The Wild Frontier (7 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
Indians sometimes tortured members of sister tribes under odd circumstances. The Fox and Sac (who were allies from 1734 to the present)
were going to fight the Sioux, but the Fox were 20 horses short. They let the Sac know. The Sac came to the Fox village where the 20 young men who were “beggars for horses” were seated on the ground in a circle. Twenty Sac, on horses they had agreed to give away, rode into the village circling the men on the ground, each carrying a heavy whip. When a Sac rider had picked the man he wanted to have his horse, he gave him “the most tremendous cut with his lash” on his naked shoulders again and again as he rode around the men on the ground. Finally, the horse owner dismounted and presented his horse to the man he had whipped. Catlin said one man got a horse and the other “the satisfaction of putting his mark on the other man.”
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Perhaps the ultimate sacrifice was torturing to death a member of the killer’s own tribe. The practice is described by Harold E. Driver:
Along the Gulf from Louisiana to Florida and then up the Atlantic Coast to Virginia, chiefs had absolute authority over their subjects, including the power of life and death…. Human sacrifice of members of the in-group … has also been reported for this region. Wives and slaves were also killed at the death of a chief so that they might accompany him to the afterworld. Such sacrifice was also thought to appease the wrath of powerful spirits. Men sacrificed their own children at public spectacles to gain the favor of the chief and be raised to the rank of nobility…. The Pawnee Indians of Nebraska were the only other people north of Mexico to practice human sacrifice…. They used to sacrifice a maiden of their own tribe by tying her to a rectangular frame and shooting her with arrows.
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There was an incredible Mandan religious ceremony to select young men who were best able to lead a war party against other tribes. Catlin witnessed 45 or 50 volunteer youths who 6 or 8 at a time went through the ordeal in the medicine lodge. They were without food, drink, or sleep for nearly 4 days. Finally, a candidate came forward. A cut more than an inch deep was made in each shoulder or breast, and skewers were placed in the wound. The lodge had a hole in its roof from which a number of rawhide cords were dropped. These were attached to the skewers, and he was instantly pulled up off the ground. Then he was cut again and skewers inserted on each arm below the shoulder, below the elbows, on the thighs, and below the knees. Weights, often buffalo skulls with horns, were attached to his arms and legs. (Catlin made sketches and was so close that he could hear the knife rip through the flesh, causing him to cry “uncontrollable tears.”)
At this point, a warrior came forward with a pole and started turning
the candidate’s body around, gently at first, then faster and faster, until the candidate fainted. The important men in the tribe then checked him to be sure that he was “entirely dead.” He was then lowered to the ground. When consciousness returned, he crawled, with the weights still attached, to another warrior with a hatchet and a dried buffalo skull before him. The candidate held up the little finger of his left hand, laid it on the buffalo skull, and the warrior chopped it off near the hand with the hatchet. Catlin saw some of the candidates who had already lost their little fingers put their left forefingers on the skull, and they, too, were chopped off. (Catlin did not witness it, but several chiefs and dignitaries of the tribe without little fingers on the right hand told him they had taken a third step at the ceremony.)
After all 6 or 8 candidates had undergone this ordeal, they were then taken, with their weights still attached and skewers in place on the legs and arms, into the presence of the whole village. Two warriors put leather straps on the wrists of each candidate, and they were pulled, faster and faster, around the Big Canoe (a large hogshead 8 or 10 feet high containing choice medicines). This part of the ceremony was called the last race. The object was to run longer than the others without “dying.” When they faltered, the warriors dragged them by the wrists until the skewers were pulled out by the weights. Most fainted, then they were dropped, and appeared “like nothing but a mangled and loathsome corpse” to Catlin. When each regained consciousness and could rise, he went to his wigwam.
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The Sun Dance practiced by the Sioux was better known but similar to the Mandan dance. Two of the most famous Sun Dances involved Sitting Bull
*
and Rain-in-the-Face.
