Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora IndiansJohnson, Elias
History
Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians
Johnson, Elias
Iroquois Indians; Tuscarora Indians
It is said the Indian was cruel to the captives, and inflicted
unspeakable torture upon his enemy taken in battle. But from what we know
of them, it is not to be inferred that Indian Chiefs were ever guilty of
filling dungeons with innocent victims, or slaughtering hundreds and
thousands of their own people, whose only sin was a quiet dissent from
some religious dogma. Towards their enemies they were often relentless,
and they had good reason to look upon the white man as their enemy. They
slew them in battle, plotted against them secretly, and in a few
instances comparatively, subjected individuals to torture, burned them at
the stake, and, perhaps, flayed them alive. But who knows anything of the
precepts and practices of the Roman Catholic Christendom, and quote these
things as proofs of unmitigated barbarity.
At the very time that the Indians were using the tomahawk and scalping-
knife to avenge their wrongs, peaceful citizens in every country of
Europe, where the Pope was the man of authority, were incarcerated for no
crime whatever, and such refinement of torture invented and practiced, as
never entered in the heart of the fiercest Indian warrior that roamed the
wilderness to inflict upon man or beast.
We know very little of the secrets of the inquisition, and this little
chills our blood with horror. Yet these things were done in the name of
Christ, the Savior of the World, the Prince of Peace, and not savage, but
civilized. Christian men looked on, not coldly, but rejoicingly, while
women and children writhed in flames and weltered in blood. Were the
atrocities committed in the vale of Wyoming and Cherry Valley
unprecedented among the Waldensian fastnesses and the mountains of
Aurvergne? Who has read Fox's book of Martyrs, and found anything to
parallel it in all the records of Indian warfare? The slaughter of St.
Bartholomew's days, the destruction of the Jews in Spain, and the Scotch
Covenanters, were in obedience to the mandates of Christian princes,--
aye, and some of them devised by Christian women who professed to be
serving God, and to make the Bible the man of their counsel.
It is said also that the Indians were treacherous, and more, no
compliance with the conditions of any treaty, was ever to be trusted. But
the Puritan fathers cannot be wholly exonerated from the charge of
faithlessness; and who does not blush to talk of Indian traitors when he
remembers the Spanish invasion and the fall of the princely and
magnanimous Montezuma?
Indians believed in witches, and burned them, too. And did not the
sainted Baxter, with the Bible in his hand, pronounce it right, and was
not the Indian permitted to be present, when the quiet unoffending woman
was cast into the fire, by the decree of a Puritan council?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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