"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 when bullets round him flew."
When the mission village of Norridgewock was attacked by the New
England men about the same time, women and children were made to
suffer the fate of the warriors. The scholarly missionary, Rasles,
author of the Abnaki Dictionary, was shot down at the foot of the
cross, where he was afterward found with his body riddled with balls,
his skull crushed and scalped, his mouth and eyes filled with earth,
his limbs broken, and all his members mutilated--and this by white
men. The border men of the Revolutionary period and later invariably
scalped slain Indians as often as opportunity permitted, and, as has
already been shown, both British and American officials encouraged the
practice by offers of bounties and rewards, even, in the case of the
former, when the scalps were those of white people. Our difficulties
with the Apache date from a treacherous massacre of them in 1836
by a party of American scalp hunters in the pay of the governor of
Sonora. The bounty offered was one ounce of gold per scalp. In 1864
the Colorado militia under Colonel Chivington attacked a party of
Cheyennes camped under the protection of the United States flag,
and killed, mutilated, and scalped 170 men, women, and children,
bringing the scalps into Denver, where they were paraded in a public
hall. One Lieutenant Richmond killed and scalped three women and
five children. Scalps were taken by American troops in the Modoc
war of 1873, and there is now living in the Comanche tribe a woman
who was scalped, though not mortally wounded, by white soldiers in
one of the later Indian encounters in Texas. Authorities: Drake,
Indians (for New England wars); Roosevelt, Virginia State Papers,
etc. (Revolution, etc.); Bancroft, Pacific States (Apache); Official
Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes, 1867 (for Chivington
episode); author's personal information.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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