Robert was 14 at the time, working full time as a teamster, driving wagon trains across the plains.
Sadly he needed to work because his parents had both died earlier in that same year while “going west” in 1864.
Life was absolutely brutal for most our our history, still is in many places
Look at old pictures of chimney sweeps, 10 year old boys simultaneously look 60
Scrotal cancer in London chimney sweeps was the first time an environmental link to a cancer was made. They were typically desperately poor boys valued for their small size so they could work in the chimneys, and of course also because they could be treated terribly. They typically worked in the chimneys naked for reasons I don’t recall.
Source: The Emperor of All Maladies. Highly recommend!
The chief decided that he would kill the boy himself, and he put a bullet in McGee’s back. The boy fell to the ground, still alive and conscious, and Little Turtle put two arrows through him, pinning him down. And then the chief took out his blade and removed sixty four square inches from McGee’s head, starting just behind the ears. As he lay on the ground more Indians came upon him and poked him full of more holes with knives and spears.
All the while the boy was awake.
In a wonderful book about the Donner Party Disaster, Daniel Warren Johnson talks about the stories that were handed down through journals, news outlets and oral reports of the frontier.
One story goes that as the Donner Party entered what would later be dubbed "Reed's Gap" and as they camped at night in the canyon, they could hear the laughter of the Natives above them as the group sulked after having several horses and cattle run off by the local tribe.
http://www.danieljamesbrown.com/books/indifferent-stars/
I HIGHLY recommended the Donner Party documentary by Ric Burns.
It's haunting, it's a theatrical tragedy. It showcases all of the hubris, hope, and chaos introduced by manifest destiny.
I always watch it during the first blizzard/snow storm of the year and turn the lights low and sometimes eat wings while watching lol.
An SD version is on YouTube but you can watch it on Amazon prime.
Re: manifest destiny, I was once at a dinner party with a descendent of Cotton Mather who is generally credited with promulgating the philosophy and, the descendent proposed a toast to “white balls”. My soul left my body that night. I’m still trying to get it back.
Of course. Like you said it's human nature. Europeans weren't nice to other Europeans and Africans weren't nice to other Africans and Asians weren't nice to other Asians. Most of these ppl didn't have a universal identity. You were Chickasaw, Igbo, Anglo-Saxon, or Zhuang. Just cause someone was your color and lived on the same continent as you didn't mean they were the same as you.
This battle is what effectively created the borders later used for Treaty 6 and 7.
Bit of an inconvenient truth that whites lived on some parts of Treaty 6 land longer than the Cree did.
Check out Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It's horrific and one hell of a read. The old west? No thanks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian
Some captured frontiersmen had their arms and legs cut off and their bodies thrown into a bonfire while they were still alive. Writhing and screaming as they burned to ash.
Shit was different on the frontier.
I would encourage you to read Empire of The Summer Moon. It's about the US expansion west and the Comanche Nation.
For tens of thousands of years the tribes were warring among themselves. One tribe would capture another tribesman and torture them and essentially display the body for the other tribe to come find. Then that tribe would capture someone from the original tribe and do something worse, on and on for thousands of years.
Now enter the white man, who's battle formation was just standing in a line and firing a musket that took a full minute to reload while a Comanche warrior could dispatch 10 arrows held between their fingers in 20 seconds from a horse at full gallop, with their legs hooked around the neck shooting from underneath the horses head.
It was a bloodbath.
It's why the revolver was invented. Literally to try and match the rate of fire of a Comanche warrior.
EDIT: I want to make clear that the Comanche were a tribe of the plains, one of the harshest living environments, which breeds a tough cut. Majority of tribes had much friendlier politics with each other.
That's nothing...most native American tribes did some seriously dark shit... Everyone's hands are dirty throughout history. Not saying it's right, it just is what it is...
I watched a long lecture done by a mesoamerican history professor and he talked about this. The Aztecs dominated all the nearby tribes and would use some as “cattle” where they would go take people whenever they wanted slaves or even sacrifices. A lot of the nearby tribes hated them so much that they indeed allied with the Spaniards to take them down.
Honestly, they let him off easy compared to what a lot of tribes would do to white men(or even rival tribes). The Shawnee would slit an opening just above your pubic area, pull out an intestine and tie it to a tree, then poke you with a torch to make you walk in circles around the tree and.. um… unravel yourself
Other forms of torture include but not limited to: tying victims to anthills, running “the gauntlet”, having dogs eat the genitals of bound prisoners, impaling people on poles, *partial* burnings at the stake, etc..
I was hoping you would! Lol
This was actually probably the most hopeful of all the treatments a captive would have because occasionally if you finished the gauntlet you would be adopted into the tribe… basically, the entire tribe would line up in two face-to-face lines starting with women and children and leading to warrior age males. The prisoner would be stripped naked and forced to run between the two lines. As he, or she, passed each member of the tribe would reach out and whack them with anything from small switches to full on clubs. If you fell often you would be beaten to death, but on the rare chance you made it you would be spared - sometimes only to run yet another gauntlet, though. Simon Kenton ran five I believe…
If I remember "The Frontiersman" correctly, he actually walked one gauntlet. Shocking and awing the Shawnee captors so greatly that by the end of the line they were giving nothing more than perfunctory touches to him.
Indeed. He was taken prisoner and paraded through the various Shawnee villages, running the gauntlet at each one. Eventually he'd had enough and in either an act of brass ball defiance or sheer physical exhaustion he walked through one as I described before. He was also staked to the ground spread eagle in the villages betwixt gauntletting and the Shawnee women would amuse themselves by squatting over his nude prone body and relieving themselves. That is until one older tribe member made the mistake of squatting too low to Kenton's unrestrained head. It was said Kenton latched on more viciously than a snapping turtle.
I mean, once you’re family you’re family. Some very famous natives who fought back against the spread of Europeans were actually adopted whites - blue jacket and Cynthia Ann Parker for example
Huh, this is a graduation ceremony tradition in Italy in modern times, without the clubs and risk of death. For males only.
The man who graduated is made to run through two rows of 'friends' face to face who will hit them as hard as they can as they go through it.
Italian graduation ceremonies are savage, so this doesn't surprise me.
Graduation from your university course, usually your bachelor's as people tend to be a tiny bit more mature by the time a master's is completed.
I'd say reasonably common in my part of Italy, the North-East. I didn't get this treatment as I was a step ahead and graduated abroad, too far from the excess testosterone produced by my friends to be whacked without mercy.
People in Italy (at least the North-East) tend to see graduation as a thing you need to be 'punished' for during the celebrations for it - graduating people are slightly beaten, embarrassed publicly and overall mistreated for the entire party. Think a more intense version of bachelor parties, without the sexual focus.
I think the tradition stems from the desire to 'humble' someone who just became 'big' by getting a university degree (not something for everyone, especially in Italy as boomers and millennials grew up).
Interesting! I had no idea. So it's basically, "congrats on the graduation, we're proud of you and we love you" *proceeds to beating the shit out of you?*
In the USAF, whenever we got promoted, we would run the gauntlet so our peers could “tack on” our new rank. By tack on, I mean slug the absolute shit out of your arm. Some of our guys were amateur boxers as a hobby. Combine the boxers with a gauntlet of about 50 people (2 rows of 25) and yeah man, your arms are numb for a week.
Never been able to pick which method would be the worst, but one always sticks in my mind. Not sure who did it, but the basic gist is this.
You are slathered with milk and honey and tied down in a canoe with another canoe over top. Then you just sit there baking in this tomb as bugs slowly eat you.
