                 
264 Grenier, The First Way of War, 39-41; Chaplin, Subject Matter, 266-69; Slotkin, Regeneration Through 

Violence, 94-115; Drinnon, Facing West, 435; Steele, Warpaths, 140-46; Ann-Marie Weis, “The Murderous 

Mother and the Solicitous Father: Violence, Jacksonian Family Values, and Hannah Duston’s Captivity,” in 

American Studies International Vol. 36, No. 1 (February 1998), 46-65; Humphreys, “Mass Marketing of the 

Colonial Captive.” Grenier sets the governor’s reward at £50; Humphreys says £25. Hannah’s surname has been 

variously spelled as Duston, Dustin, or Dustan. 



 

265 

 

prisoners, and 27 scalps, and one of the ranger captains “later lamented that the river’s swift 

current washed over 50 Indian bodies downstream” before they could be scalped. After 

inflicting large-scale Abenaki casualties by their surprise attack, the New Englanders, 

according to Father de la Chasses, the Superior-General of the Missions in New France, 

apparently singled out the elderly Jesuit’s corpse for particular mistreatment, expressing 

sectarian hatred through what Anglo-Americans imagined “savages” would do. After looting 

and desecrating Norridgewock’s Catholic church, the Protestant New Englanders gouged out 

Rale’s eyes, knocked in his head with hatchets, plugged his eye sockets with mud, and 

riddled his body with bullets.265 

Ranger companies in present-day Canada were also launched against the Mi’kmaq 

and Maliseet in Nova Scotia during the 18th century. The cession of Acadia by France to 

Britain with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 brought unprecedented numbers of British settlers 

and traders into Maine and Nova Scotia, and with them what Salisbury calls a “train of 

abuses” against French-allied members of the Abenaki Confederacy and Francophone 

Acadians, through unregulated private trade and British demands for land cessions and 

formal recognition of their sovereignty. Against this backdrop of hauteur and bigotry, 

Mi’kmaq historian Daniel Paul notes such cases of vigilante actions by British colonists as 

the serving of poisoned food to Mi’kmaq at a 1712 gathering and, citing the Catholic 

missionary Father Pierre Maillard, the killing of 200 indigenous people by distributing 

“poisoned [i.e., contaminated with disease] woollen goods”. These ongoing tensions meant 

that the war between Britain and France known as King William’s War, which began in 

                                                 
265 Grenier, The First Way of War, 47-52 (“they dare not approach you”); Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: An 

epic story of revenge from the savage war that inspired The Last of the Mohicans (London: Weidenfeld & 

Nicolson, 2004), 31-37; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 164-74; details of the death of Râle in 

Calloway, Dawnland Encounters, 81-83. 



 

266 

 

1744 and ended elsewhere in 1748, continued in the Maritimes until 1755 as Father Le 

Loutre’s War, a rebellion against British settlers and administrators. As in previous wars 

against the Abenaki Confederacy, the British responded with scalp bounties. In November 

1744, William Shirley, Captain-General and Commander in Chief of Massachusetts Bay, 

targeted the “Indians of the Cape Sables and St. John’s Tribes” by offering £100 from the 

public treasury for the scalp of a male Indian aged 12 years or up, and £50 for the scalp of an 

adult woman or child under 12. Shirley’s declaration also offered payments for live 

prisoners, set at £105 for each man and £55 for each child or woman; but a markup of only 

£5 for guarding and feeding prisoners while retreating under fire raises questions as to 

whether this was sincere or merely a merciful façade. Shirley’s scalp bounty was answered 

by Captain John Gorham, leading a mixed company of 50 British and Mohawk mercenaries, 

whose first victims, according to Father Maillard, were three pregnant women and two small 

children.266 

 In 1749, the Mi’kmaq of peninsular Nova Scotia and Île Royale were enraged when 

Lieutenant-General Edward Cornwallis, the Crown-appointed Governor of Nova Scotia, 

established Halifax on their land without their consultation or permission. To make their 

intentions clear, the Mi’kmaq formally declared war against the British; Cornwallis, who in 

1745 had starved, terrorized, and laid waste to the Scottish Highlands to punish the Jacobite 

rebellion, likewise made his intentions plain. Initially requesting more arms for the colonists, 

he issued a proclamation “to Annoy, distress, take or destroy the Savages commonly called 

                                                 
266 Salisbury, “Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600 – 1763,” 431-440; Daniel 
N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages: Collision between European and Native American Civilizations, third 

edition (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2006), 107-122, 152-55, 194-96; A.J.B. Johnston, Endgame 1758: The 

Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of Louisbourg’s Last Decade (Lincoln and London: University of 

Nebraska Press, 2007), 23-45; Friederici, “Scalping in America,” 433-36; Anderson, Crucible of War, 110-115. 



 

267 

 

Mic-macks, wherever they are found”, on the grounds that, their declaration of war 

notwithstanding, “they ought to be treated as so many Banditti Ruffians, or Rebels, to His 

Majesty’s Government.” On 1 October he proposed to a governing council, which included 

John Gorham, to immediately raise a volunteer company “not exceeding fifty men” for 

immediate counterattacks, followed by a campaign of attrition for the winter of 1749-50; in 

company with 100 New Englanders, Gorham’s rangers should scour the province for “a 

reward of ten Guineas for every Indian Micmac taken or killed, to be paid upon producing 

such Savage taken or his scalp (as in the custom of America) if killed”. Paul lists various acts 

of “extreme barbarism and cruelty” attributed to Gorham’s rangers, including their reported 

cashiering of 25 scalps in a single day; on 21 June, 1750, the bounty was raised to £50 

sterling per scalp. A heinous 1753 incident described by Daniel Paul illustrates the 

distinctions between a mourning-war rationale of reciprocal injury and Anglo-American 

scalp bounties’ potentiality for ghoulish opportunism. After stealing 40 barrels of provisions 

from a Mi’kmaq storehouse, two British colonists, James Grace and John Connor, were 

shipwrecked, then rescued and offered food and shelter by a Mi’kmaq family of two men, 

three women, a child and a newborn; in the night, they murdered their seven hosts to collect 

their scalps for bounty. Though a 1752 treaty promised prosecution of settlers who 

committed crimes against Mi’kmaq, British officials did nothing to punish Grace and 

Connor; in response, a Mi’kmaq war party killed seven British bargemen, sparing one 

Anthony Casteel because he was French. Eventually ransomed from the Mi’kmaq by a 



 

268 

 

French trader, Casteel reported his captors’ resolve to “never forgive or forget” Grace and 

Connor’s crime.267  

As the war in the Maritimes continued, the scope and scale of British violence against 

Indians and Acadians expanded further. In 1755, observes Friederici, a bounty of £100 was 

placed on the scalp of Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre, who called for an insurrection to restore 

Acadia to French possession; for his part, Father Le Loutre offered a bounty of 100 livres for 

English settlers’ scalps. In 1756, as Acadians continued to be deported en masse to 

Louisiana, Nova Scotia’s Governor Brigadier-General Charles Lawrence issued another anti-

Mi’kmaq scalp bounty offering £25 for the scalp of a man aged 16 and up, £30 for every 

male prisoner 16 and up, and £25 for every female or child prisoner. By authorizing “all 

Officers, Civil and Military, and all His Majesty’s Subjects, to annoy, distress, take and 

destroy” not just Indians, but “all such as may be aiding or assisting them,” the 1756 

declaration also extended violence to the Acadians. As in French Louisiana and the Spanish 

colonies (see Chapter 6), French-indigenous intermarriage meant many Acadians’ hair was 

straight and dark enough to qualify for scalp bounties, and Paul notes that Acadian deputies 

regularly protested the bounty’s existence to the Governor; on one occasion, writes A.J.B. 

Johnston, “British soldiers shot twenty-five French and brought in their scalps, claiming they 

were Mi’kmaq.”268 

                                                 
267 Paul, We Were Not the Savages, 107-122, 152-55, 194-96; Johnston, Endgame 1758, 23-45; Friederici, 

“Scalping in America,” 433-36; Anderson, Crucible of Empire, 109-112; “to Annoy, distress, take or destroy” 

in Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 

second edition (Toronto, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 134-35; Calloway, White People, 

Indians, and Highlanders, 94-95. 
268 Paul, We Were Not the Savages, 107-122, 152-55, 194-96; Johnston, Endgame 1758, 23-45 (40: “on at least 

one occasion”); Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 244; Friederici, “Scalping in America,” 433-36; Brumwell, White 

Devil, 95; Benjamin Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and 

New Methods,” 114-117, in The American Historical Review Vol. 120, No. 1 (February 2015), 98-139. 



 

269 

 

 

 As Peter Silver observes, “almost no one in eighteenth-century America or England 

seems to have realized that Indian war,” with surprise attacks and mutilated bodies left in the 

roads, “was designed by its practitioners to be precisely as terrifying as they found it”; 

imagining Indians to be unhinged wild men rather than rational actors, panic was as likely a 

reaction as bravado to the unexpected appearance of Indians in frontier districts. In 1727, 

when a conclave of Munsees travelled through northern New Jersey celebrating the accession 

of their new sachem, settlers took them for a war party and fled to New York and Long 

Island. In 1728, after hearing reports about Indian attacks on charcoal-burners in northern 

Pennsylvania, the brothers John and Walter Winter were visiting a neighbour when they 

spotted Indians near the woodpile; believing them to be lurking warriors, they fired their 

muskets and then finished off the wounded with a gun butt and an axe, by which point they 

realized they were killing two old women who had lived in the district for years, a “horrible 

accident” and “wicked murder” they apologized for on the gallows. In other cases, settlers 

could become paralysed with fear during actual Indian attacks, even when family members 

were dying. Correspondingly, during the 1740s and 1750s the emotions frontiersmen felt 

while scalping and posthumously mutilating Indians’ bodies could be “straightforwardly 

described as satisfaction or happiness.”269 

                                                 
269 A parallel present-day phenomenon to colonial frontier panics is the disproportionate shooting of black 

males by police, security guards, and armed members of the general public, informed by stereotypes of black 

men as hypermasculine, aggressive, and nearly superhuman in strength. These reactions often occur with such 

speed that it is clear that subconscious considerations, rather than careful deliberations, inform them. “Unarmed 

people may be more likely to be judged as physically formidable, and thus subjected to force, if they belong to 

groups stereotyped as threatening.” See John Paul Wilson, Kurt Hugenberg, and Nicholas O. Rule, “Racial Bias 

in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat,” in Journal of Personality and Social 

Psychology, 13 March 2017 (published online); Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 45-48 (“horrible accident”), 56-

59 (“almost no one”), 77-79 (“satisfaction or happiness”). 



 

270 

 

 Settlers’ subjective experience during frontier clashes can only be fully understood if 

we consider the ways in which they articulated their sense of powerlessness and 

victimization in diabolical, nightmarish terms. The first “communal reading experience” of 

British North America, the captivity-narrative genre, began with Mary Rowlandson’s The 

Soveraignty and Goodness of God (Boston, 1682); describing her captivity among the 

Nipmucks during King Philip’s War as a trial from God, the tone of the early captivity 

narratives was a stark Biblical typology. But this soon gave way to a saleable pornography of 

violence. By 1758, standards had sunk so low that Robert Eastburn’s captivity narrative was 

prefaced with an endorsement by the Rev. Gilbert Tennent, reminding the reader that 

Eastburn is a deacon and thus his testimony “may with safety be depended upon.” While the 

documentary record shows that the majority of Indian attacks on the mid-18th-century 

northwestern frontier occurred during broad daylight against men working in the fields, that 

the majority of casualties were adult men, and that the majority of captives and subsequent 

adoptees in Indian villages were children and women, captivity narratives inverted the 

priorities of the mourning-war complex with scenes of children and women scalped and 

tormented. Eventually, themes of home invasion, infanticide and male powerlessness became 

the stock scenario of captivity narratives and frontier horror stories: in midnight attacks, 

Indian warriors burned family cabins, took white men prisoner, and forced them to watch 

their wives and children being sadistically tortured and murdered. In a typically lurid story, 

The Affecting History of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederic Manheim’s Family, the titular 

“industrious German” immigrant, his wife, and his three daughters are carried off with 23 

neighbours by “hostile Canasadaga Indians” from the New York frontier in October 1779. 

After the Indians quarrel over “whose property” the 16-year-old Manheim twins Maria and 



 

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Christina should become, their chiefs command the “hapless virgins” be burned alive with 

pinewood splinters and turpentine. Typically for the genre, after describing this scene in 

gruesome detail the writer then called it “a scene of monstrous misery, beyond the power of 

speech to describe, or even the imagination to conceive.” The protagonists of these stories 

often emphasize their inability to articulate the horror and pathos of their scenes of incredible 

and unbelievable tortures, a strategy to overwhelm the reader which Peter Silver describes as 

“the anti-Indian sublime.”270 

Collections of these lurid stories, such as the Manheim Anthology (1793) and A 

Selection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives of Outrages Committed by the Indians 

in Their Wars with the White People (1808), regularly beggar belief. Sufferings of Peter 

Williamson, the overall credibility of which is questioned strongly by James VanDerBeets, 

includes multiple scenes of old men being made to watch their wives and small children 

“inhumanly scalped and murdered”; one of these old men begs his captors for death, who 

ignore him and load him like a mule with their plunder. Sufferings also describes Indian 

warriors roasting a merchant alive and “[making] of his head what they called an Indian 

                                                 
270 Ian Steele’s study of clearly-identified Shawnee attacks between 1754 and 1765 shows very few children 

under 16 were killed (9 out of 103) though their cries gave away warparties’ locations; four times as many 

women over 16 were captured than killed (7 out of 28); men were nearly twice as likely as women to be killed 

in Shawnee attacks, and adult men were more likely than women to be killed—see Steele, “The Shawnees and 

the English: Captives and War, 1753-1765,” 11-12; Dorothy M.F. Behen, “The Captivity Story in American 

Literature, 1577-1826” (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1951), 41, 190, “roguery” 133, 

cited in Richard Drinnon, White Savage: The Case of John Dunn Hunter (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 

106, footnote 25; Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 85; Richard VanDerBeets, The Indian Captivity 

Narrative: An American Genre (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), ix-x, 1-50; Archibald 

Loudon ed., A Selection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives of Outrages Committed by the Indians in 

Their Wars with the White People, two volumes (Arno Press and the New York Times 1971 [Harrisburg 

Publishing Company, 1888 [Carlisle, 1808]]), volume I, iv-v (Introduction), 58-60 (“Affecting History of the 

Dreadful Distresses of Frederic Manheim’s Family”), 66-69 (“Narrative of the Adventures of Capt. Isaac 

Stewart; taken from his own mouth, in March, 1782”), 74-87 (“Sufferings of Peter Williamson, one of the 

Settlers in the Back Parts of Pennsylvania. Written by Himself”), 119-251 (“An Account of the Remarkable 

Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith During his Captivity with the Indians, in the years 

1755-59”), 252-301 (“A Narrative of the Captivity of John M’Cullough, Esq., written by himself”). Henceforth 

abbreviated as Loudon Anthology.  



 

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pudding” by eating his brains, while another man is buried up to his neck and a small fire 

placed adjacent until “his brains were boiling in his head.” Symbolic emasculation of Anglo-

American men was also performed through stories of the killing of women, which Ann-

Marie Weis notes as a departure from the earlier narratives of resilient Puritan women 

surviving captivity among pagans and Catholics. By contrast, the Gothic or sentimental 

tendencies of the 18th and early 19th-century accounts changed the stock female character to a 

“passive mother” who witnessed “a cruel monster-man” slaughtering her infant and 

abducting her older children, a “frail woman submissively kneeling before her Indian 

captor.” The disparity between the physical power and cruelty of the Indian warrior and the 

physical helplessness of the female victim could reach queasy extremes, as this lurid bit of 

prose, printed in Detroit in 1811: 

The tenderest infant, yet imbibing nutrition from the mamilia of maternal love, and the 

agonized mother herself, alike await the stroke of the relentless tomahawk…Nothing which 

breathes the breath of life is spared… It is in the dead of the night, in the darkness of the 

moon, in the howling of the [wolf] that the demoniac deed is done. 

The anti-Indian sublime conflated violence with violation.271  

Captivity narratives also presented the killing of white women and children as the 

whole purpose of mourning-war raids rather than a state of exception. “[A] boy, about three 

years old, being unwilling to leave the house, they took it by the heels, and dashed it against 

the house, then stabbed and scalped it,” stated the Account of the Sufferings of Massy 

Herbeson and her Family, adding that when a five-year-old later “began to mourn for his 

                                                 
271 Weis, “Murderous Mother and Solicitous Father,” 50-54; Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 244-251; Entry 

“Captivity Narratives” in BFI Companion to the Western 78-81; Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark eds., 

Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724 (Harvard University Press, 

2009 [1981]), 25 (“passive mother… Indian captor”); “stroke of the relentless tomahawk” in Cited in Taylor, 

Civil War of 1812, 204. 



 

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brother [,] one of the Indians then tomahawked and scalped him.” “My dear and effectionate 

[sic] wife, with five children, all scalped in less than ten minutes,” laments the account of the 

Reverend John Corbly, of events of July 1785. In Alexander Tsesis’ summary, through these 

stories “Indians became the bogeymen” of American society, “specters sweeping up children 

and women in the middle of the night only to scalp them and then whoop it up around a fire 

afterwards.” In his 1846 memoirs, T.L. McKenney, chief administrator of Indian affairs from 

1816-1830, wrote that the greatest single obstacle to the assimilation of Indians as full equals 

into American society were the “nursery stories” which “told of the Indian and his cruelties”; 

with “his tall, gaunt form, with the skins of beasts dangling from his limbs, and his eyes like 

fire,” the Indian warrior “stood for the Moloch of our country.”272 

These stories of child-killing, torture, rape, and the scheming of Catholic priests and 

French administrators behind it all, informed Anglo-American atrocity stories of the Seven 

Years’ War, the paramount and central tale being the surrender at Fort William Henry. 

Infuriated that after travelling hundreds of miles to fight for the French and asking only for 

ammunitions, rations, and whatever gifts Montcalm bestowed, they would be denied the 

ransoms and loot that they fought for in lieu of wages, Montcalm’s allies were able to impose 

their will on the French by ransoming at least 200 prisoners at Montreal, each bringing in an 

average of 130 livres of trade goods and 30 bottles of brandy. French accounts, like that of 

the missionary Pierre-Joseph-Antoine Roubaud, described a very short burst of violence 

                                                 
272 Thomas Loraine McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, with Sketches of Travels among the Northern 

and Southern Indians; embracing a war excursion, and descriptions of scenes along the western borders, 

Volume 1 of 2, second edition (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 233, cited in Alexander Tsesis, 

Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way For Harmful Social Movements (New York and 

London: New York University, 2002), 56; Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture, 18 (“specters… whoop”); 

Loudon Anthology Volume I, 69-73 (“Account of the Sufferings of Massy Herbeson and her Family”), 74-87 

(“Sufferings of Peter Williamson”). 



 

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followed by prisoner-taking, looting, and haggling: Roubaud ransomed a six-month-old 

English baby, held in the arms of a Wyandot warrior and calmly playing with the warrior’s 

necklaces, by buying an English scalp from an Abenaki to trade. Penobscots had also joined 

Montcalm’s army, and later told Roubaud that they were more than justified to do so, citing 

Massachusetts’ 1755 scalp bounty against them. Fred Anderson observes that Montcalm 

angered these allies by only informing them of his generous surrender terms to the British 

after concluding the capitulation and immediately before it was signed; Ian Steele notes that 

officers were warned that Indians would have to be gratified from among the baggage, and 

“if any resistance was made by which a single Indian should be killed, it would not be in the 

power of M. De Montcalm to save a man from butchery.” David Starbuck dubs Montcalm 

“exceptionally naïve” in believing a few hundred French soldiers could prevent 1,600 Indian 

warriors from taking what they wanted. Anglo-American accounts, on the other hand, dealt 

in all the clichéd images of Indian warfare as dark carnival: prisoners “stripped, killed and 

skalpt” by the “savage blood hounds” (John Entick’s General History of the Late War, 1763), 

dead bodies “violated with all the wanton mutilations of savage ingenuity” (David 

Humphreys’ Essay on the Life of Israel Putnam, 1778), babies dashed against trees and 

rocks, and an English prisoner cannibalized “on Montreal plains” (John Maylem’s Gallic 

Perfidy: A Poem, 1758).273  

During the American Revolution, the British took the part of the French in colonists’ 

conspiratorial fantasies. A cycle of Revolutionary propaganda and subsequent American 

                                                 
273 David R. Starbuck, Massacre at Fort William Henry (Hanover and London: University Press of New 

England, 2002), 1-35, 110-12; Anderson, Crucible of War, 187-201; Maylem, Entick, Carver, Humphreys, 

Dwight, Mante, Smollett, and Cooper cited in Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry and the 

“Massacre” (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 149-185; Roubaud cited in Brumwell, 

White Devil, 92-96. 



 

275 

 

folklore grew out of the 1778 Wyoming Valley campaign of Iroquois warriors and Loyalist 

militia led by Colonel John Butler, “a Connecticut Tory.” One account claimed that “all but 

the women and children [were] massacred in the most inhuman manner” at a fort along the 

Susquehanna, while another account reprinted in Loudon’s anthology made Colonel Zebulon 

Butler, commandant of Fort Kingston, into the cousin of John Butler, and claimed he fled the 

scene when the Loyalists and Iroquois displayed, “for their contemplation, the bloody scalps 

of [196] of their late friends and comrades.” It was left to the commanding officer Col. 

Nathan Dennison to ask the Loyalists’ surrender terms, “to which application Butler 

answered, with more than savage phlegm, in two short words – the hatchet.” The anonymous 

author then claimed that after taking Fort Kingston, “the barbarous conquerors, to save the 

trouble of murder in detail,” locked most of the survivors in the buildings and set the fort on 

fire. Though the Mohawk chieftain Thayendanegea or Joseph Brant was nowhere near the 

Wyoming Valley at the time, confused early reports made him Butler’s co-demon, “a half 

blooded Indian, of desperate courage, ferocious and cruel beyond example.” Brant’s brother-

in-law Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, also provided ample 

ammunition for Revolutionary propagandists, as did other British officers like Henry 

Hamilton, who offered pre-war feasts in the traditional style – substituting steers for a 

previous era’s white dog—where warriors metaphorically feasted on their enemies. In 

December 1775 at the urgings of Congress, a letter from General Philip Schuyler was printed 

in most American newspapers reporting that at a conference at Montreal, William Johnson’s 

son had given each British-allied tribe’s delegate “a war belt and a hatchet (…) After which 

they were invited to FEAST ON A BOSTONIAN AND DRINK HIS BLOOD. An ox being 

roasted for the purpose, and a pipe of wine being given to drink, the war song was sung…” 



 

276 

 

That the inroads of Christianity into Iroquois towns had rendered ritual eating of enemies 

defunct was of no importance to such critics as Jamaican plantation owner Edward Long, 

who in 1778 called the British army “patrons and abettors of Wanton Homicide […] 

stretching forth Cannibal Indians to scalp, tomahawk, and torture, with undistinguishing 

fury.”274 

A flurry of trans-Atlantic Anglo-American attention focused on the death of Jane 

McCrea, the fiancée of a young Loyalist lieutenant in the Fort Edward garrison, in 1778. 

General John Burgoyne’s controversial boast of his “thousands” of Indian warriors standing 

by to inflict “devastation, famine, and every concomitant horror” on the North American 

rebels became a public-relations nightmare when Jane McCrea was mistakenly captured, 

shot, and scalped by Burgoyne’s forces in the Saratoga campaign. Revolutionary propaganda 

held her Tory fiancée complicit and claimed he and the redcoats had watched the murder, 

while in Britain an Opposition political cartoon placed Jane McCrea’s scalping in a “diorama 

of horrors” including an incident from the Quebec campaign where prisoners were stuck full 

of flaming pine splints and burned alive. The scene was depicted in standard Savagist 

dichotomy in John Vanderlyn’s 1804 oil painting The Death of Jane McCrea. The Indian 

warriors both sport multicoloured feathers in their straight black hair and are clad lightly in 

tradecloth breechcloths and leggings, with only one wearing moccasins, permitting 

Vanderlyn to show off the clearly-delineated muscles rippling underneath their bronze skin. 

The two warriors glower fiercely as they set themselves to their task: the moccasined warrior 

                                                 
274 Edward Long’s English Humanity No Paradox, or An Attempt to Prove that the English Are Not a Nation of 

Savages (1778) cited in Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 232-51; Loudon’s anthology Vol. II, “Account of the 

Dreadful Devastation of Wyoming Settlements, in July, 1778. From Gordon’s History of the American War,” 

100-06; Seeman, Death in the New World, 264-89; Steele, Warpaths, 193; Bernard Sheehan, “"The Famous 

Hair Buyer General": Henry Hamilton, George Rogers Clark, and the American Indian,” in Indiana Magazine 

of History, Volume 79, Issue 1 (1983), 1-28. 



 

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has firmly seized McCrea’s blond hair with his left hand and pulled it taut from her hairline, 

with his drawn knife in his right hand ready to make the incision, while his barefoot partner 

pinions McCrea’s right arm with his left hand and has his tomahawk readied to strike.275  

In contrast to their physical hardness, power, and cruelty, Vanderlyn’s Jane McCrea 

embodies aspirational bourgeois feminity. Wearing rich fabrics contrasted against the 

Indians’ tradecloth and leather, her apparel is both demure and revealing, with short sleeves 

and generous neckline displaying ivory-white skin undamaged by the sun, including her 

entire right breast exposed all the way to the nipple. The physical contrast of light and dark is 

completed by the icy-blue eye shown fixed on the tomahawk, and her blonde hair, which 

Steven Blakemore notes was given a “fetishistic focus” in contemporary accounts of her 

death. Vanderlyn’s painting was originally commissioned to accompany Joel Barlow’s 

depiction of the scene, with Jane McCrea renamed ‘Lucinda’ and her fiancée as ‘Heartly,’ in 

Book VI of his epic poem The Columbiad (1807). Lucinda, watching Heartly from the 

sidelines during the Battle of Saratoga, is separated from him just as the “kindred cannibals” 

of Sir William Johnson scatter to “scour the waste for undistinguish’d prey” and “scalp every 

straggler” they can lay hands on. When two Mohawks seize her, Barlow depicts the scene in 

lurid terms: “Her kerchief torn betrays the globes of snow, / That heave responsive to her 

weight of woe.” Barlow then leers, “Does no superior bribe contest her life?” 

There does: the scalps by British gold are paid;  

A long-hair’d scalp adorns that heavenly head; 

And comes the sacred spoil from friend or foe, 

                                                 
275 Weis, “Murderous Mother and Solicitous Father,” 50-54; Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 244-251; Entry 

“Captivity Narratives” in BFI Companion to the Western 78-81; Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark eds., 

Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724 (Harvard University Press, 

2009 [1981]), 25. 



 

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No marks distinguish, and no man can know. 

“With calculating pause and demon grin,” Barlow’s Indians violently destroy her feminine 

beauty (“thro her face divine / drive the descending axe”) and scalp her. Heartly, sword in 

hand, arrives just in time to avenge her by killing “The yelling fiends; who there disputing 

stood / Her gory scalp, their horrid prize of blood.” “Are these thy trophies, Carleton!” 

bellows Heartly, denouncing the British commanders who brought these “scalpers and ax-

men” to the battlefield.276 

 General Henry Hamilton wrote Haldimand from Detroit in June 1778 to the effect 

that “Some Delawares […] who are desirous of showing their intention” for British alliance 

“have presented me two pieces of dryed meat (scalps) one of which I have given the 

Chippoweys, another to the Miamis, that they may show in their villages the disposition of 

the Delawares.” Hamilton accepted enemy body parts while feasting his allies with roasted 

steers and gifting them with trade goods, while believing he could constrain Indian warriors 

through orders to “cease to act as Wolves” and placing British officers in command of mixed 

parties of Indians and French militia. But stories of Hamilton gifting Indian warriors with 

trade goods, including “scalping knives,” were transformed into tales of Hamilton offering 

bounties for settlers’ scalps, and Revolutionary propagandists indelibly dubbed him “the Hair 

Buyer General.” In return, Hamilton smeared his counterpart across the Ohio frontier, 

Lieutenant-Colonel George Rogers Clark, as the other sort of white savage. One of 

Hamilton’s French-and-Indian war parties had returned to Vincennes unaware that Clark had 

                                                 
276 Barlow, The Columbiad, 236-240; Steven Blakemore, Joel Barlow’s Columbiad: A Bicentennial Reading 

(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 173-177; Weis, “Murderous Mother and Solicitous Father,” 

50-54; Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 244-251; Entry “Captivity Narratives” in BFI Companion to the 

Western 78-81; Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark eds., Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of 

Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724 (Harvard University Press, 2009 [1981]), 25.  



 

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captured it, and were ambushed by the rebels. Two Indians were shot and scalped, two 

Frenchmen were released, then on Clark’s orders the remaining four Indian warriors were 

publicly tomahawked, scalped, and their bodies thrown in the river. Loyalist propagandists 

could embellish as well as the revolutionaries, and retellings claimed Clark personally 

wielded the hatchet while smearing his face with blood and “yelping as a Savage,” while an 

Indian victims pulled the axe out of his own head and handed it back to Clark. Francis 

Maisonville, one of Hamilton’s French militiamen, was also targeted as a partisan and 

scalped, though accounts differ as to whether he was only partially scalped, as Clark and 

Hamilton told the story, or fully scalped by the ferocious Americans, as Hamilton’s aide 

Lieutenant Jacob Schlieffen claimed.277 

Such accusations of British perfidy continued throughout the period between the end 

of the Revolutionary War and the outbreak of the War of 1812. Following the fight at 

Prophetstown dubbed the Battle of Tippecanoe, the Chillicothe Scioto Gazette of Ohio 

reported on 27 November that 100 newly-manufactured British muskets were found 

afterwards on the battlefield. Accounts of well-armed Indian fighters using British firearms 

been reported after St. Clair’s defeat (1791) and after Anthony Wayne’s victory at the Battle 

of Fallen Timbers (1794), and the frontier population and the War Hawks seized on this as 

confirmation of British collusion in savage war. Felix Grundy of Tennessee stated in 

November 1811 in support of a House Committee on Foreign Affairs report that the British 

should no longer be permitted to “setting on the ruthless savage to tomahawk our women and 

children.” In an open letter published in the Western Intelligencer of Worthington, Ohio on 

                                                 
277 Sheehan, “The Famous Hair Buyer General”; White, The Middle Ground, 377; Axtell, Natives and 

Newcomers, 277-78.  



 

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25 December, 1811, Harrison claimed that “within the last three months, the whole of the 

Indians on this frontier, have been completely armed and equipped” from the king’s stores at 

Amherstburg. The breakdown of the votes that decided the War of 1812 show that a desire to 

wage war was pronounced among inland states and particularly pronounced in the south. 

Following Madison’s approval of the resolution to wage war against Britain, Jefferson wrote 

John Adams that America would be “obliged to drive [the Indians], with the beasts of the 

forest into the Stony [i.e., Rocky] mountains,” while the conquest of Canada “secures our 

women and children for ever from the tomahawk and the scalping knife, by removing those 

who excite them.”278  

A propaganda cartoon printed in Philadelphia in 1812 sums up these attitudes in 

visual form. Sarcastically entitled A Scene on the Frontiers as Practiced by the Humane 

British and Their Worthy Allies, it depicts a well-fed, sideburned, John-Bullish British officer 

cheerfully cashiering scalps from two well-plumed Indian warriors. “Bring me the Scalps and 

the King our master will reward you,” he says pleasantly to one of the warriors, bearing a 

musket slung over his shoulder helpfully identified by a placard as “Reward for Sixteen 

Scalps,” while a similar label, “Secret Service Money,” dangles from the officer’s coat 

pocket. The other Indian is sawing away at a dead American soldier’s hairline with a knife 

while, in the background, two British soldiers and two Indian warriors hold hands and dance 

around a campfire. “Arise Columbia’s sons and forward press!” reads the attached verse:  

Your country’s wrongs call loudly for redress; 

The Savage Indian with his Scalping knife 

Or Tomahawk may seek to take your life. 

                                                 
278 Eugene M. Wait, America and the War of 1812 (Commack, NY: Kroshka Books, 1999), 79; Robert S. Allan, 

His Majesty’s Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada, 1774-1815 (Toronto & Oxford: 

Dundurn Press, 1992), 117; Glenn Tucker, Poltroons and Patriots: A Popular Account of the War of 1812 

(Indianapolis: the Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1954), 125; George G.F. Stanley, The War of 1812: Land 

Operations (Macmillan of Canada: National Museum of Man, 1983), 35-41; Jefferson to Adams cited in 

Drinnon, Facing West, 96-98. 



 

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But the author-engraver William Charles assures his titillated readers of a swift resolution: 

American bravery will drive them back “to the Woods in Flight,” leaving their “British 

leaders” to “quickly shake” and make restitution. In fact, this bravado was less certain. 

Revolutionary War hero William Hull, governor of the Michigan Territory, was famously 

tricked into surrendering Detroit to a much smaller British and Indian force led by Isaac 

Brock and Tecumseh after a campaign of psychological warfare against him; on 5 August, 

ten days before Hull’s surrender, Tecumseh and his followers routed an American guard 

south of Detroit, killed 17 men, staked their bodies to the ground, and showily mounted their 

scalps on long poles which waved in the breeze. On 29 May, 1813, 115 well-armed 

Americans surrendered to British naval officer James Richardson, commanding a warship on 

Lake Ontario, after they had suffered light casualties skirmishing with 36 Indians on the 

shore. Richardson noted that his American counterpart was “armed to the teeth, with a hanger 

by his side and pair of pistols on his belt,” yet shook with fear as he told him that the woods 

were full of Indians and that they preferred British captivity to capture and massacre.279 

Actual British policies during the war were meant to forestall American propaganda: 

no bounties were offered for scalps or dead soldiers, whereas prisoner bounties were highest 

when the captives were unharmed. The first scalp of the war, Alan Taylor points out, was not 

lifted by an Indian warrior. During General Hull’s invasion of Upper Canada in July and 

August 1812, Captain William McCulloch scalped a Menominee warrior, outraging the 

Menominees, who had honoured a British request not to scalp any of Hull’s men. They 

carried the corpse back to Amherstburg, confronted the British officers, and vowed to resume 

scalping their enemies. Ten days later, McCulloch fell into an Indian ambush and lost his 

                                                 
279 Carl Benn, The Iroquois in the War of 1812 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 52-53; Taylor, 

Civil War of 1812, 153-66, 203-33.  



