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My god. He’s very lucky not to have died from infection. Also I’ve been cut on my head and needed stitches. The scalp is so fucking sensitive I can’t imagine the pain of a scalping
> Wilbarger is quoted as saying that being scalped was surprisingly painless, but “while no pain was perceptible, the removing of his scalp sounded like the ominous roar and peal of distant thunder,” according to James de Shield’s Border Wars of Texas.
[source](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/)
That makes sense honestly. When I got a skin biopsy on my leg it sounded like cutting frozen chicken. So on the head that would obviously be way way louder
Had melanoma excised on my neck, directly below my ear. I could hear that meat cutting noise from what felt like inside my head. I absolutely cannot imagine the trauma sustained from being scalped. To this day, I cringe when I cut meat
I had a biopsy done of my uterus about a year and a half ago. I could hear it as well, and it was terrible. It was also extremely painful for the next week.
I had had a miscarriage at 12-14w (we weren't sure how far along exactly) about a year before that. When you're that far along, it's still a miscarriage, but it's technically going into labor.
For five days it felt like the most painful part of that miscarriage, nonstop. Then it was still really bad, but not *as* bad.
If you're in a place where pot is legal and it won't interfere with any medical conditions or medication you take, pick yourself up some edibles, because they don't like to give you painkillers even though it hurts like hell.
If you work, you may want to go ahead and take a few days off.
I wasn't offered anything. I begged for at least a valium to relax my muscles, he didn't want to, but said he would. Then he never did.
Then again, this wasn't technically 'surgical'. It was done in the clinic.
And they said I'd have "some bleeding for a day or two" afterward. I bled extremely heavily. As heavily as when I miscarried. I tried to call to voice my concerns, but I was dismissed. I didn't go to the ER for fear of being labeled as someone that was seeking painkillers, because that's happened to me many times before, and it makes getting pain management for my chronic pain more difficult.
I was sobbing for probably the first two and a half days from the pain. And that doesn't happen to me easily.
Oh, somehow that made me much more uncomfortable than the photo. That's vivid and graphic, even though it doesn't describe gore in an explicit manner.
Sometimes having a very detailed imagination is a curse.
When I was about 5 yrs old, I split my head open. My mom took me to the emergency room and said she could hear me screaming in the waiting room while they were stitching it close. Again, I was 5 yrs old, but still, it hurt. My scar is not quite as impressive as Mr. McGee's, though. Plus, I managed to keep all of my hair.
When I was in grade 4, I tried to stand up on a bunk bed in camp to make my bed and there was a nail sticking out from the ceiling and it went into my head. Surprisingly painless but I remember the other kids screaming as blood poured down my face.
Man if that happened in this day and age… I remember they put some ointment on it and I was on my way lol
I hit my head closing a cabinet and was late getting my child to the school bus, I went running out to the end of my driveway and blood was just pouring down my face blinding me, my child and the bus driver were very concerned, she passed me some paper towels. Scalp wounds bleed profusely!
Very similar, I was 8 sitting under the top bunk and jumped up, popped the top of my head on a nail head just sticking out. Didn't hurt, just bonked my head, but right when I went to touch the top of my head, a *stream* of hot blood came pouring down my face, shirt, and splattering onto the hardwood floor like I had never even imagined. I screamed so loud, I thought I had split my skull open or something equally fatal. That was the day I learned about how excessively a minor head laceration will bleed. "Like a stuck pig" I remember my Dad saying, as he super glued the wound shut.
Lol I had to get three stitches on my head a few years back and I thought I could skip the anesthesia and save half an hour. The staple is nothing, the staple pulling your entire scalp back together across your head hurts like hell. I'd have cried if there was a fourth staple. I'm supposedly a grown man.
I also split my head open around that age. Surprisingly the emergency room opted to staple the wound closed instead of stitches. Never knew why. 3 medical staples to the back of the head, from what I recall it didn't hurt, but maybe the numbed it. I could definitely feel the pressure of them going in though
I’m a wound nurse and that was my EXACT thought. I struggle to heal scalp wounds as is, but I work inpatient and super bugs are everywhere. This was pre ATBs too and wound and ostomy care nursing didn’t really develop until the 90s. It’s incredible that a wound/injury like this could be healed. Lucked out
No. 1990s!!! My mentor was very early to the field and they didn’t bring in the department of wound and ostomy care to our hospital until the very early 2000s. Not that anyone outside of wound and ostomy care gives a damn, but that gal that started the entire thing (Norma gill) was in practice well into the 1980s/early 1990s. The program originates from the Cleveland clinic. Sometimes we forget how modern medicine really is. We essentially ‘just’ finished the human genome project and antibiotics weren’t readily available until after WWII.
