It’s the summer of 1864 and a 14-year old orphan boy has been denied work at Fort Leavenworth in
Kansas. It’s a blow for him, but he soon finds a job as a teamster in a caravan taking flour to
Fort Union in New Mexico Territory. The journey, he’s aware, is one fraught with danger. On July 1,
with the wagons loaded, the caravan sets off down the perilous Santa Fe Trail.
As the days pass they run into bands of Indians, but as pioneers armed to the teeth,
they don’t lose one single man. After 18 days, close to the fort,
they set up camp at Walnut Creek. The atmosphere is tense, but there’s excitement among the men.
A big payday is soon to come. The military isn’t too far away, so the men settle down for dinner
and don’t think too much about security. Suddenly war cries fill the air. Shots are
fired as the painted faces of Brulé Sioux Indians rush around them. The swishing
sound of arrows surround the boy’s head. He watches in horror as men drop one by one.
Little Turtle, the leader, victoriously holds his arms aloft as he takes pride in
looking at the blood-stained buffalo grass. The Indians have no use for the flour. They
burn all the wagons. They steal the horses, but they want something else to take back with them.
They want scalps, and scalps they get. Some men are grievously injured after being hit
with arrows, but it’s the act of scalping that finishes them off.
Not two hours after, a commanding officer and his men from Fort Larned arrive at the scene.
Bodies are strewn everywhere, with the men noting their crooked postures, as if they’d died the
most painful death a person could experience. The commander suddenly sees movement. He walks
past the mutilated corpses to find two boys, one of them the orphan. They’ve been shot, they’ve
been mutilated, they’ve been scalped, but somehow, they’re alive. Well, one of them lasts only a few
hours after they reach the fort, but the other, a boy named Robert McGee, survives to tell the tale.
As for his appearance, let’s just say he will turn heads throughout the rest of his days.
It took sometime for him to be well enough to talk about what happened, but when he was able,
he described how he’d watched the Indians take the scalps from the men of his caravan. He said
when it came to him, Little Turtle seemed to tell his tribe that he would kill the boy himself. He
took out his gun and shot him and then fired two arrows into him. McGee, still conscious, recalled
how Little Turtle pulled out a large knife. He stooped over him, and the last thing he could
remember, was the force of the blade on his skull. Ok, so that bit of violence is a true story. Well,
we say a true story but there are different versions of it. The boy’s fate became legend,
and as things tend to happen, legends mutate. The kid definitely got scalped and that massacre
definitely happened, but there are different slants to the tale. Just to be clear, some of
the stories say the army watched from a distance as the massacre happened. That likely happened,
since the 15th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry Commander was charged with cowardice,
We found a news clipping from “The Great Bend Weekly Tribune” dated 1906,
which states “15 white men and two negroes were butchered” but the latter two guys didn’t lose
their scalps. It also says this, “Because he had no hair to lift, his head was virtually skinned,
the entire scalp being torn off after an incision had been made in the forehead around
over the ears back to the nape of the neck.” Looking at the history books, it seems it was the
Scythians who took to scalping first. Their first kingdom popped up in the 7th century BC, and they
could be found in present day Russia, Ukraine, Mongolia, some of the ‘stans’, bits of China,
and parts of eastern Europe. In the 5th and 4th centuries BC they started trading with the Greeks,
and so it is through the Greek historian named Herodotus that we know a bit about
their proclivity to skin a person’s head. According to Herodotus, a Scythian warrior
would kill a man in battle and then keep the head. That was proof of a kill, which gained
him some status. But there was more to it than that. He would cut around the skin so that when
he shook the head the skull would be released. It would still have bits of flesh stuck to the
skin, so the guy would then give it a good ole scraping with the rib of an ox. When the skin
was cleared, he might use it as a handkerchief or just tie it on to his horse as an adornment
which showed others he was a mighty warrior – especially if he had a lot of them.
As you’ll see later, drying out scalps and keeping them as a badge of honor
happened many years later in other places. We know others were scalped in Europe as far
back as the 3rd century. One skull that was excavated showed that a woman in Germany back
then was hit three times on the head and then someone cut off her scalp. Why? No one knows.
Let’s now go to England in the 11th century and the Anglo-Saxons that ruled there.
Harold II was the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings because in 1066 those formidable
Norman conquerors came over and took him out with an arrow to the eye. That’s the legend, anyway.
His father, Earl Godwin, was apparently good with a knife and was a keen proponent of scalping.
Sometimes he blinded his enemies, sometimes he made sure they’d never walk again,
but occasionally he took the scalp. An ancient manuscript proves that it should
be included in the worst ways to die. Bearing in mind what we just said about blinding and maiming,
that very old chronicle says about scalping, “No more horrible deed was done in this country.”
The son of “Æthelred the Unready”, “Alfred Aetheling” was always caught up in power
struggles. According to the manuscripts, he was captured by Earl Godwin. He was put in a boat and
sent to an island, but when he got there, they tore his eyes out and some say he was scalped.
Some monks took pity on him, but he died not long after. That’s the thing with scalping injuries,
if the initial injury doesn’t kill you, the blood loss or ensuing infection will.
As for Aetheling’s men, this was written about them in the chronicle of Florence of Worcester:
“Some he put in fetters and afterwards blinded, some he tortured by scalping and punished by
cutting off their hands and feet; many also he ordered to be sold, and he killed by various
and miserable deaths 600 men at Guildford.” Before we get back to North America,
let’s talk a bit more about scalping in general. One of the reasons people took scalps was because
heads were bulky. You can hardly take back 11 heads and show everyone how well you’d
done on the battlefield. Logistically, on horseback 11 heads just doesn’t work out.