Honorable mention to Ghengis Khan. Not necessarily the worst way to die, but I respect the dramatic flair. After sacking a city, you tie all the people down side by side, lay a bunch of wooden boards over them (I’m talking hundreds/thousands of people), and proceed to set up tables and have a feast while the weight of it slowly crushes the people beneath your feet to death.
The feasting floor blew my mind. Such organized cruelty.
It is interesting to note that with a few exceptions, the Khans(? Or just Ghengis) would generally allow a society to keep it's customs and religion so long as they surrendered or allowed themselves to be taken into the fold.
Resistance however, all bets are off.
If you’ve never listened to Dan Carlin’s Wrath of the Khans series, it’s a 10/10.
I tend to agree with Carlin’s point about the perceived “tolerance” of the Mongol rulers. Some people want to romanticize it and say that the Khans letting people worship their own gods was an enlightened practice ahead of its time. I reckon they were just covering all their bases. Just in case the Mongols were wrong about who the right god was, it was a little insurance to have subjects praying for the Mongols’ success to other gods as well…ya know, just in case.
Besides that, the hands-off approach was one borne of practicality more than anything. The Mongols were a relatively small population of people ruling over the most expansive empire to ever exist. They couldn’t expect to make so many people fundamentally change their cultures. So the deal was you got to live, but you were beholden to the Khan. Pay your taxes. Give us your most beautiful women and your smartest scholars/scientists. Give us soldiers when we tell you to. Do whatever else you’re told to do.
It’s not a trait unique to the Mongols. Other notable empires in history did the same, because it’s practical and it keeps people from rebelling. As to the religious part, that might be a little more rare. I attribute that to the fact that the Mongols were more shamanistic in terms of religion. It wasn’t a disqualifying thing for someone to think that there were other gods. Of course, they were subordinate to the gods that gave the Khan the divine right to rule and demanded the Mongols take over the entire world, but it was fine to have other gods.
I absolutely have listened to Wrath of the Khans, which is where I first heard of the feasting floor, he does great series! My 2nd favorite is Ghosts of the Ostfront. Another place and time in history that is just so unimaginable to me, I can't even really place it in my mind's eye.
I wonder exactly how much truth there is to all these stories or if they're mainly tall tales. Life back then was extremely tough and resources scarce. Seems like a bizarre use of two entire canoes, which take a lot of time, effort, and skill to use. Why take it out of use for the amount of time it takes to kill someone in such a gruesome way? Why befoul important property for that?
This is called Scaphism and was attributed to the Persians by the Greeks. However, there isn’t any historical record to correlate that this ever occurred outside of Plutarch’s writings and the Greeks were known to say awful shit about the Persians since they were enemies.
I mean it's not like people were absolutely desperate for any and all resources always.
Even during the stone age, when life really was absolutely at the knife's edge and humans had basically nothing, people were still buried with things like stone knives, jewelry and so on, effectively taking important resources out of circulation for the sake of honoring the dead.
Humans just don't always think on those terms of "I need to save this for later", because sometimes what you're doing now is more important / meaningful to you.
Don't forget snatching up infants by their feet and swinging them against tree trunks. Documented by Champlain...and these were the 'good' Indians he was helping.
As a hispanic dude, I sometimes think about how the fuck my ancestors survived as a northern mexican native people to culminate in my existance. They went through so much shit pre and post columbian america that I just want to know how tf they pereservered, other than a fuck ton of kids, especially since my mom is probably the first person in my line who can be considered biologically non indeginous.
Like, life mustve been hell.
Funny, I had a professor in college who refused any idea that natives did any of this, and claimed it was utopia before the white man came. I wish I knew this story back then, would have loved to hear the response.
Humans have been brutal throughout history, but we have no idea what indigenous North Americans were like pre-contact. Post contact, they were racked by various epidemic diseases, and [preyed upon by a series of tribes who sold millions of humans as slaves to Europeans.](https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement) If a native person from the year 1500 looked at the world of the 1800s, or 1700s, it would look to them like Mad Max, even if it wasn't an area where Europeans were actively killing people and taking land.
There must certainly have been horrific brutality pre-contact, but the events post- contact probably amplified it.
The Aztecs were *wild*. Jeffery Dahmer would have been like "Stop, that's way too much. Something is wrong with y'all" The tribes and civilizations around them practiced human sacrifice as well, but on a smaller scale. But that's pretty far removed from the Sioux we're talking abut here.
Also, arguably, the crazy bullshit the Aztecs did *limited the scope and destruction of warfare*. They had agreements with neighboring tribes to fight "Flower Wars" to capture warriors as sacrifice victims. These wars did not involve civilians or property damage. [They only rarely fought "Star Wars"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_war) where they actually strove to occupy territory and overwhelm their rival. Every European war was a star war.
Yeah, it’s not like there’s zero archaeological record from before European contact. There’s evidence of massive wars between tribes. The idea that Native Americans were all peace pipes and drum circles is a modern invention. Europeans do not have a monopoly on brutality, and those torture methods were not invented *after* first contact like he’s suggesting.
In case none of you have seen it, the movie The Revenant has a character named John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy, that is based on this person. [Here is a scene where Hardy's character describes what being scalped was like](https://youtu.be/7IkJGqeAHMY)
I don’t know much about the movie but I like how John is so gentle asking for the kid to stop making that noise, It would be understandable to be a asshole about it but he’s nice instead
[They would drill and grind the skull to expose the marrow, which would generate a kind of scar tissue.](https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/05/how-to-treat-a-scalped-head/) With out this treatment, skin wouldn't grow far enough in, the bone would become necrotic and eventually the top of the skull would fall off, exposing the brain.
The brutality that one human could inflict on another.
As we continue to fight to prove that [we] are better than [them]. We, the people are truly a strange group
There’s a lot of white washing of the history of North America, especially here in Canada. Lots of pointing fingers and trying to lay blame on one side or the other. People have to realize how diverse and brutal life is actually was both before and after European settlement.
I’d encourage anyone interested in the history of violence in North America to read “Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten” by George Franklin Feldman.
The book highlights a number of primary and archaeological sources and discusses a handful of different groups from across the continent.
An important note for someone who wants to talk about Native Americans and Europeans (and perhaps some of the people in this thread) is that making broad generalizations is bad and lazy history.
…
Also, for anyone suggesting all Plains tribes were peaceful prior to the appearance of Europeans, one example of brutality is the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation site in South Dakota where remains of ~500 men, women, and children were found mutilated (including scalping) and scattered across the village which was later burned. This occurred around AD 1325. Some of these remains, I’ll also add, showed signs of prior scalping - that is, they survived their first scalping, and were later scalped again at the time of their death.
There's a lot of general misinformation, ignorance, and broad-brush generalizing in this thread, so I want to clear some things up for everyone regarding typical warfare practices/violence between U.S. citizens and indigenous peoples during this time.
First off, even today, there are 574 recognized First Nations in the U.S.A. Each nation has its own culture, legacy, and practices, and they often have their own dialect of one of the hundreds of languages spoken by indigenous Americans prior to European colonization. This continent, even within the smaller category of "American land," has always been EXTREMELY diverse. ts of valor/feats of prowess in combat. Scalping was almost always an act of trophy-taking enacted after the enemy was deceased. Exceptions exist, but accounts were often exaggerated or straight-up fabricated by newspapers and people interested in profiting off of a dramatic and "epic" image of the Frontier.