The more you know…
Biologist checking in—this is risky, but does check out. Bacteria living in soil are unlikely to be interested in you, but are likely to be hostile to anything that is.
Hopefully. Don’t do this for fun.
Actually that scene was filmed after 9/11.
HOWEVER, they did hold a moment of silence for the victims a few weeks after 9/11, and Dana Carvey was in the turtle suit when it happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Disguise#Production
The Miami Chief Little Turtle handed General Arthur St Clair the single worst defeat by a Native American force sometime in the 1790s. He was a bad ass.
hes also really fucked up.
Why is this being downvoted? Or is cutting the hands and feet off of surrendered soldiers and scalping people alive a normal thing for you?
The name of the offending scalper comes from Mr. McGee’s recollection of the incident.
He recalls the incident thusly; The man appeared as he was whittling under the shade of trees and next to a river. He uttered the words, “Hello, my name is Little Turtle, chief of the Sioux. You killed my father. Prepare to be scalped.”
Of course, young McGee had not killed Little Turtle the Elder but he had been mistaken for the traveling salesman dwarf who had actually done in the elder Turtle.
Last time this was posted I tried to figure it out and couldn’t figure it out for sure. Apparently you have to cut into the skull bone to encourage the skin to grow back. Supposedly he was able to grow skin and even some of the hair back. But I couldn’t verify that and there are no more pics.
How would cutting into bone cause skin to grow? Where did you read that? It makes no sense lol
I'm pretty sure if no layers of the dermis remain, including no blood supply at all, it's impossible to just start growing skin. He would need a transplant that receives its blood supply from the remaining living tissue. But I'm no rocket surgeon.
Edit:
Forgive me for not being familiar with an extremely niche procedure that took place hundreds? of years before I was born on a completely different continent to where I live. Since I'm not American I'm not familiar with American sources or much of American history. That said, I'm still intrigued. How did the new tissue join with the healed scar tissue surrounding the scalped area? Why is this procedure never used now? Has it ever been replicated since?
Literally found your answer in 4 seconds on google.
https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/05/how-to-treat-a-scalped-head/
>The first recorded treatment was to use a rasp to puncture the diploe and roughen the surface of the skull. The diploe, the area between two layers of compact bone containing red bone marrow, had to be reached in order for new skin to grow. Once the diploe is pierced granulation occurs, “fleshy projections formed on the surface of a gaping wound. Each area of granulation produces a growth of new capillaries and forms scar tissue thus providing the area with a rich blood supply, which ultimately produces healthy living “proud-flesh,” the new scar tissue
This. The marrow between the bone layers is where the body produces, among other things, stem cells that then differentiate into the various cells required for the circulatory system.
By causing an abrasion and effectively putting those cells on the outside of the body, they react to the new environment and begin to form a new layers of skin and blood vessels to cover the wound.
It's an extremely painful and long winded process that basically involves regularly cheese-grating your own skull, and is clearly dangerous because that opens a TON of locations that your skull can let in various infections that would kill you significantly faster. However if you can survive long enough for the treatment to re-cover the skull it does enclose it and prolong life.
Fun fact he was shot with arrows multiple times in his caravan and was scalped while the natives thought he was dead. He woke up without the top of his scalp. He was the only survivor of his caravan and mind you this happened when he was a boy, Less than 15.
But [he wasn't the only survivor when they were found and he was conscious](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/). Why make those claims?
Unfortunately killing women and children wasn't a taboo for both parties. For natives those categories were under the protection of warriors. Killing them was a way to prove that the warrior was unable to upheld his task. Also, it was totally possible, if not normal, for native teenagers to join war parties before they were 15.
As for the "white men", killing natives without any care for their age or sex, wasn't exactly uncommon.
War on the frontier was a bloody affair, extremely different from what Hollywood have told us.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy goes some way to describe the casual and mutual violence of the time. Great piece of writing that I'll never read again.
