The Wild Frontier (17 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
The army also had Gatling guns and 12-pound howitzers. The Gatling gun was a 10-barrel crank-revolved weapon theoretically capable of firing 400 shots a minute. Its barrels frequently fouled, however. Although the 12-pounder was bulky, it could lob 2 shells a minute that killed anything they hit and raised a lot of dirt.
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When the character of the Indians is contrasted with that of the settlers, it is not difficult to understand how confrontations and atrocities occurred.
*
Frenchman J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813) fought in two battles in the French and Indian War. He learned about America while a traveling salesman and a surveyor.
CHAPTER 4
Pre-Colonial Atrocities
T
he word
atrocity
when used here indicates an act of intentional extreme cruelty against another person during this war. The killing of an opponent in battle is not an atrocity because this was war, and such killings were acceptable.
Although there were many atrocities during the American-Indian War, they began long before then. The atrocities in the New World were not unique. They were committed by both Europeans and Indians long before Jamestown and Plymouth were settled.
Reminiscent of Governor Wyatt calling the Indians to a peace conference at the colony and then trying to poison them, legend has it that before the birth of Christ, Roman cofounder Romulus invited the Sabine people surrounding Rome to a festival. The Romans then carried off the Sabine women by force and raped them. The Sabines, of course, then went to war with the Romans (as did the Indians with the Virginians).
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Roman law made use of torture. Emperors often ordered condemned persons burned at the stake, a practice followed by Indians but interestingly enough apparently never adopted by the settlers, even though they committed other kinds of atrocities.
2
Charlemagne of the Franks has been called “the civilizer.” He wanted to subjugate as many peoples as possible and force them to become
Christians. He finally conquered the heathen Saxon tribes, but only after executing 4,500 of them at Verden in 782. Twelve years later, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
3
The Spanish Inquisition began in 1231. Roman Catholics accused of heresy were tried in the Court of the Inquisition, which was established by Pope Gregory IX in that year.
4
If the heretics confessed, they were reconciled with the Church after performing penance. If they did not confess, they could be tortured. The most common form of torture was the rack, which wrenched the limbs of the victim. If torture failed to make the victim confess, then he or she was turned over to civil authorities.
5
In the Spanish region of Castile alone, thousands of people were burned to death.
6
The total number of people tortured and killed is not known.
7
Heresy is the unacceptable deviation from Church doctrine. Witchcraft, on the other hand, is the claimed performance of a supernatural act. Saint Joan of Arc was tried for both and burned at the stake in 1431. She was found innocent 25 years later by Pope Calixtus III.
8
The sophisticated Aztec Indians of Mexico used military aggression to maintain their trading empire and to take “captives for human sacrifice, which served as a function of the state for keeping order.”
9
Religion dominated the conduct of the Aztecs. Their war god, Huitzilopochti, demanded great tribute. Thousands of prisoners were slain at the top of his temple pyramids, their hearts subsequently torn out by the priests. Sometimes the hearts were still beating because they had been cut from the chests of living victims.
Legend says that at the coronation of Montezuma II in 1502, more than 5,000 people were sacrificed.
10
Sometimes the devout Aztec offered his or her own blood drawn from cuts in the tongue through which sticks and strings were sawed back and forth. Often the body of a sacrificed victim was eaten at a religious feast.
11
The capital of the Aztec empire was Tenochtitlán. There the heads of the victims were impaled on a towering skull rack in the main square. Captured warriors were given mock weapons, tied to a stone, then killed in mock combat by warriors with real weapons. Priests danced wrapped in the skins of their victims, which were dripping with blood. Captives were lashed up as targets and shot with arrows and darts so their blood would fertilize the earth. Children were sacrificed to Tlaloc, the rain god. Victims were burned alive to celebrate the harvest.
12
The paradox of the Aztecs was that they had “a complex, sophisticated culture with high intellectual pursuits and a refined sense of esthetics;
yet here also was a ferocious culture that fed on the ritualistic death of others.”