†
In 1875, Sioux war chief and medicine man Sitting Bull held a 3-day Sun Dance along the Rosebud River in Montana. About 10,000 to 15,000 warriors were in attendance. Edward Lazarus described the ceremony involving Sitting Bull:
Sitting Bull offered his flesh to the Great Spirit, gouging fifty small strips from each of his arms. His blood streaming, the chief danced for eighteen hours without rest or food, staring at the sun and moon by
turns. He fell into a trance and saw a vision: white soldiers falling into his camp, while a voice boomed in his head that these white men were a gift from the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka.
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The Sun Dance of Chief Rain-in-the-Face was even more dramatic. He told an Indian named W. Kent Thomas that he “would rather fight than eat.” Rain-in-the-Face described his Sun Dance, which took place in the presence of Sitting Bull, as follows:
The Sun Dance is that ceremonial performance in which the young Sioux aspirant gives that final proof of endurance and courage which entitles him to the
toga virilis
of a full-fledged warrior. One feature of it is the suspension in air of the candidate by a rawhide rope passed through slits cut in the breast, or elsewhere, until the flesh tears and he falls to the ground. If he faints, falters, or fails, or even gives way momentarily to his anguish during the period of suspension, he is damned forever after, and is called and treated as a squaw for the rest of his miserable life.
Rain-in-the-Face was lucky when he was so tied up. The tendons gave way easily, and he was released after so short a suspension that it was felt he had not fairly won his spurs. Sitting Bull, the chief medicine man, decided that the test was unsatisfactory. Rain-in-the-Face thereupon defied Sitting Bull to do his worst, declaring there was no test which could wring a murmur of pain from his lips.
Sitting Bull was equal to the occasion. He cut deep slits in the back over the kidneys—the hollows remaining were big enough almost to take in a closed fist years after—and passed a rawhide rope through them. For two days the young Indian hung suspended, taunting his torturers, jeering at them, defying them to do their worst, while singing his war songs and boasting of his deeds. The tough flesh muscles and tendons would not tear loose, although he kicked and struggled violently to get free. Finally, Sitting Bull, satisfied that Rain-in-the-Face’s courage and endurance were above proof
[sic]
, ordered buffalo skulls to be tied to his legs, and the added weight with some more vigorous kicking enabled the Indian stoic to break free.
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The federal government prohibited the Sun Dance in 1910 because it constituted self-torture.
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The purpose of this dance was quite similar to that of the Mandan ceremony—namely, to demonstrate the ability to withstand pain and therefore fight bravely in war.
John Rodgers Jewitt, who had been taken captive by the Nootka Indians, attended the annual celebration in honor of their god between 1803 and 1805. He saw 3 men, each of whom had 2 bayonets run
through his sides between his ribs, walking back and forth in the room singing war songs and exulting in their behavior.
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There were other kinds of self-torture. Female relatives of slain Comanche warriors were expected to show their grief by self-torture for weeks, months, or years. They would withdraw from camp, wail until exhausted, and meanwhile slash their arms, faces, and breasts.
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The Sioux, with captive Fanny Kelly, were fleeing General Alfred Sully and his troops in 1864. Several warriors were killed. Kelly reported a scene of terrible mourning that took place among the women:
Sometimes the practice of cutting the flesh is carried to a horrible extent. They inflict gashes an inch in length on their bodies and limbs. Some cut off their hair, blacken their faces, and march through the village in procession, wailing and torturing their bodies to add vigor to their lamentations.
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The Hurons had a Dance of Fire, which called for the dancers to carry coals or heated stones in their mouths. They also plunged their arms into boiling water. It was thought this invoked a spirit to cure the sick.
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Several explanations for Indian torture have been advanced. William Brandon in
Indians
and Bernard W. Sheehan in
Seeds of Extinction
gave the most plausible one. Sheehan said that after “sating the urge for blood” in a battle, the Indian “took the few survivors prisoner to endure a more horrid fate on the return to the victor’s country. These [were] atrocities saved by the Indians for the entertainment of the home village.”
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Brandon agreed and said that the practice had no underlying significance. “It is hard to escape an impression that simply the entertainment involved had become the main force behind the ritual torture of captives of war.”