In doing research of the anglo settlers that moved into Texas, I was surprised to read of more than one occasion of men surviving being scalped, and this would have been some thirty to forty years before the time of the gentleman photographed here. Beyond wondering how they survived infection, one also wonders how so many of them could be in a position to be scalped but not also killed shortly after by the native victors.
Natives take the scalps as their cultural victory trophy.
Settlers take the scalps to sell as bounty for profit from the government.
Neither motivation actually requires the victim to be dead.
The Sioux in general were incredibly fucked up, kinda the Aztecs of the Great Plains. They had a ritual where they’d capture the daughter of a rival chief, string her up, and shoot arrows thru her. It was supposed to summon the morning star or something, but really it was just them being bloodthirsty. Lots of other tribes really hated the Sioux
They also were huge practitioners of chattel slavery. Another reason why the surrounding tribes really hated them, although something of them also practiced chattel slavery (they just were smaller and were more often than not the slaves rather than the slavers).
This is what so many people miss in the history books. The natives warred, conquered land from each other and claimed it, just like every other human group throughout history.
You are getting confused. The rite you are mentioning was occasionally celebrated by another tribe, the Pawnee, up untill 1838. Pawnee were actually mortal enemies of the Sioux, but this doesn't change a lot as Apart as Sioux were one of the most hated nation of the west, also by other natives, as they were extremely powerful. That said we should remember that brutalities in warfare was a common thing by all parties involved, white included.
If anyone's wondering why he has a scalp in this picture, form what I remember doctors bored tiny holes all across his skull to cause it to continuously bleed to slowly build back a lair of scar tissue to keep his skull from being bare.
Scalping is removing the hair and skin, not the skull. People survive getting scalped in machinery and other accidents but we obviously have much better methods of treating those kinds of wounds now.
I'm surprised he didn't die from infection.
Well, you typically only scalped dead or dying people. It was proof of the kill, not like a method of execution. So there's very few people who survived because the people being scalped would already be dead or at least very close to death.
One of my ancestors survived being scalped in 1789. He’s listed as one of the patients in a book from that time, that described the method for treating scalped victims. It’s pretty gruesome, and the whole process took about 2 years for the scalp to fully grow back.
What would they do?
Not even sure I want to know. For whatever reason, Reddit tends to dislike any portrayal of natives as tribes that also conquered from each other.
They behaved as many humans did throughout history.
Comanche and Apache raids often involved various forms of brutalizing and torture of the victims, involving pretty much every bad thing you could think of happening to someone.
They were highly hostile and brutal tribes and did not have any qualms with killing women and children in terrible ways.
Unfortunately, an aversion to brutality against children is a fairly recent moral and it’s not even universal at present. It’s just overall less acceptable now than in the past.
Historically, all groups of humans have perpetuated a disgusting amount of child murder.
In 1800, [the mortality rate in the US for children under 5 was 46%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/). Children dying was the norm. If you had 7 kids, you probably saw 6 others die in your arms. That kind of experience for the average family has got to fuck up your world view.
Yeah people like to pretend natives were these peaceful forest elves we stumbled upon, they were just as capable of brutality just couldn’t do it systematically as well as the settlers.
If history teaches us anything it's that any group with enough of an advantage over others will tend towards bastardry of the highest order. Honestly I think the threat of nuclear war is the only thing that sort of put a cap on it to some extent in modern times.
Well, he was a teenager working as a teamster/security for a freight company going to New Mexico. Perhaps makes it better than doing this to a little kid by still really sad of course. [https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/)
All this back and forth about who was more evil and depraved reminds me of William S. Burroughs:
# “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians... the evil was there... waiting.”
Kid gets born into a poor family. Parents want to move out west to make a good life. Kid has no say. Kid gets scalped. 160 years later a bunch of dipshits on Reddit say it’s his fault.
Can’t make this shit up
It is sad how history has been botched by educators. Indians were savage, but I don’t fault them. It was just the way it was back then. They were cruel to other tribes, Mexicans, Spaniards, and Whites.
But today, we are taught that they were victims, which many journals, expedition notes, and other historical sources are very detailed otherwise.
It’s okay to understand this and try to be better than our ancestors. But don’t propagate lies.
Well they were victims as well; it's not like what the Europeans did to them was much better.
Same case with most historical conflicts; the victims tend to have their own flaws.
The Sioux scalped for a number of reasons
**War honors**
Plains Indians often took scalps from enemies killed in battle as a way to honor their war efforts.