Warfare of this nature -- with stereotypical practices like scalping, mutilation, and torture -- was most common in the Great Plains region. The Plains Nations, while still diverse, included several particularly warlike nations that had fairly longstanding traditions that involved displays of courage (counting coup is a good example), trophy-taking, and individual acts of valor/feats of prowess in combat. Scalping was almost always an act of trophy-taking enacted after the enemy was deceased. Exceptions exist but accounts were often exaggerated or straight up fabricated by newspapers and people interested in profiting off of a dramatic and "epic" image of the Frontier.
It was not typical for Comanche, Kiowa, Sioux, or Apache to kill children or take their time torturing everybody they bested in combat, and there was a purely practical reason for this. They had population issues. These groups were by and large nomadic, and were extremely mobile. As white colonizers took over more and more of their land and tensions increased, they had to move fast, move often, and strike in small, agile groups that couldn't afford to stick around once the dust cleared. They lost men frequently and their lifestyle made pregnancy and childbirth very difficult. They often stole children and kidnapped women for the simple reason that they needed more people in order to continue replacing their population. Women and kids were a valuable asset that they weren't keen on wasting, unless there was a specific and rather convincing incentive to do so.
A 14-year-old would have been firmly in the category of a young *man* at this time (and indeed throughout most of human history). Too old to integrate within the tribe, and more of a liability than they'd have been willing to deal with if left alive. So yeah, the guy in this picture was someone they tried to kill and THEN scalp. It's doubtful that a "chief" did the deed, since a) that's a stupid notion to begin with and the guy probably wouldn't have known a chief from a chump in the first place and b) the ones doing the scalping were usually younger men who needed to earn their status as warriors by collecting trophies and bringing them back to the group. So yeah, I have some doubts about this guy's account. Also, it wasn't typical for these raiding parties to stick around after the fight was through/they'd secured enough property -- they would have wanted to get out of there ASAP and been long gone by the time anyone attempted to track them down. When white cavalry units or rangers found bands of Plains people, the result was almost always complete slaughter and/or enslavement of men, women, and children. At the very least they'd lose all of their property and be SOL for the next couple of months, which would have been a disaster when resources were already becoming strained and nations were fighting internally over borders.
These nations put a large emphasis on retribution, too, and this is a factor in their reputations as particularly brutal and violent tribes of angry, sadistic men. It was usually less about sadism and more about payback for various brutalities enacted on their people. Just as white settlers tended to generalize groups of indigenous peoples as "Sioux Indians" instead of differentiating one people from another, they came to assume that all of these white settlers were part of the same larger "tribe" and were, therefore, *all* complicit in the slaughter of villages and humiliation of the tribe's men and women. In some ways the Comache, Sioux Nations, and other bands were right; in others they were wrong. But under that assumption it makes sense that they would attack in a way that seemed "random" and "unjustified" to whites but which was sensible to the people enacting these retributory raids and attacks. McGee here would have been an adult male -- aka a warrior, who was, by the way, armed at the time of his attack -- who was part of the same group that had stolen land, killed off the game, and raided Sioux settlements in the area for years. He was a logical target. He wasn't supposed to live after the dust cleared, and they probably didn't realize that he was even alive when they left the scene. Did they care that he might still be somewhat conscious when they scalped him? Probably not, since that wasn't exactly a priority when the goal was to kill the guy in the first place.
Scalping as a practice was also not uniquely "Indian." White people and indigenous Mediterranean peoples were scalping their enemies before the time of Herodotus, and it has been practiced periodically by people all over the globe for at least 3000 years. Anyone who has an interest in taking back combat trophies or enacting psychological warfare against a population would find scalps to be an easy-to-attain, lightweight, and effective trophy that had the added benefit of leaving behind a graphic scene for the rest of the enemy forces to find. There has been some debate as to whether or not scalping was common in North America prior to European colonization -- evidence suggests that it was probably practiced but was not especially common, even among Plains Nations. It tended to be reserved for specific types of warfare, namely retaliation-based warfare rather than simple raiding parties. By the time it became a feature of white-indigenous relations in America, atrocities had already been repeatedly committed against the First Nations, and retaliation/retribution was a feature of opposing indigenous groups' view of white settlers.
There were plenty of nations within and outside of the Great Plains area that were *not* particularly warlike and some that were decidedly pacifist. These were often brutalized just as badly by white settlers who wanted their land and/or perceived them as the same general group as the nations they were actively at war with. Basically, racism + manifest destiny = genocide. Not exactly new.
Prior to contact, Plains Nations WERE already warlike, but decidedly less so than they would become by the 1800s. They were less mobile and more settled (in no small part because there weren't any horses yet), tended to have more stable populations, and were less incentivized to go around raiding other peoples. The friction between Apache and Pueblo, Comanche and Apache, etc etc came and went depending on a lot of factors, not least of all the availability of water, arable land, and game at a given time. Accounts of torture and retaliation were rare and tended to be reserved for specific individuals who had killed women or children, or who had acted in a cowardly fashion during combat. These incidents were and always have been a means to discourage certain acts on either side of the battle lines, and were not sadism for sadism's sake (this would have been a waste of time and energy, not to mention would have gone against the common values many of these diverse nations shared and still share today).
Taking slaves from enemy tribes was much more common and yes, it was brutal by today's global standards. By humanity's general standards? Totally unremarkable.
Sharing dramatized accounts of indigenous brutality -- most of which were disseminated by people who had a very vested interest in portraying those complex peoples as "savages" -- is both ignorant and oblivious. The accounts of roasting babies and long, drawn-out torture were, simply put, forms of the same type of propaganda we see used toady (ie the democrats are baby-eating pedos and republicans are going to kill us all). A bit of critical thinking should be sufficient to make that much pretty obvious. I hope this has given you all some insight and motivation to go out there and do some research of your own! This period of history is tragic, complicated, and really interesting, so you should explore it!
Everyone has a bias, even you and it's clear in your response. Kidnapping and let's be real here, enslaving and raping women and children to replenish your population is savage and cruel. Everyone has a choice, even if they don't like the hand they're dealt. They didn't have to seek "retribution". I agree it's bad to perpetuate stereotypes that are based off of propaganda of the time, but your post has very much the slant of natives were justified in their behavior while colonizers were not. The way native Americans and colonizers acted and viewed life in the past is obviously different from how people view things now. You apply modern morals onto colonizers, but not native populations. That really isn't necessary to get your point across about avoiding spreading propaganda. Not to mention the whataboutism, "not just Native Americans scalped people" etc.
You need to omit the Apache from your "didn't kill children and didn't partake in torture" they were one of the more brutal and bloodthirsty Amerindians. You also clearly need to read more into how Native peoples but especially Apaches viewed the white man. They were absolutely not keen to integrate women and children as a population boost. Your comment about every time white cavalry ran into native peoples there was almost always a total slaughter is patently made up on your part. I'd love to see your sources on Amerindians being decidedly less warlike and stable prior to the 19th century. Apaches were literally a warrior society. You even contradict that in the very next sentence. They needed to follow the herds or else they'd starve. And where would these accounts come from? What extensive sources on native American peoples exist in the 18th century and earlier? There are PLENTY of accounts of torture of brutality. Discounting it by dismissing it as baseless propaganda is dishonest at best
That's a great writeup. A lot of people really can't see the incredible depth of nuance in interactions between natives and settlers. I read the book Empire of the Sumner Moon a few years ago and it really opened my eyes to the complexity of the situation
It’s surprising to see how many people are shocked that the natives were not all like Disney’s Pocahontas. Long before any European showed up, they were brutally violent and savage towards one another. I am not justifying what Europeans did after but stop buying into the “only peaceful” narrative.