 

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own scalp, to the Menominees’ delight. While the War Hawks accused the British of buying 

American scalps for $6 apiece, officers in the American army were looking the other way as 

their troops scalped British-allied Indians. Brigadier General Alexander Smyth, fighting on 

the Niagara front, bolstered his volunteers’ morale by offering $200 for every horse taken 

from the British, and $40 “for the arms and spoils of each savage warrior,” a clear allusion to 

their scalps. American soldiers’ looting and burning of York in 1813, and the theft of the 

ceremonial mace from the Parliament building, was justified by the claim that Major 

Benjamin Forsyth had found a white man’s scalp suspended over the speaker’s chair in the 

Parliament house.280 

 In January 1813, General James Winchester and his Kentucky volunteers were 

defeated at Frenchtown, on the River Raisin in the Michigan Territory, by General Henry 

Procter’s combined force of indigenous fighters, British troops, and Canadian militia. Able-

bodied prisoners were taken to Amherstburg, while 80 of those too badly wounded to travel 

were left under guard at Frenchtown. About 200 of Procter’s allied Indians stayed behind and 

when the militia who guarded the Kentuckian prisoners fled in fear of the Indians, they fired 

the two buildings housing the wounded and killed and scalped any who managed to escape 

the flames. American popular opinion held this to be a latter-day Fort William Henry 

orchestrated by the British, as indicated by the engraving Massacre of the American 

Prisoners, at French-Town, on the River Raisin, by the Savages. In July, Congress claimed 

General Procter had personally masterminded the “Raisin River Massacre,” and “Remember 

the Raisin” became the battlecry of Kentuckians for the rest of the war.281  

                                                 
280 Benn, Iroquois in War of 1812, 83-85; Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 192, 209; Sarah McCulloh Lemmon, 

Frustrated Patriots: North Carolina and the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 

1973), 102. 
281 Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 209-220. 



 

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 The Kentuckians force-marched to Canada were subjected to other shows of 

animosity by Procter’s allies. The Indians stripped them of their coats, pants, and shoes in the 

middle of winter, and killed any prisoner found to have a scalp in his possession. Then, at 

Amherstburg, angry Indian women attacked them; Procter noted that the Indians hated 

Kentuckians “as a band of banditti.” Descended from Virginian and other Anglo-American 

“long hunters” and trans-Appalachian settlers, Kentuckians took great pride in their history 

of warring with American Indians, transforming a warning from the militant Cherokee leader 

Dragging Canoe (that they would find the settlement of his land “dark and bloody”) into a 

self-congratulatory folk etymology of Kentucky as “the dark and bloody ground.” 

Kentuckians had inherited the Virginians’ indigenous ethnonym of Big Knives, and they were 

regular users of the gigantic knives they ported everywhere. In 1813, after a reprimand by 

British officers for mutilating an American corpse, the Ottawa war chief Black Bird replied 

that Kentuckians had disinterred Indians’ graves and cut up the bodies: “If the Big Knives, 

when they kill people of our colour, leave them without hacking them to pieces, we will 

follow their example. They have themselves to blame.” John Ketcham, a mounted ranger 

during the war, recalled later in his memoirs that “In my first month’s service, I killed and 

scalped an Indian—was very proud of it—got leave to go to Kentucky to show it to my 

Daddy and Mamma, I guess they thought I had done about right.” George McFeely, an 

officer at Fort Niagara, entertained one of the paroled prisoners of Frenchtown, who had 

taken two scalps there and, despite the danger of discovery, had managed to conceal them in 

his waistband on the march to and from Amherstburg:  

While in the fort with us he ripped open his waist band, took out the scalps, fleshed them with 

his knife, salted them, and set them in hoops in true Indian style. He said he had twenty-eight 



 

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scalps at home, and these two would make thirty he had taken off with his own hands in his 

time, and that he would raise fifty scalps before he would die.
282 

On at least one occasion, Kentuckians sought out the Indians’ supposed puppetmasters. 

Major Peter Chambers of the British army’s 41st Regiment reported in 1814 that Sergeant 

Collins of the 41st Foot and Private Barto of the Canadian militia were killed on the north 

shore of Lake Erie by Kentuckians “in the most horrible manner.” Postmortem examination 

showed that Barto had not been shot before he was “actually butchered,” and both men were 

“scalped and cut shockingly.”283  

Conclusion: Black Hawk’s memoirs, or “Sauk Humanity No Paradox” 

Native American stories from the other side of the frontier rarely held frontiersmen in 

high esteem. The Pequot William Apess, later a famous memoirist and Methodist minister, 

enlisted in the American army as a drummer during the War of 1812, tried to leave when 

transferred to the ranks, and was arrested on charges of desertion in 1813. His fellow 

soldiers, clearly readers of captivity narratives threatened him with the pine-knot torture. 

Every day during the “dreary march” to Canada, Apess wrote later in his memoir A Son of 

the Forest (1829), “the officers tormented me by telling me that it was their intention to make 

a fire in the woods, stick my skin full of pine splinters, and after having an Indian powwow 

over me, burn me to death.” During the Black Hawk War, in May 1832, after scouts under a 

flag of truce were shot at by American militiamen, Black Hawk’s counterattack of 40 

warriors “on the prairie, […] about sundown” provoked a panicked rout of 300 armed men 

                                                 
282 Reginald Horsman: Kentuckians and Tennesseeans “hated the Indians with a passion,” and “wanted to expel 

Indians, not transform them” through the eastern seaboard’s Enlightenment schemes of religious and cultural 

conversion—in Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambrige, 

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 103-114. 
283 On Chambers, see Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 138. 



 

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known as Stillwell’s Run. Black Hawk was baffled by this, since his own forces had lacked 

tree cover and since “the Americans, generally, shoot well.”284 

Black Hawk’s 1833 memoir, dictated to a French/Potawatomi interpreter named 

Antoine LeClaire and transcribed by Illinois newspaper editor John B. Patterson, though 

admittedly a “mediated” text, has a critical advantage over Franklin’s Narrative of the Late 

Massacres: it gives a look at what the experience of being on the other side of Anglo-

America’s frontier was like. That the image was doubtless disturbing and troubling for many 

Anglo-American readers is perhaps reflected in Illinois governor (1842-46) Thomas Ford’s 

insistence in 1854 that the book was a forgery. Black Hawk describes relatives and 

neighbours being assaulted by white frontiersmen and robbed of pelts and trade goods, 

farmland ploughed under after Sauks planted corn to deny them their harvest, and himself 

given a humiliating beating after three frontiersmen ambushed him alone while hunting and 

accused him of killing their hogs. Black Hawk relayed a story told him by Gomo, a 

Potawatomi leader whose band had been contracted to supply the nearby Fort Clark with 

venison; a hunting party of 9 men and their wives led by Má-ta-táh, a well-respected leader, 

had met some cattleherders on the prairie, and when he tried to be diplomatic—he 

surrendered his gun and “endeavoured to explain that he was friendly”—they shot him, then 

pursued and killed almost all of the hunters. Gomo, said Black Hawk, then blackened his face 

in mourning and went to Fort Clark to report this to the lieutenant. “His countenance 

changed; I could see sorrow depicted in it,” Gomo reported; “He tried to persuade me that I 

was mistaken, as he ‘could not believe that the whites would act so cruelly.’” Black Hawk, 

                                                 
284 Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812, 203-33; Kennedy ed., Life of Black Hawk, xi-xii, 75-79; Carl Benn, 

Native Memoirs from the War of 1812: Black Hawk and William Apess (Baltimore: John Hopkins University 

Press, 2014), 25-80. 



 

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himself, had suffered a great personal loss at their hands: his adopted son had disappeared 

while deer hunting one winter, and the trackers found he had been taken captive and 

murdered by settlers. “His face was shot to pieces—his body stabbed in several places—and 

his head scalped! His arms were tied behind him!”285 

Well-aware that many members of the American public considered him, like other 

Indian warriors, a cruel barbarian, Black Hawk’s memoir carefully deploys and rearranges 

the by-now-familiar images and narratives of scalping and savage war to illustrate the Sauk 

experience. “I must contradict the story of some of village criers”—i.e., journalists—“who (I 

have been told,) accuse me of “having murdered women and children among the whites!” 

This assertion is false!” Responding to an Anglo-American public equally horrified and 

fascinated by the idea of Indian warriors who scalped and killed women and children, Black 

Hawk emphasized the mercies that he had shown to his enemies, particularly the unarmed or 

outnumbered and particularly children and women, ever since his beginning of his military 

career at 15. In describing the revenge raid he led following his adopted son’s murder, Black 

Hawk also took pains to delineate something that might have taken many of his readers by 

surprise: that Indians could find scalping just as disturbing and ugly as white people did. At 

one point during the raid, Black Hawk and some of his followers surprised two white men 

riding on one horse, startling them so that they fell off and then both ran in different 

directions. In Black Hawk’s account, he recognized the man he was pursuing and allowed 

him to escape: “He had been at Quàsh-quà-me’s village to learn his people how to plow. We 

                                                 
285 Kennedy ed., Life of Black Hawk, 30, 42-43, 53-57; Benn, Native Memoirs from the War of 1812, 25-80. 



 

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looked upon him as a good man.” He returned and met one of his followers, who “said he 

had killed the other man, and had his scalp in his hand!” This turned out to be premature:  

We had not proceeded far, before we met the man, supposed to be killed, coming up the road, 

staggering like a drunken man, all covered with blood! This was the most terrible sight I had 

ever seen. I told my comrade to kill him, to put him out of his misery! I could not look at him. 

This mercy-killing was followed by another, less sanguine act of empathy, but also one 

which doubtless surprised his readers. When he spotted two young boys hiding in the bushes, 

“I thought of my own children, and passed on without noticing them!”286 

Black Hawk’s raid was not a rampage, nor did it result in indiscriminate killing. Only 

two scalps were brought back: that of the unfortunate horseman, and another from an 

American killed in the ‘Battle of the Sinkhole’ between Black Hawk’s war party and a local 

militia. Against this carefully-delineated reciprocal justice, Black Hawk contrasts the 

continual and prevailing unjustness by which the United States had treated him and his 

people: women and children indiscriminately killed, refugees driven across the Mississippi to 

be attacked by Sioux on the other side, and that a people who had “fine houses, rich harvests, 

and every thing desirable” would drive them across the Mississippi, taking “our village and 

our grave-yards from us” “for which me and my people had never received a dollar.” In the 

tradition of Inca Garcilaso’s La Florida del Inca (1606) and as Geronimo’s memoir would do 

in 1906 (see Chapter 7), Black Hawk’s Life went beyond apologia to become an appeal to the 

American public that indigenous people were, like themselves, human beings who performed 

violent acts to defend their homelands from invasion. 

                                                 
286 Kennedy ed., Life of Black Hawk, 30-33; Benn, Native Memoirs from the War of 1812, 25-80. 



 

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Chapter Six: Heading West: Scalp-hunting and Manifest Destiny, 1837 to 1876 

And where is the satisfaction, / And how are we going to get square? 

By giving the Reds more rifles? / Invite them to take more hair? 

--Jack Crawford, “The Death of Custer” (1876)287 

Introduction 

This chapter surveys the gulf between Anglo-American self-perception of themselves 

as a people between savagery and civilization; the national myth of the Indian-killing 

frontiersman as folk hero or antihero; and what happened when Anglo-Americans identified 

with or informed by these myths collided with indigenous societies in the Southwest, 

California, and the Great Plains, where settler-colonial landholding patterns and the scalping 

paradigm’s policies regarding Indians supplanted earlier Euro-American systems of violent, 

yet negotiable, coexistence between Europeans and indigenous peoples: the Hispanic pattern 

of military alliances, serfdom, and mestizaje, and the fur-trade system commercial 

cooperation and rivalry over furbearers between indigenous peoples and itinerant male 

trapping parties. My prologue, “Indian-hating at midcentury,” discusses the genesis of the 

fantasy of the white frontiersman as ersatz Indian from the end of the Seven Years’ War to 

the Jacksonian period; while Chapter 6 discussed the actual history of this period, this 

chapter discusses its apotheosis in Anglo-American national mythology. The first section, 

“Heroic genocide: the Indian-killer in fiction at midcentury,” discusses the treatment of the 

scalp-taking Indian-killer in mid-19th-century fiction, in particular the highly-successful 

novels Nick of the Woods (1837) and The Scalp-Hunters (1851), Samuel Chamberlain’s 

claims to have been a scalp-hunter in his unpublished Mexican-American War memoir My 

Confession, and Herman Melville’s warnings of the omnipresence of evil in The Confidence-

                                                 
287 Jack Crawford, The Poet Scout: A Book of Song and Poetry [New York: Burr Printing House, 1889], 106-08. 



 

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Man: His Masquerade (1857). The second section, “Scalping in the Southwest: Kirker, 

Glanton, and California,” discusses the actual histories of the scalp-hunting mercenaries of 

the American Southwest, and their vigilante and militia counterparts in post-1849 California, 

and how and why Anglo-American styles of Indian war supplanted, and worsened, Hispanic 

precedent. The third and final section, “Scalping on the Great Plains: Sand Creek (1864) and 

Slim Buttes (1876),” discusses two one-sided mass killings of Plains Indians by American 

armed forces, both in retaliation for perceived prior outrages. In both cases, participants’ 

clear-cut sense of moral superiority over a barbarous enemy was replaced by a realization 

that they bore the stigmata of the savage warrior, complicit in scalpings and killings of 

children and women. How they, and contemporary observers, tried to excape or explain this 

stain away by insisting on the Indians’ guilt, expressing remorse, or silencing themselves will 

be examined. 

Prologue: Indian-hating at midcentury 

 Looking back in 1892 at his 1840s Philadelphia childhood, Howard Paul remembered 

childhood association with two major American literary figures through his uncle, Thomas 

Cottrell Clarke, editor of the weekly literary journal The Saturday Museum. The first was 

Edgar Allan Poe, who “supplied the book reviews and occasional essays”; in Paul’s 

recollection his “amiable” uncle often took exception to Poe’s “needless severity in 

reviewing. His favourite expression was “I have scalped him!” – referring to the author under 

examination.” Though his Gothic literature focused on such European medievalisms as 

creaky castles, torture chambers, ghosts, and mad aristocrats, Poe was a member of an 

Anglo-American popular culture fixated on scalping as an omnipresent, perennial feature of 

American history. Intriguingly, Paul wrote that Poe had “sketched out the scenario of a 



 

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tragedy” with Richard Montgomery Bird, author of the American Gothic frontier novel Nick 

of the Woods (1837). Whether its Gothicism would be European-oriented like Poe’s or 

American like Bird’s is unknown to Paul, as this “never got beyond outlines and much 

talk.”288  

Paul was avuncularly acquainted with another soon-to-be-successful novelist of 

bloody American frontier tales: the Anglo-Irish traveller and adventurer Thomas Mayne 

Reid, who departed Philadelphia in 1846 to fight in the Mexican-American War. Sometime 

after dropping out of the Presbyterian seminary in 1838 Reid had left Ireland for America 

and claimed to have travelled widely from Canada to Mexico, though Poe, a frequent dining 

and drinking companion, enjoyed chiding the colourful and unverifiable nature of his stories. 

“Now, Reid, give us one of your Mexican adventures,” Poe would say, […] “and keep as 

near the truth as you can.” Poe, in Paul’s recollection, assessed Reid as “a colossal but most 

picturesque liar. He fibs on a surprising scale, but with the finish of an artist, and that’s why I 

listen to him attentively.” Reid, on the other hand, described his style as “fact, enamelled by 

fiction – a mosaic of romance and reality,” an approach he applied to his own life; wounded 

in the storming of Chapultepec and promoted to first lieutenant, he billed himself as 

“Captain” Mayne Reid from his discharge in 1848 to his death in 1883. Pointing to his 

travels and military service to verify himself as an expert on frontier adventure, Reid’s first 

two novels, The Rifle Rangers (1850) and The Scalp-Hunters (1851), made him a bestseller. 

In his foreword to the second, which explicitly drew on his Mexican-American service, he 

                                                 
288 Howard Paul, “Recollections of Edgar Allen Poe,” in Munsey’s Magazine Volume VII, April to September 

1892 (New York: Frank A. Munsey & Company, 1892), 554-558; Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence, 

147-164. 



 

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promised his readers “I have endeavoured to enamel its pages with a thousand facts—the 

result of my own experience.”289 

As in The Scalp-Hunters, a tale of a young English gentleman-adventurer named 

Henry Haller joining the motley crew of a Franco-American gentleman, “Seguin, the Scalp-

Hunter,” to rescue his daughter Adèle from captivity among barbaric Navajos, Reid helped, 

in Elizabeth Freeman’s synopsis, to “pioneer fictions of empire” not just for an American 

readership but a broader British and, through translation, global audience. To do so, Reid 

applied the well-established clichés of the older frontiers of the Appalachians and the 

Mississippi to the new, exotic frontier of the Great Plains and American Southwest. Among 

those most cherished clichés was a long-lasting cultural artifact of the Jacksonian period: the 

idea of the white, Indian-hunting, Indian-hating frontiersman as the inheritor and supersessor 

of his morally inferior prey.290  

In the Revolutionary era, the mythic figure of the Indian-like, Indian-hunting 

frontiersman reconciled to Anglo-Americans’ satisfaction a trans-Atlantic debate going back 

to the 16th century: whether the cultural influences of Indians and transplanted Africans, or 

climate as neoclassical humoural and geographical theory proposed, made American-born 

Europeans qualitatively different, and specifically worse, than Europeans per se. As 

                                                 
289 Paul, “Recollections of Edgar Allen Poe”; Thomas Mayne Reid, The Scalp-Hunters: or, Romantic 

Adventures in Northern Mexico (Philadelphia and London, 1851), Volume 1 (of 3), vii; the Western Literary 

Association, A Literary History of the American West (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987): J. 

Golden Taylor (on Ruxton, 90-91), Richard H. Cracroft (on Reid, 171-72); Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and 

the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject (Cambridge University Press, 

1995 [1993]), 8; “fact, enamelled by fiction” in Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The 

Mexican War in the American Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1998), 191-94; Thomas W. Cutrer, “Reid, 

Thomas Mayne” in Texas State Historical Association Online; “Elizabeth Freeman, “Honeymoon with a 

Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to Nabokov”, in American Literature Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 

1998), 863-897. 
290 Paul, “Recollections of Edgar Allen Poe”; “helped pioneer […] fictions of empire” in Freeman, 

“Honeymoon with a Stranger: Pedophiliac Picaresques from Poe to Nabokov”, 867. 



 

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Benjamin Isaac notes, since Greek and Roman times migration had been assumed to cause 

degeneracy; thus the 16th-century Portuguese term crioulo, used to distinguish Brazilian-born 

black slaves from African-born, implied insubordinate, licentious, and rebellious behaviour 

thought to be acquired through American birth. When transferred into Spanish as criollo to 

differentiate American-born Spaniards from peninsulares, it imputed similar qualities of 

moral inferiority, crime and vice to American-born whites; these criollos, wrote royal 

geographer Juan López de Velasco, in Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias 

(1570), “turn out like the natives even though they are not mixed with them [by] declining to 

the disposition of the land.” Translations of Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias 

(1590) spread criollo into French and English, though as early as 1589 a sermon of Cotton 

Mather’s warned of decline from Puritan ideals into “criolian degeneracy.”291 

In the British North American colonies, the rambunctious and violent behaviour of 

the early frontier population was imagined both as some kind of American creolism and, 

among Scots Highlanders, Gaelic Irish, and “Scots-Irish” Protestant settlers from northern 

Ireland, as typifying the savagery of the Celtic fringe. Thomas Cradock’s Maryland 

Eclogues, written in the 1740s but left in manuscript until 1983, conclude with the lovelorn 

planter-protagonist’s decision to flee the Atlantic lowlands for the interior to live among the 

“Scotch-Irish, […] Wild as they are, quite good enough for me”; his fictional editor, the 

                                                 
291 Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, 8-13, 45-47, 60-69, 304-323; Ralph Bauer and José 

Antonio Mazzotti eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill, NC: 

University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1-57 (“Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas”), 

118-134 (Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, “Cruel Criollos in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s First New Chronicle and 

Good Government”), 135-61 (Jeffrey H. Richards, “Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks: Creolism in the 

Literary Chesapeake, 1680 – 1750”), 219-40 (Jim Egan, “Creole Bradstreet: Philip Sidney, Alexander the Great, 

and English Identities”); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Changing definition of America,” in Kupperman ed., 

America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750, 1-29; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Creoles in British America: From 

Denial to Acceptance,” 51, in Charles Stewart ed., Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory (Walnut Creek, 

CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), 46-65; Chaplin, Subject Matter, 1-35, 157-98. 



 

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creole Sly Boots, interjects “tis hard to say whether the Indians or they are greater Savages.” 

John McDonald, a descendant of Highland immigrants who later scouted with the 

Kentuckian Simon Kenton, proclaimed in the mid-19th century that “a wild highlander of that 

day wanted but little training to convert them into genuine frontiersmen”: they “considered 

no arts of any value except prepairing amunition [sic], fighting, hunting, fishing, raising 

cabins and a little corn,” and were as unaffected by killing Indians “than a butcher would [be] 

after killing a bullock. It was their trade.” Colonial authorities saw this in grimmer terms: Sir 

William Johnson denounced Virginians in a 1772 letter as “a lawless sett of people” defined 

by “ignorance, prejudice, democratical principles, & their remote situation” while Timothy 

Pickering, in 1778, described the northwestern frontier’s settlers as “a wild ungovernable 

race, little less savage than their tawny neighbors; and by similar barbarities have in fact 

provoked them to revenge.”292 

Prior to and during the American Revolution, the frontier population’s mimesis of 

Indian material and cultural life, particularly the approximation of indigenous masculinity as 

settlers imagined it, was used to signal Anglo-American identity as somewhere between 

European civilization and American virility, defying colonial authority in acts of “playing 

Indian.” Dressed in the frontier’s mesclage of European and Indian styles, wearing moccasins 

and Indian leggings with tradecloth coats and blankets, settlers disguised themselves with 

feathers and war paint to perform acts of property destruction prefiguring the Boston Tea 

Party. In February 1765 in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, a group variously known as 

                                                 
292 Cradock cited in Richards, “Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks,” 159-60; McDonald cited in Alan D. Gaff, 

Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma 

Press, 2004), 93-94; Sir William Johnson, Thomas Gage, David McClure, and John Armstrong cited in White, 

The Middle Ground, 315-22, 340-50, 415-20; Timothy Pickering cited in Charles Patrick Neimeyer, The 

Revolutionary War (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 92. 



 

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the Black Boys, Brave Fellows, or Loyal Volunteers accoutered themselves with charcoal, 

leggings, and strouds to attack British convoys sending diplomatic gifts to the Ohio Country, 

firing off their guns and making war-whoops as they burned twenty to thirty thousand pounds 

of trade goods. One of their leaders, James “Jimmy Boy” Smith, had spent much of the 

Seven Years’ War as a captive of Indian communities on the Ohio River; later becoming 

commander of a ranger or “riflemen” company during the Revolutionary War, he wrote in 

his 1799 captivity-narrative and autobiography that “the Indian discipline in the woods” was 

key to the United States’ future sovereignty just “as the British discipline in Flanders”; if 

“only part of our men [were] taught this art, accompanied with our continental discipline, 

[…] no European power […] would venture to show its head in the American woods.” Yet 

Anglo-Americans should restrict themselves to “what is useful and laudable,” and avoid 

Indians’ “barbarous proceeding. It is much to be lamented, that some of our frontier rifle-men 

are too prone to imitate them in their inhumanity.” Smith alluded here to the Gnadenhütten 

massacre of 1782, when a gang of frontier vigilantes, many of whom had been members of 

the Hickory Boys, methodically killed and scalped 96 Lenape-Munsee Moravian converts, 

pacifists who sang hymns while awaiting death: “This was an act of barbarity beyond any 

thing I ever knew to be committed by the savages themselves.”293 

The Revolutionary era also saw the rehabilitation of Michael Cresap, an Ohio Valley 

vigilante who, in the company of Daniel Greathouse and a gang of accomplices, led a series 

of premeditated ambush killings of Lenape-Munsees, Shawnees, and Mingoes in the spring 

of 1774, including the murder of a pregnant woman. In retaliation for the deaths of 13 friends 

                                                 
293 James Smith, “An Account of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Col. James Smith 

During his Captivity with the Indians, in the years 1755-59” (Lexington, 1799), in Loudon anthology, ; Dowd, 

War Under Heaven, 203-210; Philip Deloria, Playing Indian.  



 

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and family members, including his sister and her unborn child, the Mingo chief known as 

Logan had exacted mourning-war revenge by killing 13 settlers; in return, Virginia’s 

governor Lord John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore led an army to exact large-scale casualties 

on the Indians and extract land cessions in a post-war peace treaty. In the summer of 1774, 

newspapers in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston had blasted Cresap for his excessive 

cruelty, the Pennsylvania Gazette tellingly denouncing Cresap and his accomplices as a 

“gang of worse savages.” In early 1775 Logan’s written response to Dunmore was published 

as “Logan’s Lament” and hailed among American literati as masterful oratory.294  

But with the outbreak of war against Britain in 1775, Cresap captured public attention 

by organizing a Maryland rifle company and marching for Washington’s Continental Army 

in Massachusetts. Performing rifle exercises at various stops along the way, their most 

dramatic show of Indian mimesis was performed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, site of the 1763 

workhouse massacre. Here, stripped to the waist and war-painted, they pantomimed Indian 

war as they understood it: a war dance, a chiefs’ council, an ambush, and subsequent 

scalping. When Cresap, only in his early 30s, died of exhaustion in New York City in 

October, he received a hero’s funeral. In 1797, Cresap’s son-in-law Luther Martin, Attorney 

General of Maryland, accused Thomas Jefferson of maligning Cresap by reprinting “Logan’s 

Lament” in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) and claimed the famous oratory must be a 

fabrication. George Rogers Clark, Revolutionary-era hero of the Northwestern frontier, 

waded in with a strong letter exculpating Cresap of wrongdoing. Dr. Samuel Brown of 

Lexington, Kentucky, who forwarded Clark’s letter to Jefferson from Indiana Territory, 

                                                 
294 Parkinson, “From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen,” 119-122; “The declaration of Mr. John Heckewelder,” in 

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: A New Edition prepared by the author (Richmond, VA: J.W. 

Randolph, 1853 [1782]), 259-63 



 

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added his own commentary reminding Jefferson that of the “two parties on the frontier” only 

one considered Cresap “as a wanton violator of treaties [and] as a man of cruel and inhuman 

disposition”; the other held him “an intrepid warrior and a just avenger of savage 

barbarities.”295  

Richard Slotkin notes that the captivity genre’s traditional Indian-war narratives of 

suffering in the wilderness were amended and extended during the Revolutionary era with 

the myth of the Anglo-American frontiersman as white savage, “the solitary, Indian-like 

hunter of the deep woods” who was the equal, or superior, of Indians at hunting beasts, 

rescuing captives, and killing and scalping enemies. As Mary Rowlandson’s account had 

transformed the captivity-narrative genre, a series of biographies between 1784 and 1833 

apotheosized Daniel Boone, a Kentucky fur trapper and long-hunter, into the prototypical 

Indian-hunter—through excising certain inconvenient details. While the real Daniel Boone 

did fight in the Seven Years’ War, guide Virginia settlers through the Cumberland Gap, and 

lose a son at the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782, he also had an economic and political life 

within the mainstream of American society: he engaged in large-scale land speculation, 

served several terms in the Virginia legislature, and attained the offices of sheriff and county 

lieutenant. This included cultivating and promulgating his own myth; in his later years, he 

wished aloud to a visitor that he could sue Daniel Bryan for slander over The Mountain Muse 

(1813), a Boone-themed epic poem he detested.296 

From the 1820s to the 1860s, the United States rapidly industrialized and urbanized 

while annexing thousands of acres of land obtained by deporting Southeastern Indians, the 

                                                 
295 Parkinson, “From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen,” 119-122; Dr. Brown cited in Drinnon, White Savage, 

116-117.  
296 Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence; Drinnon, Facing West. 



 

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Louisiana Purchase, and the Spanish-American war. As Anglo-Americans “yearned […] for 

what they perceived to be a simpler frontier past” in the Appalachians, the Ohio Valley, and 

the Mississippi, this nostalgia was partly expressed at the ballot box. Andrew Jackson and 

William Henry Harrison, Indian-killing heroes of the War of 1812, ascended to the 

presidency, and Richard Mentor Johnson, a “second-tier Kentucky politician,” became 

Martin Van Buren’s vice president through the hideous 1836 campaign slogan “Rumpsey 

dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh.” In a decidedly less polished vein, in 1862 an 

old man beseeched President Lincoln for clemency for his grandsons, held as Union 

prisoners of war, on the grounds that he was complicit in the heroic killing and flaying of 

Tecumseh’s body after the Battle of the Thames in 1813: “I hope [helped] Kill Tecumseh and 

hope Skin him and brot Two pieces of his yellow hide home with me to My Mother & Sweet 

Hart.”297  

Any anxiety over treatment of Indians was partially assuaged by an increasingly 

circular and negative portrait of Indians as eternal savages. The poverty of conquered eastern 

Indians or the beggars at western forts and stagecoach stations were cited as proof, as in 

Mark Twain’s bilious descriptions of Shoshones in Roughing It (1872), not that Indians’ 

livelihoods were being destroyed by invasion and colonization but that their deviance was 

timeless. Archaeological theories projected this back into the pre-Columbian past by 

proposing that the “Mound Builders” of the Southeast and the “Anasazi” of the Southwest 

had been higher races wiped out by the genocidal ancestors of modern Indians. Imagined 

Indians were also becoming more physically contemptuous, if not animal-like, compared to 

                                                 
297 Guy St-Denis, Tecumseh’s Bones (McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal & Kingston, 2005), 4-9; 

Harrison, Dark Trophies, 39-47; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 227-36; Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 

244-46. 



 

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frontiersmen. In Horatio Greenough’s statuary group The Rescue, commissioned in 1837, 

carved in the 1840s, and unveiled at the Capitol in 1853, a huge, powerful backwoodsman 

pinions a reedy Indian warrior in his arms, caught red-handed attempting to tomahawk a 

white woman and her baby. An 1873 editorial cartoon during the Modoc War, entitled “The 

Two Vultures” shows a Modoc warrior, as a generic fur-clad Indian with hook nose, askew 

feathers tangled in his hair, and a curved scalping knife in his hand, seizing a dead soldier’s 

hair and glowers fiercely at a nearby vulture. The juxtaposition, notes Boyd Cothran, “would 

have been lost on few readers.” This increasingly animal-like assessment of the Indian was 

paired with popular justifications of ethnic cleansing and genocide. As early as the Jesuit 

Relation of 1662, Indians’ way of war had been dismissed as “nothing but a manhunt”; in 

Jacksonian-era fantasies of Indian war, whites turned the tables by making Indians into their 

prey.298 

Heroic genocide: the Indian-killer in fiction at midcentury 

 Andrew Jackson’s unofficial campaign anthem, “The Hunters of Kentucky” (Samuel 

Woodworth, ca. 1820) struck a chord by describing western frontiersmen as they liked to 

imagine themselves: strong, tough, keen-eyed sharpshooters who were half-horse and half-

alligator, a common Mississippi Valley boast for “great strength and amphibious attributes.” 

Period literature, dominated by western authors, described such men as skilled at hunting and 

killing Indians. The Cincinnati journalist Timothy Flint claimed in Biographical Memoir of 

                                                 
298 “nothing but a manhunt” in Reuben Gold Thwaites ed., trans., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents 

Vol. 47, pp. 221-231, cited in Wendell S. Hadlock, “War Among the Northeastern Woodland Indians,” 213-14, 

in American Anthropologist Volume 49, Issue 2 (April-June 1947), 204-221; Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763-

1861, 4 (“Jacksonian wish-fulfillment”), 1-26; Thomas, Skull Wars; Drinnon, Facing West, 119-129; Cothran, 

Remembering the Modoc War, 50-75; on Mark Twain, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians 

and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3-9, 272-77. 



 

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Daniel Boone (1833) that his subject had once shot two Indians with the same bullet; in 

Indian Wars of the West (1833), he called Boone “More expert at their own arts, than the 

Indians themselves, to fight them, and foil them [.]” The theme of Indian-killing as 

manhunting rather than war is explicit in the work of William Gilmore Simms, whose 

historical romance The Yemmassee (1835) included a bloodhound named Dugdale trained to 

rip Indians’ throats out. Simms described Boone in “The First Hunter of Kentucky” (1845) as 

an occasional “hunter of men” who, while not “fond of this sport,” “could take a scalp with 

the rest, and might feel justified in the adoption of a practice which, when employed by 

whites, had the very great influence in discouraging the Indian appetite for war.”299  

Various unsavory frontier characters were elevated alongside Boone to the pantheon. 

In 1761 Tom Quick of Milford, Pennsylvania began exchanging drunken threats with an 

Indian named Madlin or Maudlin, who claimed complicity in the killing of Quick’s father in 

1755 and imitated the “grimaces of the dying man”; after he left, Quick followed him, shot 

him in the back, robbed him and hid his corpse in a pit. Silver notes this as Quick’s only 

recorded killing of an Indian, from which a legend developed of Quick slaying 99 Indians 

before dying of smallpox; when vengeful Indians dug up his corpse, an epidemic killed even 

more. Mike Fink, born near Fort Pitt ca. 1770, served as a scout in western Pennsylvania, 

then worked as a boatman on the Ohio and Mississippi, becoming a folk hero in his own 

lifetime for his rough practical jokes, marksmanship, and skill at drinking and fighting; two 

years before his 1823 shooting death in an argument on the Upper Missouri, he appeared as a 

minor character in a play in St. Louis, The Pedlar (1821). Magazine writers developed Fink’s 

aspect as an Indian-hunter: Morgan Neville, in “Last of the Boatmen” (1828), told how Fink, 

                                                 
299 Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence; Drinnon, Facing West; Allen, Western Rivermen, 1-26, 214-24.  



 

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who like other frontier scouts “thought it as praiseworthy to bring in the scalp of a Shawnee 

as the skin of a panther,” obtained venison by stalking and shooting an Indian who was 

stalking and shooting a deer. In T.B. Thorpe’s “The Disgraced Scalp-Lock” (1842), Fink 

earned the enmity of an exiled Cherokee warrior named “Proud Joe” by shooting off his 

scalplock at the hairline; when told Proud Joe was still alive, he “seemed perfectly 

indifferent,” only regretting that he’d missed the Cherokee’s head and calling it his “first bad 

shot in twenty years.” Daniel Brodhead, an American officer adopted into the Lenape-

Munsees’ Turtle clan, was in the middle of negotiating an alliance against the Wolf clan at 

Coshocton in April 1781 when an Ohio Valley vigilante named Lewis Wetzel, “in many 

ways the prototypical Indian hater,” tomahawked a chief from behind. A century later Wetzel 

had been elevated, in Henry Howe’s 1855 account, into “the most indefatigable Indian hunter 

on the frontiers.”300 

These stories’ fictive Indian killers not only emulated the fictive Indians they slew, 

but absorbed the cultural and physical traits of their prey. Like the fictional Indian, they also 

yielded to Manifest Destiny: after waging one-man wars against entire tribes, they 

voluntarily banished themselves further West at the approach of urbanization. In “Last of the 

Boatmen,” Neville’s version of Mike Fink is nearly transformed into an idealized Indian 

warrior, with fetishized physical and cultural traits of virile power and weaponry: Neville’s 

Fink was over six feet tall with “a large knife” hanging from his “broad leathern belt,” 

                                                 
300 Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the Great West, Volume 1 (James A. Roberts: Greenville, Tennessee, 

1855), 136-39; Richard White, the Middle Ground, 388-89; Silver, Our Savage Neighbours, 125-27; 

Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763-1861, 1-26, 214-24; Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine eds., Half Horse 

Half Alligator: The Growth of the Mike Fink Legend (The University of Chicago Press, 1956), “The Last of the 

Boatmen” (Neville, 1828), 43-55 (52: “skin of a panther”), “The Disgraced Scalp-Lock” (Thorpe, 1842), 67-82; 

T.B. Thorpe, The Mysteries of the Backwoods; or, Sketches of the Southwest (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 

1846), 118-136. 