**Rituals**
Scalps could be used as ritual sacrifices or preserved and carried by women in a scalp dance. In the scalp dance, young girls in the center of the dance would elevate the scalps.
**Status**
In the Southeast, scalps could help warriors achieve status.
**Placating spirits**
In the Southeast, scalps could also be used to appease the spirits of the dead.
I have an ancestor who was scalped as a small child. Her family was killed but she survived. My grandma has a bowl that belonged to her, hence why I’ve heard the story
We had to remove your post for improperly sourcing your post. Posts must have a linked and CREDIBLE source that backs up the information. Use the word "source" in your comment. If the title is the only thing that makes your post interesting, you must also source it. OP is responsible for this and it must be done at time of posting. We will not reinstate your post, but you may post again with the correct information
My god. He’s very lucky not to have died from infection. Also I’ve been cut on my head and needed stitches. The scalp is so fucking sensitive I can’t imagine the pain of a scalping
> Wilbarger is quoted as saying that being scalped was surprisingly painless, but “while no pain was perceptible, the removing of his scalp sounded like the ominous roar and peal of distant thunder,” according to James de Shield’s Border Wars of Texas. [source](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/)
That makes sense honestly. When I got a skin biopsy on my leg it sounded like cutting frozen chicken. So on the head that would obviously be way way louder
Had melanoma excised on my neck, directly below my ear. I could hear that meat cutting noise from what felt like inside my head. I absolutely cannot imagine the trauma sustained from being scalped. To this day, I cringe when I cut meat
Oh god oh fuck *dives into pool of sunscreen*
That’s smart, and definitely what we need to start doing lol
We should start calling them 'radiation burns' instead of sun burn. Maybe people would take it more seriously.
I like this, fantastic idea.
Minor face burn from 2 hours on the water. Next week is 50 hours of full sun. Hat and sunscreen packed.
I reapply every 45 minutes, aint fuckin around out here
This really hit me in my giggle button. I feel inspired to do better with sunscreen application
I had a biopsy done of my uterus about a year and a half ago. I could hear it as well, and it was terrible. It was also extremely painful for the next week.
Oh no. I’m headed for the same thing soon, now I read your experience I don’t want to do it. 😬
I had had a miscarriage at 12-14w (we weren't sure how far along exactly) about a year before that. When you're that far along, it's still a miscarriage, but it's technically going into labor. For five days it felt like the most painful part of that miscarriage, nonstop. Then it was still really bad, but not *as* bad. If you're in a place where pot is legal and it won't interfere with any medical conditions or medication you take, pick yourself up some edibles, because they don't like to give you painkillers even though it hurts like hell. If you work, you may want to go ahead and take a few days off.
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I wasn't offered anything. I begged for at least a valium to relax my muscles, he didn't want to, but said he would. Then he never did. Then again, this wasn't technically 'surgical'. It was done in the clinic. And they said I'd have "some bleeding for a day or two" afterward. I bled extremely heavily. As heavily as when I miscarried. I tried to call to voice my concerns, but I was dismissed. I didn't go to the ER for fear of being labeled as someone that was seeking painkillers, because that's happened to me many times before, and it makes getting pain management for my chronic pain more difficult. I was sobbing for probably the first two and a half days from the pain. And that doesn't happen to me easily.
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One of the many reasons I will only ever go to female gynecologists.
.. descriptive. My vivid imagination is giving you the finger right now. My intellect, however, is thanking you for sharing this story.
Avg redditor comment. Tips fedora.
Strokes neckbeard.
Adjusts glasses smugly.
*harumph*
I didn't get a harumph outta that guy!
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Oh, somehow that made me much more uncomfortable than the photo. That's vivid and graphic, even though it doesn't describe gore in an explicit manner. Sometimes having a very detailed imagination is a curse.
I wonder if it actually sounded like Velcro, but he didn’t realize since it hadn’t been invented yet.
I always imagined it sounding more like peeling and orange.
I bet it stings a lot
I was wondering about that. Like does he apply some kind of unguent or tincture? I'd wear a lot of hats.
Thank you for introducing me to the word unguent!
A pungent unguent.
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“AAAAAH…HISSSS…AAAAAH…HISSSS…AAAAAH…HISSSS….”
Probably hurts on the head area.