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Indian advocates sometimes imply or even assert that particular kinds of torture, such as scalping, were done first by the settlers and later copied by the Indians. That was not so. Explorers such as Jacques Cartier in 1535, Hernando de Soto in 1540, Tristan de Luna in 1559, and others reported Indian scalping before the settlers arrived.
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No evidence of scalping in Europe has been found.
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The findings of Bil Gilbert, Fergus M. Bordewich, and Alvin Josephy confirm that settlers did not scalp before Indians. Gilbert, for example, said that “a few captives were now and then put to slow, horrible deaths, a practice which, like prisoner taking itself, had originated before the coming of Europeans.”
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Bordewich noted that Indian words “for scalping and more
imaginative forms of dismemberment existed in many Indian languages from the earliest times.”
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To the same effect, Josephy noted tortures and other conduct repulsive to the settlers were encountered when they went into Indian territory:
Their [the settlers’] own intrusions into Indian homelands inevitably exposed them to practices such as horse thefts, raids for personal prestige, torture, and even cannibalism and human sacrifice and trophy-taking that repelled and angered them.
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Hatred was a strong Indian and settler characteristic. Hatred is a state of mind that may lead to revenge or even violence. It would seem that the Indians hated the settlers as soon as they realized the settlers intended to take land occupied by them. In 1607, years before the Powhatan Wars began in 1622, King Powhatan (predecessor and relative of Opechancanough) told John Smith, “Captain Smith, (saith the king) some doubt I have of your comming hither … for many do informe me, your comming is not for trade, but to invade my people and possesse my Country.”
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It would also seem the settlers began to hate the Indians as soon as they realized the Indians were committing atrocities. Henry Knox, the first secretary of war, reported to Congress in 1787 that
the deep rooted prejudices, and malignity of heart, and conduct reciprocally entertained and practiced on all occasions by the Whites and Savages will ever prevent their being good neighbours. The one side anxiously defend their lands which the other avariciously claim. With minds previously inflamed the slightest offence occasions death, revenge follows which knows no bounds. The flames of a merciless war are thus lighted up which involve the innocent and helpless with the guilty.
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One of the strongest statements of hatred toward the settlers was given by the great orator Shawnee chief Tecumseh, speaking to the Creeks in Alabama:
Accursed be the race that has seized our country and made women of our warriors! Our fathers, from their tombs, reproach us as slaves and cowards; I hear them now in the wailing winds. They seize your land; they corrupt your women; they trample on the ashes of your dead.
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Sitting Bull added a new concept, a similar settler hatred of the Indians: “No Indian that ever lived loved the white man, and … no white
man that ever lived loved the Indian.”
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The frontier settlers from the viewpoint of the Indians
were the men who squatted on Indian lands, cheated them in trading, and provoked their hatred. That hatred, in turn, led to wholesale, indiscriminate atrocities which the whites repaid by a deliberate policy of annihilation rather than simple defeat.
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Page Smith determined that “the most disastrous legacy of the Revolution could be found in the permanently embittered relations between the Western settlers and the Indians who confronted them.”
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The British promoted Indian raids, which were increasingly punitive, to punish the settlers for their presumption in revolting against the mother country. “With the involvement of the Indians, the frontier was devastated by a ruthless and barbarous total war.”
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Smith added that the settler who had built buildings and acquired animals and
then saw the buildings put to the torch and the animals slaughtered, nursed an understandable hatred of the British and their Indian auxiliaries. If, in addition, he saw the livid crimson skull of a friend or relative who had been scalped by the Indians, the lust of vengeance burned in him as long as he lived….
Of all the policies pursued by the British in the Revolutionary era, their employment of Indians to kill Americans is the least excusable…. The British policy was as cruel and exploitive to the Indians as it was bloody and ruthless to the Americans. When the British departed, they left behind them a legacy of bitterness that could never be alleviated. From the Revolution on, those Americans who lived in the frontier settlements, which moved constantly westward, viewed the Indian as the enemy, cruel, deceitful, merciless; and they judged it a simple rule of self-preservation to match him in cunning and savagery, terror for terror, life for life, scalp for scalp, settler and savage caught in a terrible ritual of violence.
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