 

301 

 

possessing the “symmetry of an Apollo” and the “limbs of a Hercules”; sun and weather had 

given him the skin tone of a “complete mulatto” and “but for the fine European cast of his 

countenance, he might have passed for the principal warrior of some powerful tribe. 

Although at least fifty years of age, his hair was as black as the wing of the raven.” Thorpe’s 

Fink, in “The Disgraced Scalp-Lock,” possesses the stereotypical Indian warrior’s bloodlust 

and callousness. “Where’s the fun, the frolicking, the fighting?” he asks, agitated to see 

development along the Ohio, and fantasizes of waging a one-man war against the Choctaws 

from a fortified hilltop cabin “just to have something to keep me from growing dull […] 

What a beautiful time I’d have of it!” He rationalizes the slaughter of Native Americans as a 

law of the wilderness: “Its natur [sic] that the big fish should eat the little ones.” Henry 

Howe’s Lewis Wetzel was “very broad-shouldered and full breasted,” with a complexion 

“dark and swarthy as an Indian’s” and face “pitted” with smallpox scars. His hair “reached, 

when combed out, to the calves of his legs,” and he had “remarkably black” eyes, which 

“would sparkle with such a vindictive glance as almost to curdle the blood of the beholder.” 

But since his preferred targets were Indians, he was not a fundamentally bad person; Howe 

called him “a true friend, but a dangerous enemy,” and “a social and cheerful companion.”301 

Wholly invented Indian-killers adhered even more closely to frontier literature’s 

Gothic clichés of obsessively-vengeful antiheroes, or Manifest Destiny’s insistence that 

Indian slaughter did not impact the benignity of Anglo-American society. The protagonist of 

Timothy Flint’s “The Indian Fighter” (1830), “sojourn[ing] on the prairies of Illinois,” hears 

the autobiography of the fictional Hermit of Cap au Gris, son of a ruined British aristocratic 

                                                 
301 Howe, Historical Collections of the Great West, Volume 1, 136-39; Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763-1861, 1-

26, 214-24; Blair and Meine eds., Half Horse Half Alligator, “The Last of the Boatmen” (Neville, 1828), 43-55, 

“The Disgraced Scalp-Lock” (Thorpe, 1842), 67-82; T.B. Thorpe, The Mysteries of the Backwoods, 118-136. 



 

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family who sought their fortune in America. After experiencing the usual Indian-war horrors, 

family wiped out, fiancée dying in his arms, captivities and near-death, etc., he leads a ranger 

company to pursue the Indians with such ferocity “that I bore in their language an appellation 

which means Indian Fighter.” Finally brought to bay at their tribal graveyard, the chief 

challenges “Indian Fighter” to single combat after his people fulfill Manifest Destiny by 

committing mass suicide. His vengeance achieved, the Indian Fighter converts to Christianity 

to await his own death: “That whole race is wasting away about me, like the ice in the vernal 

brooks. I shall soon be with them.”302  

James Kirke Paulding’s series of character sketches set in pre-Revolutionary New 

York, The Dutchman’s Fireside (1831), included the fictional Timothy Weasel of Vermont. 

After Canadian Indians had wiped out Weasel’s family and neighbours, Sir William Johnson 

told Paulding’s protagonist, he now hunted “those tarnal kritters” with “inconceivable” 

“avidity,” against which “the keenest sportsman does not feel a hundredth part of the delight 

in bringing down his game [.]” A fictional Kentucky frontiersman, Ambrose Bushfield, 

expressed those sentiments unmediated in Paulding’s novel Westward Ho! (1832) in a scene 

employing two clichés in frontier adventure: the education of a greenhorn by a dialect-

speaking old veteran, and the frontiersman’s voicing of the Sepúlvedan false dilemma, 

establishing for the audience the righteousness of killing Indians: 

There isn’t a soul in all Kentucky but has lost some one of his kin in the Ingen wars, or had 

his house burnt over his head by these creturs. When they plough their fields, they every day 

turn up the bones of their own colour and kin who have been scalped, and tortured, and 

whipped, and starved by these varmints, that are ten thousand times more bloodthirsty than 

tigers, and as cunning as ‘possums. 

                                                 
302 Drinnon, Facing West, 119-129; Timothy Flint, “The Indian Fighter,” in The Token (Boston, 1830), 37-58. 



 

303 

 

Declaring that he is “the last of my family and name,” Bushfield establishes the stakes of 

savage war: if not hunted, Indians perform white genocide.303 

That these stories peddled fantasies of Anglo-American wish fulfillment and 

overwrote actual events with simplified narratives of inevitable, guiltless genocide was 

further exposed in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) and James 

Hall’s oft-repeated Colonel Moredock story. Natty Bumppo, aka “Hawk-Eye,” 

“Leatherstocking,” or in D.H. Lawrence’s words “a saint with a gun,” slays dozens of Indians 

but never once scalps them, though his Indian companions do eagerly. His decided asexuality 

also rules out interracial sex, a possibility constantly banished by proclaiming himself of the 

purest white blood, “a man without a cross.” Instead, he takes something else from the 

Indians. In The Deerslayer (1841), an old warrior he has bested gives young Natty, and by 

extension Manifest Destiny, his blessing with his dying breath: “ –eye sartain –finger 

lightning—aim, death—great warrior soon. No Deerslayer—Hawkeye—Hawkeye—

Hawkeye. Shake hand.” Natty Bumppo’s Indian companions show “willingness to immolate 

themselves” by aiding in Manifest Destiny, quite literally in The Pioneers (1823) when the 

elderly Chingachgook, bearing the baptismal name “Indian John,” throws himself into a 

forest fire. His “bad” Indians conform to Savagist stereotypes perfectly, as in a scene in The 

Last of the Mohicans (1827) where Magua and his Hurons wolf down the raw, still-warm 

venison of a fawn before deciding to immolate Cora and Alice Munro with the pine-splint 

torture (see Chapter 5), prevented by the heroes’ nick-of-time arrival. Cooper’s critics who 

derided the fakeness of his “good” Indians— as when General Lewis Cass, prior to being 

                                                 
303 Drinnon, Facing West, 119-129, “scalped and tortured” my italics; Timothy Flint, “The Indian Fighter,” in 

The Token (Boston, 1830), 37-58. 



 

304 

 

made Jackson’s Secretary of War, called them “beings with feelings and opinions, such as 

never existed in our forests”— typically had no complaints about his “bad” Indians. In an 

1852 essay Francis Parkman, the dean of 19th-century frontier historians, declared Cooper’s 

novels “a faithful mirror of that rude transatlantic nature.” Denouncing the “good” Indians of 

Last of the Mohicans, i.e., Uncas, Chingachgook, and the ancient, fatalistic Lenape sachem 

Tamenund, as the sort of “aboriginal heroes, lovers, and sages, who have long formed a petty 

nuisance in our literature,” he had nothing but praise for the novel’s villain Magua, a 

scheming, vindictive alcoholic who plans to avenge himself on Colonel Munro by violating 

his daughter Cora. This struck Parkman as a simple statement of fact, since “It is well known 

that Indians, in real life as well as in novels, display a peculiar partiality for white 

women…”304 

The themes of inevitable ethnic cleansing, and contradictorily disavowing and 

celebrating the Indian-killing vigilante, appear in James Hall’s 1834 essay “Brief Account of 

Colonel Moredock.” Hall began by designating the backwoodsmen as a “peculiar race” 

within America, a self-contained relic population holding who combined 17th-century total 

war with 18th-century British Enlightenment belief in free markets: “[he] does not believe 

that an Indian, or any other man has a right to monopolize the hunting grounds, which he 

considers free to all.” Raised from the cradle with “horrid tales of savage violence,” Hall 

                                                 
304 D.H. Lawrence, “Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels,” 100, in Michael Herbert ed., D.H. Lawrence: 

Selected Critical Writings (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 97-112; Leslie A. Fiedler, 

“James Fenimore Cooper: The Problem of the Good Bad Writer,” in George A. Test ed., James Fenimore 

Cooper: His Country and His Art (1979), 1-10, reprinted in The Last of the Mohicans (New York: the Modern 

Library, 2001), xi-xxii; Slotkin, Regeneration, 466-516; Drinnon, Facing West, 147-164. On Parkman, see 

Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, fifth edition (Yale University Press, 2014), 94; 

Renata R. Mautner Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and 

Brazil, 1830-1930 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 154-185 ; “peculiar partiality for white 

women” in Wilbur R. Jacobs, Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: the Formative Years (University of Texas 

Press, 1991), 49-50, where Jacobs notes that Parkman may have had Magua in mind while writing The 

Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851). 



 

305 

 

allowed that the Indian-hating frontiersmen had “heard only one side” of events, but the 

appearance of even-handedness is illusory. While Black Hawk’s memoir or the writings of 

William Apess were available in English by 1834, Hall made no effort to suggest what life 

on the other side of the frontier might look like, while repetitively invoking the Indian as 

illegitimate combatants (“a midnight prowler, watching to murder the mother as she bends 

over her helpless children”; “yelling fiends in human shape,” etc.) He then shifted to the 

“many instances of individuals who, in consequence of some personal wrong, have vowed 

eternal hatred to the whole Indian race,” as proven by an entirely fictional story: of one John 

Moredock, who had gone through a succession of stepfathers (his mother “was married 

several times, and was as often widowed by the tomahawk of the savage”) before his mother 

“and all her children,” except John, were massacred horribly by an intertribal collection of 

Indian bandits on the Mississippi. After describing Moredock’s manly vitality, and his 

systematic hunting of the thirty Indians responsible in a one-man campaign of ethnic 

cleansing—up to his death from old age he “never in his life failed to embrace an opportunity 

to kill a savage”—Hall then made his most surprising assertion: that Colonel Moredock, for 

all this, “was a man of warm feelings, and excellent disposition,” promoted to Colonel as a 

ranger during the War of 1812, serving in the legislative assembly, and almost becoming 

governor of Illinois.305 

These themes of the Sepúlvedan false dilemma, nostalgia for 18th-century frontiers, 

the obsessed vigilante compelled to kill Indians, the inevitability and normality of 

frontiersmen scalping Indians, and Slotkin’s model of regeneration through violence – that 

                                                 
305 James Hall. “Indian Hating. – Some of the Sources of this Animosity. –Brief Account of Col. Moredock,” 

from Sketches of History, Life and Manners, in the West, (Philadelphia: Harrison Hall, 1835), volume 2, chapter 

6, 74-82, in Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer eds. Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man: His 

Masquerade, second edition (W.W. Norton and Company: New York and London, 2006 [1971]), 456-61. 



 

306 

 

Anglo-America can only advance by civilized whites’ descent into barbarism—all reached 

their logical extremes in Bird’s Nick of the Woods; or, the Jibbenainosay: A Tale of Kentucky 

(Philadelphia, 1837). The novel begins with the heirs of a wealthy Virginia family, Captain 

Roland Forrester and his cousin Edith, arriving in 1782 Kentucky in a wagon train 

resembling a past age of white savagery: “Vandals in quest of some new home to be won 

with the edge of the sword.” Roland, a decorated hero of the Revolutionary War, is well 

aware of Virginian and Kentucky virtues: “to fell trees, raise corn, shoot bisons and Indians,” 

but is a stripling in heroic Indian-killing-- whereas the novel’s Kentuckians are all of the 

mold of Mike Fink and Davy Crockett. Colonel Tom Bruce, chieftain of a fort on the edge of 

the wilderness, is hypervirile: of “colossal” stature, “at least fifty,” but “as hale as one of 

thirty, without a single gray hair” in his “raven locks.” Like Daniel Bone, a succession of his 

sons have been slain in the Indian wars; Tom Jr., renamed after an older brother slain in war, 

killed and scalped “a full-grown Shawnee before he war fourteen y’ar old.” The brawling 

horse-thief Ralph Stackpole “killed two Injuns once, single-handed, on Bear-Grass” and, 

towards the novel’s end, beats an Indian to death with his fists; Stackpole steals other 

Kentuckians’ horses, is a braggart and a ruffian, but his faults are overlooked as he “fights 

Injuns like a wolverine.” A dissenting note is struck by “Bloody” Nathan Slaughter, a Quaker 

and pacifist, despised as “the only man in all Kentucky that won’t fight!” And an unknown 

presence the Shawnees call the Jibbenainosay or “Spirit-that-Walks” stalks the Kentucky 

wilderness, scalping and mutilating Indian victims, particularly Shawnees, with a cross-

shaped mark across the chests of “all the meat of his killing.” Bruce scorns the accounts of 

“such lying devils as Injuns” (“for the truth ar’nt in ‘em”) but notes that dozens of settlers, 



 

307 

 

who call the creature Old Nick, have “all had a glimpse of him stalking through the woods, 

[…] always found in the deepest forests”.306 

In an unsurprising twist, the true architects of the looming threat of a pan-tribal Indian 

invasion of Kentucky are white villains: the Forresters’ lawyer Braxley, who has stripped 

them of their fortune, and the “white Injun” Abel Doe, Braxley’s henchman. In a more 

unusual development, the Jibbenainosay or “Old Nick” is revealed to be none other than 

Nathan Slaughter, imbuing his stereotyped Indian-like traits with retrospective meaning: his 

clothes, “fragments of tanned skins rudely sewed together”; his tall and lanky build; his “long 

hooked nose” and “black staring eyes.” Nathan explains how ten years ago, he handed over 

his rifle and knife as a show of good faith to the ghoulish Shawnee chief Wenonga, who then 

promptly killed and scalped his wife, old mother, and five “little innocent babes.” The 

memory triggers an epileptic fit, “brought on by overpowering agitation of mind,” and 

Nathan falls to the ground, revealing beneath his broad-brimmed hat horrible scars left by 

“the savage scalping knife” on the “mangled head.” Once recovered, Roland agrees to 

Nathan’s plan to rescue Edith and other captives from Wenonga’s village, a scenario 

identical to that of Reid’s The Scalp-Hunters (1851) and expressing the reverse-colonial 

theme: most of Wenonga’s men are with the pan-tribal army invading Kentucky, “scalping 

and murdering as they come: their villages are left to be guarded by women and children, and 

old men no longer fit for war.”307 

                                                 
306 Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods, or The Jibbenainosay: A Tale of Kentucky, volume 1 of 2 

(Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1837), 13-14 (“won at the edge of the sword”), 24-25 (“raven locks… 

fourteen y’ar old”), 42 (“shoot bisons and Indians”), 50-53 (“meat of his killing”), 50-53 (“such lying devils… 

deepest forests”), 53-60 (“Bear-Grass”), 91-92 (“like a wolverine”); Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837), volume 2, 

89-90 (“his blows falling like sledge-hammers or battering-rams”). 
307 Bird, Nick of the Woods, Vol. 1 (61-75: “fragments of tanned skins… eyes”), Vol. 2, 70-72 (“overpowering 

agitation of mind… mangled head”), 74-83 (“no longer fit for war”); Drinnon, Facing West, 119-129. 



 

308 

 

Slaughter’s traits, as well as his physiognomy, are those of the stereotypical Indian 

warrior: his skills in wilderness survival, stealth, and combat; and his sudden swings from 

self-controlled placidity to a dissociative state of violent insanity. He scalps every Indian they 

kill, which Bird rationalizes as “the practice of the border” which “was, and is, essentially a 

measure of retaliation, compelled, if not justified, by the ferocious example of the red-man.” 

At the Shawnees’ village, Slaughter doffs his tattered leather for stolen Indian clothes and 

war paint in “figures of snakes, lizards, skulls, and other savage devices,” consistent with 

Roland’s description of Shawnees as “crawling reptiles […] in spirit as in movement.” When 

added to his “lofty stature,” “the metamorphosis was so complete” that Captain Ralph 

confessed a desire “to be at his top-knot.” The Indians are also fooled until a failed rescue 

attempt of Edith, then show “unconcealed wonder and awe” when Nathan alarms Wenonga 

with “a look more hideous than his own” and falls into an epileptic fit. Taking his unknown 

prisoner to be “great Medicine,” Wenonga orders Nathan to summon the Jibbenainosay so he 

can avenge the deaths of all his sons and grandsons—not knowing that the painted 

frontiersman is the killer. Seeing the scalps of his wife, mother, and children hanging from 

Wenonga’s housepost, Nathan seizes his opportunity, telling Wenonga in perfect Shawnee 

that if untied, “The chief will see the Jibbenainosay!” Slaughter then brutally kills, scalps, 

and dismembers Wenonga with his own tomahawk and knife, seizing “the bundle of withered 

scalps—the locks and ringlets of his own murdered children” in one hand, and “the reeking 

scalp-lock of the murderer” in the other. Before fleeing the village to summon help he issues 

a death whoop worthy of the Eastmans: “in the insane fury of the moment, given forth, a 



 

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wild, ear-piercing yell, that spoke the triumph, the exulting transport, of long-baffled but 

never-dying revenge.”308 

But in the pandemonium of Wenonga’s village, Nathan’s insane screams are “such 

sounds […] too common to create alarm or uneasiness.” Bird’s depiction of Indians as a vile 

antisociety is consistent with Lawrence and Jewett’s theme of Tertullian ecstasy: “the 

enjoyment in seeing the punishment of the wicked,” which “works towards its climactic 

visceral gratification by a kind of inverted foreplay […] requir[ing] revulsion triggered by 

negative stereotypes.” From the novel’s early references to the tortured death of Colonel 

Crawford and Indians’ supposed love of killing women and children, Bird’s Shawnees are 

loathsome, ruled by their passions for murder and torture. While all of Bird’s Indians are 

racist caricatures, the most contemptuous is an old Piankeshaw chief, mourning his son’s 

killing and scalping by “Long-knife man Kentucky” in scenes which reduce the mourning-

war complex to irrationality and chaos. Swilling from Braxley’s keg of rotgut, the 

Piankeshaw alternately promises to adopt Nathan as his son or to torture him horribly, while 

praising his slain son’s ability to “kill bear, kill buffalo, catch fish” and “take scalp, squaw 

scalp, papoose scalp, man scalp, all kind scalp,” laterally comparing hunting to war, reducing 

Indian warfare to scalping and infanticide, and implicitly attributing both to bloodlust and 

sadism. Bird’s sketch of the Shawnee village, a disordered collection of hovels inhabited by 

                                                 
308 Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837), Vol. 1, 158 (“crawling reptiles”), Vol. 2, 106 (“practice of the border”), 115-

16 (“Then, daubing over his face, arms and breast with streaks of red, black, and green paint, that seemed 

designed to represent snakes, lizards, and other reptiles; he was, on a sudden, converted into a highly 

respectable-looking savage, as grim and awe-inspiring as these barbaric ornaments and his attire, added to his 

lofty stature, could make him. Indeed, the metamorphosis was so complete, that Captain Ralph, as he swore, 

could scarce look at him without longing, as this worthy personage expressed it, ‘to be at his top-knot.’” My 

italics), 161-62 (“snakes, lizards, skulls”), 195-207 (“long-baffled but never-dying revenge”); Drinnon, Facing 

West, 119-129; On Slaughter’s metamorphosis into simulacrum of an Indian warrior, see Shirley Samuels, 

Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2004), 36. 



 

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“male vagabonds,” “naked children,” and “oppressed and degraded women,” use literal or 

spiritual intoxication as his master-theme of Indian dysfunction and wickedness. The eye of 

the “squalid sot” Wenonga gleams with “mingled drunkenness and insanity,” while the 

Indians, preparing to burn Roland, Edith, and Ralph, are swept away in “the drunkenness of 

passion,” as though possessed in “the sway of unchained demons, or […] the horrible 

impulses of lycanthropy.” This Tertullian foreplay reaches its climax when, just before the 

pyre is lit, Slaughter arrives with Colonel Bruce and an army of Kentuckians itching to 

avenge the defeat at Blue Licks. Transfixed by their “universal devotion to the Saturnalia of 

blood,” the Indians are caught by surprise.309  

Omitting the sexual abuse of women and killing of children and women which were 

endemic to frontier war, Bird’s audience is entreated to celebrate sanitized ethnic cleansing. 

Roland kills Wenonga’s “witch-like” wife, a “hag” more sadistic than her husband, while she 

tries to light his pyre; the Kentuckians take a harvest of warriors’ scalps; Braxley, who could 

“pass for an Indian” with his height and “uncommon darkness of skin and hair,” is scalped by 

mistake by an over-eager Massachusetts greenhorn. But a larger number of Indians are made 

prisoners, “including all the women and children”—no collateral damage here—as “the 

surest means of inducing the tribe to beg for peace.” With Nathan in the forefront (“his step 

was fierce, active, firm, and elastic, like that of a warrior leaping through the measures of the 

war-dance”), the Kentuckians loot and torch the village and its cornfields to inflict winter 

hunger on the Shawnees. “[R]estore[d] once more to his wits” by completing his mission of 

                                                 
309 Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837), Vol. 1, 39-40 (death of Colonel Crawford), Vol. 2, 34-37 (“Long-knife… 

kill bear… all kind scalp”), 116-17 (“oppressed and degraded women”), 121-36 (“male vagabonds… naked 

children”), 140-43 (“squalid sot”), 176-78 (“unchained demons… lycanthropy”), 195-207 (“drunkenness and 

insanity”, “such sounds […] too common”), 215-19 (“drunkenness of passion… Saturnalia of blood”); 

Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero, 309-337.  



 

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vengeance, Nathan finds his neighbours’ praise more upsetting than their former taunts and 

insults. Fearing that his story will “scandalize and disparage” the Society of Friends, Nathan 

asks Roland not to repeat it and disappears into the wilderness like Natty Bumppo, Mike 

Fink, and other Indian-killers, “going no man knew whither.”310 

In his foreword to a revised 1853 edition, Bird insisted on the historical accuracy of 

his fictional story. Nathan, his antiheroic Daniel Boone, represented a real “class of men” 

such as “Boone and Kenton, McColloch and Wetzel,” who were “scattered along the extreme 

frontier” of every state “from New York to Georgia, […] men in whom the terrible 

barbarities of the savages […] had wrought a change of temper as strange as fearful.” He 

professed himself innocent of the charges arrayed against him in the foreword of a British 

edition of Nick of the Woods, “of influencing the passions of his countrymen against the 

remnant of an unfortunate race, with a view of excusing the wrongs done to it by the whites, 

if not of actually hastening the period of that “final destruction” which it pleases so many 

men […] to predict.” He unwittingly proved his British critic’s point by invoking the 

Sepúlvedan false dilemma, contrasting Cooper and Chateaubriand’s dying-Indian characers 

Uncas and Atala against his “real” Indians: “ignorant, violent, debased, brutal,” whose 

“miserable” lives were devoted to “the pleasures of the chase and of the scalp-hunt—which 

we dignify with the name of war.” His 1837 foreword had more explicitly damned the Indian 

warrior as a habitual child-killer who “wages […] systematic war […] upon women and 

children […] we look into the woods for the mighty warrior, ‘the feather-cinctured chief,’ 

rushing to meet his foe, and behold him retiring, laden with the scalps of miserable squaws 

                                                 
310 Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837), Vol. 2, 121-36 (Braxley “could pass for an Indian”), 144-47 (“witch-like”… 

“hag”), 224-33 (Braxley scalped), 230-33 (“taken prisoners… beg for peace”), 234-42 (“measures of the war-

dance… restore him once more… no man knew whither”).  



 

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and their babes.” His 1837 text was, in fact, guilty of normalizing genocide, declaring 

scalping as part of “the mortal feud” which will only end “with the annihilation of the 

American race” by “the white invader.”311 

Reid’s The Scalp-Hunters (1851) offered a similarly sanitized story with clear-cut 

heroes and villains in a fantastical version of the Southwest. Knifed by a Mexican bravo at a 

Santa Fé fandango, Henry Haller, a young British gentleman-adventurer travelling in 

America, recovers in the home of a French-American creole named Seguin, a Santa Fé 

gentleman with a sinister reputation as “the Scalp Hunter.” As in Westward Ho!, Seguin 

deploys the Sepúlvedan false dilemma—the demolition of the saccharine Indian stereotype to 

justify the demonic Indian stereotype—to educate the greenhorn Haller:  

If you knew the history of this land for the last ten years; its massacres and its murders; its 

tears and its burnings; its rapes and spoliations; whole provinces depopulated; villages given 

to the flames; men butchered on their own hearths; women, beautiful women, carried into 

captivity to satisfy the lust of the desert robber. 

Merchants from Bent’s Fort have already introduced Haller to Southwestern barbarism: 

Hispanics are both primitive and decadent, Pueblo Indians are natural serfs, while the 

Comanches, Apaches, and Navajos are the warrior-races of the Southwest, descendants of the 

Aztecs who scalp men, kidnap women, commit cannibalism and worship Quetzalcoatl with 

human sacrifice. As per usual Anglo-American stereotypes, behind the Indians’ depredations 

is a white mastermind: Governor Manuel Armijo, New Mexico’s governor from the late 

1830s throughout the 1840s. Andrés Reséndez notes that Navajos had raided New Mexico 

with increasing frequency from 1846 until 1849, and Reid’s imagination drew a link: his 

                                                 
311 Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods, or, The Jibbenainosay: A Tale of Kentucky; A new edition, 

revised by the author (New York: 1853), iii-vii; Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837), Vol. 2, 106 (“mortal 

feud…invader”); Drinnon, Facing West, 119-129. 



 

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Navajos, the main antagonists of The Scalp-Hunters, raid the province at will and serve as 

Armijo’s bodyguards and private army via his brokered peace treaty which prohibits the 

army from fighting them. At Armijo’s instigation the Navajos destroyed Seguin’s mines and 

carried off his daughter Adèle. After years “hunting for my child,” Seguin was offered the 

command of a ranger unit paid in scalp bounties, and accepted this “strange guerilla […] in 

the hope that I might yet recover my child, I accepted it—I became a scalp-hunter.”312 

 Seguin enlist Haller as his second-in-command for his long-awaited expedition into 

“Navajoa,” as circumstances have moved in his favour. According to his informant, a foul-

mouthed and leathery trapper named “Old Rube” recently escaped Navajo captivity minus 

scalp and ears, the Navajos and their allies are on the verge of a great expedition to the gates 

of Durango. As in Nick of the Woods, this will leave their villages unguarded save for 

women, children, and old men; as in Nick of the Woods, perfect chivalry is to be observed 

from the outset: Seguin forbids the scalping of women and noncombatants, or the 

mistreatment of women, stipulating that he will only pay for warriors’ scalps (at $50 apiece) 

and unharmed hostages to extort a prisoner exchange from the Navajos. A recent drop in the 

price of beaver pelts has brought Anglo-American fur trappers from the eastern plains, who 

“find ‘red-skin’ pays better”; with no sense of contradiction, he describes these Anglo-

American trappers as essentially benign: “bold, but good-humoured and generous.” The 

company, whose three largest ethnic contingents are Anglo-American trappers, Mexican 

norteños, and “Delaware” Indians, with a babel of French-Canadians, Southwestern Indians, 

                                                 
312 Reid, The Scalp-Hunters (1851), volume 1, 79-82 (cannibalism, human sacrifice), 206-220 (“rapes and 

spoliations”, “human monster,” “strange guerilla”); Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 242; On Reid’s fanciful 

Southwestern ethnography as common in the writings of Mexican-American veterans, see Robert W. 

Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York and 

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 152, 179-80. 



 

314 

 

escaped Louisiana slaves, Hawaiians, and others, resembles both the polyethnic fur trappers’ 

brigades of the intramontane West and the similarly polyethnic scalp-hunter companies of 

James Kirker and John Joel Glanton, described below. Kirker, “a rough, brutal-looking 

fellow,” appears briefly as the one bad apple in the bunch. While the other scalp-hunters are 

content to follow Seguin’s orders, harvesting scalps from the Indian warriors who inevitably 

show up when the action starts to flag, Kirker threatens mutiny at the Navajo village, where 

Adèle is found to have become a sort of white goddess: the high priestess of the shrine of 

Quetzalcoatl. Kirker’s mutiny is swiftly put down—“you are a cowardly brute, for all your 

bluster”—and in the Indian counterattack he is swept to his death in a flash flood. As in Nick 

of the Woods, white villains are deserving targets of scalping; “They’ll lift his har to a 

sartinty” eulogizes one of the party.313 

Villainous treatment of scalp-hunters, like Reid’s version of Kirker, required their 

treatment as outsiders self-deported from American society. Samuel Chamberlain, the 

Mexican-American war veteran, sketched a gallery of grotesques in his unsubstantiable claim 

that he had ridden with John Joel Glanton’s gang of scalp-hunters in 1848-49 after deserting 

from the army. Chamberlain claimed to have first laid eyes on Glanton in a saloon in Bexar 

in 1846, on a night when it was filled with Texas Rangers and “a motley crowd of desperate 

characters” better suited for “the Infernal regions”; Glanton supposedly picked a fight with 

another Ranger, killed him with a bowie knife, then resumed drinking and playing cards. 

This “famous Indian fighter and desperado of the frontier,” Chamberlain wrote, in a 

                                                 
313 Reid, The Scalp-Hunters (1851), vol. 1, 236-40 (“find ‘red-skin’ pays better”), 254-60 (“bold, but good-

humoured and generous”), Vol. 2, 16-18 (“rough, brutal-looking”), 163-67 (“Fifty dollar a plew!” [Old Rube] 

muttered, unsheathing his knife and stooping over the body. “It’s more’n I got for my own. It beats beaver all 

hollow. D—n  beaver! say this child.”), 248-54 (the siege of Navajoa; “the gal is what they call Mystery 

Queen”), 265-88 (Kirker’s mutiny), 308 (“lift his ha’r to a sartainty”).  



 

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biography Goetzmann notes is unsubstantiable from extant records but is consistent with the 

origin stories of Indian-haters, was once a pious and respectable youth from South Carolina, 

until his fiancée, a 17-year-old Texan orphaned in childhood by Lipan Apaches, was carried 

off by the Lipans. By the time Glanton and other Texans caught up to them, she and the other 

captive white women  

after suffering horrible outrages […] were tomahawked and scalped while the fight was 

raging. Glanton rescued the gory locks of his beloved from the death clutch of a painted 

demon that he slew, and ever afterwards wore the sad memento next his heart. From this 

tragic scene, Glanton returned a changed man, no longer the happy farmer and kind 

neighbour, he became a gloomy monomaniac hating all mankind. 

Like other literary Indian-killers, Glanton could wage one-man wars against entire tribes. 

Chamberlain writes that Glanton’s expeditions into the Texas wilderness “invariably” 

returned with fresh scalps; rather than turn them in for money, he collected a “mule-load,” 

smoke-dried in a hut on the Guadelupe River.314  

Unlike Colonel Moredock, Chamberlain’s Glanton had a “diseased state of mind”: his 

former piety became “horrid blasphemy,” and he “drank deeply,” seeking the company of 

“the most hardened desperadoes of the frontier.” Under commission from the Mexican state 

of Sonora, he led a motley crew of “Senorrans, Cherokee and Delaware Indians, French 

Canadians, Texians, Irishmen, a Negro and a full blooded Comanche” to hunt Indians for $50 

a scalp. Chamberlain’s half-fictionalized Glanton was given a wholly fictional, grotesque 

second-in-command: “Judge Holden of Texas,” an enormous man whose face was “destitute 

of hair and all expression” and whose “hoglike eyes” gleamed at the sight of blood. A 

polymath who gave impromptu lectures on Southwestern botany, archaeology, anthropology, 

                                                 
314 Chamberlain, Goetzmann ed., My Confession, 1-25, 61-63, 298-309.  



 

316 

 

and geology, Chamberlain’s Judge Holden, “[t]his intellectual beast,” was also guilty of rape 

and murder, yet “lecture[d] me on the immorality of my […] drinking and gambling!” The 

real Glanton gang had reputedly begun killing Mexican citizens to pass off their scalps as 

Apaches’, and Chamberlain paints a Satanic picture of this phase in their careers: disguised 

as Apaches, the gang began robbing, murdering, and preying upon Mexican civilians in 

“brutal Saturnalias” and “hellish orgies.” On one hand, this story makes scalp hunters into 

freaks rejected by both American and Hispanic society, absolving the Mexican state of its 

role in commissioning them in the first place. On the other, Goetzmann notes that 

Chamberlain’s story is consistent with the “melodrama” of sin and salvation: “the innocent 

who becomes hardened, corrupted, a sinner who becomes a murderer and foul scalp-hunter, 

who then repents but is nonetheless consigned to hell—in this case the Mojave Desert.”315 

“Hate Indians? Why should he or anybody else hate Indians? I admire Indians,” the 

cosmopolitan Francis “Frank” Goodman ingenuously tells an Arkansan, Charles “Charlie” 

Noble, in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857): “really, I would like to know 

something about this Indian-hating. I can hardly believe such a thing to be.” Through inter-

textual interrogation of James Hall’s oft-repeated story of Colonel Moredock, chapters 25 to 

28 of Melville’s dense, deliberately cryptic satire took aim at the clichés of the frontier horror 

story, particularly the Sepúlvedan false dilemma and the moral righteousness of the obsessive 

Indian-killing vigilante. James Hall was a friend of his father, replies Noble, and Hall 

repeated the story so often at dinner parties that he “heard his history again and again” and 

can recite it from memory—a sly dig at Hall rewriting and republishing the Colonel 

Moredock or Indian-hater story under varying titles at least five times between 1828 and 

                                                 
315 Chamberlain, Goetzmann ed., My Confession, 1-25, 61-63, 298-309. 



 

317 

 

1857. As Richard Drinnon notes, through the “puzzle-box device” of the Arkansan Charlie 

Noble quoting James Hall on Moredock, i.e., a westerner quoting a westerner “on yet another 

Westerner,” Melville established that all “shared a doctrinal hate for Native Americans.” 

Melville then raised questions of confirmation bias and indigenous agency as Noble 

explained Indians’ crimes, real or imagined, by comparison to famous criminals incarcerated 

in notorious British and American prisons, while frontiersmen are compared to famous 

pagans: Alexander the Great, the Roman emperor Julian, and Polynesian surfers. The 

righteousness of frontiersmen’s hatred of Indians is called into question by Noble’s 

observation that Indians, “quite unanimously [...] protest against the backwoodsman’s view 

of them,” and that “some think that one cause of their returning his antipathy so sincerely as 

they do, is their moral indignation at being so libeled”—though whether Indians may testify 

in their own defense is a question for the Supreme Court (here Melville sarcastically alludes 

to Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), in which the Supreme Court ruled they could not). 

Frontiersmen, for their part, prefer to believe that whether laying traps for animals or 

deceiving enemies, deceit is the “general conduct of life” of Indians they think of as snakes 

and red devils. The risk is too great to believe otherwise:  

… scarce a family he knows but some member of it, or connection, has been by Indians 

maimed or scalped. What avails, then, that some one Indian, or some two or three, treat a 

backwoodsman friendly-like ? He fears me, he thinks. Take my rifle from me, give him 

motive, and what will come? 

