Among the Eastern Woodland Indians of North America, as in Europe, the killing and consumption of animals seem to have provided important conceptual metaphors for certain kinds of social relationships, and vice versa. Indigenous warfare, for instance, was modelled in many respects on hunting. Among the Iroquois, hunting and war were the two principal occupations of men, and both boys and adult men practised them regularly with the use of weapons (Benn 1998: 70; Graymont 1972: 17). Training for hunting was also training for war because indigenous warmaking employed much the same weaponry, techniques and skills as the hunting and stalking of deer and other game, and this remained the case after the introduction of firearms (P.M. Malone 2000; Starkey 1998: 27; cf. Keener 1999).
At the same time, many of the Eastern Woodland peoples regarded their relationship to the game they hunted as a social relationship, rather than as a merely instrumental or utilitarian one in some narrow sense. In other words, they categorized the animals in important respects as persons, with whom they were connected by strong mutual obligations and dependencies (Hallowell 1960; Tanner 1979).
Similar conceptions seem to have been reflected also in the ways in which they related to their enemies in war. One important goal of warfare among the Huron and Iroquois, for instance, especially after their populations began to decline in the eighteenth century, was to take captives, adopting them as relatives and incorporating them into their kin groups as replacements for dead members whose loss they were mourning. Some of these adopted captives were selected to be tortured to death in public sacrificial spectacles in which they were expected to display their bravery and powers of endurance. Afterwards, the victims’ flesh or organs were consumed to acquire their strength and courage (Brandao 2000: 39–41; Richter 1983; Trigger 1990). Nevertheless, the aim in both these cases was clearly similar. It was not so much to destroy the enemy but, through processes either of nurture or consumption, to assimilate them as social persons into the victor’s kin group and so contribute to the group’s continuation.
Despite the claims of some modern-day American Indians that the British invented scalping and brought it to North America, there is ample evidence not only of scalping in American Indian warfare in pre-Columbian times, but of the collection and use of heads, hands and a wide range of other body parts as trophies (Axtell 1981; Chacon and Dye 2008; Jennings 1975: 166). Again, such practices seem to have been closely connected with the fundamental role of men as hunters of game. Human body parts brought home from raids not only were used in status rivalry and self-aggrandizing display, but also played an important role as gifts, as prestige goods exchanged between local groups as symbols of friendship or alliance. English colonists were, from the beginning, actively involved in such transactions, but understood such gifts as tribute. In fact, they enforced such a view, demanding heads and scalps from their Indian allies as acts of homage and submission (Coleman 2003; Lipman 2008).
Setting aside their other obvious differences, many European and Indian cultures at the time did share at least one fundamental characteristic: their conceptual models of violent power relations between people drew partly upon cultural domains to do with the killing, butchering and consumption of animals. Nor were the forms of violence they derived from this extended metaphor themselves especially dissimilar on the surface. It was rather that acts similar to those directed against the enemy body in kin-based American Indian tribal and clan politics were, in Europe, a part of the violence of class politics. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which these two systems of cultural symbolism came to interact and shape one another during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Although the British did not introduce scalping to North America they certainly did promote it there, and commercialized it by offering bounties to their Indian allies for the scalps of hostile Indians. At the same time, and in much the same way, indigenous practices of hunting and trapping became commercialized, even industrialized, in the fur trade. Scalp bounties drew upon the historical precedent in England of offering rewards for the heads or scalps of wolves, and so equated Indians with ferocious local wildlife (Coleman 2003). Eventually, rewards for Indian scalps were offered to anyone, not just Indians. Some colonists found that scalp hunting was more rewarding financially than farming, and adopted it as a full-time occupation.
The authorities usually burned or buried redeemed scalps to prevent fraudulent attempts to use the same scalp twice. But they sometimes kept them for display, as they did in the courthouse at Salem, whose walls were decorated with redeemed scalps until the demolition of the building in 1785 (Axtell 1981: 218). Such practices, evoking the scalp-bedecked ‘hovels’ of Onondaga, as Burke had put it, and the displays of traitors’ heads on city gates in England, seem to have drawn on both English and Indian traditions.
Although whites who scalped Indians did so principally for the bounty, some of them also seem to have acquired and kept them for status and display as personal trophies (see, for example, Benn 1998: 84–85). By the middle of the eighteenth century, scalping had become completely assimilated into European colonial culture in North America (Axtell 1981: 232; Ward 2003: 200). Or rather, it belonged to a creolized frontier culture common to many groups, whether identified by themselves or others as European settlers, Indians, ‘mixed blood’, or in some other way (R. White 1991). They dressed alike, in mixtures of Indian and European clothing, farmed and hunted in much the same ways, and depended on the same material culture. As Calloway points out, eighteenth-century Indian and European settlements in the eastern United States are often impossible to distinguish archaeologically, and what often brought groups into conflict was not that they were alien to each other. It was their similarities that caused conflict, because they were competing for the same resources (1997: 56; see also Richter 2001).