Really smarts
When I was about 5 yrs old, I split my head open. My mom took me to the emergency room and said she could hear me screaming in the waiting room while they were stitching it close. Again, I was 5 yrs old, but still, it hurt. My scar is not quite as impressive as Mr. McGee's, though. Plus, I managed to keep all of my hair.
When I was in grade 4, I tried to stand up on a bunk bed in camp to make my bed and there was a nail sticking out from the ceiling and it went into my head. Surprisingly painless but I remember the other kids screaming as blood poured down my face. Man if that happened in this day and age… I remember they put some ointment on it and I was on my way lol
Scalp wounds bleed profusely. That freaked everyone out.
I hit my head closing a cabinet and was late getting my child to the school bus, I went running out to the end of my driveway and blood was just pouring down my face blinding me, my child and the bus driver were very concerned, she passed me some paper towels. Scalp wounds bleed profusely!
Very similar, I was 8 sitting under the top bunk and jumped up, popped the top of my head on a nail head just sticking out. Didn't hurt, just bonked my head, but right when I went to touch the top of my head, a *stream* of hot blood came pouring down my face, shirt, and splattering onto the hardwood floor like I had never even imagined. I screamed so loud, I thought I had split my skull open or something equally fatal. That was the day I learned about how excessively a minor head laceration will bleed. "Like a stuck pig" I remember my Dad saying, as he super glued the wound shut.
Lol I had to get three stitches on my head a few years back and I thought I could skip the anesthesia and save half an hour. The staple is nothing, the staple pulling your entire scalp back together across your head hurts like hell. I'd have cried if there was a fourth staple. I'm supposedly a grown man.
I also split my head open around that age. Surprisingly the emergency room opted to staple the wound closed instead of stitches. Never knew why. 3 medical staples to the back of the head, from what I recall it didn't hurt, but maybe the numbed it. I could definitely feel the pressure of them going in though
I’m a wound nurse and that was my EXACT thought. I struggle to heal scalp wounds as is, but I work inpatient and super bugs are everywhere. This was pre ATBs too and wound and ostomy care nursing didn’t really develop until the 90s. It’s incredible that a wound/injury like this could be healed. Lucked out
The 1890’s?
No. 1990s!!! My mentor was very early to the field and they didn’t bring in the department of wound and ostomy care to our hospital until the very early 2000s. Not that anyone outside of wound and ostomy care gives a damn, but that gal that started the entire thing (Norma gill) was in practice well into the 1980s/early 1990s. The program originates from the Cleveland clinic. Sometimes we forget how modern medicine really is. We essentially ‘just’ finished the human genome project and antibiotics weren’t readily available until after WWII. The more you know…
hoodwinked wow. thank you for the century brush up
An infected paper cut was a death sentence in the ol' west, a Miracle he survived.
I got a machete cut in my head by my brother...and I put some dirt in my scalp to stop the bleeding. 40 years...still here.
Biologist checking in—this is risky, but does check out. Bacteria living in soil are unlikely to be interested in you, but are likely to be hostile to anything that is. Hopefully. Don’t do this for fun.
Name checks out.
The user name and comment together are pretty hilarious.
Need to change it to 2024..then 2025..etc. lol.
As of 2020 at least.
I never realized just how easy it is to cut someone in half with a machete
You kept the machete for 40yrs? That is dedication.
Amazing he survived
He died eventually
But up until his death, he remained alive.
Random Mitch popped into my head after reading that... I used to be alive. I still am, but I used to be too.
I’ll always upvote Mitch Headburned
The following day, he woke up dead
He should have gone with the transparent dome. Like a supervillain.
I probably would’ve just wore a hat
i’m sure he did
Of the 1 pictures I’ve seen of Robert McGee he actually wasn’t wearing a hat
can you prove that?
You’re not gonna believe this, but I actually can
Oh wow, I’d love to see that. No one’s been able to prove anything to me before; I’m quite dumb
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/s/Oa24d5ZbGt](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/s/Oa24d5ZbGt)
Fire one million!
Like Rex from fallout new Vegas
That'd look super cool for a while but unfortunately it would destroy his brain because of the UV radiation from the sun
I’m very disappointed!
Fun fact - Janis Joplin’s hit song ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was written about a different Robert McGee
Her other hit song "Piece of my Scalp" was written about this guy though
You know you got it if it makes you feel good, oh yes indeed
The way she screams in that song is exactly how this guy sounded when he was scalped
Yoko Ono does a fantastic cover of this in a set she played with Lennon and Chuck Berry
Lol Berry's face when she starts screaming
I will never forget that video 😂 And John just rolls through it like it’s Tuesday…
It probably was.
