(21) Scalping by whites (p. 53): To the student, aware how easily the
civilized man reverts to his original savagery when brought in close
contact with its conditions, it will be no surprise to learn that
every barbarous practice of Indian warfare was quickly adopted by the
white pioneer and soldier and frequently legalized and encouraged by
local authority. Scalping, while the most common, was probably the
least savage and cruel of them all, being usually performed after
the victim was already dead, with the primary purpose of securing
a trophy of the victory. The tortures, mutilations, and nameless
deviltries inflicted upon Indians by their white conquerors in the
early days could hardly be paralleled even in civilized Europe, when
burning at the stake was the punishment for holding original opinions
and sawing into two pieces the penalty for desertion. Actual torture
of Indians by legal sanction was rare within the English colonies,
but mutilation was common and scalping was the rule down to the end
of the war of 1812, and has been practiced more or less in almost
every Indian war down to the latest. Captain Church, who commanded
in King Philip's war in 1676, states that his men received thirty
shillings a head for every Indian killed or taken, and Philip's head,
after it was cut off, "went at the same price." When the chief was
killed one of his hands was cut off and given to his Indian slayer,
"to show to such gentlemen as would bestow gratuities upon him, and
accordingly he got many a penny by it." His other hand was chopped off
and sent to Boston for exhibition, his head was sent to Plymouth and
exposed upon a scaffold there for twenty years, while the rest of his
body was quartered and the pieces left hanging upon four trees. Fifty
years later Massachusetts offered a bounty of one hundred pounds for
every Indian scalp, and scalp hunting thus became a regular and usually
a profitable business. On one occasion a certain Lovewell, having
recruited a company of forty men for this purpose, discovered ten
Indians lying asleep by their fire and killed the whole party. After
scalping them they stretched the scalps upon hoops and marched thus
into Boston, where the scalps were paraded and the bounty of one
thousand pounds paid for them. By a few other scalps sold from time
to time at the regular market rate, Lovewell was gradually acquiring a
competency when in May, 1725, his company met disaster. He discovered
and shot a solitary hunter, who was afterward scalped by the chaplain
of the party, but the Indian managed to kill Lovewell before being
overpowered, on which the whites withdrew, but were pursued by the
tribesmen of the slain hunter, with the result that but sixteen of
them got home alive. A famous old ballad of the time tells how
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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