13
In addition to the heresy atrocities, witchcraft atrocities were committed in both Europe and America. About 300,000 women were put to death for witchcraft by Christian churches between 1484 and 1782. All were innocent in the sense that they could not perform supernatural acts (although they may have claimed they could, often after torture).
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Tens of thousands were killed in Europe.
15
The Reverend Cotton Mather in Salem, Massachusetts, aroused the citizenry against the witchcraft danger, and in 1692 20 were killed (19 burned at the stake and the other pressed to death) and 150 more sent to prison.
16
The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama was the first to sail around Africa to India in 1497. Arab traders resented his presence and turned the Hindus against him. In 1502 and 1503 he made a second voyage there to avenge Indian violence against Portuguese sailors.
17
He burned an Arab ship containing hundreds of men, women, and children, ignoring the pleas of mothers who held up their babies to beg for mercy. “At one settlement da Gama captured about eight hundred sailors from small craft, hanged them at the yardarms, cut off their hands and heads, loaded them in a vessel, and let it drift ashore.”
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By the time his reign had ended in 1509, King Henry VIII of England had banished, beheaded, or disemboweled those who had offended him, even loyal friends. An errant cook was boiled in oil.
19
When the Spanish came to the New World, their cruelty continued. The first priest ordained in the New World, Bartolomé de las Casas, reported the conduct of the Spanish soldiers in the Caribbean islands. They would rip open the bellies of pregnant women, take out the fetus, and hew it to pieces. They would wager on who could with the greater dexterity cut a man in half. They would wager who could cut off his head with one blow. They would take children by the feet and dash their heads against the rocks. They would throw children into the water and call on them to swim. They would sometimes run a pregnant woman and her baby through at one thrust of the sword. They would erect a gallows for 13 people so low that the feet of the persons being hanged would touch the ground. As the 13 were being hanged, the soldiers would say they did it in honor of Jesus and the 12 Apostles. Then they would burn the 13 alive.
20
The first 2 Spanish ships to drop anchor in the 1520s off the Carolinas found a “gentle, kindly, hospitable” people whom they named the Chicoreans. The Spaniards invited scores of them aboard, offered
them a view of the lower decks, then locked them in and sold them as mine slaves in Santo Domingo. This was repeated by other slavers, so that by the end of the 1600s, the tribe was extinct. The same was true of inhabitants of many of the West Indian islands.
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Pánfilo de Narváez, a Spanish roughneck soldier, pillaged in Mexico, then came to the area around Tampa Bay in 1529. An Indian chief and his family were lured into his camp, where he cut off the chief’s nose, then ordered the chief’s mother torn apart by dogs. His army of 400 was eventually destroyed by Indians, exhaustion, exposure, and disease. Only 4 soldiers survived, according to one author;
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another says 242 survived.
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Perhaps one of the most depressing things about the Spanish in the New World was that under their
encomienda
system, a land grant included not only the land, but also the people on the land.
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The land and the slaves were packaged together.
About 1541, near Albuquerque, Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado burned 100 or more men at the stake and took the bulk of the women and children as slaves.
25
An engraving from a 1594 edition of a book by Theodor De Bry entitled
America
appears in literature relating to Indian atrocities with some frequency.
26
The foreground shows 2 Indians holding a bound Spanish soldier on the ground while a third pours molten gold down his throat. The background shows a human arm and leg being cooked on a fire while 2 Indians are bringing an additional arm and leg for roasting. In the right center, a nude Spaniard lies on the ground; one Indian is severing his right arm and another his left leg.
In 1598, in what is now New Mexico, the Spanish commander, Juan de Oñate, ordered his second in command and his nephew, Vincente de Zaldivar, to wage war without quarter on the Pueblo Indian town of Acoma because the Indians there had killed 13 Spanish soldiers.