If the frontiersman is driven by fear and self-righteousness, the Indian-hater is a more 

chimerical creature. The Indian hater par excellence never returns from the wilderness; 

Moredock, having a life within frontier society, is a diluted or apostasizing Indian-hater, 

though still dysfunctional. In Melville’s version, he turned down the governorship of Illinois 



 

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because it would interfere with his quest: “there would be an impropriety in the Governor of 

Illinois stealing out now and then […] for a few days’ shooting at human beings.” Noble also 

remembers visiting Moredock’s house as a child to find a decoy of moss and twigs in his 

bed; the skittish vigilante had fled at the approach of a small boy and his father.316 

Frontiersmen might be suspicious and paranoid, but at least they can recognize 

human potential for evil among white Americans as well as Indians. The supposedly frank, 

good man who shares wine and cigars with Charlie Noble is, in fact, the same shapeshifter 

who has been travelling the steamboat Fidèle (“Faith”) since the novel began at dawn on 

April Fool’s Day, chiding suspicious travellers for their lack of faith in his goodness while 

gulling them into signing over money—or a more precious commodity, since “Frank 

Goodman” is actually Satan at large on the Mississippi. Tellingly, one of the only cases of 

recognition is when a giant, sickly frontiersman, “an invalid Titan in homespuns” and his 

child “of alien maternity, perhaps Creole, or even Camanche,” knocks him to the boards with 

a haymaker for selling painkilling patent medicine: “Profane fiddler on heart-strings! Snake!” 

But the titan is in the minority on a ship whose passengers are taken by feel-good 

transcendantalist mysticism, get-rich-quick schemes, and an unwarrantedly sunny view of 

American history. Melville noted that “where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase”: 

Manifest Destiny had driven off the Mississippi’s Indians, bandits, and frontiersmen, but 

replaced them with rubes who eagerly purchased cheap biographies of famous Mississippi 

robbers and river pirates—Measan, Murrell, the Harpe brothers—while pickpockets worked 

the crowd of “farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, 

                                                 
316 Drinnon, Facing West; Parker and Niemeyer eds., Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man, 137-165. 



 

319 

 

bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these 

hunters.”317 

Melville was disturbed by his fellow Americans’ inability to acknowledge that their 

actions could have negative consequences, particularly for peoples they deemed savage or 

primitive, and their refusal to recognize that racism stained the soul of the racist. His 

observations in Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) that colonization had brought starvation, 

disease, and poverty to Polynesia, including a story of a missionary’s wife being taken to 

church on Sundays in a buggy pulled by Hawaiians, had led to a backlash from American 

Protestant churches for his defense of “cannibals,” and their successful boycott of Moby-Dick 

reduced him to borrowing money. Textual violence against Native Americans also perturbed 

him. He took exception to Francis Parkman’s assertion that acquaintance with Indians should 

automatically breed contempt in a white observer: “when we are told too, that to such a 

person, the slaughter of an Indian is indifferent as the slaughter of a buffalo; with all 

deference, we beg leave to dissent. […] though in many cases this feeling is almost natural, it 

is not defensible; and it is wholly wrong.” Francis Goodman, in The Confidence-Man, cannot 

believe Noble’s declaration of Moredock as “to all but Indians juicy as a peach”: “if ever 

there was such a man as Moredock, he, in my way of thinking, was either misanthrope or 

nothing; and his misanthropy the more intense from being focused on one race of men.”318 

                                                 
317 James Hall, “Indian Hating. – Some of the Sources of this Animosity. –Brief Account of Col. Moredock,” 

from Sketches of History, Life and Manners, in the West (Philadelphia: Harrison Hall, 1835), volume 2, chapter 

6, 74-82, cited in Parker and Niemeyer eds., Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man, 456-61; Philip F. 

Gura, Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (Macmillan, 2013), 179-215. 
318 Herman Melville, “Mr. Parkman’s Tour,” in the New York Literary World (31 March, 1849), 291-93, review 

of Francis Parkman Jr., The California and Oregon Trail; being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life 

(New York: Putnam, 1849), in Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer eds., Norton Critical Edition of The 

Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, second edition (W.W. Norton and Company: New York and London, 2006 

[1971]) 461-62; Hershel Parker, “The Confidence-Man’s Masquerade,” in Norton Critical Edition, 293-303 ; 

James Hall, “Indian Hating. – Some of the Sources of this Animosity. –Brief Account of Col. Moredock,” from 



 

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Scalping in the Southwest: Kirker, Glanton, and California 

In November 1846 General John Wool’s Chihuahuan expedition, a 3,400-man force 

comprised of two Illinois volunteer infantry regiments, an Arkansas volunteer cavalry 

regiment, and a small contingent of the regular U.S. army, occupied Coahuila’s state capital 

of Saltillo and remained in place during the winter of 1846-47, awaiting further orders from 

General Zachary Taylor. Wool’s forces chafed at garrison duty, and a widespread Anglo-

American contempt for Mexicans which combined British sectarian-national hatred for 

“Spaniards” with North American prejudice against mestizos and Indians, motivated 

volunteers from all companies to begin preying upon the civilian population of Saltillo and 

its environs. In a letter to his parents back in Illinois, Second Lieutenant Adolph Engelmann 

wrote that “an old gray headed” Mexican shepherd had been shot “because he objected to the 

shooting of his sheep.” The culprit had not yet been discovered, wrote Engelmann, “though I 

think he is an Illinois man.” The single worst offenders were the Arkansas Mounted Rifles, 

whose insubordination and inept leadership by Colonel Archibald Yell earned them Wool’s 

unfavourable nicknames of “Arkansas Devils” and “Colonel Yell’s Mounted Devils”; among 

many crimes to their credit, the Devils robbed the Agua Nueva ranch, 17 miles south of 

Saltillo, around Christmas Day and committed several sexual assaults of Mexican women 

while doing so. As Engelmann observed, such crimes did not go unpunished: “from time to 

time” lone Arkansas volunteers caught outside of camp “would be lassoed and dragged by 

the Mexicans.”319  

                                                 
Sketches of History, Life and Manners, in the West (Philadelphia: Harrison Hall, 1835), volume 2, chapter 6, 74-

82, cited in Parker and Niemeyer eds., Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man, 456-61. 

319 Karl Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846-1848 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992 

[1974]), 145-63, 201-210; Samuel Chamberlain, William H. Goetzmann ed., My Confession: Recollections of a 

Rogue (Austin, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 1996), 18, 132-34, 358 n. 271; on the historicity of 



 

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When in early 1847 the Arkansas Volunteers were mustered south to engage Santa 

Anna’s northward-marching army and encamped at Agua Nueva, a well-liked private of 

Yell’s regiment was found dead outside the camp on 9 February, “badly mangled from 

dragging over the brush and rocks.” On the following day, about 100 members of the 

regiment went looking for the culprits, and they opened fire when the Arkansan private’s 

carbine sling was found on a Mexican citizen near the village of Catana. By the time the 

officers arrived to stop them, they had pursued the survivors into a cave. The official 

investigatory report listed four dead, but most eyewitness accounts, notes Karl Bauer, “speak 

of 20 or 30” casualties. Engelmann, for instance, writes of a body count “variously placed at 

from 18 to 30 though it may be more.”320 

Samuel Chamberlain, then a member of the Illinois volunteers, wrote in his 

Confession that his company was ordered forward to arrest the rampaging Arkansans. 

Placing the number of irregulars at 109, his numbers leap upwards again when describing 

what they saw upon approaching the cave: “a greasser, shot and scalped, laying on the 

ground yet alive” and twenty other Mexicans “dead and dying in pools of blood.” Out of the 

darkness of the cave emerged an irregular, “a brutal looking Rackansacker” who “advanced 

                                                 
Chamberlain’s memoir see Goetzmann, and Lynda Lasswell Crist, review of My Confession: Recollections of a 

Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain and William H. Goetzmann, in The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 64, No. 2 

(May, 1998), 365-366. For background on the “massacre of the cave,” see Michael L. Collins, Texas Devils: 

Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande, 1846-1861 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 9-16; 

David Stephen Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, The Mexican War (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 81-82; 

entries “Wool, John Ellis” and “Wool’s Chihuahua Expedition” in Spencer C. Tucker ed., The Encyclopedia of 

the Mexican-American War: A Political, Social, and Military History, volume 1: A-L (Santa Barbara, Denver, 

Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2013), 735-37; Walter Lee Brown, “The Mexican War Experiences of Albert Pike and the 

“Mounted Devils” of Arkansas,” in The Arkansas Historical Quarterly Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter 1953), 301-315; 

Otto B. Engelmann ed., trans., “The Second Illinois In the Mexican War: Mexican War Letters of Adolph 

Engelmann, 1846-1847,” 424 (“old gray headed”), 439 (“lassoed and dragged”), in Journal of the Illinois State 

Historical Society Volume XXVI, April 1933 – January 1934 (Springfield, IL: the Illinois State Historical 

Society, 1934?), 357-452.  
320 Otto Engelmann, “Letters of Adolph Engelmann,” 439 (“badly mangled”), 440 (“18 to 30”); Bauer, The 

Mexican War, 201-210.  



 

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towards us brandishing a huge knife, dripping with gore in one hand, and a bunch of reeking 

scalps in the other.” Chamberlain illustrated this as a watercolour copying Seth Eastman’s 

iconic Death-Whoop, his bearded, buckskinned irregular holding the scalps in his left hand 

and his bowie knife, or “Arkansas toothpick,” in his right. Chamberlain adds they found an 

additional thirty Mexicans inside the cave “butcherd [sic] on the floor, most of them 

scalped.” As in the wars between New England and New France, sectarian anti-Catholic 

violence and racialized anti-Indian violence had hybridized: “some irreverent wretch had 

crowned” a roughly-hewn crucifix at the back of the cave “with a bloody scalp, the gore 

trickling down the pale features of the Saviour.”321 

American volunteers from other states reportedly scalped Mexicans during the war, 

citing Mexican collective guilt and past offenses with the violent self-pity usually deployed 

against Indians. When American occupational authorities established a court in Monterrey to 

settle disputes between Mexican citizens and American soldiers, claims filed against Texans 

predominated; Ohio volunteer Luther Giddings acidly noted that Texans’ self-justifications 

for their abuses and depredations “invariabl[y] began, continued and ended with the Alamo, 

or Goliad or Mier.” As Texas Ranger Creed Taylor recalled, after the battle of Resaca de la 

Palma in May 1846, General Taylor was revolted to learn that a Texan scout named John 

Bate Berry had scalped a Mexican after the battle. When Taylor demanded an explanation, 

Berry tearfully reiterated his grievances—“I was at Mier where my brother was butchered 

like a dog,” etc.—and stated “I have sworn by the eternal to kill Mexicans as long as I live.” 

In 1847 General Zachary Taylor’s adjutant-general William Bliss commented on the transfer 

                                                 
321 Goetzmann ed., My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue, 132-34. On Samuel Chamberlain’s enlistment in 

the Illinois volunteers, see Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the 

Mexican-American War (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 49-52.  



 

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of Major Chevallié to General Wool after a series of depredations on Mexican citizens; while 

Chevallié was “a good partisan officer,” he and his Rangers “have the fault of all Texans i.e. 

an indifference to human life.” Chevallié, a major in the first Texas Ranger battalion in 

federal service, resigned his commission after Wool, in Goetzmann’s words, “deplored his 

assaults on Mexican citizens.” Chevallié and one of his officers, John Joel Glanton, were to 

find a lucrative trade south of the border.322 

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Ibero-American patterns of conquest and 

assimilation we noted in Chapter 1, including Indian slave trades and body-part bounties, 

were still well-entrenched. But where the Indian enemies of the Chichimec wars had been 

pedestrians armed with bows and arrows, Spain now faced equestrians with arsenals of 

firearms. The introduction of donkeys and Iberian horses, creatures used to hot and dry 

climates, into the arid Southwest, had given indigenous peoples a superior beast of burden to 

the dog and a means for escaped mission Indians in California, Apaches and Navajos in the 

Southwest, and the Comanches in the southern Plains to resist Iberian imperialism. 

Comanchería’s possession of vast horse herds, the best buffalo territory, and dominance of 

trade routes in the southern Plains made the Comanches too numerous, powerful, and well-

armed for the Spanish government to inflict any lasting defeats on them. In 1786, peace was 

brokered with Comanchería on the premise of war against mutual enemies: the Osages of 

Spanish Louisiana and the evasive Apaches of the Southwestern mountains. In the case of the 

Apaches, the Comanches were promised a bounty of a bridled horse and pair of belduques, 

                                                 
322 Jimmy L. Bryan, Jr., More Zeal Than Discretion: The Westward Adventures of Walter P. Lane (College 

Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 61-62 (“began, continued and ended”, “as long as I live”), 

59-76; Smith, Borderlander, 218-34, 292-93 n. 7.  



 

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single-edged multipurpose knives similar to the Anglo-American “scalping knife,” for every 

Apache prisoner delivered to Santa Fe.323 

This state of affairs was an end result of a series of late 17th century Apache defeats 

by Comanches who seized rich grassland for their horse herds, bison which provided food 

and bison products for export, and Apache captives to increase Comanchería’s population 

through adoption and enslavement. In the time of Coronado, Athabaskan-speaking peoples 

collectively known as Apaches had occupied a continuous swathe of territory from Arizona 

to north Texas; now, the western and eastern divisions of the Comanches operated as a 

federation of autonomous tribes who met annually to determine national policy, while the 

Apaches were scattered culturally and politically. The Lipan and Plains (or Kiowa) Apaches 

remained on the plains of Oklahoma and Texas, while the various Apache groups of the 

mountains of New Mexico and Arizona relied heavily on livestock stolen from Hispanic 

ranches, partly for war and transportation, but largely for food. The Hispanic public 

considered Apaches as barbarians lacking the useful economic skills of town-dwelling 

farmers like the Pueblos or the Nahuas of central Mexico, and policies of extirpation were 

popular. From Mexico City the Viceroy, Bernardo de Gálvez, crowed his approval of the 

Apaches’ “special ruination” per the 1786 Comanche treaty, as the “happiness” of the north 

depended on their “voluntary or forced submission,” or “total extermination.” During the 

                                                 
323 Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff, “Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle Frontiers in Latin 

America,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Oct., 1978), 587-620; Pekka 

Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Weber, The 

Mexican Frontier, 207-216; Calloway, Winter Count, 376-395; Thomas A. Britten, The Lipan Apaches: People 

of Wind and Lightning (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 124-140; David J. Weber, 

Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University 

Press, 2005); Ralph Adam Smith, Borderlander: the Life of James Kirker, 1793-1852 (Norman, OK: University 

of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 55-65; John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds, on de Croix (602-03) and 

Apache deportation (751); Shelley Bowen Hatfield, Chasing Shadows: Indians Along the United States-Mexico 

Border 1876-1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 11-21. 



 

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1770s and 1780s, as the northern provinces of New Spain from the Californias to Texas were 

placed under the direct control of the Crown and the military, strings of dried Indian ears sent 

by field commanders to confirm their official reports’ kill counts had adorned the doorway to 

the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fé, a grotesque counterpart to the ristras of dried chilies that 

hung in ordinary New Mexican homes. Ear bounties coexisted quite comfortably with 

decapitation: in the 1770s the commander of Tucson presidio, Pedro de Allande, boasted of 

placing Apache heads on the battlements, and Antonio Cordero y Bustamante, commander of 

Janos, hung severed Apache heads from mesquite trees along the road to the fort. Private 

bounties could be also be offered to raise the troops’ spirits: in 1780, during Governor Juan 

Bautista de Anza’s punitive expedition, Commandant-General Teodoro de Croix offered his 

men cash bounties for live Apache prisoners or for the heads and ears of the dead. The carrot 

was alternated with the stick: Apaches who turned themselves in received rations, land, and 

peace in return for military alliance against Apaches still at large. Such regimes of violence 

also existed in California, where escaped mission Indians stole livestock for food. In January 

1834, a few volunteers from Joseph Walker’s beaver-trapping brigade joined a Californian 

punitive expedition, seeking Indians who had stolen 300 horses from Mission San Juan 

Bautista. With the Americans’ assistance, the Californians tracked the raiders to their camp 

where, according to participant Zenas Leonard, most of the horses had already been killed 

and butchered for meat, and only a few women, children, and “old and feeble” Indians 

remained. Leonard later recalled that the incensed Californians opened fire on them with an 

artillery piece and, contrary to Governor Figueroa’s instructions that stock-stealing Indians 



 

326 

 

be taken to the presidios for punishment, killed the survivors and cut off their ears “to show 

the Priests and Alcaldes, that they had used every effort to regain the stolen property.”324 

Following the end of their rebellion against Spain in 1821, newly-independent 

Mexico was “born bankrupt” due to the flight of Spanish capital, no longer able to maintain 

peace with Apache and Comanche bands in the north by offering trade goods and rations for 

treaty Apaches. During the thirty years of peace established on the northern frontier between 

the 1790s and the 1820s, Mexico’s north had been rapidly repopulated and its ranching and 

mining economies developed, with American merchants and mercenaries flocking around the 

vast copper mine of Santa Rita del Cobre in the New Mexico Territory, many of them having 

wandered south from Bent’s Fort in Colorado. Now, throughout the the 1820s and 1830s 

northern Mexico was devastated annually by mass incursions of Apaches, Comanches, and 

various peoples of the southern Plains seeking horses, cattle, captives, and plunder. In New 

Mexico, Apache raiders returning from Chihuahua and Sonora sold stolen mules to the 

copper miners for guns, powder, and lead as well as food and whiskey, in express defiance of 

Mexican contraband laws. As the state governments of Mexico’s north increasingly devolved 

                                                 
324 Santiago, The Jar of Severed Hands, 81-97; Weber, Mexican Frontier; Weber, Bárbaros; Ned Blackhawk, 

Violence Over the Land; Edwin R. Sweeney, Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief (Norman and London: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 15-58; Lance R. Blyth, Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence 

in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680 – 1880 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 87-154; Matthew 

Babcock, “Blurred Borders: North America’s Forgotten Apache Reservations,” in Juliana Barr and Edward 

Countryman eds., Contested Spaces of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 

163-183; on Apaches’ preference for horsemeat over beef, see Matthew Babcock, Apache Adaptation to 

Hispanic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 156; Apaches preferred to take the fattest horses, since they 

were easier to herd, tastier, and would have more energy reserves on a long flight back to their villages—on this 

and Apache warfare terminology, see Grenville Goodwin, Keith Basso ed. Western Apache Raiding and 

Warfare (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1973 [1971]), 13-19, 258; Hatfield, Chasing Shadows, 11-

21; Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821 to 1846; E.A. Schwartz, The Rogue River Indian War and its 

Aftermath, 1850-1980 (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); On Zenas Leonard, see 

James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma 

Press, 1984), 54-59, and George Harwood Phillips, Indians and Intruders in Central California, 1769-1849 

(Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 157-58, and Zenas Leonard, Milo Milton Quaife 

ed., Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard (Chicago: R.R. Donnelly and Sons Company, 1934), 189-91, 

cited in Phillips, 90. 



 

327 

 

responsibility for recovering stolen stock and captives onto parties of armed citizens bearing 

licenses from state authorities, the question of what constituted evidentiary pieces to confirm 

kills of enemy Indians began lurching towards the Anglo-American style of scalp bounties. 

In 1837, John Johnson, a Kentucky-born naturalized citizen of Moctezuma, Sonora, turned in 

four scalps of known Apache leaders, with ears attached to fulfill the technicalities of 

Mexican ear bounties, and asked for compensation. The incident provoked Apache 

retaliations across the north, not least because Johnson had obtained these scalps by posing as 

an unlicensed trader and offering dry goods before opening fire on the crowd with an artillery 

piece stuffed with scrap metal and glass. Mexican authorities were also uncertain as to 

whether they should encourage armed American adventurers so soon after the secession of 

Texas, but ultimately rewarded Johnson and his party.325 

In August 1837, having gained the approval of the Chihuahuan War Tribunal, a cabal 

of private citizens in Chihuahua State, comprised of various high members of government 

and the American and French naturalized citizens who owned Santa Rita del Cobre, proposed 

in the state newspaper El noticio the first scalp bounty program in Mexican history. In 

addition to the pre-existing regulated prices paid by ranchers for animals recovered from 

Indians, volunteer expeditions against the Apaches would receive fixed prices for scalps: 

$100 for a man’s, $50 for a woman’s, and $25 for “each Indian [captive] under twelve years 

old.” The owners of Santa Rita proposed the company be led by a security guard for their 

mule train to Chihuahua City named James Kirker, the sort of sleazy individual too weird to 

                                                 
325 Matthew Babcock, Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 172-249; 

Smith, Borderlander, 68-70, 268-69 notes 10, 11, 16, 17; Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace, 157-184; 

Sweeney, Cochise, 15-58; Joseph C. Jastrzembski, “Treacherous Towns in Mexico: Chiricahua Apache 

Personal Narratives of Horrors,” in Western Folklore vol. 54, no. 3 (July 1995), 169-196; Rex W. Strickland, 

“The Birth and Death of a Legend: The Johnson “Massacre” of 1837,” in Arizona and the West Vol. 18, No. 3 

(Autumn 1976), pp. 257-286. 



 

328 

 

make up: born in northern Ireland, he had gained American citizenship as a teenager by 

fighting as a privateer in the War of 1812, left behind a wife and child in New York City to 

go west as a beaver trapper in the early 1820s, and was one of the Mexican frontier’s most 

notorious Apache contrabandists. An eastern Indian variously identified as a Shawnee or 

“Delaware” named Spie-buck or Spybuck, who Kirker had met working as a hunter and 

trapper at Bent’s Fort, was chosen for his second-in-command, to lead a polyglot company of 

mercenaries. The law was struck down by the central government in Mexico City in October 

1837, who objected on moral grounds and that it would attract armed “foreigners and 

adventurers,” so the initial outings of Kirker and Spybuck’s company, like those of civilian 

volunteer parties, aimed to take captives to sell into slavery and livestock to resell, keep, or 

return to ranchers for recovery fees. The central problem was that Kirker avoided fighting the 

Apache bands actually at war with the Mexican state, like those of Pisago Cabezón, as they 

were his contraband partners; instead, Kirker and Spybuck attacked peaceful or neutral 

Apaches, embroiling the state in wider conflicts.326 

In December 1839 the Chihuahuan state threw misgivings to the wind and 

renegotiated Kirker’s contract. His 250-man army, including a hiring quota of 50 Mexican 

citizens, would receive daily wages double those of Mexican soldiers and officers, and were 

guaranteed $50 for each confirmed kill or capture of an Apache male age 14 or up, and $25 

for death or capture of women or children under 14. The authorities would accept scalps, 

with both ears attached, as a pieza, provided they were confirmed by the inspection of a 

committee of four esteemed residents of Chihuahua City. On 9 January 1840, while the 

                                                 
326 Smith, Borderlander; Babcock, Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 

172-249; Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace, 157-184; Sweeney, Cochise, 15-58; Jastrzembski, “Treacherous 

Towns in Mexico”. 



 

329 

 

Chihuahuan army was conducting peace negotiations with Pisago Cabezón, Kirker, ordered 

to stay out of the field during peace talks, attacked Pisago’s village in the Chihuahuan 

mountains, killing 10 warriors and carrying off 20 prisoners and 70-odd head of livestock; in 

a further defiant flourish, he captured Pisago’s teenage son Janaso Marcelo from Janos for 

the $50 bounty for male prisoners. Chihuahua’s new governor Francisco García Conde 

swiftly cancelled his contract, and when the rates were sharply reduced later that year, to $5 

for every scalp or prisoner of any age or sex and $2.50 for every recovered mule, Kirker 

promptly fled Chihuahua. Leaving Mexican citizens to cope with attacks by Apaches he had 

armed or antagonized, the company dispersed for five years.327 

By 1842, Governor Conde had managed to negotiate an incomplete peace with Pisago 

Cabezón, Ponce, and some other leaders, whose bands received slim, often late weekly 

rations of corn, sugar, tobacco, and meat. But other Apache bands remained at war with 

Chihuahua, and both parties continued to raid Sonora, fencing their stolen stock and loot with 

friendly Chihuahuan towns and settlements, even Janos presidio. Such bilateral agreements 

between Hispanic towns and Indian raiders had occurred across the north since the 18th 

century, but in the 1820s and 1830s the Apaches began to warn each other of the possibility 

of betrayal in what was known as a mescalería: Mexicans showed generous hospitality to 

Apache guests, plying them with food and liquor, then attacked them with knives and clubs. 

In some instances, like the killing of four Apaches by a mob at Santa Rita in 1836, civil 

authorities were openly defied and threatened with violence by citizen vigilantes, an event 

which seems eerily similar to the vigilante killings in 1763 Pennsylvania. In December 1845 

                                                 
327 Smith, Borderlander; Babcock, Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 

172-249; Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace, 157-184; Sweeney, Cochise, 15-58; Jastrzembski, “Treacherous 

Towns in Mexico”. 



 

330 

 

the state of Chihuahua had contracted Kirker again for his services while opening the $50 

bounty on Apache captives or piezas, including scalps, to the general public to wean 

themselves from their dependency on Kirker. While Kirker was in the field in the summer of 

1846, Chihuahuan authorities began peace negotiations with Chiricahua Apache leaders, and 

in the later recollection of such Chiricahua notables as Mangas Coloradas, Yrigóllen, and 

Jason Betzinez, those Chiricahuas who went to trade at the Chihuahuan town of Galeana in 

early July were assured of the protection of a treaty with state authorities. On this point the 

British traveller George Frederick Ruxton concurred, writing in 1847 that they had come to 

Galeana to trade “in good faith.” The Galeaños apparently offered the Chiricahuas copious 

amounts of mescal or whiskey and the mescalería which followed killed 130 Apaches. 

Kirker was in the area pursuing Apaches who had stolen cattle at nearby Encinillas, but his 

actual role in the massacre is disputed. Ruxton described him as a co-conspirator or tactician 

who planned the massacre with the Galeaños, provided the “several kegs of spirits,” directly 

participated in the riot with his scalp hunters, and then rode into Chihuahua City in triumph 

bearing scalps on poles. Edwin Sweeney considers Kirker’s provisioning of the liquor 

“unlikely” but agrees otherwise with Ruxton and contemporary accounts by Chihuahuan 

officials which implicated Kirker in the massacre.328 

Sweeney notes self-justifying statements made by or attributed to Kirker reprinted in 

the state newspaper El provisional, proclaiming a “kill or be killed” situation where, unless 

they struck first, they would all “perish at the hands of the ten [Chiricahua] chiefs with their 

hordes of warriors,” a surety since “more than one hundred times had the Indians been 

                                                 
328 Smith, Borderlander; Babcock, Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 

172-249; Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace, 157-184; Sweeney, Cochise, 15-58; Jastrzembski, “Treacherous 

Towns in Mexico”.  



 

331 

 

treasonous to us.” Kirker’s biographer Ralph Smith is the lone dissenting voice, arguing that 

most of the killing was done by Galeaños and that Kirker was unable to stop them; “as part of 

their job,” Kirker and his men subsequently descended like vultures to scalp the Apache 

dead. The Chiricahuas always denied that they had stolen the cattle from Encinillas, and 

Galeana further entrenched mutual suspicion between Mexicans and Apaches while moderate 

leaders were further discredited or alienated. As Lance Blyth writes, while Mexicans 

considered Apaches as “barbarians” and “savages” whose lives revolved around war and 

robbery, Apaches came to believe that “all Mexicans in their hearts simply ‘wanted’ to kill 

Apaches.” Even among other Apaches, the Chiricahuas became particularly implacable; for 

the rest of the 1840s, observes Sweeney, “every Chiricahua band went to war with 

Mexico.”329 

And then, as in 1840, Kirker promptly abandoned Mexico to deal with the revenge 

attacks he had provoked. Offered a colonelcy in the Mexican army, Kirker deserted to the 

Doniphan Expedition and the American army. With a $10,000 reward offered by the state of 

Chihuahua for his death or capture, Kirker’s army now acted as scouts, foragers, and 

interpreters for Doniphan’s Missouri volunteers and aided in enforcing the occupation code, 

flogging and hanging Mexican citizens they had been contracted to protect months before. 

The Mexican population dreaded as the Missourians as “Texans, Yankees, heretics and 

pirates,” and a recurrent fear that Kirker was passing off Mexican citizens’ hair as Apache 

resurfaced. It had first appeared in print in 1841 when George Wilkins Kendall, an editor for 

the New Orleans Picayune and correspondent with the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, cited a 

                                                 
329 Lance R. Blyth, Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680 – 

1880 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 152 (“all Mexicans in their hearts”); Smith, Borderlander; Babcock, 

Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 172-249; Griffen, Apaches at War 

and Peace, 157-184; Sweeney, Cochise, 15-58; Jastrzembski, “Treacherous Towns in Mexico”. 



 

332 

 

“half-blood Delaware” named Charley Tirrell to the effect that Mexican officers “jealous” of 

Kirker’s successes against the Apaches had invented a rumour “that [Kirker] was in the 

practice of bringing in counterfeit scalps,” taken from the “lower order of Mexicans” to “pass 

off their topknots for those of true Apaches.” In 1846, Mexican popular opinion held that 

Kirker’s horde would scalp Mexican men and enslave their wives and daughters, branding 

them with cattle irons. The reality was less dramatic: at war’s end in 1848, Kirker resumed 

his trade of guns and powder for stolen livestock. As well-armed Southwestern and Southern 

Plains raiders under increasing pressure from California-bound American migrants inundated 

the northern frontier in 1848 and 1849, northern Mexican states began contracting American 

mercenaries as scalp hunters.330 

 In early May 1849 two former Texas Rangers en route to the California goldfields, 

Lt.-Col. Michael Hancock Chevallié and Lt. John Joel Glanton, arrived in Chihuahua City 

leading an armed company and expressed a willingness to kill Indians for money. Striking 

while the iron was hot, American and Mexican businessmen in Chihuahua City backed the 

formation of a new scalp-hunter company to be funded by contributions from wealthy 

citizens. Over the veto of Chihuahua’s Governor Ángel Trías Álvarez, on 25 May 1849 the 

state congress ratified a new scalp-contracting policy dubbed “the Fifth Law” or “the Kirker 

bill.” Article 2 of the bill required the governor to contract with national and foreign 

volunteers to fight “the barbarous Indians,” while Article 5 offered generous terms: $200 for 

each slain Indian warrior confirmed by evidentiary piezas, $250 for a warrior taken alive, and 

$150 for a female captive or child of either sex 14 years old or less. On 30 June, after 

                                                 
330 Smith, Borderlander; Babcock, Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 

172-249; Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace, 157-184; Sweeney, Cochise, 15-58; Jastrzembski, “Treacherous 

Towns in Mexico”. 



 

333 

 

promoters in Durango had floated the idea of contracting “some skilled foreign riflemen,” 

particularly “some hundreds of Americans or Irishmen” to fight Indians, Durango passed its 

own “Kirker law” on 30 June, instructing its governor to contract with “national or foreign 

partisans” to fight “the barbarous Indians” and pay them $200 apiece for kills or captives. 

Denounced in the Mexico City press as “blood contracts,” “the vile industry of selling 

scalps,” quirquismo, and an invitation to another American invasion, the federal 

government’s declaration of the Chihuahuan law as unconstitutional in late July was ignored 

in the north.331  

As Chevallié’s company brought back scalps, prisoners, and livestock from several 

1849 expeditions against the Apaches, the floodgates were opened to imitators. Records 

indicate that the state of Chihuahua alone paid out $17,896 for scalps in 1849, and the 

implication that scalp-bounty policies were an effective alternative to funding the military 

spurred the declaration of scalp bounties in Nuevo Leon and Coahuila, and inspired new 

scalp-hunter companies to seek contracts in the northern states. These included Anglo-

American Forty-Niners, Texas Rangers, and naturalized citizens like James Johnson of 

Moctezuma, as well as the first Mexican companies of scalp-hunters. In 1851, a Comanche 

“generaless and prophetess” named Tave Peté and her grandsons Bajo el Sol and Magüe 

became contracted scalp hunters with Chihuahua, agreeing by treaty to stop raiding the state 

in exchange for hunting Apaches. The scalp bounties levied in Mexico’s northern states 

against Apaches, Comanches, and the Seri peoples of southwestern Sonora for the rest of the 

century were collected by companies of other nations as well: Seminoles and Kickapoos 

                                                 
331 Smith, Borderlander; Babcock, Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 

172-249; Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace, 157-184; Sweeney, Cochise, 15-58; Jastrzembski, “Treacherous 

Towns in Mexico”. 



 

334 

 

given reservations in Mexico, black ex-slaves who had fled to Mexico seeking emancipation, 

and Anglo-Americans from across the border. Scalp bounties also inflected wars between 

indigenous peoples: Akimel and Tohono O’odham, Pueblos, and Rarámuris (Tarahumaras) 

targeted by Apache and Comanche raids turned in their defeated enemies’ scalps or ears for 

bounty, while Apaches and Comanches at war with each other did likewise.332 

 Among all of Kirker’s successors, Chevallié and Glanton stood apart for their 

indiscriminate violence. Alfonso Anderson, a self-declared participant in Chevallié’s second 

1849 scalphunting expedition, described seeing “a child no higher than his knee killed in cold 

blood and scalped.” When Chevallié went west to California, where for reasons unknown he 

reportedly “blew out his own brains” on the road, Glanton succeeded him, leading a mixed 

Company of Anglo-American Forty-Niners, Mexican citizens, and Native Americans into the 

field. In 1850 state troops drove the Glanton gang out of Chihuahua after reports that they 

were killing agriculturalist Indians and mestizos for their scalps. After contracting with 

Sonora to hunt Apaches at rates of $150 for warriors dead or alive and $100 for female 

captives or live children under 14, the Glanton gang were driven out of Sonora after rumours 

of mestizo-scalping surfaced there as well. Continuing on to California, Glanton and his 

followers seized a ferry at the Yuma Ford at the intersection of the Colorado River and the 

Gila Trail, and descended into brigandage against Hispanic and Anglo-American travellers. 

                                                 
332 Babcock, Apache Adaptation, 250-264; William B. Griffen, Apaches at War and Peace: The Janos Presidio, 

1750-1858 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 223-246; Edwin R. Sweeney, Cochise: 

Chiricahua Apache Chief (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 59-98; Hämäläinen, 

Comanche Empire, 307; John Emil Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian, revised and expanded edition (Austin, 

TX: University of Texas Press, 2008 [1993]), 5-11, 44; John Emil Sepich, “ ‘What kind of indians was them?’ : 

Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” in Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce ed., 

Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 123-143; Ralph A. Smith, 

revised by Sloan Rodgers, entry “Glanton, John Joel” in Handbook of Texas Online; Smith, Borderlander, 218-

234.  



 

335 

 

On the morning of 23 March, 1850, Quechans (or “Yumas”) who the Glanton gang had 

violently antagonized swept the Crossing in a dawn attack and wiped out the scalphunters.333 

Where Mexican scalp bounties had been offered at the state level, Californian scalp 

bounties were offered by municipalities or wealthy private individuals. As elsewhere, Anglo-

American scalp hunters proudly displayed scalps no matter the circumstances of their taking, 

as the Sacramento Union reported in December 1852 had happened in Yreka. Led by a 

Benjamin Wright, a party of 18 volunteers had paraded through the streets of Yreka in 

triumph, each of them carrying an Indian’s bow and arrows “and the muzzle of his gun 

decorated with a scalp taken from the enemy.” According to General Ethan Hitchcock, they 

had invited these Indians to a peace conference and then turned on them, and claimed 30 kills 

to their credit. In 1855, when municipal officials of Shasta City offered $5 for Indians’ heads, 

one resident claimed to have seen a mule train enter town with each beast burdened by 8 to 

12 heads. One California county, notes Lindsay, “paid 50 cents for every Indian scalp and $5 

for every Indian head brought in,” perhaps because the latter were surer proofs of death than 

scalps. In 1859, a community near Marysville paid bounties, collected by public subscription, 

“for every scalp or some other satisfactory evidence” of an Indian’s death. In 1861, plans 

were made in Tehama County to raise a fund “to be disbursed in payment of Indian scalps”, 

and in 1863 the citizens of Honey Lake paid $0.25 per scalp. While, notes Lindsay, a 

California gold miner made an average of $3 per day, and thus $0.25 to $5 per scalp was a 

fair amount of money, these rates paled in comparison to the $200 to $250 that Apache 

scalps brought in contemporary northern Mexico, or the rates of up to $200 that Indian 

                                                 
333 Goetzmann ed., My Confession; Ralph A. Smith, “Glanton, John Joel,” in Handbook of Texas Online; Bryan, 

More Zeal than Discretion, 61-66, 200 n. 17. 