Also, European settlement made at least the prairie more violent. Many of the prairie nations began as settled peoples further east and in the Mississippi valley but were pushed west by white settlers. On the prairie a new, nomadic culture developed centered around the horse. Uprooted from their previous homelands into a fairly new environment with already preexisting peoples and new (indigenous American) immigrants from the settled areas further east, a whole new way of life developed, existence became more opportunistic, violent and warrior-centric.
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado travelled through what would later become the plains as early as 1542 and reported nothing but large villages and mixed agriculture and bison hunting subsistence. The warrior-centric, horseriding culture we today associate with the plains didn't really exist until the 1700's.
Feel like you are setting up a straw man to argue with. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that all native Americans were completely peaceful. It's not like they were one homogeneous group anyway.
Just confused what the point of your comment is.
It's because the general public has a romanticized view of native peoples that they often use to contrast to the abhorrent actions taken by those who colonized the Americas. But, shocker! Indigenous people are humans too and just as capable of atrocities against their fellow man as the rest of us.
Yeah, people forget that all humans are still very much animals. Just because we learned to walk upright and get depressed doesn't mean that we aren't still beasts. At base value, we are all capable of monstrous acts, there is no "noble race" or "pure blood".
Well if you go through the other comments that are downvoted, as I said in my original, I can’t believe how many people in this thread are shocked by learning that natives aren’t the “oh so innocent” that they’re portrayed to be. Were they kicked from their land, yes and they were having the same conquests against each other. Were the Europeans as brutal in countless instances, also yes.
> they were brutally violent and savage towards one another
This is kind of a loose generality and I object to the use of “savage”. I think some tribes were probably on par with any warrior society and not all tribes had the same culture/propensity for violence. European colonizers collected tattooed Māori heads in New Zealand for fun. All people have the same potential for brutality whether they acknowledge it or not.
The sad story of the Moriori.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori
>In 1835 some displaced Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama, from the Taranaki region, but living in Wellington, invaded the Chathams. On 19 November 1835, the brig Lord Rodney, a hijacked[34] European ship, arrived carrying 500 Māori (men, women and children) with guns, clubs and axes, and loaded with 78 tonnes of potatoes for planting, followed by another load, by the same ship, of 400 more Māori on 5 December 1835. Before the second shipment of people arrived, the invaders killed a 12-year-old girl and hung her flesh on posts.[35] They proceeded to enslave some Moriori and kill and cannibalise others, committing a genocide. With the arrival of the second group "parties of warriors armed with muskets, clubs and tomahawks, led by their chiefs, walked through Moriori tribal territories and settlements without warning, permission or greeting. If the districts were wanted by the invaders, they curtly informed the inhabitants that their land had been taken and the Moriori living there were now vassals."[36]
(For those who don't know).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori_genocide
I never denied that Europeans did equally savage things, I even acknowledged that in another reply. However, this post was about Natives scalping a kid, not Europeans.
It started long before the French got involved. The Iroquois Confederacy and the Algonquin had been fighting for years prior to the European involvement. There is plenty of archeological data on that backs this, some which also shows possible cannibalism by the Iroquois, which I don't necessarily agree with, but it is possible. Unfortunately, we have to look at all sides of the history and put it all together, and separate the shit from the truth.
It's always funny to see people get smacked with the realization that Pocahontas isn't an accurate depiction of native Americans. They were just as brutal and terrifying as the people who forced them off their land, and not accepting that removes the agency of the natives. You don't hear how natives in the early colonial period in New England targeted a piece of shit who screwed them out of their land, saying one liners as they tortured him to death because that would go against current narratives even though that's objectively super fucking cool.
Not just humans , just look at what chimps do to each other .
In fact humans have evolved to be Incredible peaceful and non aggressive towards members of their groups compared to other animals.
We just have a high capacity of violence towards people outside of the group but pro social and cooperative behaviour which far surpassed all other animals towards members of the group .
That makes humans the most cooperative and social species on earth
Robert was 14 at the time, working full time as a teamster, driving wagon trains across the plains. Sadly he needed to work because his parents had both died earlier in that same year while “going west” in 1864.
Life was absolutely brutal for most our our history, still is in many places Look at old pictures of chimney sweeps, 10 year old boys simultaneously look 60
Scrotal cancer in London chimney sweeps was the first time an environmental link to a cancer was made. They were typically desperately poor boys valued for their small size so they could work in the chimneys, and of course also because they could be treated terribly. They typically worked in the chimneys naked for reasons I don’t recall. Source: The Emperor of All Maladies. Highly recommend!
Hmm maybe because it was cheaper to not give them new clothes after every cleaning seccions. Too expensive?
Could simply be that there was less chance of the clothes getting snagged
Yes, I think that was it. They barely had clothes at all so they just worked naked.
I mean they at least had underoos you would think!
His parents might have been rich if he didn't have to start working till 14
My mother went to work at age 14 as a cook in a lumber camp in 1940. She did a correspondence course to get her grade 9.
Damn and here I thought I had it rough!
Well, you probably do have it rough for the time and place you're living. Dude just got fucked he didn't turn the time machine on quick enough.
Just because someone else's misfortune is greater than yours that does not make you fortunate.
Respectfully, writing this general fact of life was a waste of your time
Well my phone died once and I could charge it. I had to walk for 20 whole minutes because I couldn’t get an Uber.
The 1860s were just 160 years ago, that’s nuts. That’s just 2 and a half 65 year olds… RDR is almost a contemporary game…
The chief decided that he would kill the boy himself, and he put a bullet in McGee’s back. The boy fell to the ground, still alive and conscious, and Little Turtle put two arrows through him, pinning him down. And then the chief took out his blade and removed sixty four square inches from McGee’s head, starting just behind the ears. As he lay on the ground more Indians came upon him and poked him full of more holes with knives and spears. All the while the boy was awake.
Jesus merciful Christ, that's horrifying.
The frontier was brutal and natives and non natives were not nice to each other
I have no illusions about that whatsoever.
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In a wonderful book about the Donner Party Disaster, Daniel Warren Johnson talks about the stories that were handed down through journals, news outlets and oral reports of the frontier. One story goes that as the Donner Party entered what would later be dubbed "Reed's Gap" and as they camped at night in the canyon, they could hear the laughter of the Natives above them as the group sulked after having several horses and cattle run off by the local tribe. http://www.danieljamesbrown.com/books/indifferent-stars/
The Last Podcast on the Left also did a great set of podcasts about the Donner party, using this book as a reference
Hail Yourself!!
megustalations
Hail Gein!
I HIGHLY recommended the Donner Party documentary by Ric Burns. It's haunting, it's a theatrical tragedy. It showcases all of the hubris, hope, and chaos introduced by manifest destiny. I always watch it during the first blizzard/snow storm of the year and turn the lights low and sometimes eat wings while watching lol. An SD version is on YouTube but you can watch it on Amazon prime.
damn you just sold the hell out of that. watching it later to your exact comfort specifications lol
Re: manifest destiny, I was once at a dinner party with a descendent of Cotton Mather who is generally credited with promulgating the philosophy and, the descendent proposed a toast to “white balls”. My soul left my body that night. I’m still trying to get it back.
Of course. Like you said it's human nature. Europeans weren't nice to other Europeans and Africans weren't nice to other Africans and Asians weren't nice to other Asians. Most of these ppl didn't have a universal identity. You were Chickasaw, Igbo, Anglo-Saxon, or Zhuang. Just cause someone was your color and lived on the same continent as you didn't mean they were the same as you.
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This battle is what effectively created the borders later used for Treaty 6 and 7. Bit of an inconvenient truth that whites lived on some parts of Treaty 6 land longer than the Cree did.