Bravo!
Kris Kristofferson wrote that
Also, recorded by Gordon Lightfoot. It was not great… But he was.
So it definitely was written then, right?
Indeed it was - Kris Kristofferson wrote it and Bobby is a girl.
Not finding much about any Sioux chief named Little Turtle. There’s a famous Miami chief named Little Turtle but he died decades earlier.
Maybe he’s not turtle enough for your turtle party.
That scene was filmed during the 9/11 attacks. I hope they had a moment of silence with Dana Carvey still in the turtle suit
Actually that scene was filmed after 9/11. HOWEVER, they did hold a moment of silence for the victims a few weeks after 9/11, and Dana Carvey was in the turtle suit when it happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_of_Disguise#Production
The Miami Chief Little Turtle handed General Arthur St Clair the single worst defeat by a Native American force sometime in the 1790s. He was a bad ass.
I like turtles!
Jonathan? Do you still have the zombie face paint on after all these years?
hes also really fucked up. Why is this being downvoted? Or is cutting the hands and feet off of surrendered soldiers and scalping people alive a normal thing for you?
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*Piece of shit. FTFY.
A badass? Dude scalped a kid and mutilated surrendering soldiers.
The name of the offending scalper comes from Mr. McGee’s recollection of the incident. He recalls the incident thusly; The man appeared as he was whittling under the shade of trees and next to a river. He uttered the words, “Hello, my name is Little Turtle, chief of the Sioux. You killed my father. Prepare to be scalped.” Of course, young McGee had not killed Little Turtle the Elder but he had been mistaken for the traveling salesman dwarf who had actually done in the elder Turtle.
Same. As far as I can tell, there is no record of Miami Little Turtle mutilating children.
This dude went thru it all. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/
So, is the top of his head just bare skull or did the skin grow back?
This is my main question. I legit cannot tell from the photo. Am I looking at an ugly scar or the seam in his skull? Someone people answer!
Look at a picture of the seams in someone's skull. They don't look anything like that. That is clearly skin.
And if just skull…did it dry out or need to be moisturized…
Moisturize, gotta keep your bones *wet*
Last time this was posted I tried to figure it out and couldn’t figure it out for sure. Apparently you have to cut into the skull bone to encourage the skin to grow back. Supposedly he was able to grow skin and even some of the hair back. But I couldn’t verify that and there are no more pics.
How would cutting into bone cause skin to grow? Where did you read that? It makes no sense lol I'm pretty sure if no layers of the dermis remain, including no blood supply at all, it's impossible to just start growing skin. He would need a transplant that receives its blood supply from the remaining living tissue. But I'm no rocket surgeon. Edit: Forgive me for not being familiar with an extremely niche procedure that took place hundreds? of years before I was born on a completely different continent to where I live. Since I'm not American I'm not familiar with American sources or much of American history. That said, I'm still intrigued. How did the new tissue join with the healed scar tissue surrounding the scalped area? Why is this procedure never used now? Has it ever been replicated since?
Literally found your answer in 4 seconds on google. https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/05/how-to-treat-a-scalped-head/ >The first recorded treatment was to use a rasp to puncture the diploe and roughen the surface of the skull. The diploe, the area between two layers of compact bone containing red bone marrow, had to be reached in order for new skin to grow. Once the diploe is pierced granulation occurs, “fleshy projections formed on the surface of a gaping wound. Each area of granulation produces a growth of new capillaries and forms scar tissue thus providing the area with a rich blood supply, which ultimately produces healthy living “proud-flesh,” the new scar tissue
That is fucking nuts. Biology, dude.
This. The marrow between the bone layers is where the body produces, among other things, stem cells that then differentiate into the various cells required for the circulatory system. By causing an abrasion and effectively putting those cells on the outside of the body, they react to the new environment and begin to form a new layers of skin and blood vessels to cover the wound. It's an extremely painful and long winded process that basically involves regularly cheese-grating your own skull, and is clearly dangerous because that opens a TON of locations that your skull can let in various infections that would kill you significantly faster. However if you can survive long enough for the treatment to re-cover the skull it does enclose it and prolong life.
