The famous scalp hoax devised by Franklin during the Revolutionary war, for the purpose of bringing the execration of civilized mankind upon the employment of Indians by the English generals, was vividly pictorial. Upon his private printing-press in Paris he and his grandson struck off a leaf of an imaginary newspaper, which he called a "Supplement to the Boston _Independent Chronicle_." For this he wrote a letter purporting to be from "Captain Gerrish, of the New England Militia," accompanying eight packages of "scalps of our unhappy country folks," which he had captured on a raid into the Indian country. The captain sent with the scalps an inventory of them, supposed to be drawn up by one James Crawford, a trader, for the information of the Governor of Canada. Neither Swift nor De Foe ever surpassed the ingenious naturalness of this fictitious inventory. It was indeed _too_ natural, for it was generally accepted as a genuine document, and would even now deceive almost any one who should come upon it unawares. Who could suspect that these "eight packs of scalps, cured, dried, hooped, and painted, with all the Indian triumphal marks" upon them, had never existed except in the imagination of a merry old plenipotentiary in Paris? There were "forty-three scalps of Congress soldiers, stretched on black hoops four inches diameter, the inside of the skin painted red, with a small black spot to denote their being killed with bullets;" and there were "sixty-two farmers, killed in their houses, marked with a hoe, a black circle all around to denote their being surprised in the night." Other farmers' scalps were marked with "a little red foot," to show that they stood upon their defense; and others with "a little yellow flame," to show that they had been burned alive. To one scalp a band was fastened, "supposed to be that of a rebel clergyman." Then there were eighty-eight scalps of women, and "some hundreds of boys and girls." The package last described was "a box of birch-bark containing twenty-nine little infants' scalps of various sizes, small white hoops, white ground, no tears, and only a little black knife in the middle to show they were ripped out of their mothers' bellies." The trader dwells upon the fact that most of the farmers were young or middle-aged, "there being _but_ sixty-seven _very_ gray heads among them; which makes the service more essential." Every detail of this supplement was worked out with infinite ingenuity, even to the editor's postscript, which stated that the scalps had just reached Boston, where thousands of people were flocking to see them.