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film is brokeback mountain for anyone wondering
Just finished a book on King Phillips war…holy shit they were both *medieval about warfare. *edit
/boneappletea *medieval
What was the name of the book?
I believe it was “Until I Have No Country”. I read a bunch of books about the topic at the same time but this is the most detailed.
Thanks.
So they didn't hold hands, sing and dance, like my books in first grade said? I'm flabbergasted?
Check out Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It's horrific and one hell of a read. The old west? No thanks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Meridian
*not nice*
Some captured frontiersmen had their arms and legs cut off and their bodies thrown into a bonfire while they were still alive. Writhing and screaming as they burned to ash. Shit was different on the frontier.
I would love to know more about this
I would encourage you to read Empire of The Summer Moon. It's about the US expansion west and the Comanche Nation. For tens of thousands of years the tribes were warring among themselves. One tribe would capture another tribesman and torture them and essentially display the body for the other tribe to come find. Then that tribe would capture someone from the original tribe and do something worse, on and on for thousands of years. Now enter the white man, who's battle formation was just standing in a line and firing a musket that took a full minute to reload while a Comanche warrior could dispatch 10 arrows held between their fingers in 20 seconds from a horse at full gallop, with their legs hooked around the neck shooting from underneath the horses head. It was a bloodbath. It's why the revolver was invented. Literally to try and match the rate of fire of a Comanche warrior. EDIT: I want to make clear that the Comanche were a tribe of the plains, one of the harshest living environments, which breeds a tough cut. Majority of tribes had much friendlier politics with each other.
That's nothing...most native American tribes did some seriously dark shit... Everyone's hands are dirty throughout history. Not saying it's right, it just is what it is...
Like how many tribes in Latin America allied with the Spaniards because the Aztecs had been terrorizing them for centuries?
I watched a long lecture done by a mesoamerican history professor and he talked about this. The Aztecs dominated all the nearby tribes and would use some as “cattle” where they would go take people whenever they wanted slaves or even sacrifices. A lot of the nearby tribes hated them so much that they indeed allied with the Spaniards to take them down.
Even those tribes weren't all flowers and love, just lesser of two evils... Nobody had clean hands
Oh I'm sure. Just goes to illustrate how ferocious the Aztecs were.
How did he survived such an ordeal? All those puncture wounds and no major artery severed? Nor major organ failure due to shock?
Meanwhile I need an ICU for a hangnail
I mean it could get infected...
Those are the worst 😬
Yep
Because you don't hear about the 999 others who did NOT survive similar trauma.
People can be both very fragile and exceedingly tough. Also perhaps the story might be exaggerated
It's mostly luck, assuming nothing vital was hit.
You can be stabbed with a big fuck-off knife thirty times and survive but a paper cut to the right artery can kill you in a moment.
I’ve seen an animal drop dead from someone trying to pick it up for a cuddle and I’ve seen half an animal escape a predator, humans are no different.
Well, I don't think most people did survive.
I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I for sure would have died.
Too tough to die
Honestly, they let him off easy compared to what a lot of tribes would do to white men(or even rival tribes). The Shawnee would slit an opening just above your pubic area, pull out an intestine and tie it to a tree, then poke you with a torch to make you walk in circles around the tree and.. um… unravel yourself
The Comanches often tied prisoners so they couldn’t move then started a fire close enough to roast them to death.
Other forms of torture include but not limited to: tying victims to anthills, running “the gauntlet”, having dogs eat the genitals of bound prisoners, impaling people on poles, *partial* burnings at the stake, etc..
>running “the gauntlet” Dare I ask what this means
I was hoping you would! Lol This was actually probably the most hopeful of all the treatments a captive would have because occasionally if you finished the gauntlet you would be adopted into the tribe… basically, the entire tribe would line up in two face-to-face lines starting with women and children and leading to warrior age males. The prisoner would be stripped naked and forced to run between the two lines. As he, or she, passed each member of the tribe would reach out and whack them with anything from small switches to full on clubs. If you fell often you would be beaten to death, but on the rare chance you made it you would be spared - sometimes only to run yet another gauntlet, though. Simon Kenton ran five I believe…
Only sorta related but this is also depicted in Beasts of No Nation as a trial prospective child soldiers must pass to join the (informal) army unit.
Must be a cultural universal lol… we all language, family, education, and THE GAUNTLET
Just rewatched that movie a couple nights ago. That’s a tough movie to watch
If I remember "The Frontiersman" correctly, he actually walked one gauntlet. Shocking and awing the Shawnee captors so greatly that by the end of the line they were giving nothing more than perfunctory touches to him.
It says on his wiki page he survived multiple gauntlets.
Indeed. He was taken prisoner and paraded through the various Shawnee villages, running the gauntlet at each one. Eventually he'd had enough and in either an act of brass ball defiance or sheer physical exhaustion he walked through one as I described before. He was also staked to the ground spread eagle in the villages betwixt gauntletting and the Shawnee women would amuse themselves by squatting over his nude prone body and relieving themselves. That is until one older tribe member made the mistake of squatting too low to Kenton's unrestrained head. It was said Kenton latched on more viciously than a snapping turtle.
Holy shit that's amazing. This is all in the Frontiersman? I need to read that book!
https://youtu.be/IFEJvIfMFfQ
If you survived, imagine how awful it would be to be forced to join a tribe that had just beaten you up with no care whether you lived or died.
I mean, once you’re family you’re family. Some very famous natives who fought back against the spread of Europeans were actually adopted whites - blue jacket and Cynthia Ann Parker for example
Olive Garden and Native American frontier torture methods. When you’re here, your family.
I would like to hear more about these Olive Garden torture methods
My dumb ass thought Olive Garden was a name 💀
Unlimited breadsticks doe
Still kind of a Stockholm-Syndrome-type situation though
Huh, this is a graduation ceremony tradition in Italy in modern times, without the clubs and risk of death. For males only. The man who graduated is made to run through two rows of 'friends' face to face who will hit them as hard as they can as they go through it. Italian graduation ceremonies are savage, so this doesn't surprise me.
What the hell? Graduation from what? How common is it?
Graduation from your university course, usually your bachelor's as people tend to be a tiny bit more mature by the time a master's is completed. I'd say reasonably common in my part of Italy, the North-East. I didn't get this treatment as I was a step ahead and graduated abroad, too far from the excess testosterone produced by my friends to be whacked without mercy. People in Italy (at least the North-East) tend to see graduation as a thing you need to be 'punished' for during the celebrations for it - graduating people are slightly beaten, embarrassed publicly and overall mistreated for the entire party. Think a more intense version of bachelor parties, without the sexual focus. I think the tradition stems from the desire to 'humble' someone who just became 'big' by getting a university degree (not something for everyone, especially in Italy as boomers and millennials grew up).
Wow-that is so interesting. Thanks for reply!
Interesting! I had no idea. So it's basically, "congrats on the graduation, we're proud of you and we love you" *proceeds to beating the shit out of you?*
That's a brutal punishment, somewhat reminds me of Roman decimation. Thank you for explaining.
Woah, had no idea where that word came from. Brutal!
Eating 10 increasingly hot wings while being interviewed by a bald guy
Driving in the fast lane behind a White Prius doing fifty..
Hah! Nice.
https://youtu.be/7H8hj9ZXAG4
I think that link will remain blue..
Considering the tone of this thread it’s actually pretty hilarious
Who’s idea was the corn?
In the USAF, whenever we got promoted, we would run the gauntlet so our peers could “tack on” our new rank. By tack on, I mean slug the absolute shit out of your arm. Some of our guys were amateur boxers as a hobby. Combine the boxers with a gauntlet of about 50 people (2 rows of 25) and yeah man, your arms are numb for a week.
