The Wild Frontier (6 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
A trapper and hunter named Wootton—but called Uncle Dick—noted that before the settlers came, the Indians not only robbed and plundered and stole from one another, but killed, scalped, mutilated, tortured, and enslaved. When the settlers came, they did these same things to them.
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T
HE SIGNIFICANT
wars among Indians are described in Appendix A, which lists more than 500 known intertribal wars
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between 1622 and
1890. Wars that are not important to the subject of this book are merely listed in skeletal fashion, giving only the date and the belligerents. Probably there was not a time between 1622 and 1890 when Indians were not fighting other Indians.
Many of these intertribal wars occurred before the settlers arrived in any significant numbers, and more than 450 occurred after the Powhatan Wars began in 1622—that is, after the Indians became aware that battles with the settlers might occur. Earlier, King Powhatan had expressed fear that the settlers were going to invade and possess land occupied by Indians.
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O
NE OF
the most telling illustrations of Indian love of warfare is that Indians very frequently served as mercenaries and scouts for pay for the English, French, and American armies against other Indians, even other Indians from the same tribe. Such events are included in Appendix A. Marshall saw this as “another sad chapter in the story of Indian betrayal of Indians.”
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Cyrus Townsend Brady in his
Indian Fights and Fighters
believed that this situation was instrumental in the success of American arms against the Indians:
It is a singular thing to note the looseness of the tie with which the members of the various tribes were bound. Frequently we find bands of the same tribe fighting for and against the United States on the same field. One of the most fruitful causes of the success of our arms has been this willingness on the part of the Indians to fight against their own people, of which the government has been willing to avail itself.
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The conflicting views about Indians in general also applies to the effectiveness of their warfare. On the one hand, Waldman believed that the Indians were “among history’s most effective warriors, and their guerrilla tactics—emphasizing concealment and individual initiative”—were adopted by many modern armies.
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William Brandon praised the Indians’ “remarkable courage.”
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Roy Harvey Pearce observed that the Indian “will defend himself against a host of enemies, always choosing to be killed rather than to surrender.”
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Harold E. Driver similarly noted that
few indigenous peoples in the world at the same level of culture have fought so valiantly against European intruders as did the Indians east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States. Man for man, bow for
bow, and gun for gun, they were a match for the best troops sent against them and were overwhelmed only because of the greater numbers and superior armament of the English and French colonizers.
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On the other hand, Page Smith made a detailed critique of the Indian as a warrior. He said that the Indian had a basic weakness in warfare in that he was not prepared for protracted campaigning. The Indian preferred stealthy raids, was unwilling to sustain heavy casualties, and did not have the will to persist in the face of heavy odds. He fought for glory and spoils but not for victory, was capable of effective attack but not defense, and could not be restrained or controlled once aroused. The Indians would stand fast in the face of attack by a superior force only when confronted with death or surrender, in which event death was almost always chosen.
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Lack of Indian staying power in battle has also been noted by others.
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Indians had a tendency to run away from a battle. Old West writer Bret Harte put it like this:
The red men had different ideas of bravery than those to which whites had been schooled. Most Indians saw no glory in dying nobly for a doomed cause when it was possible to get away and resume the battle elsewhere under better conditions.
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General Philip Henry Sheridan discovered that “Indians seldom [make a] stand when the force is able to defeat them…. They will scatter.”
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“Indians rarely fought,” according to Axelrod, “unless they enjoyed substantially superior numbers.”
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Cyrus Townsend Brady put it another way: “The well-known disinclination of Indians to fight pitched battles is a factor which enters largely into every campaign.”
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And he noted another drawback:
One of the curious Indian superstitions, which has often served the white man against whom he had fought to good purpose, is that when a man is killed in the dark he must pass all eternity in darkness. Consequently, he rarely ever attacks at night.
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And there was another inhibiting factor noted by Ralph K. Andrist—cold. “Indian war parties very seldom operated in winter.”
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Very few combatants have the advantage of knowing that the enemy will probably not attack at night or in the winter. Andrist further said the Indians often did not have “the ability to improvise tactics.”
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Charles Robinson called attention to one more liability of the Indian as a fighter:
The average Indian thought almost entirely as an individual, and not as part of a larger organization. Strategy, communications, even numbers of people in a particular location—essential to any white history—were seldom noted because they did not affect most Indians as individuals.
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N
OT SURPRISINGLY
, ruthlessness in warfare was another Indian characteristic. When the Sioux were fighting the Ute, Sioux chief Red Cloud
*
saw that a Ute warrior trying to cross a stream was about to drown because of a wounded horse. Red Cloud went into the stream, saved the warrior from drowning, then scalped him. Later Red Cloud killed an Indian child who was tending a horse herd before running the horses away.
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C
RUELTY IS
an indispensable element of an atrocity—and was another characteristic shared by the Indians and the settlers. James Adair, an Irish trader who married many Indian women and fathered many Indian children, recalled that “once the contest began, the Indians had no sense of where to end it. Their thirst for blood of their reputed enemies is not to be quenched with a few drops—the more they drink, the more it inflames their thirst.”
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Catlin reported that “cruelty is one of the leading traits of the Indian’s character…. In the treatment of their prisoners also, in many tribes, they are in the habit of inflicting the most appalling tortures.”
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Missionary John Heckewelder, who was a friend of the Indians, acknowledged in 1818 “that the Indians are in general revengeful and cruel to their enemies. That even after the battle is over, they wreak their deliberate revenge on their defenseless prisoners.”
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Catlin also found that “the Indians are hard and cruel masters.”