 

336 

 

children fetched in the California slave trade. Some ranchers also hired individuals to patrol 

their lands and kill Indians on sight, as the Daily Alta California reported in 1853: two 

ranchers in Colusa county, “Messrs. Thomas & Toombe,” having lost $5,000 worth of stock 

to Indian rustlers, had hired two men “at $8.00 per month to hunt down and kill the Diggers, 

like other beasts of prey.” Perhaps these low rates simply speak to Californians’ contempt for 

“Diggers” as easy prey. The prices Frank and Pierce Asbill offered at their Summit Valley 

ranch for other threats to their livestock are instructive: $5.00 for the scalps of bears or 

panthers, $1.50 for those of “wildcats” and eagles, $10 for those of coyotes. In other words, 

the life of a coyote was considered harder to take than the life of a human being.334 

 Rather than note the challenges endemic Indian-killing raised for the professed 

benignity of Anglo-Californian society, contemporaries preferred to attribute such actions to 

unsavory characters unrepresentative of American society as a whole, distanced from the 

mainstream with racialized epithets like “thug,” “squaw man,” or “white Indian” and 

regularly described as worse than Indians, reifying Indians as the yardstick of savagery. An 

example appears in a San Francisco Bulletin article of 1859, telling of a party led by John 

Breckenridge, one of Toombe’s salaried Indian-killers, who had ambushed and slain a party 

of five Indians and their white leader. The latter was unknown to them but believed to be a 

member of the “Butte Creek squaw men,” a gang of “some forty or fifty white brutes” who 

kept Indian women “in a state of concubinage” and armed and protected the Indians “in all 

                                                 
334 Clifford E. Trafzer and Joel R. Hyer, eds., Exterminate Them! Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape, and 

Enslavement of Native Americans during the California Gold Rush (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State 

University Press, 1999), 28-29, 67-68 (Daily Alta California 6 March, 1853: “Sacramento News [per Adam’s & 

Co.’s Express] “Exciting News from Tehama—Indian Thefts—Terrible Vengeance of the Whites”); James J. 

Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 

185-86; Lynwood Carranco and Estle Beard, Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars of Northern 

California (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma press, 1981), 183.  



 

337 

 

their depredations.” According to the Bulletin, Breckenridge scalped him “[a]s a trophy, or 

sort of remembrance that there was a man so base as to lead on a band of savages to deeds of 

butchery and theft”. In an 1860 editorial in the New York Century, “Indian Butcheries in 

California,” denouncing the Eureka volunteers’ Humboldt Bay massacre, the editors 

thundered that “civilized humanity” could “scarcely believe it possible” for white men to be 

degraded so far below savages” as the “filthy wretches who infect the frontier settlements.” 

A letter to the Sacramento Union from the Mattole region of Humboldt County in 1862, 

asking for government assistance to protect settlers, noted that while Indians “hovering 

around the mountains and on the beach” occasionally killed cattle, “we have some among us 

claiming to be white men who are worse than Indians. Last Monday night one of them set 

fire to the school house.” As late as 1870, the appearance of Missouri hide-hunters in the 

Yolla Bolly mountains prompted derision in the press of the “buckskin gentry,” “squatters” 

and “squaw men.”335 

A larger proportion of the population took mental refuge in the cognitive dissonances 

Manifest Destiny permitted, which proclaimed Anglo-Americans’ God-given destiny to scalp 

and extirpate Indians but, when Anglo-Americans acted upon these beliefs, proclaimed such 

events as unfortunate accidents or historical processes that went beyond human agency. 

Governor Burnett, author of the 1850 Act which made massacre, for-profit Indian hunting, 

and Indian slave labour the norm in the state of California, declared in 1851 that “the 

inevitable destiny of the race,” i.e., extinction, “is beyond the power or wisdom of man to 

avert.” Such self-exculpatory thinking also appears in the 1894 memoirs of John Bidwell, an 

                                                 
335 Trafzer and Hyer, Exterminate Them!, 34, 67-68, 126-27; Robert F. Heizer, ed., They Were Only Diggers: A 

Collection of Articles from California Newspapers, 1851-1866, on Indian and White Relations (Ramona, CA: 

Ballena Press, 1974), 88; Rawls, Indians of California; Carranco and Beard, Genocide and Vendetta. 



 

338 

 

influential Anglo-Californian farmer, philanthropist, temperance activist, and Senator who 

had settled in California in the 1830s. Looking back, he recalled that the term “Digger,” 

applied on the other side of the Rockies to pedestrian Great Basin peoples, had been brought 

to California by “specimens of an abandoned class of the mountaineer type of white men” 

who “seemed to think no more of killing an Indian than shooting a coyote.” He recalled 

meeting one of these “degraded” individuals who “boasted of the number of Indians he had 

killed,” tallied with nearly 100 “notches which he cut on his tomahawk handle.” Bidwell, by 

contrast, avoided bloodying his own hands: as Brendan Lindsay notes in Murder State, on 

one occasion he issued and paid out a private $500 bounty for the scalp of a known Indian 

stockthief from Mill Creek.336 

An officer stationed in northern California’s Humboldt Bay had a fright one night in 

1852 when an owl flew into his cabin and landed on his head in the dark. Fresh out of West 

Point and having heard constant stories of “the treachery and cruelty of the Indians” since 

leaving New York, George Crook wrote decades later that his younger self “felt the sensation 

of my scalp leaving my head” at the prick of the owl’s talons. Such preconceived notions 

began to erode under the observed realities of life in the Humboldt Bay, where he saw the 

Wiyots, who he called “my first Indians,” attacked by Eureka volunteers. Crook wrote in his 

memoirs that another local group, the “Bald Mountain Indians,” were in fact “more or less 

hostile” and “killed a good many whites,” while the Wiyots were in his words “harmless,” 

“miserable,” “defenseless beings” who probably thought “their very condition would be their 

safeguard.” Instead, the Eureka vigilantes who sailed out to attack them on the night of 25-26 

                                                 
336 Lindsay, Murder State; Rawls, Indians of California; Carranco and Beard, Genocide and Vendetta; Trafzer 

and Hyer, Exterminate Them!; Heizer, They Were Only Diggers. 



 

339 

 

February 1860 targeted them for precisely this reason, while convincing themselves that the 

Wiyots were in collusion with the Bald Mountain tribe to justify massacring them; nor was 

this injustice isolated to the killers, as Crook noted that local newspapers “lauded” the 

massacre. Such injustice was endemic to the state of California, as Crook explicated: it was 

“no unfrequent occurrence” for indigenous men to be shot “in cold blood” or women raped 

“by some brute.” And as “Such a thing as a white man being punished for outraging an 

Indian was unheard of,” wars between Indians and settlers were endemic up and down the 

Pacific coast. Crook sympathized with the Indians: “the outrages of the whites” prompted 

Indians to either “take the war path or sink all self respect.”337 

Scalping on the Great Plains: Sand Creek (1864) and Slim Buttes (1876) 

 An outsider arriving in or passing through the young state of Colorado in 1867 would 

have noticed a flurry of public interest regarding scalp bounties. A mass meeting in Denver 

promised $10 for each Arapaho or Cheyenne scalp remitted, while in Central City a 

gathering of locals raised $5,000 to pay bounties of $20 per scalp, and took out ads in the 

regional press. On 4 May, another regional Colorado newspaper promised $10 per Indian 

“crown.” Since the winter of 1864-65, Coloradans and the federal Army had been at war with 

Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Lakota, with the advantage held by the Indians: federal troops 

were spread too thin to achieve substantive victories, while the highly-mobile Plains lifestyle 

meant that Indian raiders and war parties essentially controlled the countryside. As in 18th 

century Pennsylvania, two of scalping culture’s central narratives, i.e. that Anglo-Americans 

were the only real victims of frontier warfare and that Indians only understood violence, had 

                                                 
337 George Crook, Martin F. Schmitt ed., General George Crook: His Autobiography (University of Oklahoma 

Press, 1986), 11-16; Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873 

(University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 70-123, 304-312 



 

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in a self-confirming way led firebrands to commit a massacre which guaranteed the all-out 

war they feared. In the case of 1860s Colorado, the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, in which 

900 predominantly-Coloradan militia led by Colonel John Chivington launched a surprise 

attack against a 500-strong village of the Cheyenne and Arapaho accommodationist factions, 

created a situation of all-out war between southern Plains Indians and the United States. For 

decades afterwards, Chivington and his defenders clung to two articles of faith to justify this 

disastrous and counterproductive massacre: that Sand Creek had achieved its aims of 

intimidating Indians, and that an exponentially increasing number of white settlers’ scalps 

had been found in the village, proving the wickedness of the people of Sand Creek.338 

 The details of Sand Creek have been formidably well-documented in Stan Hoig’s The 

Sand Creek Massacre (1961) and Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre (2013) and are only 

perfunctorily reiterated here; what I focus on is the way in which the question of who scalped 

who was used by Chivington’s defenders to assign absolute guilt to the Indians and degrees 

of innocence to the perpetrators. Chivington’s first official report to General Curtis, dated 29 

November, crowed of a victory over “[a] Cheyenne village of 130 lodges and 900 to 1,000 

warriors strong.” He and his men had killed several chiefs and “between 400 and 500 other 

Indians,” seizing an equal number of horses and mules, at a cost of “9 killed, 38 wounded. 

All died nobly.” Clearly, these Indians had deserved their fate: his forces had “found a white 

man’s scalp, not more than three days’ [sic] old, in one of the lodges.” As the general public 

                                                 
338 On scalp bounties in 1867 Colorado, see Ralph Smith, Borderlander: the Life of James Kirker, 1793-1852 

(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 298 n. 50; on Sand Creek, see Jerome A. Greene, 

Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867-1869 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 

2004), 1-60; Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961); entry “Sand 

Creek” in Wishart, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians; Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling 

over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ned Blackhawk et. 

al., Report of the John Evans Study Committee (Northwestern University: Evanston, Illinois, 2014), 37-95. 



 

341 

 

heard the grotesque details of what had been done to the Indians by Chivington’s troops at 

Sand Creek and as Chivington and his troops came under three separate federal 

investigations, one military and two congressional, the number of scalps began climbing 

steadily upwards. Chivington’s report to General Curtis of 16 December, 1864 changed the 

“one white man’s scalp” of his initial report into “several scalps of white men and women in 

the Indian lodges” and “articles of clothing belonging to white persons”; he also castigated 

the whistleblower Captain Silas Soule as an Indian-lover, “more in sympathy with those 

Indians than with the whites.”339 

 On the witness stand in January 1865, Chivington’s scalp count leaped upwards again 

to 19 scalps of white settlers, “one of them still fresh with gore,” and, perhaps meant to 

retroactively justify their killing of Indian children, “a child captured at the camp ornamented 

with six white women’s scalps.” On the stand and in their depositions, Chivington’s 

supporters also claimed to have seen white settlers’ scalps at Sand Creek: “a number of white 

person’s scalps—men’s women’s and children’s” (Stephen Decatur); “a good many white 

scalps” (Thaddeus Bell); “one new scalp, a white man’s, and two old ones” (Luther Wilson). 

While cross-examining Soule, Chivington pushed the principle of reasonable doubt to its 

logical extreme, pressing Soule’s admission that while he “saw soldiers with children’s 

scalps during the day,” he “did not see them cut off.” The Indians’ rifle pits hastily dug in the 

sandbanks with knives or by hand were transformed into evidence of a preexisting 

conspiracy: like Little Bighorn, Sand Creek was really an ambush, and the half-Cheyenne 

eyewitness George Bent was really a Confederate agent orchestrating a vast Plains Indian 

                                                 
339 Greene, Washita, 1-60; Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre; entry “Sand Creek” in Wishart, Encyclopedia of 

the Great Plains Indians; Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre; Blackhawk et. al., Report of the John Evans Study 

Committee, 37-95. 



 

342 

 

plot to destroy a new Union state. Nor did Chivington ever recant this position. In 1883, still 

imposing at age 62, he travelled from Cincinnati to Denver to give the keynote address for 

the 25th anniversary dinner of the Colorado heritage organization “the Pike’s Peak Pioneers 

of ’58,” where he fulminated at length on the Indians’ treachery and wickedness, concluding 

with “I stand by Sand Creek!” What proof did he have? The “scalps of white men, women, 

and children, several of which they had not had time to dry and tan since taken.” Speaking as 

though certain that his audience knew exactly what he was alluding to, he asked, “What of 

that Indian blanket that was captured, fringed with white women’s scalps?”340 

The central paradox was that nobody but Chivington or his partisans ever reported 

seeing these phantom scalps, and not one of the alleged several dozen was ever brought back 

from Sand Creek to Denver. On the other hand, contemporary accounts indicate that the 

volunteers had no compunctions about publicly, proudly, and shamelessly displaying dozens 

of Cheyenne and Arapaho scalps and other body parts they took as trophies at Sand Creek—

including the genitalia and pubic hair of both men and women—as they rode in triumph 

through the streets of Denver upon their return from Sand Creek, even using them as props in 

two Denver theatrical productions re-enacting their version of events, one of which was 

entitled The Battle of Sand Creek. Over the decades, the Colorado oral tradition embroidered 

the spoils supposedly found in the village, as indicated by William Byers, editor of the Rocky 

Mountain News, in a published dispute in the New York Tribune with Helen Hunt Jackson, 

Indian-policy reform activist and author of A Century of Dishonor (1881). In early 1880, 

after Jackson had criticized Colorado’s collective punishment of the White River Utes by 

                                                 
340 Greene, Washita, 1-60; Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre; entry “Sand Creek” in Wishart, Encyclopedia of 

the Great Plains Indians; Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre; Blackhawk et. al., Report of the John Evans Study 

Committee, 37-95. 



 

343 

 

noting that the same principle of collective punishment could be used to hold all white 

Coloradans responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre, Byers, who in 1864 had described 

Chivington and his men as having “covered themselves in glory,” fired back. Byers invoked 

a standard justification for Sand Creek: the killing of ranch foreman Nathan Hungate, his 

wife, and two young children, whose bodies had been publicly displayed in Denver as in 

1750s Pennsylvania and whose killers, later found to be Arapaho raiders with an outstanding 

grievance against the ranch’s owner, were assumed in 1864 and thereafter to be the very 

same Cheyennes who had surrendered themselves to Army custody. While Jackson cited the 

testimonies recorded in the Joint Commission’s official records, Byers went for alternative 

facts: “scalps of white men” which “had not yet dried,” “an Indian saddle-blanket fringed 

entirely around the edges with white women’s scalps, with the long, fair hair attached,” and a 

story of how a white woman’s skin had been found stretched over the pommel of a 

Cheyenne’s saddle. Given that several eyewitnesses reported the posthumous trophies made 

of indigenous women’s private parts by the volunteers, Byers’ unsubstantiable story of the 

flaying of a white woman by the Indians is testament to denial and projection filtered through 

a bowdlerizing Victorian imagination.341 

For Byers and many other Westerners, it was certain that the people of Sand Creek 

were the “confessed murderers of the Hungate family,” and if Jackson had seen the “cut, 

mutilated and scalped” bodies of the Hungate family, “the work of those same red fiends who 

were so justly punished at Sand Creek,” she would change her mind. Other authors piled on: 

W.B. Vickers, a Coloradan who wrote a history of the state in 1881, justified the 1879 White 

                                                 
341 Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of 

California Press, 2003), 227-28; Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre; Greene, Washita, 1-60; Kelman, A Misplaced 

Massacre; Blackhawk et. al., Report of the John Evans Study Committee, 37-95. 



 

344 

 

River War and the subsequent deportation of Utes from the state by reference to the “Sand 

Creek fight” which “some” had “called a massacre”: “If so, it was a massacre of assassins, 

for fresh scalps of white men, women and children” – again, the scalps whose existence was 

never verified—“were found in the Indian camp after the battle.” The single-longest chapter 

of J.P. Dunn’s Massacres of the Mountains (1886) cited, as proof of Cheyenne guilt, the 

murder of the Hungates and the supposed presence of a vast haul of white women’s scalps at 

Sand Creek; he scoffed at “certain Indian-ring gentlemen,” for promulgating the lie “that the 

Cheyennes were ever friendly to the whites, […] Many well-meaning but poorly-informed 

people,” a possible allusion to Jackson, “have been drawn into this delusion.” Claiming that 

“Scalping and mutilation also strike terror to the Indian heart” Dunn also insisted, in spite of 

all evidence to the contrary, that Sand Creek had halted further warfare: “The Cheyennes and 

Arapahoes got over into Kansas and Indian Territory as quickly as possible,” – which was 

true – “and stayed there,” which was decidedly not true. Theodore Roosevelt repeated this 

line of argument in one of the many attacks on contemporary Indian policy he inserted into 

his 1900 biography of Thomas Hart Benton, a Missouri politician and major proponent of 

Manifest Destiny, declaring “the so-called Chivington or Sandy Creek Massacre” as, “in 

spite of certain most objectionable details, […] as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever 

took place on the frontier.”342 

 Similar patterns of mind, where implications of scalping or brigandage were used to 

inflate Indians’ putative guilt while real or imagined hardships on the Anglo-American side 

                                                 
342 J.P. Dunn, Massacres of the Mountains: A History of the Indian Wars of the Far West (New York: Capricorn 

Books, 1969 [1886]), 332-373, 614 (“No warlike Indian… his spirit must be broken”); Theodore Roosevelt, 

Thomas Hart Benton (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900), 211-12; Thomas G. 

Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 

1980), 79-81; Roger L. Di Silvestro, Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician’s Quest for 

Recovery in the American West (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011), 190-97, 318 n. 94. 



 

345 

 

were used to obscure Indians’ victimization, including scalping by Anglo-Americans, appear 

in accounts of Slim Buttes, an inglorious skirmish between General Crook and Lakotas in 

September 1876. In August, attempting to catch up to retreating Lakotas following Little 

Bighorn, General Crook and 2,200 men had begun pursuit through the Dakota badlands with 

minimal provisions and gear in unseasonally cold and rainy weather which turned badlands 

clay into clinging mud. In what became known as the “Horsemeat March,” Crook’s herd of 

packmules and horses were gradually reduced by lack of forage, exposure, and exhaustion 

while the troopers, eating half-raw meat from played-out animals, fared little better. By 5 

September Crook decided to bivouac for the winter in the new mining towns in the Black 

Hills, which the Sioux had not yet ceded legally to the United States (and, at the time of this 

writing, still have not).343 

 On 7 September Crook had ordered Captain Anson Mills to take 150 men on the 

strongest remaining horses and head to the Black Hills’ northernmost mining camps to 

purchase fresh provisions. Unnoticed in the fog and rain, Captain Mills’ scouts stumbled on 

the morning of the 8th upon a 37-lodge village led by a Lakota named American Horse the 

Elder, or Iron Plume, nestled on the eastern side of what the Lakotas called Paha Zizipela, 

translated by the scouts as Slim Buttes. Though they technically enjoyed a four-to-one 

numerical advantage over their enemies, Crook’s 2,200 men and their remaining horses were 

so enervated that in their attack on the morning of 9 September they could do no more than 

                                                 
343 Smith, Borderlander, 298 n. 50; Kingsley Bray, Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 

2011), 240-47; Jerome A. Greene ed., Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877: The Military 

View (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 96-115; Charles F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, or, 

The Conquest of the Sioux (Chicago, 1890), 249-66; Jerome A. Greene, Slim Buttes, 1876: An Episode of the 

Great Sioux War (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982); Darlis A. Miller, Captain Jack 

Crawford: Buckskin Poet, Scout, and Showman (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2012), 

41-66. 



 

346 

 

take about 20 prisoners from the village, and hold their ground against a counterattack of 500 

Lakotas and Cheyennes from Crazy Horse’s village 20 miles away in the afternoon. And 

their attack on the village comprised a victory that none of them seemed keen to remember in 

later years: while most of the residents had fled, about 28 people, very few of them men of 

fighting age, had been mercilessly besieged when they took shelter in a brushy ravine. The 

Lakota chief Moses Flying Hawk later observed that “had [the roles] been reversed, [Slim 

Buttes] would have been called by the whites a terrible massacre.”344 

Charles Finerty, correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, noted acts of bravery by 

various troopers in the siege of the ravine, including the “ingenious” stratagem of the scout, 

Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier, of using a woman as a human shield (“a captive squaw as a living 

barricade”) while he scalped a man he had killed “in a manner that displayed perfect 

workmanship. Scalping is an artistic process, and, when neatly done, may be termed a satanic 

accomplishment.” Finerty admitted that “the savages acted purely in self defense” in 

defending their families, but insisted that, “until their cries were heard above the volume of 

fire,” Crook and his officers did not think women and children were in the gully –which, 

given Crook’s long history as an Indian-fighter, seems implausible. Finerty’s feelings were 

                                                 
344 Lakota veterans interviewed in the early 20th century unanimously disagreed that either the elder or younger 

American Horse was present or died at Slim Buttes, but differed on the identity of the man in the ravine. 

According to Has Horns, he was a Sans Arc named Iron Shield, a respected man but not a leader—see Richard 

G. Hardorff ed., Lakota Recollections of the Custer Fight: New Sources of Indian-Military History (Spokane, 

Washington: the Arthur H. Clark Company, 1991), 151, 161-62 (footnote 9). According to Short Buffalo, the 

fatally-wounded leader at Slim Buttes was named Iron Plume, and his brother was Charging Bear—Paul D. 

Riley, “Oglala Sources on the Life of Crazy Horse: Interview Given to Eleanor H. Hinman,” 205, in R. Eli Paul 

ed., The Nebraska Indian Wars Reader, 1865-1877 (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 180-215. Greene 

(Slim Buttes, 49, and 159, footnote 61) names him as “the Minneconjou American Horse, also known as Iron 

Plume, Iron Shield, and Black Shield.” Charging Bear, one of the captives who remained with Crook during the 

retreat, helped negotiate the surrender at Slim Buttes and later became a corporal in Crook’s scouting division— 

Greene, Slim Buttes, 77, 168 (footnote 77). Durwood Ball and Paul Andrew Hutton eds., Soldiers West: 

Biographies from the Military Frontier, second edition (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 

189-90; Greene ed., Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 96-115.  



 

347 

 

decidedly mixed: the scene of Slim Buttes, “if properly put on canvas, would […] give the 

civilized world a faithful picture of the inevitable diabolism of Indian warfare.”345 

The newspaper correspondents and the memoirists preferred to focus on moments 

that could be inflated or reshaped into clear-cut examples of heroism and villainy. The 

fatally-wounded Minniconjou leader American Horse, who gripped a stick between his teeth 

to cope with the pain of his fatal abdominal injury and refused the surgeon’s chloroform, was 

unanimously praised by Finerty, King, Bourke, and other eyewitnesses for his stoicism and 

“Spartan courage” – that, perhaps, he feared losing consciousness in the Americans’ custody 

does not seem to have been voiced in writing. Much attention was given to the death of the 

scout Charles White, a hanger-on of “Buffalo” Bill Cody who bore the nickname “Buffalo 

Chips” and was one of the only soldiers killed in the siege of the ravine; Finerty, Bourke, 

King, and others wrote him heroic, melodramatic death scenes. All attempted to distance 

themselves from the scalping that took place during and after the battle, which Finerty 

restricted to “a few – a very few – brutalized soldiers.” He claimed that they drew inspiration 

from a scout named “Ute John” who “scalped all the dead, unknown to the General or any of 

the officers.” Ute John functioned as something of a scapegoat figure for Finerty, who 

attributed to him a desire to scalp the slain baby yet noted that American Horse’s death was 

so noble, “Even Ute John respected the cold clay of the brave Sioux leader and his corpse 

was not subjected to the scalping process.” Captain Bourke couldn’t resist getting his own 

licks in even while defending “the much-disparaged” Ute John: noting that while he had a 

reputation as a rogue who had “murdered his own grandmother and drunk her blood,” this 

                                                 
345 Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac,  , 257 (“volume of fire”), 259 (“inevitable diabolism”), ; Moses Flying 

Hawk cited in Major Israel McCreight, Firewater and Forked Tongues: A Sioux Chief Interprets U.S. History 

(Trail's End Publishing: Pasadena, CA, 1947), 153-54. 



 

348 

 

was “somewhat exaggerated, and he was harmless except when sober, which wasn’t 

often.”346 

Charles King, on the other hand, attributed a hunger for scalps to all the “rabid 

Indians” they had faced both in and out of American Horse’s village, calling them “the Dick 

Turpins of the Plains”. In a short few sentences written in an 1880 retrospective, he managed 

to cast aspersions on the Indians who had had the courage to surrender by portraying them as 

treacherous, filthy, and sadistic: 

Here’s one grinning, hand-shaking vagabond with one of Custer’s corporals [sic] uniforms on 

his back—doubtless that corporal’s scalp is somewhere in the warrior’s possession, but he 

has the deep sagacity not to boast of it; and no man in his sound senses wants to search the 

average Indian. They are our prisoners. Were we theirs, by this time we would be nakedly 

ornamenting a solid stake and broiling to a juicy death to the accompaniment of their exultant 

howls. 

King also made much of the idea that “the skulking rascals” would “come prowling” as soon 

as the soldiers left to dig up, scalp, and mutilate the three American dead before leaving them 

“to their four-footed relatives, the prairie wolves” – again, using traditional Savagist 

language to criminalize and animalize them.347 

                                                 
346 Bourke, On the Border With Crook, 349-50 (“which wasn’t often”), 356 (“much-disparaged”); Finerty, War-

Path, 289; Greene, Slim Buttes, 169 (footnote 83) identifies “Ute John” as Nicaagat, also known as “Captain 

Jack,” a traditionalist Ute leader during the White River War of 1877—see Robert Emmitt, The Last War Trail: 

The Utes and the Settlement of Colorado (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 14, 39-40, 55, 96, 

172, 197, 301-02. On Charles “Buffalo Chips” White, whose nickname was variously attributed to General 

Sheridan and Lieutenant Alfred Norton and apparently a bowdlerized version of “buffalo shit,” see entry 

“WHITE, Charles” in Charles M. Robinson III ed., The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke volume 2: July 29, 

1876 – April 7, 1878 (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 2005), 454. 
347 Richard C. Stirk, 10 November, 1906, cited in Richard E. Jensen ed., Voices of the American West Volume 2: 

The Settler and Soldier Interviews of Eli S. Ricker, 1903-1919 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska 

Press, 2005), 282-85. Stirk, who was at Fort Robinson when Buffalo Bill “is said to have had his fight with 

Yellow Hand,” noted, “He did not see this; but say some of the men claimed that they killed the Indian and that 

Bill merely took his scalp.” Captain Charles King, Campaigning with Crook (1891; Norman: University of 

Oklahoma Press, 1964 reprint), 114-15. Most of this was a reprint of an 1880 edition, compiled from articles 

published that year in the Milwaukee Sentinel—Don Russell’s introduction, xv-xvi, in Paul L. Hedren ed., 



 

349 

 

 In possible imitation of Buffalo Bill, “Captain Jack killed and scalped an Indian a 

mile from the column,” reported Reuben Davenport of the New York Herald of the battle 

with Crazy Horse’s relief force on the afternoon of the 9th. Crawford, another friend of Bill 

Cody’s, had succeeded him as the 5th Cavalry’s chief of scouts when Cody, having taken his 

“first scalp for Custer,” left the service and returned east in August. In his function as 

correspondent for the Omaha Daily Bee, he told his readers in passing that he had taken “one 

top-knot” during a fight in which he “came near losing” his own hair. Crawford’s poetry, in 

1876 and afterward, wrote of the need to slay Sioux to avenge Custer and Buffalo Chips, but 

in real life he found the act more morally-troubling than he let on. “He later regretted this 

bloody deed,” notes his biographer Darlis Miller, “and never spoke of it in his public 

performances.” Similarly, Batiste Pourier seemed troubled by his scalping of an old Lakota 

man in the siege of the ravine, which was no secret: an article in The Saturday Review (12 

July, 1890) looking at memoirs of the Sioux Wars had noted Finerty’s account of Slim Buttes 

in War-Path and Bivouac and noted “Mr. Finerty regrets that some of the soldiers scalped the 

dead. White men have usually been very prone to adopt savage customs.” Donald Brown, a 

former member of the 5th Cavalry, told historian Eli Ricker in 1907 that “he thinks Bat 

brought back a scalp” from the gully, but Pourier was conspicuously silent on this point in 

his two interviews with Ricker in that same year.348 

 

                                                 
Campaigning with King: Charles King, Chronicler of the Old Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 

1991). 
348 Miller, Captain Jack Crawford, 59-60; Jensen, Settler and Soldier Interviews, 255-282, 361; “The Conquest 

of the Sioux” 48-49, in The Saturday Review (12 July 1890), collected in John Douglas Cook et. al., The 

Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, vol. 70 (1890). 



 

350 

 

Chapter Seven: Scalping Culture at Frontier’s End, 1893-1914 

It’s true they’ve killed and scalped a fioux, 

But they’ve joined a church or twioux 

--A bad bit of poetry on the Sioux in the Washington Post, 17 October, 1888349 

White men seem to have difficulty in realizing that people who live differently 

from themselves still might be traveling the upward and progressive road of life. 

--Luther Standing Bear, 1933350 

Prologue: The Triumph of Mythology, and the Myth of Triumph 

 One morning at the World’s Columbian Exposition, popularly known as the Chicago 

World’s Fair, in September 1893, a group of visitors began speculating aloud on the ethnicity 

of a Native American man standing outside of a tent. All secure in their assumption that he 

did not speak English, the debate raged furiously: was Sioux or Cheyenne? Reaching no 

consensus, the discussion shifted to whether he was “really very ugly,” all involved agreeing 

he looked quite “savage”; the debaters then fled in terror when he threw what they took for a 

harvest of scalps at them. The man in question was Antonio Apache, a self-identified 

grandson or great-grandson of Cochise and assistant to Professor Frederic Ward Putnam, the 

director of the Fair’s Department of Ethnology and Archaeology, who had hired him after a 

meeting at the Peabody Museum in December 1892. Among his other duties at the Fair, 

Putnam had most recently asked him to organize an Indian pageant, which posed an 

unexpected problem. Antonio had hired 24 Native American men to perform, but as their 

modern short haircuts—the sort that were now standard-issue at Indian boarding and 

residential schools, as well as the height of male fashion—made them look too “civilized” 

                                                 
349 Commemorating a deputation of Sioux chiefs to Washington to negotiate the terms of their landholdings 

under the threat of further amendments (the General Amendment Act, aka the Dawes Act). Cited in Utley, The 

Lance and the Shield, 275. 
350 In Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 

1978 [1933]), xxi. 



 

351 

 

and therefore inauthentic, he had purchased an assortment of long-haired black wigs for 

them. Furious at the tourists’ insults and condescension, Antonio turned into his tent and 

scooped up an armload of long-haired black wigs. Whether he was throwing the wigs away 

or throwing them deliberately at the tourists is unclear, but the fairgoers shrieked and fled 

regardless.351 

 At least, so said Teresa Dean in a Chicago Daily Tribune article, “Antonio Has Fun 

with a Choice Set of Wigs.” Such an encounter between the traditional horror-imagery of 

Indian warfare and the smug complacency of jaded dilettantes does sound like the sort of 

story which captured the spoken and unspoken contradictions and ironies of a World’s Fair, 

particularly what the Anglo-American public liked to imagine as the collision of America’s 

frontier past, embodied by the Indians, with its modern and industrial present, while more 

progressive readers could enjoy a self-satisfactory chuckle at an educated, modernized 

Apache getting the better of bigots. But questions of wigs and authenticity would come back 

to haunt Antonio Apache, whose life upon closer inspection contained some contradictions of 

its own. After acting as a promoter and recruiter for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School 

throughout the 1890s, in January 1901 the Carlisle school newspaper ran a disclaimer stating 

“We are credibly informed that the man calling himself Antonio Apache is not Indian; that he 

wears a wig of straight stiff, black hair; that the real hair when permitted to grow is curly.” 

Mary Cota Weed, a Native American woman he married in 1919, filed for an annulment on 

grounds of fraud less than a year later, echoing the 1907 allegations of Western artists 

                                                 
351 Melissa Rinehart, “To Hell with the Wigs! Native American Representation and Resistance at the World’s 

Columbian Exposition,” 403, 405-06, 429, in The American Indian Quarterly Volume 36, Number 4 (Fall 2012) 

403-442; David L. Browman and Stephen Williams, Anthropology at Harvard: A Biographical History, 1790-

1940 (Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, 2013), 250-53; Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology 

Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 

2007), 1-163. 



 

352 

 

William Cary and Edwin Deming: Antonio was really Tony Simpson, a Southerner of 

African and European ancestry. Like Warner McCary and Sylvester Long, also Southerners 

who had escaped “the stigma of blackness” in the Jim Crow era by passing as Native 

Americans and entering the entertainment industry as, respectively, the Choctaw chief’s son 

Okah Tubbee and the Blackfoot chief’s son Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Tony Simpson 

had apparently become an Apache via a shaven head and an assortment of wigs. “He wore a 

wig of straight black hair plastered close to the scalp,” reads a handwritten note discovered 

by historian Kathleen Howard in the archives of Los Angeles’ Southwest Museum; the note 

goes on to state that Deming “once saw him with his wig off.”352 

 That the self-appointed experts of Indian authenticity had been taken in by a 

confidence man with a shaven scalp is fitting per Melissa Rinehart’s description of the 

World’s Fairs as “essentially contradictory sites in a colossal heterotopia” where ironies 

“abounded.” And such ironies as the demand to find “authentic” long-haired indigenous men 

in the assimilation-focused Allotment era (1886-1933), which stigmatized and all but 

outlawed such long hair, were products or reflections of the unspoken anxieties regarding the 

closing of the frontier that freighted the minds of American visitors to the World’s Fairs. To 

                                                 
352 Rinehart, “To Hell With the Wigs!”; Browman and Williams, Anthropology at Harvard, 250-53. Born in 

North Carolina, Sylvester Long was of partially indigenous (Croatan) descent; after learning some Cherokee 

from performers in a Wild West show he enrolled at Carlisle as a Cherokee. After being adopted by the Blood 

subgroup of the Blackfoot Confederacy in 1922 he identified as a Blackfoot, writing a fictitious autobiography 

describing his Blackfoot childhood in 1927—see Donald B. Smith, “Long Lance, Buffalo Child” (1991), in 

William S. Powell ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (University of North Carolina Press, 1979-

1996). Okah Tubbee, aka Warner McCary, a former slave from Natchez, Mississippi, was possibly of partial 

indigenous ancestry, but in all probability not the son of prominent Choctaw chief and cattleman 

Mushulatubbee as he claimed in his autobiography, as “It stands to reason that a man of such prominence would 

have complained, petitioned, or at least alerted someone that his cherished young son had been kidnapped” (22). 