The French and British soldiers who came to North America to serve in the Seven Years’ War were trained in sieges and formal set-piece battles on open ground, the conventional forms of European warfare. Indians, on the other hand, more often employed tactics such as ambushes, sniping, or shooting from cover, rooted in the techniques of hunting deer and other game animals in woodland. European soldiers viewed these ‘skulking’ (P.M. Malone 2000) methods of fighting as dishonourable and underhand, though they eventually adopted similar techniques themselves (Calloway 1997: 102–103) or formed special units who adopted them.
An example was a military force called Rangers, which the British in North America employed specifically to hunt and fight Indians allied to the French in the Seven Years’ War. This was a militia made up of local settlers and frontiersmen, who employed many of the warfare practices and tactics of the Woodland Indians whom they fought. In particular, they specialized in a pattern of long-distance, mobile raiding rather than conventional, pitched battles. The British measured the effectiveness of the Rangers’ raids by the numbers of scalps they brought back (Grenier 2005: 130). Although they proved indispensable in helping eventually to defeat the French, British officers and regular soldiers tended to look down upon them as insubordinate semi-savages, little better than Indians themselves, because they did not fight according to the European conventions.
The ‘savagery’ of Indians seemed self-evident in practices such as torturing prisoners of war to death, or mutilating the bodies of those killed in battle and taking away parts of the body as proof of the killing. A lieutenant in a Scottish highland regiment expressed shock after his first sight of bodies treated in this way: ‘I dare say no human creature but an Indian or Canadian would be guilty of such inhumanity as to insult a dead body’ (quoted in Calloway 2008: 100). To Europeans, it must have seemed that Indian warriors were less like professional soldiers of the time, with their codes of honour and propriety, and much more akin to executioners, an ignoble and defiled trade whose task was to reduce human bodies to the level of animal carcasses (see Stuart 1999).
Nevertheless, some British and French soldiers certainly did scalp Indians, primarily because the bounties offered were sometimes substantial (Way 1999). British soldiers in the Seven Years’ War received £5, sometimes 5 guineas, for an Indian scalp, a sum representing about five months’ wages for an ordinary private (Brumwell 2002: 184–85). Similar bounties of five months’ pay for a private soldier were offered in the American forces for the scalps of Indians allied with the British in the War of 1812 (Benn 1998: 85).
Soldiers in the French, British and American revolutionary armies sometimes dressed as Indians or wore mixtures of European and Indian dress when on campaign; and by choosing particular mixtures of costume they made assertions about their identity and their intentions (Calloway 1997: 63). All the North American colonial conflicts involving France and Britain were full of incidents in which captured ‘Indians’ were said to have been exposed as ‘Whites’ after their warpaint was removed. Many of the supposedly ‘Indian’ units who fought for the French in the Seven Years’ War included Métis – part-French backwoodsmen whom the British called Canads or Canadians, and who lived, dressed and fought as Indians. Soldiers would also dress as Indians to commit atrocities (Mann 2005: 9–10, 115), not only to disguise themselves and deflect blame but also, perhaps, because this cross-dressing was felt to free the wearer inwardly from some of the formalities and constraints of conventional European war. Any man dressed as an Indian appeared to proclaim an intention not to abide by civilized rules of conduct, and could therefore be expected to be treated accordingly if he fell into enemy hands. Hence Wolfe’s famous but curiously worded order to his men in July 1759 during the siege of Quebec: ‘The general strictly forbids the inhuman practice of scalping, except when the enemy are Indians, or Canadians dressed like Indians’ (Wright 1864: 531).
These chameleon-like transformations of identity through choice of dress and body decoration were facilitated by Enlightenment understandings of race. In the eighteenth century, it was assumed that racial differences consisted largely in differences in skin colour and hair type, and that these came from external causes such as diet and climate (Eden 2001; Finch 2001). For instance, it was assumed that Africans brought to England would become white after a certain number of generations, due to exposure to English food and weather. Likewise, it was expected that a population of Europeans living in Africa would naturally become black after a certain time had passed (Wheeler 2000). So while skin colour was an important marker of difference, it signified the accidents, rather than the essence, of human physical nature. Human beings had the same capacities regardless of their type of skin or hair; these superficial features were envisaged as rather like a costume, covering a nature essentially identical in all peoples.
In North America at the time, medical experiments had been carried out on blacks to discover whether they could lose their pigmentation, for instance by being caused to sweat profusely, and there were a number of celebrated cases of spontaneous transracial metamorphosis in which a black person or an Indian had supposedly begun turning into a white person for no apparent reason. The French naturalist Buffon thought that it was the American climate that had caused Indians to become red-skinned and savage, implying that any people who lived there long enough might undergo the same transformation (Melish 2001; Sweet 2003: 271–311).