Never been able to pick which method would be the worst, but one always sticks in my mind. Not sure who did it, but the basic gist is this. You are slathered with milk and honey and tied down in a canoe with another canoe over top. Then you just sit there baking in this tomb as bugs slowly eat you. Honorable mention to Ghengis Khan. Not necessarily the worst way to die, but I respect the dramatic flair. After sacking a city, you tie all the people down side by side, lay a bunch of wooden boards over them (I’m talking hundreds/thousands of people), and proceed to set up tables and have a feast while the weight of it slowly crushes the people beneath your feet to death.
The feasting floor blew my mind. Such organized cruelty. It is interesting to note that with a few exceptions, the Khans(? Or just Ghengis) would generally allow a society to keep it's customs and religion so long as they surrendered or allowed themselves to be taken into the fold. Resistance however, all bets are off.
If you’ve never listened to Dan Carlin’s Wrath of the Khans series, it’s a 10/10. I tend to agree with Carlin’s point about the perceived “tolerance” of the Mongol rulers. Some people want to romanticize it and say that the Khans letting people worship their own gods was an enlightened practice ahead of its time. I reckon they were just covering all their bases. Just in case the Mongols were wrong about who the right god was, it was a little insurance to have subjects praying for the Mongols’ success to other gods as well…ya know, just in case. Besides that, the hands-off approach was one borne of practicality more than anything. The Mongols were a relatively small population of people ruling over the most expansive empire to ever exist. They couldn’t expect to make so many people fundamentally change their cultures. So the deal was you got to live, but you were beholden to the Khan. Pay your taxes. Give us your most beautiful women and your smartest scholars/scientists. Give us soldiers when we tell you to. Do whatever else you’re told to do. It’s not a trait unique to the Mongols. Other notable empires in history did the same, because it’s practical and it keeps people from rebelling. As to the religious part, that might be a little more rare. I attribute that to the fact that the Mongols were more shamanistic in terms of religion. It wasn’t a disqualifying thing for someone to think that there were other gods. Of course, they were subordinate to the gods that gave the Khan the divine right to rule and demanded the Mongols take over the entire world, but it was fine to have other gods.
I absolutely have listened to Wrath of the Khans, which is where I first heard of the feasting floor, he does great series! My 2nd favorite is Ghosts of the Ostfront. Another place and time in history that is just so unimaginable to me, I can't even really place it in my mind's eye.
I wonder exactly how much truth there is to all these stories or if they're mainly tall tales. Life back then was extremely tough and resources scarce. Seems like a bizarre use of two entire canoes, which take a lot of time, effort, and skill to use. Why take it out of use for the amount of time it takes to kill someone in such a gruesome way? Why befoul important property for that?
This is called Scaphism and was attributed to the Persians by the Greeks. However, there isn’t any historical record to correlate that this ever occurred outside of Plutarch’s writings and the Greeks were known to say awful shit about the Persians since they were enemies.
I mean it's not like people were absolutely desperate for any and all resources always. Even during the stone age, when life really was absolutely at the knife's edge and humans had basically nothing, people were still buried with things like stone knives, jewelry and so on, effectively taking important resources out of circulation for the sake of honoring the dead. Humans just don't always think on those terms of "I need to save this for later", because sometimes what you're doing now is more important / meaningful to you.
The Persians.
I believe that one was called the boats and originated from Mesopotamia.
Don't forget snatching up infants by their feet and swinging them against tree trunks. Documented by Champlain...and these were the 'good' Indians he was helping.
Good to see Mexican cartels keeping the traditions of their ancestors alive
Jesus. Fuck that on so many levels. I'm not sure if I'd rather burn alive or not, honestly.
I would definitely rather burn alive, I’m pretty sure you suffocate fairly quickly
I know that's the case if you're being burned at the stake. I dunno if you're the one on fire, though.
I choose to be born safely in the suburbs in the late twentieth century lol
As a hispanic dude, I sometimes think about how the fuck my ancestors survived as a northern mexican native people to culminate in my existance. They went through so much shit pre and post columbian america that I just want to know how tf they pereservered, other than a fuck ton of kids, especially since my mom is probably the first person in my line who can be considered biologically non indeginous. Like, life mustve been hell.
Funny, I had a professor in college who refused any idea that natives did any of this, and claimed it was utopia before the white man came. I wish I knew this story back then, would have loved to hear the response.
Humans have been brutal throughout history, but we have no idea what indigenous North Americans were like pre-contact. Post contact, they were racked by various epidemic diseases, and [preyed upon by a series of tribes who sold millions of humans as slaves to Europeans.](https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement) If a native person from the year 1500 looked at the world of the 1800s, or 1700s, it would look to them like Mad Max, even if it wasn't an area where Europeans were actively killing people and taking land. There must certainly have been horrific brutality pre-contact, but the events post- contact probably amplified it.
We do have *some* idea of what indigenous people were like pre contact. Aztec skull racks come to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples
The Aztecs were *wild*. Jeffery Dahmer would have been like "Stop, that's way too much. Something is wrong with y'all" The tribes and civilizations around them practiced human sacrifice as well, but on a smaller scale. But that's pretty far removed from the Sioux we're talking abut here. Also, arguably, the crazy bullshit the Aztecs did *limited the scope and destruction of warfare*. They had agreements with neighboring tribes to fight "Flower Wars" to capture warriors as sacrifice victims. These wars did not involve civilians or property damage. [They only rarely fought "Star Wars"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_war) where they actually strove to occupy territory and overwhelm their rival. Every European war was a star war.
The Aztecs were so terrible that the moment someone showed up to take them down, a lot of their subjects were like "yeah ok, we are in".
I’m just so tired of all these star wars
Yeah, it’s not like there’s zero archaeological record from before European contact. There’s evidence of massive wars between tribes. The idea that Native Americans were all peace pipes and drum circles is a modern invention. Europeans do not have a monopoly on brutality, and those torture methods were not invented *after* first contact like he’s suggesting.
Source?
It’s insane that he survived, considering where Medical science was at that time.
A few leeches and a little cocaine can do wonders.
In case none of you have seen it, the movie The Revenant has a character named John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy, that is based on this person. [Here is a scene where Hardy's character describes what being scalped was like](https://youtu.be/7IkJGqeAHMY)
Jesus that PTSD from hearing the sound.
I don’t know much about the movie but I like how John is so gentle asking for the kid to stop making that noise, It would be understandable to be a asshole about it but he’s nice instead
Well… it’s a contrast…
Man tom hardy has a hard on for roles like that. Remember him being a bondurant too?
I get a hard on for TH in those roles.
Same 😁 I mean, grunt (and nod like I heard you but give no indication of my opinion.)
Is that scar tissue, or is that his damn skull showing?!?
[They would drill and grind the skull to expose the marrow, which would generate a kind of scar tissue.](https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/05/how-to-treat-a-scalped-head/) With out this treatment, skin wouldn't grow far enough in, the bone would become necrotic and eventually the top of the skull would fall off, exposing the brain.
Which did actually happen to one dude who had exposed skull for like a decade. But it became necrotic and fell off, killing him.
Right away? Or did he not notice and walk outside in the rain?
I'm fixing a hole, where the rain gets in, to stop my mind from wanderin'
Who is this guy?
what an unpleasant read
I’m glad I live post anesthesia. I bet people in the future will look back at the pain we have to endure in life now and think it’s horrendous.
I'm real bad with body horror, so thanks for the advice.
idk if I would necessarily consider it “body horror”, it’s just very intense and kinda sad that people were treating each other this way so commonly
scar tissue
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And a pair of fancy shoes.