While McCary / Okah Tubbee’s authenticity was periodically questioned, that of his wife, a white Mormon 

named Lucy Stanton who presented herself as a Mohawk / Delaware chief’s daughter named Laah Ceil, rarely if 

ever was—pointing to the ways “in which “white Indians” are more readily accepted than “black Indians,” even 

among modern scholars.” See Angela Pulley Hudson, Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White 

Mormon Became Famous Indians (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 1-42, 171-75 

(172: “stigma of blackness”, 175: “white Indians”). 



 

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be clear, when I discuss “the frontier” in this chapter, I don’t mean the historic zones of 

contested control between expansionist Euro-American empires and colonies and as-yet 

unconquered indigenous peoples and polities, but the fantasy of benevolent assimilation and 

benign, unavoidable ethnic cleaning that in Anglo-America frontier culture was known as 

Manifest Destiny. In the frontiers of actual history, indigenous communities formed friendly 

and hostile relationships with individual members or groups of polyglot, polyethnic male 

sojourners, predominantly but not exclusively Euro-American, such as fur traders, garrison 

troops, explorers, merchants, and missionaries, as well as small communities of religious 

minorities, fugitives, contrabandists, squatters, and so on. Eventually, a creeping tide of 

Anglo-American settlers had disrupted these previous relationships, displaced indigenous 

peoples from their lands and resources, and replaced older forms of racialized violence like 

scalp hunting and slavery with new forms of racialized legislative violence such as 

reservation pass certificates and rations, blood quantum, and selectively-applied laws. Yet 

North American settler societies defined themselves and their local histories by the 

deployment, borrowing, and appropriation of their versions of indigenous foods, symbols, 

placenames, and so on. Both at the grassroots and at the governmental level, belief in the 

mythology of Manifest Destiny meant minimizing or explaining-away ongoing indigenous 

presence by insisting on a rigid definition of “authenticity” which went beyond ancestry and 

phenotype. Simply put, “Indians” and “modernity” were incompatible, and Manifest 

Destiny’s success was supposed to mean that Indians vanished—but to prove Manifest 

Destiny’s success, one required Indians.353 

                                                 
353 Rinehart, “To Hell With the Wigs!”; Michael D. Green, “The Expansion of European Colonization to the 

Mississippi Valley, 1780-1880,” 467. 



 

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 This essentialized late-19th-century version of the past, which contrasted an Anglo-

American society which had always been technologically-advanced and morally superior vis-

à-vis Indians who had always been primitive and culturally inferior, served in part as a 

charter myth of American history, particularly in terms of the frontier violence which, 

whether implicitly or explicitly, was both omnipresent and sanitized. Through the old 

reverse-colonial scenarios of the burning cabin and the wagon-train raid staged in Wild West 

shows, fin-de-siecle Anglo-Americans could remind themselves of their past victories; by 

seeing their defeated enemies engaged in handicrafts at World’s Fairs, they could reassure 

themselves of their benevolence in civilizing such benighted folk. There was a precedent in 

putting figures like Sitting Bull and Geronimo on display, dating back at least to the Removal 

era of the 1830s. In 1834, Black Hawk, the Sauk leader of 1833’s Black Hawk War, was 

taken on a tour of the eastern cities, culminating in New York, where a balloonist named Mr. 

Durant proclaimed, literally from on high, a valedictory ode hailing Black Hawk for having 

“fought for Independence” and “struck for Freedom” with “a few unconquered souls.” What 

this was all about was perhaps more plainly illustrated in a photograph of Sitting Bull and 

Buffalo Bill shaking hands; taken in Montreal during the Lakota celebrity’s tour with Cody’s 

Wild West show in 1885, it was widely reprinted on posters with the caption “Foes in ’76, 

Friends in ’85.”354 

As Patrick Wolfe has observed, the settler-colonial desire to seek some kind of 

absolution from people they had displaced and killed is inextricable from a desire to 

nominate themselves as legitimate inheritors of that land. As the actual “frontier” era of 

                                                 
354 Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 260-67; Utley, Geronimo, 258-61; Clements, Imagining Geronimo, 18; 

Kennedy ed., Life of Black Hawk, vii-xxvii; J. Gerald Kennedy, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and 

Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (Oxford University Press, 2016), 176-219. 



 

355 

 

contested control by unconquered peoples ended, it was assumed that these fictions of the 

past could go unchallenged. But there was a fly in the ointment: indigenous peoples not only 

continued to exist, but continued to offer their own interpretations of past and present while 

exploiting Manifest Destiny for fun and profit. As Gerald Vizenor writes, the “simulations of 

dominance” with which Anglo-Americans fantasized about indigenous peoples, including the 

“bankable simulation” of that “occidental invention,” the “Indian,” could be opposed or even 

“ousted” by alternative narratives of “survivance”: the continuation of indigenous identities 

and ontologies grounded in culturally- and historically-specific traditions.355 

 The contrast between such expectations and realities appears in Seattle’s 1909’s 

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, as residents of the largest city of the final northwestern 

frontier trumpeted their status as “Queen City of the Pacific.” A collage of indigenous 

imagery abstracted from its contexts included Edwin S. Curtis’ photographs of modern 

Native Americans shepherded into “authenticity” via his trunks of buckskins, headdresses 

and props; ubiquitous Pacific Northwest woodcarvings, including the amusement strip’s 

South Gate combination of two totem poles propping up a Tori arch as an example of “Jap-

Alaskan” architecture; and live human exhibitions including schoolchildren from the Tulalip 

Reservation north of Seattle, a small number of Inuit and a large number of Siberians 

performing handicrafts in a plaster “Eskimo Village”; and a Wild West show of stagecoach-

fight re-enactments by Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne horsemen. In case the connection 

                                                 
355 Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth- Century Northwest 

Coast (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-14, 198-207; Paige Raibmon, “Theatres of 

Contact: The Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw Meet Colonialism in British Columbia and at the Chicago World’s Fair,” in The 

Canadian Historical Review 81:2 (University of Toronto Press, June 2000), 157-190; Slotkin, Gunfighter 

Nation: , ; Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln and London: 

University of Nebraska Press, 1999 [1994]), 1-44; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 3-14, 52-108.  



 

356 

 

was incomplete, the Government Building’s Dead Letter department was, in perhaps 

someone’s idea of a sick joke, turned into a display area for dried scalps.356 

 That the Fair’s organizers and spectators had less absolute claim over indigenous 

peoples than they imagined is illustrated by the complicated participation of Nancy 

Columbia, a 16-year-old Labrador Inuit performer who spoke publicly against management’s 

ignoring of Inuit contributions to Arctic exploration. Nancy, who won the Seattle 

Exposition’s Queen of the Carnival beauty contest, had been born at the Chicago World’s 

Fair in 1893, educated at a boarding school in Coney Island and apparently her English bore 

a New York accent. On the other side of the fairground, twenty-three of thirty Ghost Dancers 

held at Fort Sheridan north of Chicago had been paroled into Buffalo Bill Cody’s custody for 

his 1893 Rough Riders of the World season, and many of his troupe of almost 200 Indians 

had signed on to travel, earn wages, and escape the constant scrutiny of Indian agents on Pine 

Ridge and other reservations. During the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, not only did 

significant numbers of Native Americans participate in order to sell artwork and handicrafts, 

but significant numbers paid their entry fees and attended as spectators, meaning that Indians 

were paying to look at other Indians. Most conspicuous were the Osages from Oklahoma, 

whose oil money meant that they were both the most well-dressed Indian attendees and the 

most lavish purchasers of Native American art—leading to more than a few discontented 

grumblings, prefiguring the casino debate, about Indians with money.357 

                                                 
356 Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle and London: University of 

Washington Press, 2007), 113-148; Rinehart, “To Hell With the Wigs!”, ; Lisa Blee, ““I came voluntarily to 

work, sing and dance": Stories from the Eskimo Village at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition,” in The 

Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 3/4, “Race and Empire at the Fair” (Summer/Fall 2010), 126-139. 
357 Rinehart, “To Hell With the Wigs!”, ; Lisa Blee, ““I came voluntarily to work, sing and dance"; Parezo and 

Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 1-163 (on Osages, 118-120). 



 

357 

 

 This chapter will investigate these settler anxieties of past triumphs and an uncertain, 

post-frontier future with a more granular focus on two specific case studies in eccentric 

chronological order: the participation of the Apache leader Goyathlay or Goyaałé, better 

known as Geronimo, in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of St. Louis, Missouri in 1904, 

and the participation of Buffalo Bill Cody and Rain-in-the-Face in the World’s Columbian 

Exposition of Chicago in 1893 – abbreviated at times throughout the text as “St. Louis 

World’s Fair” or “Chicago World’s Fair.” In all cases, the question of who had scalped who 

before the closing of the frontier, which was in strict chronological terms not that far distant 

but in symbolic terms now part of a past epoch, were inseparable from these three old men’s 

public appearances. Of course, their public reputations, within which the who-scalped-who 

question was integral, were the whole reason they had been asked to participate in these 

festivals of curated American history. All three, who were getting on in years, were also 

engaged in acts of self-representation and management of their reputations, for which 

participation in the World’s Fairs offered something more than just financial compensation.  

“no trouble with the cowboys”: Geronimo, Roosevelt, and St. Louis, 1904-06 

 News that Geronimo would be at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 doubtless caused 

the public much nervous excitement and consternation. Geronimo had gained a reputation in 

Mexico and the United States as the hardest and most vindictive leader of reservation 

“breakouts” from the San Carlos and Turkey Creek communities of the Fort Apache 

reservation in 1878-79, 1881-84, and 1885-86, and a grisly mythology had coagulated around 

him. Rumours had circulated in the American press during the summer of 1900 that the 

restless old war leader, who the Salt Lake Herald called “one of the most bloodthirsty Indians 

that ever figured in history,” had gone insane in captivity—though an officer from Fort Sill, 



 

358 

 

quoted in the New York Herald, suggested “that he is planning to fool his guards and 

escape.” In 1901, the newspapers again were reprinting rumours about Geronimo, this time 

regarding his supposedly extensive scalp collection. Stories from the Kansas City Journal 

reprinted in Pennsylvania and Ohio claimed that Geronimo’s buckskin coat, with “more than 

forty scalps” “dangling from the shoulders,” had been sold for $500 by “a collector of Indian 

curios” in San Francisco, or stolen from the collector. The Davenport Daily Republican of 

Iowa said Geronimo had woven his scalps into a mat upon which he “plant[ed] his feet” 

every morning. When N.F. Shabert, an Oklahoma businessman who lived near Fort Sill, 

recommended Geronimo’s participation at the St. Louis Fair to Samuel M. McCowan, 

superintendent of the Chilocco Academy Indian school in Oklahoma and administrator of the 

St. Louis Fair’s model-Indian school, he touted Geronimo as having “between eighty-five 

and one hundred white scalps to the credit of his savagery; also a vest made of the hair of the 

whites whom he has killed.”358 

 McCowan’s initially considered Geronimo unsavory, and when he insisted on a salary 

for appearing at the Fair, McCowan called him a “blatant blackguard, living on a false 

reputation.” But when Geronimo agreed to attend the St. Louis Fair without salary, 

McCowan began to reconsider his opinion of a man often referred to as a “human tiger” and 

“the worst Indian who ever lived.” Marshall Everett, author of a popular exposition 

guidebook, promised the presence of “The Red Devil” Geronimo, “whose presence made 

every white settler tremble with fear, as his extreme cruelty was dreaded.” Ticketholders 

                                                 
358 William Clements, Imagining Geronimo: an Apache Icon in Popular Culture (Albuquerque, NM: University 

of New Mexico Press, 2013), 57-137;  Richard W. Etulain and Glenda Riley eds., Chiefs & Generals: Nine Men 

Who Shaped the American West (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2004), 85-104; Utley, Geronimo, 196-

98; Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 1-163; Edwin R. Sweeney, From Cochise to Geronimo: 

The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874-1886 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012). 



 

359 

 

awaiting a terrible brigand chieftain didn’t quite know what to make of the old man who 

crossed the fairgrounds in a suit. Unstooped from age and still energetic at 75, his skin deeply 

creased from a lifetime of desert sun and wind, Geronimo appeared every morning at 9 in the 

Indian School building to carve souvenirs, namely canes and bows and arrows, to sell 

alongside his portrait photographs and autographs. He refrained from maiming or killing rude 

tourists who insulted his “feeble” appearance, who asked for war-whoops, or tried to cut off 

locks of his hair, instead holding a taciturn silence which prompted one reporter to declare 

that “the wild Indian has always been overestimated” and “those lofty and laconic speeches 

[…] in those Canonicus, Uncas, and Powhatan stories” had to be nothing but lies: “Geronimo 

never perpetrated an epigram.” Grasping at straws, reporters claimed the Apache songs he 

sang while playing his violin were war chants, and that his Western clothing was due to 

government orders forbidding him “to wear his regalia on account of the bad effect it has on 

his emotions.”359 

 Goyaałé’s lack of subversiveness was, in itself, deeply subversive. Now a member of 

the Dutch Reformed Church, he said “God bless you” when parting ways and publicly took 

off his hat for “The Star Spangled Banner,” a scene which impressed a New York Times 

reporter who wrote of “this old warrior, standing in the rays of the setting sun […] in silent 

salute to the flag he so long defied.” Nor could the national press resist the human-interest 

element of his public reunion with his teenage daughter Lenna, who he had not seen since her 

birth in 1886. “[S]aid to be one of the most cruel and heartless of the chiefs who fought the 

whites, […] tears coursed down his wrinkled cheeks, and the broken old warrior seemed 

                                                 
359 Utley, Geronimo; Clements, Imagining Geronimo; Sweeney, From Cochise to Geronimo; Parezo and 

Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 1-163 (114: “lofty and laconic speeches”). 



 

360 

 

entirely overcome with […] joy,” wrote the Arizona Republican: “The long record of his 

prowess in many wars and the story of his cruelty were all forgotten by those who saw the 

old soldier weep with joy at the sight of the daughter he had not seen since she was a baby.” 

On the surface, there is nothing unusual or surprising about the joy of a 75-year-old man, 

who had seen many members of his family die violently, at being reunited with one of his 

children. But in his deliberate and conspicuous shows of his newfound Americanness, 

Goyaałé had launched his final campaign: the war for his public image.360 

 At age 14, Goyaałé already went by the name Geronimo, at least among Hispanics, as 

evidenced by his appearance under that name on the ration rolls of Corralitos, a mining town 

near Janos presidio, dated 13 August 1843. Warfare between Mexicans and Apachería 

continued into the first decade of the 20th century, and on 20 January 1851, the Chiricahuas 

won the largest Apache victory over Mexican forces in history. At Pozo Hediondo in Sonora 

state, 26 of 100 Sonoran troops, including the state’s military commander, were killed and 46 

seriously wounded by 150 Apaches led by a who’s who of Chiricahua leadership: Mangas 

Coloradas, Cochise, Juh, Miguel Narbona, and Geronimo, then 22 years old and a father of 

three. A month later, they rode to Janos in Chihuahua state to sound out the local authorities 

regarding the possibility of peace talks and, in time-honoured fashion, to fence their Sonoran 

loot to the merchants of Janos. After the commander’s saddle was recognized, his successor 

Col. José María Carrasco hastily gathered his forces, crossed the state line into Chihuahua, 

encircled the encamped Apaches near Janos while the men were absent, and attacked. “[M]y 

                                                 
360 Utley, Geronimo; Clements, Imagining Geronimo; Sweeney, From Cochise to Geronimo; Parezo and 

Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, 1-163. 



 

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aged mother, my young wife, and my three small children were among the slain,” said 

Geronimo in his autobiography fifty years later; “I had lost all.”361  

 At some point during his period of mourning and the retaliatory raids he led, 

Geronimo perceived himself, and was perceived by other Chiricahuas, as having become a 

diyin, a person gifted with other-than-human power. Many diyin were healers, and one 

manifestation of Geronimo’s personal power was a well-known skill in healing battlefield 

wounds and extracting bullets and arrowheads. But his unyielding and unforgiving qualities, 

galvanized by the events of 1851, were also manifested as Enemies-Against Power, whose 

possessors were exceptional in raiding and war, and shared their gift with others by 

manufacturing blessed shields and protective amulets for adult warriors, and the sacred 

objects born by adolescents during their war apprenticeship. Even among diyin with 

Enemies-Against Power, Geronimo seems to have stood out; during a raid, one of his 

followers later claimed that he had on one occasion used his Power to hold back the sunrise 

for two or three hours. Yet the warfare activities of all Apaches, whether possessors of 

Enemies-Against Power or not, were also hemmed in by a complex array of prohibitions 

regarding death and the possessions of the dead, which were believed to cause debilitating or 

fatal illnesses collectively known as “ghost sickness.” Paradoxically, this meant that a people 

                                                 
361 This ordering of events is conspicuously at odds with Geronimo’s sequence of events: that the massacre of 

his and other Bedonkohes’ families at “Kas-Ki-Yeh” preceded a retaliatory victory at Pozo Hediondo. See 

below, and S.M. Barrett, Frederick W. Turner III eds., Geronimo: His Own Story (New York: Ballantine Books, 

1971 [1970, 1906]), 87-95. Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery, 230-37, 395 n. 28: “Geronimo’s own account 

is demonstrably inaccurate and needs to be used with caution.”; Sweeney, Cochise, ; Robert M. Utley, 

Geronimo, 23-29; Sweeney, Cochise, notes that in 1863 in Chihuahua Cojinillín, a leader of the Carrizaleño 

band of the Nednhi Apaches, was killed by Joaquin Terrazas and his volunteers for a 500 peso bounty on his 

scalp (212) and points out an incident in 1871 where a Tohono O’odham (Papago) war party slew five or six 

Apaches and turned in their paired ears—not their scalps—for the bounty (323). As late as the aftermath of 

October 1880’s Tres Castillos Massacre, according to Asa Daklugie, over 90 Apache women and children were 

marched south by their Mexican captors to be sold into slavery in Chihuahua—see Eve Ball, Indeh: An Apache 

Odyssey, 78-84. 



 

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that Mexicans and Anglo-Americans considered a barbarian horde of scalp-takers were the 

most reluctant scalp-takers in the Southwest, far more so than the mercenaries who hunted 

Apaches for theirs. As Apaches also believed that anything but total abstinence would make 

members of war parties sluggish and doom their martial efforts, the endemic rapes of Euro-

American women attributed to savage Apaches by Hispanic and Anglo-American writers 

appear to also have been groundless, as were previous and similar accusations in eastern 

North America (see Chapters 3 and 4).362 

 While the Comanches to the east took scalps as secular trophies and agricultural 

peoples to the west curated enemy scalps for rain-making and warfare purposes, Apache rites 

regarding scalps and scalping were almost perfunctory in comparison. Two of Grenville 

Goodwin’s informants in the early 20th century drew a connection between scalping and 

Enemies-Against Power, noting that a warrior looking to cultivate this power might perform 

the scalping, and that someone already possessing Enemies-Against Power might whisper 

words to the scalp to weaken the enemy’s people, such as Americans, Mexicans, Navajos, or 

other foes, before hanging it high in a tree where coyotes couldn’t reach it. This was 

pointedly restricted to external enemies, as Apaches never scalped each other in feuds 

between bands. When in hostile territory, one scalp, physically distanced from the warriors 

by being placed on the end of a pole, was sufficient for a scalp dance and then disposed of 

immediately afterwards. Major John Cremony, an officer during the 1860s Apache wars, 

                                                 
362 On diyin, Enemies-Against Power, and the metaphysical dimension of Apache warfare, see Grenville 

Goodwin, Keith Basso ed., Western Apache Raiding and Warfare (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 

1973 [1971]), 223-298; Etulain, Chiefs and Generals, 85-104; James L. Haley, Apaches: A History and Culture 

Portrait (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997 [1981]), 63-75. In the words of Asa Daklugie, Juh’s son 

and Geronimo’s nephew, “Geronimo personally directed much of the training of the young boys for the 

warpath.”—cited in Eve Ball, with Nora Lynn and Lynda A. Sánchez, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey (Norman, 

OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988 [1980]), 86. 



 

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characterized the scalp dances of the Apaches as “strictly religious” against the “grand 

rejoicing, a triumphal jubilee” of other western Indians. The same was true for an enemy 

prisoner back to a village for a slain kinsman’s sister or close maternal cousin to deliver the 

killing blow; his scalp might be danced with after his death, but only briefly, and disposed of 

immediately. “No Apache would keep them,” noted Geronimo in 1906, “for they are 

considered defiling.” Needless to say, Geronimo’s putative overcoat or floormat of scalps 

were ruled out by the reality of Apache warfare and religious beliefs.363 

 As American settlers, ranchers, miners, and soldiers entered the Arizona and New 

Mexico Territories in the later 1850s, tensions grew between Anglo-Americans and Apaches. 

War broke out between the Chiricahuas and the United States two months before the 

outbreak of the Civil War in the “Bascom Affair” between First Lieutenant George Bascom 

and Cochise at Apache Pass in February 1861. During the Confederate occupation of Arizona 

Territory from 1861 to spring 1862, exterminationist sentiments towards Apaches became 

bipartisan. Lieutenant-Colonel John Robert Baylor, a Confederate Texan of Kentuckian 

origin, ordered one subordinate, Captain Mastin, to “kill [Apaches] anyway he could; and did 

not care whether he made them drunk, poisoned them, or shot them on sight.” Three months 

before Confederate forces retreated from the Territory, in March 1862, Baylor chastised the 

commander of the Arizona Guards at Pinos Altos for reportedly pursing peace talks with an 

Apache band. Declaring them “cursed pests who have already murdered over 100 men in this 

Territory,” he instead ordered him to lure the Apaches “or any tribe” into ambush under the 

                                                 
363 Goodwin and Basso ed., Western Apache Raiding and Warfare,  On the curation of scalps in warfare rituals 

among Cocopas, Quechans, and Akimel and Tohono O’odham (“Pimas” and “Papagos”), see Clifton B. 

Kroeber and Bernard L. Fontana, Massacre on the Gila: An Account of the Last Major Battle Between 

American Indians, with Reflections on the Origin of War (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 89-94; 

Barrett and Turner, Geronimo, 167-68; on abstinence see Goodwin, Basso ed., Western Apache Raiding and 

Warfare 311 n. 78, and Utley, Geronimo, 264, on the Peck massacre: “Apaches neither raped nor scalped.” 



 

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guise of peace talks, to “kill all the grown Indians” and sell their children into slavery “to 

defray the expense of killing the Indians.” The Union forces who retook Arizona after the 

Confederate retreat in 1862 also thought in extirpationist terms: Brigadier-General James 

Carleton gave orders in October 1862 to reject all flags of truce and kill all male Apaches 

capable of bearing arms.364 

 In January 1863, the 70-year-old Chiricahua leader Mangas Coloradas was taken 

prisoner during parley with the Army on orders of Brigadier-General Joseph West, who 

instructed his soldiers to present Mangas Coloradas “dead or alive” the next morning. 

Tortured with hot bayonets in full view of other Apache captives that night, Mangas 

Coloradas was shot “while trying to escape.” After his death, one soldier scalped him, 

perhaps for a rumoured hefty bounty being offered on the Mexican side of the border, while 

others cut off and boiled his head to send east to the Smithsonian. Asa Daklugie, Juh’s son 

and Geronimo’s nephew, told oral historian Eve Ball in the 1940s that while the betrayal and 

murder of Mangas Coloradas was bad enough, the Apaches considered his posthumous 

decapitation as “much worse,” as it doomed him to be “forever headless” in the next world. 

Carleton’s plan of spring 1864 “to hunt and destroy all but the women and children” met with 

popular approval in the territories; Secretary of Arizona Territory Richard McCormick 

summed up popular opinion as “[in] favour of an utter extermination of the ruthless savages.” 

An 1864 editorial in the Arizona Miner of Prescott stated this explicitly: the only solution to 

conflict between settlers and Apaches was “to exterminate nearly if not the whole race of 

savages… and the sooner this is accomplished the better for the whole country.”365  

                                                 
364 Sweeney, Chochise, 187 (“kill them anyway he could”), 195 (“kill all the grown Indians”), 203-04.  
365 Sweeney, Cochise, 220; Daklugie cited in Ball, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey, 83; The Prescott Arizona Miner, 

1864, cited in Bil Gilbert, Westering Man: The Life of Joseph Walker (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 263, cited 



 

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 Whether raiding to steal livestock or in revenge for a relative’s death, the whole 

purpose of Apache raids was to strike and retreat, which precluded lingering to perform the 

inventive tortures which Arizona and New Mexican territorial newspapers constantly 

reported. “[I]f an Indian scalps an American soldier, outrages and then burns at the stake an 

American woman, or brains an American baby,” stated an editorial in the Miner, the 

government will “give him some beads and a new scalping knife, and let him go.” In 1871 

Arizona residents sent a memorial to Congress tallying 178 whites killed by Apaches in 

Arizona Territory in the past two years. Tellingly, as Clare McKanna notes, of these 178 

documented killings only eight were listed as mutilated, though the report tried to 

compensate for this by dwelling in great detail on the details of the mutilations (e.g., 

“scalped,” “partially burned,” “all mutilated in a horrible manner”). Daklugie, observing that 

post-mortem mutilations were regularly confused by American settlers for marks of torture, 

noted to Eve Ball “And then there are these many stories of torture and mutilation. Well, 

some of the torture stories are true, but they were done in retaliation for worse crimes.”366 

 Apaches had a long list of grievances of their own to point to. Mixing dry goods with 

strychnine, a poison used to kill wolves and other animals, was a widespread practice in the 

West, and in 1864 a prospector named King Woolsey sold some Apaches piñole mixed with 

strychnine. In 1866, after a proposition for Apache scalp bounties was narrowly defeated in 

the Arizona Territory’s legislative assembly, a public gathering in Prescott raised a fund by 

voluntary subscription to hire thirty “Rangers” for ninety days, to take and deliver “bounty 

pieces.” In 1871, a mob from Tucson of 40 Anglo-American and Hispanic citizens and 100 

                                                 
in Clare V. McKanna, Jr., Homicide, Race, and Justice in the American West, 1880-1920 (Tucson: The 

University of Arizona Press, 1997), 117-154. 
366 Sweeney, Cochise, 220; Ball, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey, 83; McKanna, Jr., Homicide, Race, and Justice in 

the American West, 1880-1920, 117-154. 



 

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Tohono O’odham descended upon Apaches encamped near Fort Grant and killed and scalped 

85 people in a single day—a number equal to almost half of that 1871’s memorandum’s 178 

total casualties. Very few of the victims were men of fighting age, and none of the killers 

were found guilty by an Arizona jury. In an 1883 report to the Adjutant General’s office, 

General George Crook, then head of the Arizona Department, explained to his superiors that 

“public sentiment in frontier communities does not consider the malicious killing of an 

Indian, murder, nor the most unblushing plundering, theft.” The same was true in the 

territorial press: Arizona newspapers disseminated “all sorts of exaggerations and 

falsehooods” about Apaches, “while the Indian’s side of the case is rarely ever heard.”367 

 Apache horror stories about Americans expressed their bewilderment regarding these 

uncanny, “strange people,” who “respected nothing and nobody.” Both Daklugie and Big 

Mouth, a Mescalero scout for the Army in the 1880s, told of a terrible incident that happened 

during the Mescaleros’ confinement near Fort Stanton: “a drunken soldier,” in Big Mouth’s 

words, killed an Apache baby by “dashing its head against a wagon wheel. He said, “Nits 

make lice”,” said Daklugie. Big Mouth also heard this story, and told another of a Mescalero 

warrior, who believed he was travelling under protection to Fort Stanton, being betrayed like 

Mangas Coloradas and killed; the soldiers were butchering hogs, and the Mescalero was 

thrown into the “big kettle of boiling water” they were using to scald the hog carcasses. He 

also remembered that Mescalero mothers silenced crying children by warning that the 

soldiers would overhear, find them, and kill them. “They hunted us through the forests – our 

own forests – like wild animals,” added Big Mouth. “And they spared nobody.” Looking 

                                                 
367 Sweeney, Cochise, 317-18; Donald E. Worcester, The Apaches: Eagles of the Southwest (Norman: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 72; Crook cited in McKanna, Homicide, Race, and Justice in the 

American West, 132-33. 



 

367 

 

back from the 1940s, Asa Daklugie also connected dehumanization and hunting: “Both in 

this country and in Mexico, a bounty was offered for Apache scalps, just as there is today for 

those of some animals. And it was collected, too.”368 

 In the recollections of Charlie Smith, child of a Chiricahua Army scout and a 

Mescalero mother, Geronimo only recrossed the American border “to get ammunition. I do 

not think that he wanted to kill, but there were cases where he had no choice.” Smith was 

four or five years old in 1885 when his mother and some other Mescalero women, gathering 

piñon nuts in the mountains off-reservation, were impressed into Geronimo’s band, and he 

had inescapable memories of what happened on these cross-border forays:  

If [Geronimo] were seen by a civilian, it meant that he would be reported to the military and 

they’d be after us. So there was nothing to do but kill the civilian and his entire family. […]  

I do not like to talk of it. I do not like to think of it. But the soldiers killed our women and 

children, too. Don’t forget that.
369 

By the 1880s, Geronimo and his small group of followers became automatically responsible 

in the public mind for any act of homicide that occurred in the Territories if he was off-

reservation at the time, particularly those committed or believed to have been committed by 

Apaches. By the time of his surrender to Lieutenant Charles Gatewood in 1886, the press had 

laid at his feet responsibility for around 400 murders, with particular weight placed on home 

invasions like the “Peck Ranch massacre” of late April 1886. Geronimo’s followers had 

killed a rancher’s hired man, baby, and pregnant wife and taken his 10-year-old niece 

hostage, but spared his life for unclear reasons. Geronimo had addressed the rancher, who 

                                                 
368 Ball, Indeh, 78-84 (Daklugie), 200-01 (Charlie Smith). Asked by Ball sometime after 1944 whether he 

thought “it was the intention of the white race to inflict genocide upon the Indians?” and being given a 

definition of genocide as “The intention of one race to exterminate another,” Daklugie replied, “I never heard 

the word before, but I am thoroughly familiar with its practice.” 
369 Charlie Smith cited in Ball, Indeh, 102-04. 



 

368 

 

sported red rolled-up sleeves from his undershirt, as “Mangas Coloradas” (coloured sleeves), 

and Clements suggests nostalgia for his slain relative as moving him to uncharacteristic pity. 

But according to stories reprinted in Maryland, Illinois, and Colorado, Artisan Peck had been 

tied up and made to watch his wife “outraged and killed” or subjected to “indescribable 

tortures” by the Apaches, driving him temporarily insane and inducing the superstitious 

Apaches, who considered his madness as a danger to them or as a sign of divine favour, to 

spare his life.370  

 Across the border in Mexico, bounties on Apache scalps were offered until 1891, but 

a public perception that the government was either unable or unwilling to protect them from 

the Apaches prompted, within months of Geronimo’s final breakout in May 1885, the 

reinstatement of scalp bounties in some counties in Arizona. A story reprinted in the New 

York Times in October 1885 reported that armed bodies of ranchers and cowboys were 

forming up for “a real old-fashioned Indian hunt” in Cochise, Pima, and Yavapai counties, 

having “brought to light an old law” offering a $250 reward for each Apache scalp. 

Tombstone, the center of Cochise county, had offered to double that reward to $500 for every 

“buck Indian” scalp, which Pima and Yavapai would match; reportedly, the counties of 

Yuma, Apache, and Maricopa intended to follow suit. “This reward system, while it may 

seem savage and brutal to the Northern and Eastern sentimentalist,” the writer continued, was 

considered the Arizona settler’s only means “of ridding Arizona of the murderous Apaches.” 

                                                 
370 Utley, Geronimo, 196-98; Clements, Imagining Geronimo, 62-67; Sweeney, From Cochise to Geronimo, 

537-38. 



 

369 

 

Benjamin Madley writes that these were probably the last publicly-offered scalp bounties in 

United States history.371  

 By the time he appeared at the 1904 World’s Fair, Goyaale / Geronimo was well 

aware that many members of the American public viewed him with considerable distaste – as 

did many Chiricahuas, who were collectively punished after his 1886 surrender with exile, 

first to Florida and then to Oklahoma. In 1905, after a controversial public appearance riding 

in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade alongside five other famous Native American 

leaders, his personal entreaty to the president to allow himself and his people to return to 

Arizona was rebuffed. The decision to publish his autobiography came in the summer of 

1905, after Geronimo’s return from the Roosevelt inauguration, and required the permission 

and final approval of the War Department; his nephew Asa Daklugie, now a Carlisle 

alumnus, served as translator for the passages Geronimo composed ahead of time and recited 

as monologues to S.M. Barrett, a friend and superintendent of schools in nearby Lawton, 

Oklahoma. From his first chapter to the last, Geronimo’s ultimate goal was an appeal to 

allow himself and his people’s return to their homeland in Arizona. Of course, this would 

require winning over President Roosevelt, a man who once likened indigenous land claims to 

those of “every white hunter, squatter, horse thief or wandering cattleman” and as having no 

basis beyond “having butchered the previous inhabitants.”372  

                                                 
371 “Money for Indian Scalps: Arizona and New-Mexico settlers propose to destroy the savages. –Deming, 

New-Mexico, October 11,” in the New York Times, 12 October, 1885; Madley, “Reexamining the American 

Genocide Debate,” 117. 
372 Barrett, Geronimo: His Own Story; Utley, Geronimo, 258-61. On Roosevelt’s views on Native Americans, 

see Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Hart Benton , 211-12; Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of 

Race (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 79-81, and Roger L. Di 

Silvestro, Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician’s Quest for Recovery in the American 

West (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011), 190-97, 318 n. 94. 