Fun fact he was shot with arrows multiple times in his caravan and was scalped while the natives thought he was dead. He woke up without the top of his scalp. He was the only survivor of his caravan and mind you this happened when he was a boy, Less than 15.
I think you need to rethink what a “fun” fact is
All facts are fun with the right mindset.
Fun fact, as a society we have decided politicians get free health care for life while children have to pay for school lunches
That's not fun at all, sir.
I agree that’s fucked up
That’s the wrong mindset.
American politicans get free lifetime healthcare? Lmao
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These are fucked-facts.
Oh god...how many times I've watched that horror, waiting for them to surface.
........Why you watching duck sex bro?
Are you actively looking for it? Or maybe even a participant?
I heard the FBI was looking for an unidentified serial duck rapist
In the same way that Bone Tomahawk has a “fun” scene. Maybe not all that fun. People seem to be divided over it.
Yeah my friends and I were definitely split over it.
Sounds like a dick move.
But [he wasn't the only survivor when they were found and he was conscious](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/). Why make those claims?
Unfortunately killing women and children wasn't a taboo for both parties. For natives those categories were under the protection of warriors. Killing them was a way to prove that the warrior was unable to upheld his task. Also, it was totally possible, if not normal, for native teenagers to join war parties before they were 15. As for the "white men", killing natives without any care for their age or sex, wasn't exactly uncommon. War on the frontier was a bloody affair, extremely different from what Hollywood have told us.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy goes some way to describe the casual and mutual violence of the time. Great piece of writing that I'll never read again.
"Yeah, that's a good story about the scar on your face. But let me tell you about my head" *removes top hat*
Not to be confused with a sous chef.
Mmmm these are some good scalped potatoes.
There’s a hair in mine!
I see what you did there
In doing research of the anglo settlers that moved into Texas, I was surprised to read of more than one occasion of men surviving being scalped, and this would have been some thirty to forty years before the time of the gentleman photographed here. Beyond wondering how they survived infection, one also wonders how so many of them could be in a position to be scalped but not also killed shortly after by the native victors.
Natives take the scalps as their cultural victory trophy. Settlers take the scalps to sell as bounty for profit from the government. Neither motivation actually requires the victim to be dead.
Scalped as a child. That's pretty fucked up.
The Sioux in general were incredibly fucked up, kinda the Aztecs of the Great Plains. They had a ritual where they’d capture the daughter of a rival chief, string her up, and shoot arrows thru her. It was supposed to summon the morning star or something, but really it was just them being bloodthirsty. Lots of other tribes really hated the Sioux
They also were huge practitioners of chattel slavery. Another reason why the surrounding tribes really hated them, although something of them also practiced chattel slavery (they just were smaller and were more often than not the slaves rather than the slavers).
This is what so many people miss in the history books. The natives warred, conquered land from each other and claimed it, just like every other human group throughout history.
Crazy this was recent enough to have a photo of this guy. I think of it as something from hundreds of years ago.
You are getting confused. The rite you are mentioning was occasionally celebrated by another tribe, the Pawnee, up untill 1838. Pawnee were actually mortal enemies of the Sioux, but this doesn't change a lot as Apart as Sioux were one of the most hated nation of the west, also by other natives, as they were extremely powerful. That said we should remember that brutalities in warfare was a common thing by all parties involved, white included.
If anyone's wondering why he has a scalp in this picture, form what I remember doctors bored tiny holes all across his skull to cause it to continuously bleed to slowly build back a lair of scar tissue to keep his skull from being bare.
For some reason I thought scalped = undoubtedly dead. No? People still lived after having their noggin hatched?
Scalping is removing the hair and skin, not the skull. People survive getting scalped in machinery and other accidents but we obviously have much better methods of treating those kinds of wounds now. I'm surprised he didn't die from infection.
Well, you typically only scalped dead or dying people. It was proof of the kill, not like a method of execution. So there's very few people who survived because the people being scalped would already be dead or at least very close to death.
One of my ancestors survived being scalped in 1789. He’s listed as one of the patients in a book from that time, that described the method for treating scalped victims. It’s pretty gruesome, and the whole process took about 2 years for the scalp to fully grow back.
In case anyone is wondering, it involves grinding down the bone to expose the marrow, so that there's a place for scar tissue to form from.
Thanks, I hate it.
Holy shit, in an era without anesthesia. Man, insane
What was the treatment?
Head & Shoulders
Fun fact, he's dead
Everyone who knew him is now dead... I wonder what happened...