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After 2 days of fighting, the town was destroyed, 500 men and 300 women and children were killed in cold blood, and about 500 women and children and 80 men were taken alive. All people over 12 years of age were condemned to 20 years of slavery. Men over 21 had one foot cut off as an additional penalty, girls under 12 were turned over to the friars to be distributed wherever they chose, and the boys were given to Zaldivar.
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Two Hopi were captured. Their right hands were cut off, and then they were set free to let others know about what happened to those who revolted.
29
English captain Thomas Hunt in 1614 called on several ports in New
England pretending to seek trade. Instead he seized about 30 Indians and sold them as slaves in Spain.
30
(Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., in
Chapter 3
of
500 Nations
described many more Spanish atrocities.)
Historians do not dispute these atrocities. Neither do they dispute the hard-to-believe atrocities committed by settlers and Indians after 1614. One commentator has said, “The degree of violence that was woven into the texture of early frontier life fairly boggles the mind of our, in some ways, far more delicate age.”
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Atrocities were a vice shared by settlers and Indians alike, although there sometimes is disagreement as to who started the dispute that led to an atrocity.
Indian and settler atrocities are presented together here, usually in chronological order. Deaths from Indian atrocities are summarized in Appendix B; deaths from settler atrocities in Appendix C. The figures for numbers of deaths are conservative because not all deaths are known and because such deaths are frequently not reported. For example, if it was said the soldiers shot “Indians,” only 2 deaths are counted, and if the report was that the Indians scalped “many settlers,” only 3 deaths are counted, even though the context indicated that there possibly were many more.
A good deal of information about Indian atrocities is available from written reports from persons who were captured by the Indians. Some background about these captives and their narratives is useful in evaluating the atrocities described. J. Norman Heard noted that
the tradition of captive-taking goes back to prehistoric times among North American Indians. Centuries before white men came to these shores, captives were taken from neighboring tribes to replenish losses suffered in warfare or to obtain victims to torture in the spirit of revenge.
32
During the French and Indian War alone, perhaps as many as 2,000 American captives were taken to Canada as prisoners by the Indians. (Canada was controlled at the time by the French, who were the Indians’ allies.) “The Indian captivity was a massive historical reality.”
33
Captivity was so common at times that abductions came to be accepted as part of life on the frontier.
34
While the Puritan captives saw the Indians as fiends from hell, the later Quaker captives saw them as savage men in need of enlightenment.
35
Quaker captive Jonathan Dickinson referred to the “cruelly devouring jawes of the inhumane cannibals.”
36
Mary Rowlandson’s narrative is an example of how these captive narratives
reveal Indian characteristics. Others are found in Frederick Drimmer’s book
Captured by the Indians
, which deals with the captivities of James Smith, Thomas Brown, Alexander Henry, Moses Van Campen, John Knight, John Slover, John Tanner, Charles Johnston, John Rodgers Jewitt, Elias Darnell, John W. B. Thompson, Nelson Lee, Lavina Eastlick, and Fanny Kelly. The Smith, Knight, Jewitt, Darnell, and Kelly narratives are firsthand. It is not known whether or not the Henry, Van Campen, Johnston, Lee, or Eastlick narratives are firsthand, and the Slover narrative was told to a Pittsburgh lawyer named Hugh H. Brackenridge. Richard VanDerBeets, in
Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642-1836
, explained how avidly the public took to these stories:
These narratives were tremendously popular, and “first editions are rare today because they were quite literally read to pieces, and most narratives went through a remarkable number of editions.”
37
Although there are claims that some captive narratives were exaggerated, romanticized, mere propaganda, and misrepresented facts, no such claim has been made against any of the narratives relied upon here, so far as can be determined. Gary L. Ebersole, in
Captured by Texts
, analyzed 41 captive narratives, 7 of which are relied upon here: Jewitt, Johnston, Kelly, Lee, Rowlandson, Tanner, and Van Campen. He flatly concluded in his last paragraph, “I have no problem accepting at face value the accounts of the white Indians mentioned above.”
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