 

370 

 

 The version of Geronimo’s life that appeared in Geronimo: His Own Story therefore 

made careful omissions of content regarding his long campaigns of war and his own role as a 

diyin, incompatible with his new image as a convert to Christianity. Only a hint peeps out in 

his description of traditional Apache medicine as half-herbalism, half-prayer: “Some of the 

Indians,” he noted, were skilled in extracting “bullets, arrow heads, and other missiles” from 

injured warriors, and “I myself have done much of this, using a common dirk, or butcher 

knife.” Of his early life before the massacre of his family, which he dated to 1858, nostalgia 

for his youth is obvious: of his first marriage he simply states “We followed the traditions of 

our fathers and were happy.” In his retelling the sequence of events was reshuffled: the great 

defeat of the Mexicans at Pozo Hediondo was placed after Carrasco’s massacre at Janos, not 

before, to occlude the inciting incident, simply calling them “Mexican troops from some 

other town” and referring to the site of the massacre as “another Mexican town” called “Kas-

ki-yeh.” Given that this version of events was dictated fifty years after the fact, it is possible 

that he had rearranged these events in his mind over the decades, consistent with his image of 

Mexicans as “treacherous and malicious.”373 

 By emphasizing his doctrinal hate for the Mexicans, of whom he could not recall how 

many he had killed (“for frequently I did not count them. Some of them were not worth 

counting”), Geronimo carefully drew a contrast between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, 

the former his preferred foes, the latter minimized as his enemies. Interestingly, Geronimo 

and his amenuenses Barrett and Daklugie isolated stories of scalping to this early phase of his 

career. Of the Apache warriors he led to fight the Mexicans in his version of Pozo Hediondo, 

                                                 
373 Barrett, Geronimo, 64 (“Usen gave homes in the land of the West”), 67-68 (“the Apaches and their homes 

each created for the other”), 70 (“Usen does not care for the petty quarrels of men”), 73-74 (“I myself have done 

much of this”), 75-84 (laws, customs, marriage), 87-95 (Chapter 6: “Kas-Ki-Yeh”), 125-26 (“treacherous and 

malicious”) 



 

371 

 

Barrett’s text states that “their long scalp-locks” were “ready for the hand and knife of the 

warrior who would overcome them” – something of a Fenimore Cooper touch, as Apache 

men grew their hair long and not restricted to one tuft or lock. He signalled his victory over 

the Mexicans by “[giving] orders for scalping the slain.” He floridly sums up another fight, 

which he dated to 1860, by stating “When the Apache war-cry had died away, and their 

enemies had been scalped…” While waiting in the mountains to learn of the fate of Mangas 

Coloradas, he described himself and his followers as stumbling upon four herdsmen and their 

cattle: “We killed all four, but did not scalp them; they were not warriors.” Of a defeat 

inflicted upon Mexicans by himself and Juh in what he describes as the Battle of White Hill, 

dated 1872, he notes “we scalped the slain, carried away our dead, and secured all the arms 

we needed.” This was the last incident of scalping his enemies he described in his memoir, 

well aware that it would inflame the sensibilities of many Anglo-American readers against 

him. In contrast to an unvaried hatred for Mexicans, his perception of Americans was more 

ambivalent: he spoke favourably of the surveyors who met the Chiricahuas in the late 1850s 

(“they were good men”) and ambivalently of the soldiers who followed: “At first they were 

friendly [.]” The soldiers, he told his readers, “never explained to the Government when an 

Indian was wronged, but always reported the misdeeds of the Indians.” He also played into 

the settler-colonial desire to project frontier violence onto white undesirables rather than 

structural racism by stating “Much that was done by mean white men was reported at 

Washington as the deeds of my people.”374 

                                                 
374 Barrett, Geronimo, 91 (“long scalp-locks”), 95 (“I gave the orders”), 100 (“their enemies had been scalped”), 

119 (“we scalped the slain”), 129-142 (“They were good men”; “At first”; “misdeeds of the Indians”); 140-160 

(“pure, honest white man”), 134-38 (136: “They were not warriors”). 



 

372 

 

 When presenting his escapes from San Carlos Geronimo described his emotions and 

motives in universalist terms. The 1881 break he attributed to fears that troops stationed at 

San Carlos were preparing to arrest them and put them on trial for actions in past wars; this 

“served to revive the memory of all our past wrongs,” such as the Bascom Affair, the 

assassination of Mangas Coloradas, and his own arrest at Ojo Caliente in 1877. “We thought 

it more manly to die on the warpath,” Geronimo summed up, “than to be killed in prison.” 

Otherwise, he simply mentioned crossing the border while omitting any mention of escape or 

pursuit by the Army. Of his break from the Fort Bowie Reservation in June 1876: “I took my 

tribe back to Hot Springs [Ojo Caliente] and rejoined Victorio’s band.” Of the flight from 

San Carlos: “In 1883 we went into Mexico again,” and a brief return in 1884 was to recruit 

other Apaches to fight the Mexican army. On the 1885 break, prefaced by a complex plan by 

Geronimo and which prompted Crook’s replacement by Nelson Miles who afterwards 

punished the Chiricahuas collectively: “In Arizona we had trouble with the United States 

soldiers and returned to Mexico.”375  

 Of the violence that occurred during these breakouts, he would only admit to violence 

against Mexicans, and hedged these confessions with caveats. Saying he believed that the 

Mexican government had asked American troops to pursue them across the border, “We were 

reckless of our lives, because we felt that every man’s hand was against us”—an interesting 

and probably deliberate self-comparison to Ishmael (Genesis 16:12). If he returned to the 

reservation, “we would be put in prison and killed.” He said he was certain that Crook had 

planned to get rid of him by “issu[ing] the orders for me to be put in prison, or to be killed in 

                                                 
375 Barrett, Geronimo, 122 (“we went into Mexico again”), 123 (“returned to Mexico”), 142 (“rejoined 

Victorio’s band”), 145 (“memory of our past wrongs… killed in prison”). 



 

373 

 

case I offered resistance,” and Barrett had to add a disclaimer footnote to avoid a libel suit. If 

they stayed in Mexico, soldiers would be continually sent to fight them, “so we gave no 

quarter to anyone and asked no favors.” Geronimo fully admitted to his persona as a public 

menace only when acknowledging killings south of the border: “we attacked every Mexican 

found, even if for no other reason than to kill.” But conflicts with American citizens who 

were not members of the armed forces were elided, downplayed, or denied. His skirmishes 

with Mexican “cowboys” across the border in 1868 and 1869 could be admitted, but the Peck 

Ranch massacre could not, and therefore he declared that while pursued by Captain Lawton 

and his scouts, “We passed many cattle ranches, but had no trouble with the cowboys.”376 

 The final element of his rehabilitation strategy was describing his adaptation to 

American society: conversion to Christianity, learning to farm, and making money. By 

contrast, the terms of his 1886 surrender had been violated: Nelson Miles had promised him 

land, hired hands to work it, freedom from arrest while in federal custody, and reunion with 

his and his followers’ families if they surrendered. Instead he was sent to Pensacola for 2 

years’ hard labour, Alabama, and then Oklahoma, where “I have been arrested and placed in 

the guardhouse twice for drinking whisky.” Yet he praised the essential benignity of 

American society, which he knew his audience wanted to hear, at the expense of his old 

enemies the Mexicans:  

I saw many interesting things and learned much of the white people. They are a very kind and 

peaceful people. During all the time I was at the Fair no one tried to harm me in any way. 

Had this been among the Mexicans I am sure I should have been compelled to defend myself 

often. I wish all my people could have attended the fair. 

                                                 
376 Barrett, Geronimo, 113-16 (Mexican cowboys), 122-23 (“In 1883… In Arizona…”), 141-42 (“back to Hot 

Springs”), 148-49 (“in case I offered resistance”), 150 (“no trouble with the cowboys”), 150-51 (“every man’s 

hand… no quarter”). 



 

374 

 

As the editor of the 1970 reissue of Geronimo, Frederick Turner III, noted here, “His 

statements about white culture often have the appearance of cutting several ways.” Beneath 

the surface, Geronimo may have been amazed that people who thought him a bloodthirsty 

monster would line up to purchase tchotchkes and autographs and offer him nothing sharper 

than the occasional bit of rude language.377 

The first scalp for Custer, redux: the Chicago World’s Fair and Buffalo Bill, 1893-1914 

 The only late-19th-century Native American treated with more public opprobrium 

than Geronimo, notes Clements, was Sitting Bull, and even he was publicly feted. In 1884, 

the Standing Rock Indian agent James McLaughlin and the St. Paul hotelier Alvaren Allen 

toured New York and Philadelphia with a troupe called “The Sitting Bull Combination,” 

witnessed in Philadelphia by a then 16-year-old Luther Standing Bear, attending while on 

leave from Carlisle. Sitting Bull, who could sign his name for autographs but whose spoken 

English was limited, was introduced to the crowd as the slayer of Custer and then asked to 

give a speech. As the only Lakota speaker in the audience, Standing Bear was the only one to 

perceive its dishonest translation: Sitting Bull’s oration about the need for reconciliation 

between American settlers and Plains Indians became a confession about the ambush and 

gory killing of the 7th Cavalry. The translator “told so many lies that I had to smile,” Standing 

Bear wrote years later, and then things became stranger to him: 

Then the white man said that all those who wished to shake hands with Sitting Bull would 

please line up if they cared to meet the man who had killed Custer. The whole audience got in 

line, as they really believed what the white man had told them. It made me wonder what sort 

                                                 
377 Barrett, Geronimo, 153-60 (surrender and exile, 154: “arrested twice”), 171-77 (World’s Fair); Nana, quoted 

by James Kaywaykla, in Jastrzembski, “Treacherous Towns in Mexico,” 176; on Tres Castillos, see Kathleen 

Chamberlain, Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 195-220 



 

375 

 

of people the whites were, anyway. Perhaps they were glad to have Custer killed, and were 

really pleased to shake hands with the man who had killed him!
378 

Three years after Sitting Bull’s death, the curious could do one better and visit Sitting Bull’s 

home at the Chicago World’s Fair.  

Through the largesse of the Indian Office, the managerial board of the 1893 

Columbian Exposition obtained Sitting Bull’s log house from Pine Ridge. Purchased from 

his widows log by log, it was shipped to Chicago and reassembled on the Midway as the 

“Sitting Bull Cabin Exhibit.” The attraction’s carnival appeal was obvious and ghoulish: as 

this was the house in which Sitting Bull had been assassinated by tribal police in December 

1890, visitors were offered the authentic site of a famous murder and a chance to look for 

bullet holes. Somewhat cheapening the effect was the fact that two other attractions on the 

fairgrounds also claimed to be the authentic Sitting Bull cabin. As if proving that the 

distinction between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” is largely a matter of class, the assemblers of 

this grisly monument barred Cody’s Wild West show from the fairgrounds, on the pretext 

that its presence would (in Melissa Rinehart’s paraphrase) “cheapen the progressive theme of 

the fair.” Directed by P.B. Wickham, the Cabin Exhibit employed Oglala Lakotas and Crows 

who had fought at Little Bighorn as performers. Just outside the fairgrounds’ southwest gate, 

Buffalo Bill opened his 1893 iteration of his show, flamboyantly titled “Buffalo Bill’s Wild 

West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” with another material artifact of the life 

                                                 
378 Utley, Geronimo, 258-61; Clements, Imagining Geronimo, 18; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 260-67; 

Luther Standing Bear, E.A. Brininstool ed., My People the Sioux (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska 

Press, 2006 [1928]), 177-190; Wishart, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians, entry “Standing Bear, Luther 

(1863/1868 – 1939),” 197-98. Connell notes in Son of the Morning Star (227-28) that while Sitting Bull may 

have understood French and English “better than anyone suspected,” his spoken English appears to have been 

limited in the latter years of his life to “Hello,” “Sitting Bull” with a heavy accent, the surprisingly-peppy “You 

bet,” and, for autograph seekers, “How much?” When the artist DeCost Smith identified him in a general store 

at Standing Rock (“Yes, it’s Sitting Bull”), the old statesman rapidly clasped his hand in a vigorous handshake 

and replied “Sitting Bull, you bet!” 



 

376 

 

of Sitting Bull: a light-gray circus horse he had grown fond of and which Cody had gifted to 

him at the end of the 1885 tour. Purchased from Sitting Bull’s widows, the horse led the 

procession of Cody’s 500 performers into the arena, carrying a rider bearing an American 

flag.379  

The physical line that separated “highbrow” World’s Fair and “lowbrow” Wild West 

show was then cris-crossed repeatedly, most notably by Cody’s nearly 200 Native 

Americans; not formally permitted to perform at the Exposition, they were frequently invited 

to parade through the fairgrounds, attend dedications, and even stand in for the Taínos, 

warbonnets and buckskins notwithstanding, to welcome Columbus’ shore party on Italian 

Day. Early in the season, the Columbian Exposition and the Congress of Rough Riders’ 

interests intersected when the Midway’s Sitting Bull Cabin was the site of a public 

reconciliation between the indigenous combatants of the Little Bighorn. Crows and Arikaras 

shook hands with Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho counterparts, the two most notable figures 

in this respect being Curly, Custer’s favourite Crow scout, and Rain-in-the-Face, who had 

inherited from Sitting Bull the role of nemesis of the Custer brothers. When Curly, a 

performer in the Sitting Bull Cabin Exhibition, demanded to be released from contract to 

return to North Dakota “in search of the villain who had slain his happiness in this world” 

upon learning that his wife had eloped with another man, a vacancy was left open and in 

midsummer, Rain-in-the-Face crossed the fairground. After his petition to the World’s 

Columbian Exposition Company management for more indigenous control over Indian 

                                                 
379 Reportedly, during Sitting Bull’s assassination, this old circus horse had taken the gunshots as its cue and 

begun going through its act: “He solemnly sat down in the middle of the bloodbath, and raised his hoof,” which 

thoroughly unnerved the tribal police. See Bridger, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West, 384-

86; Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 260-67, 312; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 63-87;  Connell, Son of the 

Morning Star, 393-97; Rinehart, “To Hell with the Wigs!,” 410-14.  



 

377 

 

exhibits and for an honoured Native American day was turned down, he lost interest, and his 

“spiritless performances” towards the end of the exposition were noted.380 

Up until the end of his life, Rain-in-the-Face could not escape the legend of his killing 

of the Custer brothers, and alternated between gruesome, embroidered variations on the 

legend, and denying it altogether. In 1894, he told journalist W. Kent Thomas that he had 

killed Tom Custer, “cut out his heart and bit a piece out of it and spit it in his face,” then 

“rode off shaking it” (see Introduction). When Ohiyesa / Dr. Charles Eastman visited Rain-

in-the-Face two months before his death in 1905, he denied it: “Many lies have been told 

about me.” A missionary named Mary Collins, however, claimed that on his deathbed he had 

confessed to killing George Custer: “I was so close to him that the powder from my gun 

blackened his face.” Either way, DeCost Smith, an artist who painted three portraits of Rain-

in-the-Face, shared Luther Standing Bear’s appreciation of the ludicrousness involved in a 

full crowd of Chicago World’s Fair attendees coming to the Sitting Bull Cabin to meet the 

killer of Custer: “while believing the tales of his horrid deeds were willing to treat him as a 

friend, shaking his hand and gazing in his face, while marvelling at the mildness of his 

expression.”381  

Just outside the fairgrounds proper, Buffalo Bill Cody offered not only a troupe of 

nearly 200 Native Americans, but three hundred other sharpshooters, trick riders, and 

entertainers: Anglo-Americans, British, Russians, French, Germans, and Arabs, support staff, 

a herd of horses and ponies, and a small herd of bison. From 1 May to 30 October Cody’s 

                                                 
380 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 63-87; Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 381-99; Rinehart, “To Hell with the 

Wigs!” 
381 Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 296-98, 381-99; Rinehart, “To Hell with the Wigs!”; Slotkin, Gunfighter 

Nation, 1-122. 



 

378 

 

show was seen by five million spectators, including Spanish and Italian nobility, outgoing 

president Benjamin Harrison, and incoming president Grover Cleveland. With a keen sense 

of the zeitgeist and its anxieties, Cody’s refurbished 1893 show offered both nostalgia for 

America’s past frontiers and a confident look at a future of new frontiers which would keep 

America from degenerating into moral and physical decadence. An 1886 editorial reprinted 

in the densely-packed 64-page programme captured the contradictions in celebrating 

Manifest Destiny. “And what a history America has, to be sure!” crowed the editor. “From 

the mouth of the Hudson River to the shores of the Pacific, men, women and children have 

conquered the wilderness by going to the front and staying there. Not by crowding into cities 

and living as do worms, by crawling through each other and devouring the leavings.”382 

The experience of Cody’s British and European tour of 1886-87 provided ways for 

the Chicago season to balance frontier nostalgia and confident futurism. Through scenarios 

which placed athletes and performers of different American and European nationalities in 

friendly competition with each other, Cody offered a vision of reconciliation inside and 

outside of the United States, as America and its former enemies—i.e., Native Americans, 

Hispanics, the British Empire – became peers and equals in the European-dominated 

international system. Fittingly it was in Bismarck’s Germany, a nation as anxious as the 

United States about its rapid industrialization and its recent place on the world stage which 

also compensated with a homegrown military tradition and fetishization of its idealized 

preindustrial past, that the “imperial circus” of the “Congress of the Rough Riders of the 

World” first appeared, including Arab performers and Georgian horsemen deliberately 

                                                 
382 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, 10 (“as do worms” – my italics), reprinted from an editorial of the 

New York Democrat, 5 June, 1886; Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 81; Robert W. Rydell and Rob 

Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (University of Chicago Press, 

2005), 105-117; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 1-122. 



 

379 

 

misidentified as “Russian Cossacks” who Cody had hired on in Europe. In England, the Wild 

West show had staged a six-day race between two cowboys and two cyclists (the cowboys 

won); in Paris, some of Cody’s Indians had climbed the Eiffel Tower. In Chicago in 1893, 

viewers were promised an assortment of such competitions interspersed throughout the 

schedule, including a horse race between “a Cowboy, a Cossack, a Mexican, an Arab, and an 

Indian” on respective breeds of horses, and a ladies’ race between “Prairie, Spanish, and 

Indian girls” i.e., Anglo-American, Hispanic, and Native American; and a display of military 

maneuvers by cavalry of the United States, German, French, and British armies. Bookending 

the 1893 show were the grand entrance and exit by the performers, both mounted and afoot, 

and both civilized and savage—British, French, and Germans representing civilization, the 

Arabs, “Cossacks,” and Native Americans representing the primitive, and Buffalo Bill and 

his Americans as intermediaries. All reconciled into an elite regiment of regiments, Cody 

offered a vision latter-day chivalry brought into the 20th century.383 

The second major change made in Cody’s show was its simplified chronology of 

American history. In the 1880s tours Cody’s American history had been divided into the two 

major periods of the popular imagination: the first frontier of the 1820s-1840s familiar from 

Fenimore Cooper and his imitators, and the more recent prairie frontier or “wild West.” But 

even then the lines between “forest primeval,” as the 1880s shows labelled it, and the recent 

                                                 
383 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, page 2; On the Georgians’ billing as “Russian Cossacks,” see 

Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 81; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 105-117; Slotkin, 

Gunfighter Nation, 1-122. Just as the Georgians acted as stand-ins for Russian Cossacks, the Arab horsemen 

troupe of “Sheik Hadji Tahar” was made up of town-dwelling entertainers, predominantly from North Africa 

and some from the Levant, who were performing a role that they considered equally alien and exotic: Bedouin 

pastoralists. One of the performers, a Lebanese acrobat named George Hamid, later explained that he had never 

ridden a horse until hired on to perform in Buffalo Bill’s Congress of Rough Riders. See Susan Nance, How the 

Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 

2009), 111-135. 



 

380 

 

Western frontiers, were not so clear-cut: Plains Indians in warbonnets had greeted the first 

settlers on an imaginary Atlantic coast, and a short essay reprinted from the 1886 programme 

(“The Rifle as an Aid to Civilization”) had anachronistically attributed America’s constant 

westward movement to a quartet of simple technologies: “the rifle ball,” the axe “that cleared 

the forest,” and “the family Bible and school book.” No inconvenient mentions were made of 

the long history of cumbersome pre-rifling firearms like arquebuses and flintlocks, or the 

absence of organized American public schools until fairly recent times. This essentialized 

image of an America that had always been technologically and culturally advanced vis-à-vis 

the Indians was simplified it further in the 1893 show by omitting any of the “forest 

primeval” segments. For the first time, the western United States from around 1800 to the 

present stood as synecdoche for all of American history, with the gun-armed representatives 

of Anglo-American urban-industrial civilization against the bow-and-arrow-wielding Native 

American warriors as synecdoche for some 400 years of conflict. And the core of the Wild 

West show’s history was the standard narrative of Manifest Destiny: westering settlers 

suffered the unprovoked aggression of the Indians, after which the Army’s scouts and 

soldiers righteously defeated the Indians to clear a path for Anglo-American civilization, 

morality, and progress.384  

Cody, to be clear, was not the sort of unrepentant bigot or cynical profiteer of such 

latter-day depictions as 1976’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians (dir. Robert Altman). Aside from 

the simple good business sense of treating indigenous employees well, offering competitive 

wages and the opportunity to make money in side ventures like selling autographs and 

                                                 
384 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, 13 (“The Bow and Arrow”), 22-23 (“The Rifle as an Aid to 

Civilization”); Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 81; Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill 

in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 105-117; 

Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 1-122. 



 

381 

 

mementos, his Indian employees remember that he insisted on their equal treatment to his 

white performers when it came to catering and accommodations. And he seems to have taken 

the idea of postwar reconciliation seriously. The succinct caption of an illustration of a 

mounted, warbonneted Plains warrior in the programme tried to convey this sentiment: “The 

former foe—the present friend, the AMERICAN.”385  

But calls for reconciliation ended where the need to endlessly commemorate white 

victimhood at Indian hands began. Three of the four 1880s staples of Cody’s Wild West 

show, listed in the 1893 programme, involved a formula of Indian aggression and American 

retaliation: an attack on an emigrant train by “marauding Indians repulsed by “Buffalo Bill” 

with Scouts and Cowboys”; the capture of the Deadwood stagecoach by Indians and its 

recapture by Buffalo Bill “and his attendant Cowboys”; and a heroic re-enactment of 

Custer’s Last Stand billed as historically accurate. Like the Midway’s Sitting Bull cabin 

exhibit, both the wagon-train scene and the Deadwood stagecoach act attained to 

authentically titillating edutainment. The programme promised that the wagons were “the 

same as used 35 years ago” and that the old stagecoach was the same “scarred and weather-

beaten veteran” in which a “great number of people […] lost their lives on the road between 

Deadwood and Cheyenne 18 years ago.” The Little Bighorn battle scene, as heroic as the 

Anheuser-Busch lithograph of Custer’s Last Stand, was imbued with putative authenticity by 

inflating Cody’s presence in the 1876 campaign: he and his cowboys arrived at the battlefield 

just as the smoke was clearing, to gaze on the desolation. Confusing the issue further, Cody 

                                                 
385 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, 10; Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 81; Slotkin, 

Gunfighter Nation, 1-122. 



 

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had appropriated Custer’s iconography for his own since the 1880s: the long, curled hair, 

buckskin jacket, broad-brimmed white hat and neatly-trimmed moustache and goatee.386 

The Indians’ villainy was further embellished, or perhaps buried, in the articles 

reprinted throughout the 60-odd pages of the programme, which through many curious 

omissions tried to downplay or elide any possible reasons the Indians might have for making 

war on the Americans. A reprinted excerpt from General Sheridan’s autobiography repeated 

the hagiography of Charley “Buffalo Chips” White while presenting a heavily sanitized 

version of Slim Buttes. The elephant in the room, the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, was 

never mentioned in the show itself, while the programme described the euphemistic “Indian 

troubles” of 1890 in self-justifying terms. Reprinted newspaper and magazine articles quoted 

such Army figures as Colonel Dodge and Cody’s business manager Major John Burke to 

praise Cody’s indirect aid: his Lakota employees, “improved by travel,” had countered the 

“unruly Indians” of the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies and prevented an “immediate 

outbreak among the red men.” A reprinted article from Harper’s hailed the role of “that most 

faithful servant—the only good Indian except a dead one—the Indian scout” in suppressing 

the Ghost Dance. Six pages of material condensed from Illustrated America magazine held 

the Ghost Dance as a sinister conspiracy by “medicine men and politicians” whose eagle-

feather fans had been wielded like mesmerists’ watches to entrance the participants and 

transform the ceremony “from a sacred rite to a warlike demonstration”; Wounded Knee was 

                                                 
386 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, 2, 23-25 (“A Historical Coach of the Deadwood Line”); Blackstone, 

Buckskins, Bullets, and Business, 81; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 1-122; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 

52-108; Connell, Son of the Morning Star, 356-58. 



 

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called both “an unlooked-for accident” and “one of the best marked triumphs known in the 

history of Indian campaigns.”387  

The programme gave the Sioux themselves a flurry of descriptors for irrationality and 

savagery: “excusably excited,” “unintentionally wronged,” “headstrong and misguided,” and 

“warlike.” Buried in the middle of a promotional essay on Cody’s 1889-90 tour of Europe 

was a glimpse of the ugly reality: a forlorn illustration of three Army scouts watching snow 

cover frozen bodies and burned-out tipis. No mention was made of a little-known incident 

which cast a further unfavourable light on the whole affair: Peter McFarland, an Army 

teamster, told oral historian Eli Ricker in 1905 that he had seen “one Indian who was 

scalped,” “lying in the gulch on his back.” He went from bystander to participant when he 

spotted an amateur “trying to get a scalp from an Indian without success, not knowing how to 

do it,” and offered his assistance. Indian agent Valentine McGillycuddy later attributed the 

discovery of these scalped bodies to what happened in the aftermath of the aftermath: on 30 

December, the day after Wounded Knee, the body of Private Domenic Francischetti was 

abandoned in the soldiers’ retreat from the White Clay Creek Fight or Drexel Mission Fight 

between the 7th Cavalry and the Lakotas. It was recovered seven days later, scalped and 

mutilated. This never made the brochure, either.388 

While Indians’ actual suffering at the hands of American settlers or soldiers was 

deliberately downplayed or ignored, a fictitious story of Lakota baby-killing from a poem by 

                                                 
387 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, 32-34 (“improved by travel”, “Indian trouble,” “Sioux troubles”), 

38-44 “Ghost-Dances in the West: Origin and Development of the Messiah Craze and the Ghost-Dance,” 

Illustrated America magazine) 
388 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, 46-49 (Buffalo Chips), 61 (“excusably excited… unintentionally 

wronged… headstrong and misguided… warlike”, Wounded Knee engraving “After the Battle. – Field of 

Wounded Knee. – Campaign 1890-91”); Jensen, Settler and Soldier Interviews 6, 10; retaliation in Jerome A. 

Greene, American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 292-94, 503 n. 9. 



 

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“Buckskin Sam,” entitled “Cody’s Corral, or The Scouts and the Sioux” was reprinted. In the 

classic scenario of defensive invasion, it told of Cody and his scouts being ambushed by “a 

hundred hideous, painted, and fierce” Sioux warriors in a scenic mountain valley. Inevitably 

emerging the victors, Cody and his men looked upon “their dead and mangled enemies, 

whose corses [sic] strewed the ground.” This bloodletting was sanctioned by a fictional 

“Medicine Hill” massacre: “I had sworn I would avenge them,”—were the words of Buffalo 

Bill— / The mothers and their infants they slew at Medicine Hill. / Our work is done—done 

nobly [.]” To complete the fantasy of heroic Indian-killing, the programme trotted out 

Buffalo Bill’s self-created legend: the scalping of “Yellow Hand.” The programme reminded 

the audience that the Deadwood stagecoach, in which a fortunate few would be chosen to 

ride in during the show, had begun its journeys “made famous by the scenes of slaughter and 

the deviltry of the banditti” in 1875, even passing through War Bonnet Creek—“the place 

where “BUFFALO BILL” killed the Indian Chief, “Yellow Hand,” on July 17, 1876.” Cody 

himself had ridden in this very coach in August 1876 while returning from scouting for 

General Crook, “bringing with him several of the scalps of the Indians whom he had met.”389 

While none of those “several” Indians were named, the programme offered multiple 

and contradictory versions of the duel with, and scalping of, Yellow Hand. Captain George 

Price’s “Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry” praised Cody for having “killed in a 

hand-to-hand combat the Cheyenne Chief, Yellow Hand.” A poem marvelled at Cody’s 

gentleness with his infant daughter, Irma Cody, with the same hand “that seemed harsh and 

cruel, / Nerved by a righteous hate / As it cleft the heart of the Yellow Hand, / In revenge of 

                                                 
389 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, 12 (“Cody’s Corral, or The Scouts and the Sioux”), 24 (“Yellow 

Hand… banditti… scalps of several”). 



 

385 

 

Custer’s fate.” Another poem, by “an Old Comrade,” William Annin, described a long-range 

rifle shot: “I saw Bill’s fight with “Yellow Hand,” you bet it was a “mill” / He downed him 

well at thirty yards, and all the men cheered Bill.” With no contradiction, this was followed 

by the knife-fight version, reprinted from General Sheridan’s autobiography: “It is now close 

quarters, knife to knife. After a hand to hand struggle, Cody wins, and the young chief 

“Yellow Hand” drops lifeless in his tracks after a hot fight.” A passage from Buell’s History 

also granted Cody the dubious heroism of personally knifing the long-suffering Cheyenne 

leader Black Kettle as he fled the Washita in 1868. The illustration of the scalping of Yellow 

Hand which appeared in the 1893 programme was more gruesome than usual, showing his 

enemy stretching out his hands in a final agony.390 

Yet the “Scalping of Yellow Hand” act was not performed in Chicago, and had not 

been performed by Cody on stage since 1877; Paul Hedren states that Figure 7.4 was “the 

last “first scalp” image to grace a Wild West program.” Further, Hedren notes that Cody had 

grown increasingly uncomfortable with this element of his legend, as indicated in a statement 

Cody made in a 1903 letter to his friend and portraitist Irving Bacon: 

Yellow Hand was the only Indian I ever scalped. I did not believe in scalping. But it was only 

the day before that we heard of Custer and his entire command being wiped out. And I 

wanted revenge for I loved Custer and many of his brave men. Charley Reynolds his chief of 

scouts was an old time friend of mine.  

Hedren points out some “muddied” details in Cody’s chronology, written almost 30 years 

after Warbonnet Creek. At odds with Cody’s implication of scalping Yellow Hair in the heat 

                                                 
390 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West… Programme, 5 (“when he killed Yellow Hand in front of the military command in 

an open-handed fight”), 8 (“killed in a hand-to-hand combat”), 14-15 (supposed killing of Black Kettle), 19 

(“Nerved by a righteous hate”), 37 (“you bet it was a “mill””), 47 (“close quarters now, knife to knife”), 48 

(scalping of Yellow Hand, 1893 illustration); Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer”. 



 

386 

 

of the moment after learning “the day before” of Little Bighorn, Hedren notes that Cody had 

carried the news of Little Bighorn to the commander, Col. Wesley Merritt, on 6 July; not 

only was he the first in the company to hear of it, ten days separated Cody and the 5th from 

the Warbonnet Creek skirmish and the ‘first scalp for Custer’ on 16 July. Further, Cody’s 

claim that “Yellow Hand” was “the only Indian I ever scalped” contradicted the details of his 

1879 autobiography, where he claimed to have killed and scalped Indians and taken weapons 

and personal possessions as trophies in several other incidents. Hedren suggests that in the 

intervening years between 30-year-old Cody scalping Yellow Hair and 57-year-old Cody 

disavowing this to Bacon, the cultivation of good working relationships and personal 

friendships with his former Lakota and Cheyenne enemies had given him an “evolved 

disdain” towards scalping. He may have felt remorse and regret for “a legacy he created but 

then could never shake.”391 

 It was not just Cody’s decision to make. For many members of the general public, the 

simplified, morally clear-cut stories of barbarous Indians and heroic frontiersmen spoke to a 

national need to believe that the chaos and genocidal violence of the past 400 years had all 

had a higher purpose and grand-historical meaning than just one people pushing another 

people off their land, or that Anglo-American scalping culture signified some sort of creole 

seasoning process rather than a forfeiture of their imagined moral high ground over the 

Indians.  Whether he took the form of ranger, forester, scout, or cowboy, the idealized 

frontiersman was a figure in whose historical existence many Anglo-Americans, and a 

viewing public in Europe and around the world, wanted to place their faith. Cody, for better 

                                                 
391 Hedren, “The First Scalp for Custer,” 16 (“a legacy he created but then could never shake”), 21-29. 



 

387 

 

or for worse, had claimed to be the living incarnation of that figure, and was now irrevocably 

chained to it.  

 While the dime novel and its successor the paperback would continue to flourish as 

vehicles for frontier adventure in the 20th century, the Wild West roadshow-circus format 

was waning by the first decade of the 20th century. In 1894 Cody had glimpsed the future 

when he and some of his Indian troupe were filmed at Thomas Edison’s studio for the 

kinetoscope parlours which had first appeared at the 1893 World’s Fair and were now 

springing up across America, followed by full motion pictures. Silent Westerns on film, most 

famously 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, did not offer all of the three-dimensional sensory 

thrills—gunsmoke, full-colour sweat, hoofbeats, etc.— of attending an actual Wild West 

show, but were much cheaper to distribute than traincars full of actors, props, horses and 

bison. This new market cut into Cody’s profit margin at the same time that rising costs, stiff 

competition from other cowboy-circus outfits, and poor financial decisions ate away at his 

earnings. A joint film-company venture formed with Pawnee Bill Lillie in 1909 appears to 

have been unsuccessful; by 1913, he was so hard-up for cash that he placed the Wild West 

show property itself as his collateral for a $20,000 loan, which was sold at public auction 

when he was unable to pay the interest. He and his creditors then decided to recoup their 

losses and restore Cody to fiscal solvency by forming the Colonel W. F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) 

Historical Pictures Company, to transpose the scenarios from his Wild West show to the big 

screen. Like his Wild West shows, their film would have an edutainment angle that reflected 

favourably on the federal government’s civilizing mission on the Great Plains, and his 



 

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longstanding relationships with the Army meant that the Departments of War and the Interior 

leapt eagerly to assist him.392  

In October 1913, filming of The Indian Wars began on the Pine Ridge Reservation, 

with script to be written by Charles King, now a highly-successful writer of frontier 

romances with much manly action and Indian-killing. Nelson Miles, the interpreter Philip 

Wells, Cody himself, and others were tapped to appear onscreen and provide authenticity, as 

well as the 12th Cavalry to play the Army, and a host of Lakotas, many of whom had been in 

show business since the 1880s; one advertisement promised “1000 Indians, many of whom 

were leaders in the original battles.” The question of “battles,” and whose definitions were to 

prevail, were the subject of intense controversy during the film’s production. As well as 

Little Bighorn and the Battle of Summit Springs, the latter of which Cody had actually taken 

part in and which had been an element of his show in 1907, the film would stage the Army’s 

versions of Warbonnet Creek. Most troubling to the Lakotas, the film would include 

Wounded Knee, which some early reports said had been sanitized in the scripting process to 

remove the women and children from the scene and present the Indians as the aggressors. 

Apparently, General Miles and Cody were to be added anachronistically to the site of this 

“battle,” and Miles had reportedly insisted on filming at the site of the massacre and its mass 

grave.393  

Assessing the accuracy of The Indian Wars is a near impossibility, as only two 

minutes of footage survive in the archives of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, 

                                                 
392 Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer,” ; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, ; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 52-

108; Andrea I. Paul, “Buffalo Bill and Wounded Knee: The Movie,” in Nebraska History 71 (Nebraska State 

Historical Society, 1990), 182-190. 
393 Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer”; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 52-108; 

Paul, “Buffalo Bill and Wounded Knee: The Movie”; Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business.  



 

389 

 

Wyoming. Promotional materials such as posters and still photographs leaned heavily on 

Cody’s pre-established iconography, including the “First Scalp for Custer.” A promotional 

illustrated poster from 1913 promised “The Life of Buffalo Bill in Three Reels” with a 

prominent portrait of an ageless, buckskin-clad Buffalo Bill. About one-third of the poster 

illustrated Warbonnet Creek with Cody’s familiar vaunting pose, clarifying with the caption 

“First Scalp for Custer.” A still photograph from filming at Pine Ridge in 1913 shows a re-

enactment of the foundational scene of Cody’s career, to tragicomic results. With the ridges 

of the South Dakota prairie stretching out in the background like those of the Anheuser-

Busch corporation’s Custer’s Last Fight, an unnamed Lakota performer lies in the grass at 

Cody’s feet playing dead, with the toes of his moccasins sticking up in the air. As in the 

poster, the familiar vaunting pose, copied from True Williams’ woodcut, which in turn was 

copied from Eastman’s The Death Whoop, is re-enacted by Cody himself. Yellow Hair’s 

scalp and war bonnet are raised in his left hand, yet the effect is somewhat undone by the 

burgeoning paunch held back by Cody’s impressive belt buckle.394 

Chauncey Yellow Robe, a Lakota graduate of Carlisle, became the lodestone for 

criticism of The Indian Wars when he lit into it at the third annual meeting of the Society of 

American Indians in October 1913. Yellow Robe’s speech, reprinted in South Dakota’s 

Rapid City Times and sparking further critiques, accused Cody and Miles of seeking “their 

own profit and cheap glory” at the expense of the victims of Wounded Knee, and trying to 

make themselves into “heroes for a moving picture machine.” His concerns regarding 

representation also extended to the Wild West format more broadly; in 1914 he wrote that 

                                                 
394 Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer”; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 52-108; 

Paul, “Buffalo Bill and Wounded Knee: The Movie”; Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business. 