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Captive Mary Jemison married a Delaware, then later married a Seneca warrior named Hiokatoo, who was second in command to
*
Joseph Brant, a Mohawk leader, at the Cherry Valley Massacre.
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Her account of her life looked on the Indians with sympathy, but she candidly described Hiokatoo’s early training:
In early life, Hiokatoo showed signs of thirst for blood by attending only to the art of war, in the use of the tomahawk and scalping knife; and in practicing cruelties upon every thing that chanced to fall into his hands, which was susceptible of pain. In that way he learned to use his implements of war effectually, and at the same time blunted all those fine feelings and tender sympathies that are naturally excited, by hearing or seeing, a fellow being in distress. He could effect the most excruciating tortures upon his enemies, and prided himself upon his fortitude, in having performed the most barbarous ceremonies and tortures, without the least degree of pity or remorse. Thus qualified, when very young he was initiated into scenes of carnage, by being engaged in the wars that prevailed amongst the Indian tribes.
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Fanny Kelly, who wrote
My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians
, observed the same thing:
Cruelty is inherent in them, and is early manifested in the young, torturing birds, turtles, or any little animals that may fall in their hands. They seem to delight in it, while the pleasure of the adult in torturing his prisoners is most unquestionable.
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Fanny Kelly, only 19 years old but a wife and mother, was headed across the Plains for Idaho when she was captured by a group of more than 1,000 Indians in 1864. She had remarkable experiences, and a Sioux related to Kelly “many instances of outrageous cruelties of his band in their murderous attacks on travelling parties and frontier settlers.”
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Sometimes Indian cruelty was too much even for other Indians. The Iroquois were so cruel that their neighbors feared and hated them.
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U
SE OF
torture was another Indian characteristic. It is closely related to cruelty, but of course there may be cruelty without torture. Frederick Drimmer compiled a book of narratives called
Captured by the Indians.
He said that “Indians often made a cult of torture, and young and old, male and female, took part in it. The squaws had a special reputation for ferocity.”
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Some general observations about torture can be made. Alan Axelrod, in his
Chronicle of the Indian Wars
, wrote:
It is a fact that Indians were often cruel to their captives. The weak, the old, the infants, and the wounded—prisoners who would impede flight from the scene of a raid—were often summarily dispatched. Children were killed before the eyes of their parents. Elderly parents were killed in front of their children…. Cutting, flaying alive, dismemberment, piercing, beating, and burning were common. One usual torture was to cut off an ear, a strip of flesh, or a finger and force the victim to eat it…. [Running the gauntlet was a] … combination of torture, ritual, and sport [which] placed the captive at the head of parallel rows of club-wielding warriors (and often women and children as well); the captive had to run from one end of the “gauntlet” to the other as blows rained down on him. If he stumbled and fell, he was placed at the starting point again—or he was beaten to death.
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Harold E. Driver noted the same thing:
The most distinctive feature of the warfare pattern [among Indians] in the East as compared with other areas north of Mexico was the emphasis on the torture of prisoners. Most instances of torture on the Plains and Prairies seem to have been derived from the East in the historic period. Generally the prisoner was tied to a stake, frame, or platform, and tortured with fire, blows, mutilation, stabbing, shooting with arrows, or dismemberment while still alive. Such orgies lasted from a few hours to a few days, and the remains of the victim were often eaten in a cannibalistic feast.
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Howard Mumford Jones listed some of the crimes committed by the Indians during King Philip’s War:
The contest was illustrated … by the raping and scalping of women, the cutting off of fingers and feet of men, the skinning of white captives, the ripping open the bellies of pregnant women, the cutting off of the penises of males, and the wearing of the fingers of white men as bracelets or necklaces.
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William Brandon outlined tortures inflicted by the Iroquois, which included
prisoners being hamstrung, cords drawn through slits gashed at the tendons of their heels, and thus roped together being forced to march … to the town of their captors, there to be burned alive.
As among the people of the Southeast, a captive was supposed to continue singing his defiant death song while the jubilant, screaming women and children burned him with torches, gouged out bits of his flesh with jagged pieces of seashell, or while a warrior tore off his scalp and poured red-hot coals over his bleeding skull, all this cunningly managed so as to delay as long as possible the moment when the last glint of life, like a melting snowflake, died from the body.
Maybe Iroquois torture was a trifle too notorious, considering that most of their neighbors indulged in similar delights.
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Torture by Canadian Indians was apparently along the same lines. Charles Dennis Rusoe D’Eres was captured when 14 years old and spent 11 years with them. Gary L. Ebersole described what happened after a battle with an enemy:
Several of them were most inhumanely slaughtered by the tomahawk and knife, cutting open their bodies, and with their hands scooping up the warm blood out of their bodies, while alive, and drinking it greedily, whooping and dancing merrily, as if partaking of the most agreeable repast.
The prisoners who survived, were kept confined without any sustenance, and every day were whipt and tortured, by burning their fingers; forcing them into their pipes, when smoaking, and there confining them until burnt to the bone, whooping and dancing round them—this was their practice day by day.
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Colonel Richard Dodge, an aide to General Sherman during the Civil War, related his extensive experience on the frontier upon leaving the service. He recorded that a favorite method of Indian torture was the stake-out. The victim
was stripped of his clothing, laid on his back on the ground and his arms and legs, stretched to the utmost, were fastened by thongs to pins driven into the ground. In this state he was not only helpless, but almost motionless. All this time the Indians pleasantly talked to him. It was all kind of a joke. Then a small fire was built near one of his feet. When that was so cooked as to have little sensation, another fire was built near the other foot; then the legs and arms and body until the whole person was crisped. Finally, a small fire was built on the naked breast and kept up until life was extinct.
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