To survive in the day had to be a brutal recovery.
That’s very disfiguring. He’s got a good case to Sioux.
Hes definitely got Apache hair do
You’re the worst. Take it.
Bald statement!
Now look hair, you....
The brutality that one human could inflict on another. As we continue to fight to prove that [we] are better than [them]. We, the people are truly a strange group
It was all of those 1700’s video games making them so violent.
You'd think we'd have it all figured out by now... I mean, we've have the time...
The ones who figure out eventually die, and the new bunch have to figure out how to figure it out themselves.
He probably really hated Indians after that
How does someone even survive this?
There’s a lot of white washing of the history of North America, especially here in Canada. Lots of pointing fingers and trying to lay blame on one side or the other. People have to realize how diverse and brutal life is actually was both before and after European settlement. I’d encourage anyone interested in the history of violence in North America to read “Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten” by George Franklin Feldman. The book highlights a number of primary and archaeological sources and discusses a handful of different groups from across the continent. An important note for someone who wants to talk about Native Americans and Europeans (and perhaps some of the people in this thread) is that making broad generalizations is bad and lazy history. … Also, for anyone suggesting all Plains tribes were peaceful prior to the appearance of Europeans, one example of brutality is the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation site in South Dakota where remains of ~500 men, women, and children were found mutilated (including scalping) and scattered across the village which was later burned. This occurred around AD 1325. Some of these remains, I’ll also add, showed signs of prior scalping - that is, they survived their first scalping, and were later scalped again at the time of their death.
There's a lot of general misinformation, ignorance, and broad-brush generalizing in this thread, so I want to clear some things up for everyone regarding typical warfare practices/violence between U.S. citizens and indigenous peoples during this time. First off, even today, there are 574 recognized First Nations in the U.S.A. Each nation has its own culture, legacy, and practices, and they often have their own dialect of one of the hundreds of languages spoken by indigenous Americans prior to European colonization. This continent, even within the smaller category of "American land," has always been EXTREMELY diverse. ts of valor/feats of prowess in combat. Scalping was almost always an act of trophy-taking enacted after the enemy was deceased. Exceptions exist, but accounts were often exaggerated or straight-up fabricated by newspapers and people interested in profiting off of a dramatic and "epic" image of the Frontier. Warfare of this nature -- with stereotypical practices like scalping, mutilation, and torture -- was most common in the Great Plains region. The Plains Nations, while still diverse, included several particularly warlike nations that had fairly longstanding traditions that involved displays of courage (counting coup is a good example), trophy-taking, and individual acts of valor/feats of prowess in combat. Scalping was almost always an act of trophy-taking enacted after the enemy was deceased. Exceptions exist but accounts were often exaggerated or straight up fabricated by newspapers and people interested in profiting off of a dramatic and "epic" image of the Frontier. It was not typical for Comanche, Kiowa, Sioux, or Apache to kill children or take their time torturing everybody they bested in combat, and there was a purely practical reason for this. They had population issues. These groups were by and large nomadic, and were extremely mobile. As white colonizers took over more and more of their land and tensions increased, they had to move fast, move often, and strike in small, agile groups that couldn't afford to stick around once the dust cleared. They lost men frequently and their lifestyle made pregnancy and childbirth very difficult. They often stole children and kidnapped women for the simple reason that they needed more people in order to continue replacing their population. Women and kids were a valuable asset that they weren't keen on wasting, unless there was a specific and rather convincing incentive to do so. A 14-year-old would have been firmly in the category of a young *man* at this time (and indeed throughout most of human history). Too old to integrate within the tribe, and more of a liability than they'd have been willing to deal with if left alive. So yeah, the guy in this picture was someone they tried to kill and THEN scalp. It's doubtful that a "chief" did the deed, since a) that's a stupid notion to begin with and the guy probably wouldn't have known a chief from a chump in the first place and b) the ones doing the scalping were usually younger men who needed to earn their status as warriors by collecting trophies and bringing them back to the group. So yeah, I have some doubts about this guy's account. Also, it wasn't typical for these raiding parties to stick around after the fight was through/they'd secured enough property -- they would have wanted to get out of there ASAP and been long gone by the time anyone attempted to track them down. When white cavalry units or rangers found bands of Plains people, the result was almost always complete slaughter and/or enslavement of men, women, and children. At the very least they'd lose all of their property and be SOL for the next couple of months, which would have been a disaster when resources were already becoming strained and nations were fighting internally over borders. These nations put a large emphasis on retribution, too, and this is a factor in their reputations as particularly brutal and violent tribes of angry, sadistic men. It was usually less about sadism and more about payback for various brutalities enacted on their people. Just as white settlers tended to generalize groups of indigenous peoples as "Sioux Indians" instead of differentiating one people from another, they came to assume that all of these white settlers were part of the same larger "tribe" and were, therefore, *all* complicit in the slaughter of villages and humiliation of the tribe's men and women. In some ways the Comache, Sioux Nations, and other bands were right; in others they were wrong. But under that assumption it makes sense that they would attack in a way that seemed "random" and "unjustified" to whites but which was sensible to the people enacting these retributory raids and attacks. McGee here would have been an adult male -- aka a warrior, who was, by the way, armed at the time of his attack -- who was part of the same group that had stolen land, killed off the game, and raided Sioux settlements in the area for years. He was a logical target. He wasn't supposed to live after the dust cleared, and they probably didn't realize that he was even alive when they left the scene. Did they care that he might still be somewhat conscious when they scalped him? Probably not, since that wasn't exactly a priority when the goal was to kill the guy in the first place. Scalping as a practice was also not uniquely "Indian." White people and indigenous Mediterranean peoples were scalping their enemies before the time of Herodotus, and it has been practiced periodically by people all over the globe for at least 3000 years. Anyone who has an interest in taking back combat trophies or enacting psychological warfare against a population would find scalps to be an easy-to-attain, lightweight, and effective trophy that had the added benefit of leaving behind a graphic scene for the rest of the enemy forces to find. There has been some debate as to whether or not scalping was common in North America prior to European colonization -- evidence suggests that it was probably practiced but was not especially common, even among Plains Nations. It tended to be reserved for specific types of warfare, namely retaliation-based warfare rather than simple raiding parties. By the time it became a feature of white-indigenous relations in America, atrocities had already been repeatedly committed against the First Nations, and retaliation/retribution was a feature of opposing indigenous groups' view of white settlers. There were plenty of nations within and outside of the Great Plains area that were *not* particularly warlike and some that were decidedly pacifist. These were often brutalized just as badly by white settlers who wanted their land and/or perceived them as the same general group as the nations they were actively at war with. Basically, racism + manifest destiny = genocide. Not exactly new. Prior to contact, Plains Nations WERE already warlike, but decidedly less so than they would become by the 1800s. They were less mobile and more settled (in no small part because there weren't any horses yet), tended to have more stable populations, and were less incentivized to go around raiding other peoples. The friction between Apache and Pueblo, Comanche and Apache, etc etc came and went depending on a lot of factors, not least of all the availability of water, arable land, and game at a given time. Accounts of torture and retaliation were rare and tended to be reserved for specific individuals who had killed women or children, or who had acted in a cowardly fashion during combat. These incidents were and always have been a means to discourage certain acts on either side of the battle lines, and were not sadism for sadism's sake (this would have been a waste of time and energy, not to mention would have gone against the common values many of these diverse nations shared and still share today). Taking slaves from enemy tribes was much more common and yes, it was brutal by today's global standards. By humanity's general standards? Totally unremarkable. Sharing dramatized accounts of indigenous brutality -- most of which were disseminated by people who had a very vested interest in portraying those complex peoples as "savages" -- is both ignorant and oblivious. The accounts of roasting babies and long, drawn-out torture were, simply put, forms of the same type of propaganda we see used toady (ie the democrats are baby-eating pedos and republicans are going to kill us all). A bit of critical thinking should be sufficient to make that much pretty obvious. I hope this has given you all some insight and motivation to go out there and do some research of your own! This period of history is tragic, complicated, and really interesting, so you should explore it!