 

390 

 

such shows taught young children “that the Indian is only a savage being.” Prefiguring the 

concerns of late 20th century parents regarding violent media and impressionable children, in 

1914 he blamed such shows for the occasional news reports of a child “who is hurt playing 

savage.” Pointing to an 1894 story of a boy named Charles Benney “burned at the stake” by 

playfellows after seeing the Wild West show, he warned that such were the “direct 

consequences” of Wild West shows and movies “that depict lawlessness and hatred” on the 

part of the Indians. That America had been created by 200 years of scalp-hunting adults 

“playing Indian” was perhaps left unsaid.395 

                                                 
395 Hedren, “First Scalp for Custer”; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 52-108; 

Paul, “Buffalo Bill and Wounded Knee: The Movie”; Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business.  



 

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Epilogue 

“Some violence is the product of psychopathology: paranoia, sadism, wildly 

displaced rage, and the like. Violence of this sort accounts for a very small portion 

of the total and holds relatively little theoretical interest. The designation of 

violence as irrational, however, is attractive to certain theorists and policy-makers 

since it removes such acts from the realm of the comprehensible and relieves them 

of the responsibility to have prevented or understood them.”  

–Bruce Lincoln (2003)396 

From the spring of 1972 until February 1974 the Criminal Investigation Command of 

the U.S. Army collected evidence for an investigation, shelved in the wake of the Watergate 

hearings, into the conduct in 1967 of a reconnaissance platoon of the 101st Airborne in 

Vietnam. Created for counterinsurgency purposes in 1965, the platoon codenamed “Tiger 

Force” was intended to combine reconnaissance and commando functions—“not just to 

search, but to destroy,” in Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss’s summary, and were encouraged 

to behave in a way assumed to terrify the enemy. According to 27 separate witness 

statements, in 1967 the “Tiger Force” inflated the “kill counts” of their official reports by 

tallying as Viet Cong several hundred uninvolved villagers in the Central Highlands region, 

and “were observed in possession of human-ear, scalp, and gold-teeth collections” which 

were actively condoned and overlooked by their superiors. Such behaviour was not exclusive 

to the Tiger Force, and military authorites reportedly confiscated Vietnamese scalps, dried 

ears, and skulls decorated with graffiti from other soldiers returning stateside. That Baby 

Boomers nurtured on a steady media diet of Westerns in which one-dimensional Indians 

were gunned down in droves by heroic cowboys drew a connection between the racialized 

enemies of past and present, both conceived as existential threats within a Manichaean 

struggle between savagery and civilization—the Plains wars of the 19th century, the Cold 

                                                 
396 From “14 Theses on Religion and Violence,” in Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after 

September 11, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006 [2003]), 93. 



 

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War of the 20th—is unsurprising even in the absence of such nightmarish Indian play by the 

Tiger Force.397 

Increasingly critical assessments of violence in Westerns on television and at the 

movies had begun appearing in the 1950s, though such portraits of morally-conflicted 

violence by characters such as the mercenary, the “gunfighter” who develops killing into an 

art, and reluctant heroes tormented by guilt, were reserved for Anglo protagonists. Frontier 

society’s imagined enemies, all of whom stood outside of a presumedly-benign American 

moral order or as corruptions within it, remained uncomplicated and straightforwardly evil: 

corrupt railroad tycoons, rustlers, Mexican bandits, rampaging Apaches, and so on. And the 

traditional tropes remained: “good” Indians subordinated themselves to manifest Destiny and 

assimilated; “bad” Indians were invariably implacable, phlegmatic, or cruel; and interracial 

sex inevitably led to tragedy. The stabs of revisionism present in John Ford’s The Searchers 

(1956), where John Wayne appeared as an openly-racist Confederate holdout planning an 

honour killing of his niece for the crime of interracial sex, were undone by a traditional 

portrayal of the ‘bad’ Indians, the Comanches, as a barbarian horde, leaving no doubt where 

the audience’s sympathies should lie when Wayne scalps his Comanche antagonist, ‘Scar,’ at 

the climax. Outside the Hollywood studio system, Europe’s picaresque ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ 

went further with full-colour fake blood, nudity, and scenes of cruelty and torture. In the first 

two minutes of Sergio Corbucci’s Navajo Joe (1966) Mervyn Duncan (Aldo Sambrell), the 

                                                 
397 On Anglo-Americans taking trophies from East Asians in the 20th century, specifically American troops 

committing scalping and other mutilations in the Philippines and British sailors decapitating pirates in the South 

China Sea, see Stuart Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: the American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899 – 1903 

(Yale University Press, 1982), 58-95, 188 and Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye eds., The Taking and 

Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians (2007), 16-20. On the “Tiger Force,” see Michael 

Sallah and Mitch Weiss, Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War (New York and Boston: Little, Brown and 

Company, 2006), 1-34, 169-322. On the linkages between “savage war” in frontier America and 20th-century 

Vietnam see also Richard Drinnon, Facing West, 355-56, 374-79, 435, 456-57.  



 

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leader of an army of scalp hunters, has shot and scalped a woman in cold blood, replicating 

the Death Whoop pose for the camera, as prelude to his gang massacring a village. 

Contracted to hunt Indians for “a dollar a scalp,” the Duncan brothers and their followers are 

outraged to learn that a bounty has been placed on them for “attacking peaceful tribes,” and 

go on the rampage. Against them stands the lone hero, Navajo Joe (Burt Reynolds), husband 

of the woman killed in the opening scene, who offers the townsfolk of Esperanza a deal: he’ll 

wipe out the bounty hunters for “a dollar a head” plus the rewards for the Duncan brothers. 

On top of this laboured irony is a hoary stereotype: Mervyn is a self-hating “half-breed.” 

Towards the end of the 1960s, the impacts of the Civil Rights movements, the 

counterculture, and the dizzying realization that Americans were losing the sort of war they 

imagined themselves as best at, a battle in the wilderness against a racially-alien and savage 

foe, became increasingly reflected in revisionist Westerns where the true enemy was not 

savagery, but white supremacism. In 1968’s The Scalphunters, the illiterate fur trapper Joe 

Bass (Burt Lancaster), robbed of his fur bales by Kiowa warriors who press the erudite, well-

educated escaped slave Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis) on him as compensation, find themselves 

caught up in the clashes between the Kiowas and a gang of mercenaries, perhaps ironically 

led by the resplendently-bald, malevolent Jim Howie (Telly Savalas). The film runs against 

traditional racial roles in the Western: the Kiowas are rogues, but have a sense of fair play; 

Lee, perhaps prefiguring quick-witted Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little) in Mel Brooks’ Western 

spoof Blazing Saddles (1974), is invariably the smartest man in the room as he evades the 

white characters’ plans to resell him into slavery and dismantles Bass’s pro-slavery 

arguments, while Bass is clearly threatened by a black man who is, in matters of taste and 

education, his superior. The most sinister character is Howie, who brandishes an enormous 



 

394 

 

knife and giggles malevolently while threatening to skin Bass alive. Two-thirds of the way 

through Little Big Man (1970), after our sympathies have been securely placed with the 

Indians, several of whom are played by Asian or Eurasian actors to complete the 

identification of the Indian Wars with Vietnam, a scalp appears as a teaching tool for perhaps 

the first (and last) time in film history. The Cheyenne chief Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan 

George (Tsleil-Waututh)) holds up a hank of red hair to explain to his adopted son Jack 

Crabbe / Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) that while Anglo-Americans see the world and the 

people in it as “dead” objects to exploit for profit, to Indians, “ever’thing is alive. Not only 

man and animals, but also water, earth, stone, and also the things from them—like that hair.” 

In succinct and folksy language, an acknowledgement of an ontological difference between 

indigenous American and European societies is made by the use of a white settler or soldier’s 

scalp, the Western’s traditional sign of moral outrage and frontier chaos. Of course, both of 

these films’ real subjects are arguably the civil rights and antiwar movements, not the Indian 

Wars per se.398 

 These films’ then-groundbreaking upheavals of race in the Western went against the 

general grain of the revisionist Westerns of the late 1960s and 1970s; beneath a veneer of 

putative “historical accuracy,” most repackaged old fantasies about Indian disappearance and 

alternate fetishization and fear of interracial sex while treating violence in an exploitative and 

myopic fashion. In films like Duel at Diablo (1966), Cry Blood, Apache (1970), Chato’s 

Land (1972) and Ulzana’s Raid (1972), Apaches wreaked the stereotypical Indian warrior’s 

merciless revenge, usually against white hillbillies and frontier trash the audience were 

                                                 
398 Richard Gilmore, Searching for Wisdom in Movies: From the Book of Job to Sublime Conversations 

(Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 93-114. 



 

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expected to detest, through guerrilla warfare and booby traps considered stereotypically 

Apache: trussing up white victims with rawhide or ropes to dangle head-downwards, 

throwing rattlesnakes at them, scalping them, etc. In Cry Blood, Apache and Chato’s Land 

(the latter starring Charles Bronson, whose Lithuanian-Tatar ancestry and Eurasian features 

guaranteed him the major “Indian” roles habitually reserved for non-Indians), the rape, 

abuse, and murder of the indigenous hero’s family members, inverting the traditional 

violation of white owmen in the anti-Indian sublime, spurs his revenge. This queasy 

fascination with sexual violence directed against fictitious indigenous women also appeared 

in another revisionist Western, Soldier Blue (1970), which staged lurid scenes ostensibly 

based on Sand Creek and the Washita. Given the statistically high rates of sexual violence 

inflicted against indigenous people in the 20th century, such lurid scenarios, ostensibly to 

raise a non-indigenous audience’s disgust and outrage, could also function as titillation.399  

Meanwhile, the producers of the Richard Harris star vehicle A Man Called Horse 

(1970), whose central premise was that an English aristocrat captured by Sioux could rise 

from enslaved captive to village chief in under a year, touted the historical and cultural 

accuracy of a film whose major indigenous spoken roles were redface performances by 

Corinna Tsopei (Greek-American), Jean Gascon (French-Canadian), Manu Tupou (Fijian-

American), Dame Judith Anderson (Anglo-Australian), and Iron Eyes Cody, a Sicilian-

American actor (born Espera Oscar di Corti) whose real-life redface performance was, like 

Antonio Apache’s, so convincing that he became one of Hollywood’s go-to Indians. Clyde 

                                                 
399 Entry “Apache” (58) in Buscombe ed., BFI Companion to the Western (“though films such as Duel at 

Diablo or Chato’s Land represent the Apache as more sinned against than sinning, still they go out of their way 

to depict Apache tortures”); David H. Budd, Culture Meets Culture in the Movies: An Analysis East, West, 

North and South, with Filmographies (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 

2002), 176; Wishart, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians, entry “Soldier Blue” (190-91). 



 

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Dollar, Horse’s technical director and the resident historian on the Rosebud Reservation who 

obtained Lakota extras to perform in non-speaking background roles, called it “one of the 

most researched films about the early Plains Indians” and “hopefully therefore, one of the 

most authentic dramas about such people.” Yet beneath superficial elements like stretches of 

dialogue in unsubtitled Lakota, the film reprised traditional stereotypes of Indian societies as 

defined by cruelty and indifference to suffering, evidenced onscreen by the limping of 

Harris’ fellow slave (Jean Gascon), hamstrung as punishment for an escape attempt, and a 

scene, which reportedly infuriated AIM member Russell Means, where fellow villagers 

abandon an old Lakota woman (Dame Judith Anderson) to die in a snowstorm. The scenes of 

Harris in a Sun Dance, called the “Sun Vow” and heavily promoted as mark of Horse’s 

historical-cultural accuracy, sets it in a subterranean earth lodge per the Mandan version of 

the rite and stages it not in indigenous terms of an act of self-sacrifice on behalf of the 

community, but in New Age terms of the white hero’s journey of self-discovery. Compare, 

for instance, Sitting Bull’s historic vision at the Sun Dance before Little Bighorn of a great 

battle and “soldiers upside down,” against Harris’ character’s cynical, self-gratifying visions 

of himself as ruler of the Indians with soft-focus, slow-motion shots of Corinna Tsopei 

topless. How deeply ingrained and unquestioned such Manifest-Destiny narratives of Indian 

barbarism and white supersession were is indicated by the producers’ baffled, scrambling 

reaction when Native Americans responded to the film. Singer and activist Buffy Sainte-

Marie (Plains Cree) called it “the whitest” movie she had ever seen; AIM picketed a 

Minneapolis theatre screening Horse, handing out a leaflet accusing the movie of attempting 

to “Totally humiliate and degrade an entire Indian nation.” Others concurred: in a printed 

dispute in an archaeological journal, the anthropologist Melburn D. Thurman dismissed 



 

397 

 

Dollar's claims of authenticity, stating that if A Man Called Horse “is considered in terms of 

cultural context, the claim of “authenticity” is absurd.” Yet those invested in the success of 

Horse could only reply with other Manifest Destiny narratives of vanishing Indians and 

“authenticity.” Producer Sandy Howard declared that “Indians themselves do not really know 

their past” and that AIM members, being Ojibwe, Winnebagos, and ‘urban Indians,’ had no 

grounds to identify with the Sioux, Mandans, and Crows portrayed in Horse (Clyde 

Dollar)… though, apparently, Anglo-American fantasists had every right to.400 

Contemporary indigenous artists redeploy imagery of scalps and scalping to illustrate 

contiguities between the violence of the past and the ongoing violence and dispossession of 

the present, often challenging more broadly the platitudes of Anglo-American benevolence. 

Sherman Alexie’s 1996 novel Indian Killer, in which a serial killer stalks, scalps, and 

mutilates white businessmen in contemporary Seattle, subverts the conventional murder 

mystery by challenging the genre’s foundation in Enlightenment-rationalist positivism: not 

only is the true killer is never captured, their identity is never confirmed, and a chilling 

epilogue confirms that a pan-Indian uprising looms over the horizon. The never-identified 

killer combines two figures of colonial fear: the stealthy, merciless warrior who stalks, 

murders, mutilates, and evades capture to strike again; and the holy man or woman, the 17th 

century’s “sorcerer” and the 20th’s century’s “shaman,” who uses ritual paraphernalia and the 

power of other-than-human beings, in this case owls, to enhance their stealth and lethality. 

                                                 
400 Angela Aleiss, Making the White Man's Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies (Greenwood 

Publishing Group, 2005), 129-133, 130 (“infuriated Indian activist Russell Means”); Andrew Patrick 

Nelson, Still in the Saddle: the Hollywood Western, 1969-1980 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 81-111; 

Ralph E. Friar and Natasha A. Friar, The Only Good Indian: the Hollywood Gospel (New York: Drama Book 

Specialists, 1972), 94-120; the Thurman-Howard debate cited in Stanley South, An Archaeological 

Evolution (Springer Science, 2005), 207-208; on Sitting Bull’s vision, see Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 

131-44; Wishart, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians, entries “Architecture, Traditional” (27-28), “Earth 

Lodges” (62-64), “Okipa” (137-38), “Sun Dance” (198). 



 

398 

 

The novel’s indigenous characters all suffer from personal variations of a post-Indian 

malaise, grappling with American settler society’s appropriations of indigenous identity, 

bogus and self-serving definitions of “authenticity,” and the gaslighting of indigenous people 

to believe that they are not “real” Indians. This crisis of identity is the defining trait of the 

protagonist, ironically named John Smith: adopted as the only child of a wealthy white 

couple in the Seattle suburbs in Alexie’s deliberate allusion to mid-20th-century policies of 

adopting-out indigenous children, known in Canada as the “Sixties Scoop,” Smith has no 

knowledge of his biological parents and his tribal identity, and has tried to cobble together 

“authentic” Indianness from mainstream American culture. He passes up college scholarships 

to work high-rise construction in imitation of the famous “Mohawk ironworkers” photos, and 

tells whites informed by Dances with Wolves that he’s Lakota, which invariably impresses 

them. Tall, handsome, athletic and long-haired, Smith on the surface is America’s ideal 

assimilated Indian, but by his early 20s his inner turmoil and self-loathing has manifested as 

mental illness, spawning a quest to kill a scapegoat figure to punish Anglo-America for 

stealing his identity.401  

The novel’s cast of Anglo-American antagonists includes “Truck” Schultz, a racist 

radio demagogue who encourages vigilante activity against Seattle’s Native American 

homeless population; in flashbacks, the abusive white father of mixed-race Native American 

activist Reggie Polatkin, who punctuated his lectures on Indian inferiority and white 

                                                 
401 Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996). On Indian Killer, see Daniel 

Grassian, Understanding Sherman Alexie (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 104-126; 

Michele Fazio, “Homeless in Seattle: Class Violence in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer,” in Michelle M. 

Tokarczyk ed., Critical Approaches to American Working-Class Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 

2011), 141-158; James R. Giles, The Spaces of Violence (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2006), 

128-144; Patrice Hollrah, “Sherman Alexie’s Challenge to the Academy’s Teaching of Native American 

Literature, Non-Native Writers, and Critics,” in Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush eds., Sherman Alexie: A 

Collection of Critical Essays (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2010), 159-170. 



 

399 

 

supremacy by beating his son; and Clarence Mather, a ponytailed anthropology professor 

who habitually disdains his indigenous students, who drove Reggie out of graduate school 

and regularly spars with Reggie’s cousin Mary. But the novel’s most influential promulgator 

of the false “Indian knowledge” used to dispossess Native Americans is a retired white 

policeman, Jack Wilson (the baptismal name of Wovoka, the founder of the Ghost Dance) 

who writes dreadful, bestselling murder-mysteries starring a private detective-slash-medicine 

man named Aristotle Little Hawk, the last of Alexie’s fictional Shilshomish Indians, who 

uses Enlightenment positivism and broadly stereotyped shamanism to solve mysteries. 

Wilson also appropriates Indian identity through a spurious “blood quantum” claim of distant 

descent from a Shilshomish man who lived in Seattle in the 1880s, and his naïve, phony 

Indianness is taken as the genuine article by the novel’s white characters—tellingly, both Dr. 

Mather and John Smith’s mother are big fans—while considered hilarious by the patrons of 

an “Indian bar” he hangs out in, including a woman known as “Beautiful Mary,” “who was 

still beautiful, even though a keloid scar ran from the corner of her left eye to her chin.” At 

Indian Killer’s climax, Wilson is involuntarily initiated into the world of deprivation 

overwritten by his fantasies when Smith selects him as the bearer of his message to settler 

society to “Let me, let us, have our own pain”—a statement which Helen Hoy describes as “a 

grimly ironic defense of at least a minimal entitlement.” Bearing an ornately-decorated long 

knife which both replicates and fetishizes the stereotyped attribute of the Indian warrior, 

Smith slashes Wilson’s face from eyebrow to neck, scarring him in a way serendipitously 

mirroring Beautiful Mary. Smith intends this as a mark of Cain to reveal Wilson as a cultural 



 

400 

 

thief: “No matter where you go… people will know you by that mark. They’ll know what 

you did.” His work completed, Smith throws himself off the skyscraper he helped build.402 

But Smith’s suicide brings no resolution, despite the assumption of the novel’s white 

characters, Wilson included, that Smith was the Indian Killer. In a bleak conclusion, Mary 

Polatkin dismisses the idea of reconciliation as too little, too late, and predicts that copycats 

will take up the Indian Killer’s mantle, a prediction proven right in a chilling epilogue. The 

still-unidentified Indian Killer, bearing a “beautiful knife” and “carr[ying] a pack filled with 

a change of clothes, a few books, dozens of owl feathers, a scrapbook, and two bloody scalps 

in a plastic bag,” recruits followers in graveyards on unnamed reservations into what is 

implied will be the Ghost Dance fully realized: “Other Indians arrive and quickly learn the 

song. A dozen Indians, then hundreds, and more…” Alexie’s own feelings on Indian Killer 

have grown decidedly mixed over the years. Having facetiously called it “a feel-good thriller 

about interracial murder,” he began stepping away from it after the 9/11 attacks, which he 

said in a 2008 Guardian interview showed him the “end game of tribalism - when you 

become so identified with only one thing, one tribe, that other people are just metaphors to 

you.” Having written Indian Killer at age 30, he reassessed it as “a very fundamentalist, 

binary book, the product of youthful rage.”403 

In a more playful vein, a single released in 2014 by the Canadian indigenous-

electronica collective A Tribe Called Red also deployed the imageries of scalping to mock 

the straight-faced pieties of Anglo-American triumphalism. “Burn Your Village To The 

                                                 
402 “grimly ironic”: Helen Hoy, How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada (Toronto, 

Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 8. 
403 “a feel-good thriller about interracial murder” in Timothy Egan, “An Indian Without Reservations,” 18 

January 1998, The New York Times; Maya Jaggi, “All Rage and Heart,” 3 May 2008, The Guardian. 



 

401 

 

Ground” is an auditory collage mixing electronica beats and war cries with a monologue, 

from 1993’s Addams Family Values, mocking Anglo-American bourgeois aspirationalism. 

During a dreary, self-righteous Thanksgiving pageant at a summer camp, disaffected Goth 

tween Wednesday Addams (Christina Ricci), playing Pocahontas as merciless avenger, leads 

a “revolt of the repressed”. Dressed as Indians, the camp’s outcast collective of nerds, the 

physically-disabled, and ethnocultural minorities run riot against the wealthy, conventionally 

attractive WASP children whose parents own the campground. Wednesday sparks the riot 

with her self-revised monologue, which concludes with her advancing on her long-haired, 

bourgeois female antagonist with a raised knife: 

You have taken the land which is rightfully ours.  

Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations; your 

people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadsides; 

you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d’oeuvres. My people will have pain, and degradation; 

your people will have stick-shifts. 

The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, Do not trust the Pilgrims […] And for all 

these reasons, I have decided to scalp you, and burn your village to the ground. 

Released during the quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’ “discovery” in the Caribbean, 

such content in Addams Family Values could not have been coincidental. Similarly, A Tribe 

Called Red cheekily timed the release of “Burn Your Village to the Ground” for 2014’s 

Thanksgiving weekend, which they dubbed ““celebrating” in our own way” in a press 

release.404 

                                                 
404 Further: “In a way, each day is a day of thanksgiving to the Creator for the original people of Turtle Island. 

This doesn't mean that we don't enjoy turkey, pie and family as much as the next person, but at the same time 

the Thanksgiving myth largely shared in mainstream culture perpetuates a one sided view of a complicated 

history surrounding this holiday.” From https://soundcloud.com/a-tribe-called-red/burn-your-village-to-the-

ground , 25 November 2014. 

https://soundcloud.com/a-tribe-called-red/burn-your-village-to-the-ground
https://soundcloud.com/a-tribe-called-red/burn-your-village-to-the-ground


 

402 

 

Grim realities 

The later 20th century has seen a concerted effort by members of indigenous 

communities to repatriate and rebury relatives and ancestors’ scalps, bones, and physical 

remains. One case in point is the fate of Little Crow, a leader in the Dakota War, shot by a 

Minnesota farmer in July 1863 for the state’s outstanding $75 bounty on Indian scalps. After 

gross mistreatment of his body by the citizens of Hutchinson, Minnesota on the 4th of July, 

Little Crow’s killer was given a $500 bounty by state authorities; by 1896, his scalp, skull, 

and forearm bones ended up behind glass in St. Paul as a centerpiece display of the 

Minnesota Historical Society. By the early 20th century, Minnesotans were increasingly 

uneasy about such displays and the complicated questions they raised vis-à-vis their 

supposed moral superiority over Indians, and when Little Crow’s grandson Jesse Wakeman 

complained in 1918, they were quietly removed from public eyes and shuttered in a storage 

closet. There they remained until 1971, when Wakeman, then 88 years of age, appealed to 

the Minnesota Historical Society for their return. Alan Woolworth, an archaeologist and 

Society member, drove Little Crow’s remains to South Dakota where his descendants had 

been exiled post-war; here, a reburial ceremony was held in a family plot, and Woolworth 

hired a cement truck to fill in the grave to pre-empt the grave robbing and vandalism that had 

befallen Sitting Bull’s grave. “It was not so much that the whites killed Grandfather,” Wakeman 

told a reporter, “[but] what they did to his body and remains that rankles me and our people.” 

Following the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 

1990, the process began of reclaiming remains of Cheyennes and Arapahos killed at Sand 

Creek and reburying them at a cemetery at the massacre site itself. After a few years of 

arbitration with the Smithsonian to repatriate scalps and skeletal remains, a further obstacle 



 

403 

 

had to be surpassed: the massacre site was by then privately owned by a Colorado ranching 

family who, while made sympathetic to Native American perspectives through interactions 

with Southern Cheyenne chief Laird Comatsevah, were still the ultimate arbiters of access. 

Larry McMurtry writes that at an unspecified date in the 1990s, a private, ad hoc reburial 

ceremony was held on the property by an Ojibway woman named Connie Buffalo, who had 

been given two scalps by an owner of a small motel near the massacre site who remorsefully 

told her they had been taken at Sand Creek in 1864. As traffic to the massacre site increased, 

however, the Dawson family began a lengthy legal dispute with the federal government and 

the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes over the sale of the land, only resolved in 2007.405 

But what happens when scalping is passed over in public memory as a part of a 

nation’s history, as in much of present-day Canada? Just as I was completing this draft, I 

learned that an indigenous artist in Calgary, Lee Deranger, has just completed an artwork 

reminding Canadians of the scalp bounties instated against Mi’kmaq people in Nova Scotia 

by Lord Cornwallis. Already a cause of national embarrassment in 2011 when Cornwallis 

Junior High was officially renamed, the bounties have never technically been repealed. Her 

artwork depicts a barn door on which has been nailed a flag of Nova Scotia besmirched by a 

trickle of fresh red blood (red paint, thankfully). Below the flag are three artificial scalps 

nailed to the door to dry, which the artist says represent the Crown, the federal government of 

Canada, and the provincial government of Nova Scotia. In mind of the impending 

                                                 
405 Gary Clayton Anderson, Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux (St. Paul, Minnesota: Minnesota Historical 

Society Press, 1986), 7-8, 176-181; Curt Brown, “Little Crow’s Legacy,” in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, 24 

April 2015, http://www.startribune.com/little-crow-s-legacy/166467906/ ; Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre; 

Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture 

(University of Chicago Press, 2017), 67-124; McMurtry, O What a Slaughter, 92. 

http://www.startribune.com/little-crow-s-legacy/166467906/


 

404 

 

celebrations for the 150 year anniversary of Confederation, the artwork is completed below 

the scalps with “Reconcile This” painted in vivid red.406 

The Future 

“White people no longer feared Indians,” Alexie’s John Smith thinks to himself on 

the streets of late-20th-century Seattle. “Somehow, near the end of the twentieth century, 

Indians had become invisible, docile.” From the beginning of the 20th century, Indians’ 

previous role as the bogeyman within America has been applied to other groups given 

Indian-like traits. The crime fiction genres of film noir, the hard-boiled detective story, and 

vigilante films like the Death Wish series or Stallone’s Cobra, continue in an urban setting 

the Western’s central narrative of weak or corrupt institutions and unscrupulous enemies, 

often depicted as racial or cultural aliens, who must be fought outside the law. The 

commando protagonists of films such as Chuck Norris’ Missing In Action trilogy, Stallone’s 

Rambo series, and Schwarzenegger’s Commando and Predator, are visually identified as 

white savages by their costumes—minimal clothing and war paint, ostensibly for 

camouflage—and their methods of waging one-man wars against bandits, communists, and 

other dishonourable antagonists who capture and torment their victims. The racial-alien 

theme is made literal in Predator, where a savage warrior from space uses lasers and a high-

tech spear to kill, then mutilate his victims for trophies.407 

                                                 
406 On “Reconcile This,” see Tamara Pimentel, “One flag, 3 bloody scalps, and an artist who wants to change 

the law,” APTN National News, 30 January 2017, http://aptnnews.ca/2017/01/30/one-flag-3-bloody-scalps-and-

an-artist-who-wants-to-change-the-law/ , accessed 11 February 2017, 1:20 pm EST. My thanks to Kaitlin 

Khubyar for bringing this story to my attention.  

407 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero; Hoppenstand, 

“Justified Bloodshed.” 

http://aptnnews.ca/2017/01/30/one-flag-3-bloody-scalps-and-an-artist-who-wants-to-change-the-law/
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405 

 

The military tactics of America’s overseas wars from the Spanish-American War to 

the War on Terror have emphasized victory through overwhelming firepower, and popular 

histories of those wars stress the racially alien and therefore dishonourable nature of the foe, 

the need for the enemy’s total defeat and unconditional surrender, and may cast the conflict 

as part of a Manichaean global struggle between good and evil. While these arguments, 

arguably, exist in any country, what sets the United States apart is a popular belief, per 

Lawrence and Jewett’s “American monomyth,” that institutions are inherently untrustworthy, 

weak, and corruptible, and that therefore actions performed outside the law, such as Oliver 

North’s Iran-Contra scheme and the Bush administration’s unilateral decision to defy the 

United Nations and go to war with Iraq in 2003, are excusable if not explicitly preferred. 

Also not unique to the United States, though consistent with the American monomyth’s 

savage-war mythology, is a conviction that people designated as savages, however defined, 

best respond to exemplary shows of force.  

What arguably sets the United States apart from other countries in the British settler-

colonial world is a tendency to justify exttralegal action and savage war through a 

paradoxical celebration of America’s unique power and moral superiority, set against an 

overwhelming conspiracy of forces arrayed against it—what Richard Hofstadter identified as 

“the paranoid style in American politics.” In the tradition of the anti-French Jesuit and 

Indian-trader conspiracies of the Seven Years’ War and the British Indian-trader and 

Freemason conspiracies of the Jeffersonian period, the current President of the United States, 

an international businessman with hotels in several Muslim-majority countries worldwide, 

has spoken at length, as a candidate and as president, of a vast conspiracy by Hillary Clinton, 

George Soros, and other “globalists” to destroy the Western world from within through 



 

406 

 

Muslim immigration and free-trade agreements. He punctuated these by suggestions that 

what the War on Terror needs is increased collateral damage and deliberate, exemplary 

massacres: citing an apocryphal story of an American general in the Philippines who 

supposedly put down a Muslim resistance by executing his prisoners with bullets dipped in 

pigs’ blood, he also declared he would order the Air Force to target and kill the families of 

ISIS fighters. Perhaps most exemplary of the survival of Indian-war fantasies of violent self-

pity was candidate Trump’s claim in a 2015 campaign speech that thousands of Muslim-

Americans danced and cheered in New Jersey while watching the 9/11 attacks. As political 

analyst Matt Taibbi observed, while police were, in fact, dispatched to Muslim-majority 

neighbourhoods in New Jersey following 9/11, their assignment was to protect Muslim-

Americans from reprisals by their neighbours, which “is one of the reasons we know 

Muslims weren't dancing en masse in the streets. […] To believe there was a mass 

demonstration of open, gloating defiance right across the river from Manhattan while the 

Towers smoldered, speaks to a powerfully crazy fantasy both about American impotence and 

about a brazen, homogenous evil in Muslim-American communities.” If one were to change 

“Muslim” or “Muslim-American” to “Native American,” the timelessness of such a fantasy 

is revealed.408 

According to journalist Matthew Cole, “dark mimesis” in a peculiarly retrograde form 

appeared among SEAL Team 6, the elite of America’s Navy SEALs, during the wars in 

Afghanistan and Iraq. Tasked with taking fingers, skin, or sections of scalp from slain 

combatants for DNA identification purposes, team members reportedly flayed large pieces of 

                                                 
408 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture; Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the 

American Superhero; Matt Taibbi, “America is Too Dumb for TV News,” 25 November 2015, 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-20151125 . 

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-20151125


 

407 

 

skin from enemy combatants’ bodies in imitation of a 1971 Vietnam War novel Devil’s 

Guard, billed as the true account of an S.S. officer who joined the French Foreign Legion 

postwar to mutilate and terrorize the subhuman Vietnamese. As deaths of Afghan and Iraqi 

men, regardless of whether or not they bore arms, increased among all divisions, Red 

Squadron, sporting badges of a stereotypical Indian warrior with crossed stone-headed 

tomahawks, issued steel tomahawk sidearms to chop up dead and dying enemy 

combatants.409 

The danger, of course, of any study on the exotic or the bizarre is that one looks for it 

in others rather than oneself, and looks for it abroad rather than at home. As sociologist 

Thomas Dunk observed in his 1991 ethnography It’s a Working Man’s Town: Male Working-

Class Culture in Northwestern Ontario, white Canadians—in this case, in my hometown of 

Thunder Bay, Ontario—carry on the tradition of defining themselves through definition of 

indigenous peoples as their negative mirror image. The consequences of this have been 

spilling into the national media for the past year: among others, the Thunder Bay police 

department is currently being investigated over whether “systemic racism” has precluded 

investigation a series of mysterious deaths of indigenous teenagers in the city in the past 

decade. We are dealing here with a 500-year-old problem in Canadian and, ultimately, 

Western thought: a tendency to consider indigenous peoples as something other than fellow 

human beings living in the same historic time that other people are. And once an indifference 

                                                 
409 Matthew Cole, “The Crimes of SEAL Team Six,” 10 January 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-

crimes-of-seal-team-6/ , accessed 4 March 2017, 11:13 pm EST. 

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/
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408 

 

to indigenous lives can be cemented in the mind as quotidian “common sense,” the 

consequences are dire—for indigenous people, and for everyone.410  

I tend to agree with the summary of Laura McCloud (Tulalip), describing fish and 

game wardens trying to provoke Native American activists into arrestable offenses after a 

judge ruled in their favour over the “fish-in” of 1965: “the history books are wrong when 

they talk about “the last Indian wars.” They have never stopped!” At root is a need to define 

oneself by negative definition of others: the master-key which unlocks the dark side of 

human existence. In this light, the assessment of Herman Melville’s Arkansan con man, 

Charlie Noble, must also be considered:  

“…that Indian-hating was no monopoly of Colonel Moredock's; but a passion, in one form or 

other, and to a degree, greater or less, largely shared among the class to which he belonged. 

And Indian-hating still exists; and, no doubt, will continue to exist, so long as Indians do.”411 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                 
410 David Halle, review of "It's a Working Man's Town: Male Working-Class Culture in Northwestern 

Ontario.Thomas W. Dunk ," in American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 2 (Sep., 1992), 432-433. The second 

edition of It’s a Working Man’s Town (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003) unfortunately changes the 

subtitle to the vaguer “Male working-class culture.” 
411 Laura McCloud cited in Peter Nabokov ed., Native American Testimony, 362-66; Melville in Parker and 

Niemeyer eds., Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man, 147-48. 



 

409 

 

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