As for how scalping was done, well, it wasn’t always an exact science and it
depended on how much of the scalp a person wanted. It also depended on how long the
person’s hair was. After someone had cut the skin with a knife or another tool,
they used the hair to pull off the scalp. It would have been hard scalping a bald man.
With a sharp enough knife and a good bit of hair to grab hold of,
the scalp would have come right off. In the Old world, they sometimes had
to use seashells for the cutting, or flint or sharp stones. Fortunately for the victim,
scalping often happened when they were already dead or very close to it.
Ok, now let’s talk about the long history of American scalping.
It’s been said before that Europeans brought scalping to North America, which is not
true in the slightest. You already know that scalping in Europe happened many centuries ago,
but Native Americans were also scalping back then. We can look at something called the “Crow Creek
Massacre.” That happened back in 1325 or thereabouts, somewhere close to the Missouri
River. Groups belonging to the Initial Coalescent culture had been fighting there for some time.
Anyway, an excavation there discovered the remains of almost 500 people. These were villagers,
and included men, women and children. Some people had had their limbs cut off,
tongues cut out, or were beheaded. 90 percent of them had been scalped, although the children's
heads were cut higher than the men and women’s. When the first explorers from Europe arrived
in the 16th century, they talked about Indians scalping Indians in parts of present day Mexico,
what is now Florida and also in Canada. In 1535, Jacques Cartier talked about how he’d
been introduced to a tribe in what’s now called Montreal. He said he was shown scalps of their
enemies drying out in the sun. In 1540, the first European expeditioner lost his scalp near
Appalachian Bay. His name was Simon Rodriguez. Then when the first British colonists arrived
in the early 17th century, they started paying native tribes to kill other tribes
that were hostile to them. Proof of a kill was a scalp. Some of the tribes had aligned with
the colonists and were doing trade with them, while others, notably the Pequot,
were not aligned. This led to the Pequot War. Then there’s the famous story of a woman named
Hannah Duston, aka, “The mother of the American tradition of scalp-hunting.” On March 15, 1697,
her town in Massachusetts was raided by around 30 men from the Abenaki tribe. 27
of those townspeople, most just kids, were killed. Duston was taken captive along with
her newborn child. The tribe swung that child by the legs against a tree and made her watch.
After that, Duston and other captives were held by another tribe and you could say not treated very
well. One night while their captors were sleeping, Duston and others attacked the tribe’s members.
Duston herself used a hatchet to kill two men, two women, and six children. She also took their
scalps as proof and after returning to friendly territory she received 25 pounds in bounty money.
Suffice to say, there was a lot of scalping going on back then. Sometimes the colonists would do
the scalping themselves, and sometimes they’d pay native tribes to do the scalping for them.
When the British and the French were fighting over parts of North America, they both paid natives for
scalps of anyone allied to the opposing side. Acts were even introduced in both countries which made
it law that bounties could be given for scalps. Meanwhile, the colonists were still fighting
the natives. In 1756, Lieutenant Governor Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, wrote in a declaration:
“130 Pieces of Eight, for the Scalp of Every Male Indian Enemy,
above the Age of Twelve Years…50 Pieces of Eight for the Scalp of Every Indian Woman,
produced as evidence of their being killed.” Paying money for scalps of course got some
entrepreneurial people thinking. Some of them robbed newly dug graves and scalped the deceased
hoping to get a bounty. There’s also evidence of church ministers putting together scalping gangs.
In an article published in The American Historical Review, it was written, “Policymakers offered
bounties for Native American heads or scalps in at least twenty-three states of their colonial,
territorial, or Mexican antecedents.” In 1763, the Scots-Irish frontiersmen
called The Paxton Boys committed an atrocity that has gone down in history.
They brutally slaughtered 20 Susquehannock men, women, and children and took their scalps,
and it was the sermons of a holy man that ignited the violence. The people who were killed had not
provoked any of the settlers at all and they’d lived peacefully with settlers in the past.
In the 1800s, the mercenary John Glanton scalped 500 Indians in Mexico and made a lot of money from
it. He was also scalped and killed himself a bit later, by a native tribe he’d been in a rivalry
with. During the American Civil war, Bloody Bill Anderson mutilated and scalped Union troops,
at least one time under the watch of a young Jesse James.
Entire families were sometimes scalped. In the 19th century, one woman and six children were
scalped by Indians in Madison County, Illinois. It’s now known as the Wood river massacre. This
was horrific, but you have to remember that during the early to mid-19th century, American troops and
gangs killed and scalped hundreds upon hundreds of natives. In 1867, the New York Times wrote that
settlers in Colorado were offering this: “$25 each to be paid for scalps with the ears on.”
When did the scalping stop in this bloody era in North American history? We’re not exactly sure,
but as late as 1864 one of the worst atrocities against native Americans happened.
This was the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. 675 men from the Third Colorado Cavalry rode into
a Cheyenne and Arapaho village and killed at least 150 people, most of them women,
children and the elderly. They mutilated the bodies and took scalps as trophies.
We’ll finish with an English railroad worker named William Thompson. In 1867, he and others
were on a train going to Nebraska. His job there was to fix a broken telegraph wire. On the way,
a group of about 30 Cheyenne attacked them. The train derailed and he and the rest in that
car were attacked. Thompson was shot in the shoulder and lost his scalp, but he survived.
As legend has it, the pain was so much he fainted, but when he came around he
saw his scalp next to him. This was usual given that scalps were used as trophies.
When help came, he was taken to a doctor who unsuccessfully tried to reattach the scalp.
By this time, his head was already dangerously infected. He ended up
taking the scalp back to England with him, but it didn’t garner much interest. Because of that,
he sent it back to the US where it stayed. It’s now in a special box
at the W. Dale Clark Library in Omaha. It’s probably the last surviving scalped scalp.
Now you need to watch, “Skinned Alive - Worst Ways to Die.” Or, have a look at…