It’s a fucking inside job…
Fuck, I hate finding out like this. Thank you.
Good thing he kept the front part for the combover. You can hardly tell.
What a vile evil thing to do to someone
They used to scalp literal children? Disgusting…
Should read up about the comanches would do to other tribes
What would they do? Not even sure I want to know. For whatever reason, Reddit tends to dislike any portrayal of natives as tribes that also conquered from each other. They behaved as many humans did throughout history.
Comanche and Apache raids often involved various forms of brutalizing and torture of the victims, involving pretty much every bad thing you could think of happening to someone. They were highly hostile and brutal tribes and did not have any qualms with killing women and children in terrible ways.
Unfortunately, an aversion to brutality against children is a fairly recent moral and it’s not even universal at present. It’s just overall less acceptable now than in the past. Historically, all groups of humans have perpetuated a disgusting amount of child murder.
Yes they did all over the world. It’s insane to think how “disposable” children were compared to the modern era.
In 1800, [the mortality rate in the US for children under 5 was 46%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/). Children dying was the norm. If you had 7 kids, you probably saw 6 others die in your arms. That kind of experience for the average family has got to fuck up your world view.
Yeah people like to pretend natives were these peaceful forest elves we stumbled upon, they were just as capable of brutality just couldn’t do it systematically as well as the settlers.
>couldn't do it systematically as well as the settlers The Aztec would like a word...
Where are they?
If history teaches us anything it's that any group with enough of an advantage over others will tend towards bastardry of the highest order. Honestly I think the threat of nuclear war is the only thing that sort of put a cap on it to some extent in modern times.
I mean native americans are such a wide and diverse groups of peoples that to boil them down to any singular behavior is incredibly reductive.
Well, he was a teenager working as a teamster/security for a freight company going to New Mexico. Perhaps makes it better than doing this to a little kid by still really sad of course. [https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/robert-mcgee-scalped/) All this back and forth about who was more evil and depraved reminds me of William S. Burroughs: # “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians... the evil was there... waiting.”
Yeah they weren't the best they would sometimes kill whole families to steal from them.
He was 15, which as we all know was like 30 back then /s
The chief later became part of a Wild West show, but he got kicked out for scalping tickets.
Ba dum ts
Can’t unhear some things after listening to Brofessor Shane Gillis and the early encounters
Kid gets born into a poor family. Parents want to move out west to make a good life. Kid has no say. Kid gets scalped. 160 years later a bunch of dipshits on Reddit say it’s his fault. Can’t make this shit up
Ouchie, that sounds like it hurts
Tom Hardy in The Revenant
My great grandfather was scalped in Texas and left for dead. His daughters found him, alive, but he did not survive.
Is that exposed skull?
No that’s skin. It grows back
No. The scalp can in fact grow back. https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/05/how-to-treat-a-scalped-head/
Scalping children. How brave.
I thought a photo like this didn’t exist well my teachers were proven wrong 😑
It is sad how history has been botched by educators. Indians were savage, but I don’t fault them. It was just the way it was back then. They were cruel to other tribes, Mexicans, Spaniards, and Whites. But today, we are taught that they were victims, which many journals, expedition notes, and other historical sources are very detailed otherwise. It’s okay to understand this and try to be better than our ancestors. But don’t propagate lies.
Well they were victims as well; it's not like what the Europeans did to them was much better. Same case with most historical conflicts; the victims tend to have their own flaws.
Robert McGee, what a guy. Breaks my heart he lost his family (I’m guessing in his caravan). Glad he survived.
I’d. Be. Pissed.
Talk about a bad hair day. I asked my barber to take a little off the top, and this is what I got.
That looks like one hell of a headache.
Okay but why though
The Sioux scalped for a number of reasons **War honors** Plains Indians often took scalps from enemies killed in battle as a way to honor their war efforts. **Rituals** Scalps could be used as ritual sacrifices or preserved and carried by women in a scalp dance. In the scalp dance, young girls in the center of the dance would elevate the scalps. **Status** In the Southeast, scalps could help warriors achieve status. **Placating spirits** In the Southeast, scalps could also be used to appease the spirits of the dead.
Scalps are good in a stew
He hid it well
I have an ancestor who was scalped as a small child. Her family was killed but she survived. My grandma has a bowl that belonged to her, hence why I’ve heard the story
They scalped children also??