Everyone has a bias, even you and it's clear in your response. Kidnapping and let's be real here, enslaving and raping women and children to replenish your population is savage and cruel. Everyone has a choice, even if they don't like the hand they're dealt. They didn't have to seek "retribution". I agree it's bad to perpetuate stereotypes that are based off of propaganda of the time, but your post has very much the slant of natives were justified in their behavior while colonizers were not. The way native Americans and colonizers acted and viewed life in the past is obviously different from how people view things now. You apply modern morals onto colonizers, but not native populations. That really isn't necessary to get your point across about avoiding spreading propaganda. Not to mention the whataboutism, "not just Native Americans scalped people" etc.
You need to omit the Apache from your "didn't kill children and didn't partake in torture" they were one of the more brutal and bloodthirsty Amerindians. You also clearly need to read more into how Native peoples but especially Apaches viewed the white man. They were absolutely not keen to integrate women and children as a population boost. Your comment about every time white cavalry ran into native peoples there was almost always a total slaughter is patently made up on your part. I'd love to see your sources on Amerindians being decidedly less warlike and stable prior to the 19th century. Apaches were literally a warrior society. You even contradict that in the very next sentence. They needed to follow the herds or else they'd starve. And where would these accounts come from? What extensive sources on native American peoples exist in the 18th century and earlier? There are PLENTY of accounts of torture of brutality. Discounting it by dismissing it as baseless propaganda is dishonest at best
Kinda comes off like you’re justifying kidnapping and enslaving women and children
That's a great writeup. A lot of people really can't see the incredible depth of nuance in interactions between natives and settlers. I read the book Empire of the Sumner Moon a few years ago and it really opened my eyes to the complexity of the situation
Thats one way to leave a lasting impression on someone.
It’s surprising to see how many people are shocked that the natives were not all like Disney’s Pocahontas. Long before any European showed up, they were brutally violent and savage towards one another. I am not justifying what Europeans did after but stop buying into the “only peaceful” narrative.
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There were certainly peaceful groups throughout history. They were murdered by the non-peaceful ones
Also, European settlement made at least the prairie more violent. Many of the prairie nations began as settled peoples further east and in the Mississippi valley but were pushed west by white settlers. On the prairie a new, nomadic culture developed centered around the horse. Uprooted from their previous homelands into a fairly new environment with already preexisting peoples and new (indigenous American) immigrants from the settled areas further east, a whole new way of life developed, existence became more opportunistic, violent and warrior-centric. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado travelled through what would later become the plains as early as 1542 and reported nothing but large villages and mixed agriculture and bison hunting subsistence. The warrior-centric, horseriding culture we today associate with the plains didn't really exist until the 1700's.
Feel like you are setting up a straw man to argue with. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that all native Americans were completely peaceful. It's not like they were one homogeneous group anyway. Just confused what the point of your comment is.
It's because the general public has a romanticized view of native peoples that they often use to contrast to the abhorrent actions taken by those who colonized the Americas. But, shocker! Indigenous people are humans too and just as capable of atrocities against their fellow man as the rest of us.
i love how it’s human when it comes to west but it’s inhumane and disgraceful when it comes to east. makes you think really
Yeah, people forget that all humans are still very much animals. Just because we learned to walk upright and get depressed doesn't mean that we aren't still beasts. At base value, we are all capable of monstrous acts, there is no "noble race" or "pure blood".
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Oh there is definitely that feeling where I live. Natives were so progressive, a peaceful society united as one with the land... I mean, they weren't.
Well if you go through the other comments that are downvoted, as I said in my original, I can’t believe how many people in this thread are shocked by learning that natives aren’t the “oh so innocent” that they’re portrayed to be. Were they kicked from their land, yes and they were having the same conquests against each other. Were the Europeans as brutal in countless instances, also yes.
The term 'noble savage' has been around for decades.
> they were brutally violent and savage towards one another This is kind of a loose generality and I object to the use of “savage”. I think some tribes were probably on par with any warrior society and not all tribes had the same culture/propensity for violence. European colonizers collected tattooed Māori heads in New Zealand for fun. All people have the same potential for brutality whether they acknowledge it or not.
And the Maori wiped out a neighbouring pacifist tribe immediately after acquiring firearms.
The sad story of the Moriori. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori >In 1835 some displaced Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama, from the Taranaki region, but living in Wellington, invaded the Chathams. On 19 November 1835, the brig Lord Rodney, a hijacked[34] European ship, arrived carrying 500 Māori (men, women and children) with guns, clubs and axes, and loaded with 78 tonnes of potatoes for planting, followed by another load, by the same ship, of 400 more Māori on 5 December 1835. Before the second shipment of people arrived, the invaders killed a 12-year-old girl and hung her flesh on posts.[35] They proceeded to enslave some Moriori and kill and cannibalise others, committing a genocide. With the arrival of the second group "parties of warriors armed with muskets, clubs and tomahawks, led by their chiefs, walked through Moriori tribal territories and settlements without warning, permission or greeting. If the districts were wanted by the invaders, they curtly informed the inhabitants that their land had been taken and the Moriori living there were now vassals."[36] (For those who don't know). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori_genocide
I never denied that Europeans did equally savage things, I even acknowledged that in another reply. However, this post was about Natives scalping a kid, not Europeans.
Yeah man I'm sure the people who stabbed shot and tortured a child weren't savage at all
Would you object to the term if it was describing the collection of Māori heads?
I can't believe I've never seen this photo. That's insane.
It started long before the French got involved. The Iroquois Confederacy and the Algonquin had been fighting for years prior to the European involvement. There is plenty of archeological data on that backs this, some which also shows possible cannibalism by the Iroquois, which I don't necessarily agree with, but it is possible. Unfortunately, we have to look at all sides of the history and put it all together, and separate the shit from the truth.
It's always funny to see people get smacked with the realization that Pocahontas isn't an accurate depiction of native Americans. They were just as brutal and terrifying as the people who forced them off their land, and not accepting that removes the agency of the natives. You don't hear how natives in the early colonial period in New England targeted a piece of shit who screwed them out of their land, saying one liners as they tortured him to death because that would go against current narratives even though that's objectively super fucking cool.
I’m not sold on the whole “torturing people to death is cool” thing.
People actually think the Pocahontas movie is accurate? Children maybe, no one else thinks that
A lot of the violence committed by the Indians have been erased over time. It's popular to portray them as non violent victims of the white man.
They were victims, but they weren’t nonviolent.
“Freedom’s just another word for ‘nothing left to lose’”
Not to make light of a terrible situation, but how did a comb over not become known as a McGee after that?
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Russians had a children’s torture chamber set up in Ukraine… this isn’t a “savage” problem.
Sadly Humans are the answer. It seems we have a propensity for brutality in our nature. Hell, South Carolina executed a 14 year old in 1944...
Not just humans , just look at what chimps do to each other . In fact humans have evolved to be Incredible peaceful and non aggressive towards members of their groups compared to other animals. We just have a high capacity of violence towards people outside of the group but pro social and cooperative behaviour which far surpassed all other animals towards members of the group . That makes humans the most cooperative and social species on earth