Racial identities were unstable and mutable and racial boundaries crossable, in ways that would become inconceivable in the nineteenth century. Then, European concepts of race would change radically, with a shift from ‘surface’ to ‘structure’ in conceptualizations of human physical variation (Wheeler 2000: 31–33). In the Victorian period, European soldiers serving in Africa, or United States soldiers on the American frontier, were much less likely to adopt African or American Indian costume because, by then, human types were no longer viewed as a matter simply of costumes and surfaces, but as essential, immutable difference embedded in the interior of the body. The conceptual boundaries of race would harden and become uncrossable.
It was partly these conceptualizations of racial differences that made skin and hair particularly appropriate parts of the American Indian body for eighteenth-century soldiers and settlers to collect as battle trophies. They were the surface features of the body in which racial distinctions were understood to have their locus (Shoemaker 2001). They were the parts, indeed perhaps the only parts, that could be made to signify categorical differences between Europeans and Indians, who were in other respects all too alike.
There is evidence that some European colonists developed their own variations, embellishments and elaborations of scalping during the second half of the eighteenth century. Pieces of skin were sometimes said to have been taken from dead Indians, tanned and made into leather items. In 1760, an English visitor wrote that some settlers carried tobacco pouches made from the skin of Indians (Axtell 1981: 312–13). After an attack by a militia force on an Indian community in Ohio in 1782, razor strops purportedly made from strips of the victims’ skin were sold as souvenirs in the Pittsburgh area (Mann 2005: 165). Similar events were reported during the War of Independence, most notably during the punitive expedition of 1779 led by Major General John Sullivan against the four nations of the Iroquois League that had allied themselves with the British. The only battle during this expedition took place at Newtown on 29 August 1779.
Lieutenant William Barton recorded in his journal the day after Newtown that, at ‘the request of Maj. [Daniel] Platt,’ he had ‘sent out a small party to look for some of the dead Indians,’ but that the squad ‘returned without finding them.’ Going out again around noon, they finally came across their prize and ‘skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs; one pair for the Major and the other for myself.’ … Lieutenant Rudolphus Hovenburgh also dispatched a squad, noting that of the nineteen it found dead on the ground, ‘Sm Skn. By our S. fr. Bts,’ that is, ‘Some skinned by our soldiers for boots.’ … On 31 August [a Sergeant Thomas Roberts, himself a shoemaker by trade] reported on yet another skinning party sent out in the morning which ‘found 2 Indians and Skin thear Legs and Drest them for leggins’. (Mann 2005: 86)
Again, such acts – if they did indeed occur - seem to have drawn on both European and Indian practices. On the one hand, the wearing of items made of Indians’ skin, in much the same way as Indians themselves wore scalplocks, can be understood as adaptations or extensions of scalping. On the other, it also recalled the English practices of using the tanned skin of executed murderers to make commemorative pocketbooks, court proceedings bound in human leather and similar collectibles.
Settlers sometimes attributed to Indians similar acts. The Chippewas, for example, were accused of making a tobacco pouch from the skin of the arm of a British officer in Pontiac’s War (Nester 2000: 77; Peckham 1947: 136). On another occasion, a settler killed an Indian who was using an old leather glove as a tobacco pouch, the settler claiming that it had been made from the skin of a white child (Kelsay 1986: 18).
Events similar to those following the Battle of Newtown were also reported to have taken place after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814, the final battle of the Creek War. A nineteenth-century historian was told that the Tennessean troops partially skinned the bodies of dead Indians after the battle to make reins for their horses:
They began at the lower part of the leg near the heel, and, with a knife, made two parallel incisions through the skin, about three inches or more apart, running these incisions up the leg and along the side of the back and down the other leg to the heel. The strip between these incisions was then skinned out, and the soldier then had a long strap of human skin, which he used as a bridle rein. (Quoted in Kanon 1999: 14; see also Remini 2001: 78)
In the War of 1812, a Shawnee chief called Tecumseh led an Indian confederacy which allied itself with the British in Canada, against the United States. He was killed at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813. The next day, soldiers found his body and took his clothing as souvenirs, and Kentuckian troops arriving later claimed to have scalped him and taken skin from his back and thigh, with so many of them wanting a part of his body that many ended up with small pieces ‘the size of a cent piece’ (Sugden 1985: 180). One soldier exhibited what he claimed was a strip of Tecumseh’s skin in Washington the following winter. As an old man nearly fifty years later, in 1862, another of these soldiers wrote to President Lincoln asking for the release of his grandsons, who had become prisoners of war while serving in the Confederate States Army. In his letter he wrote proudly that he had served his country as a young man by helping to kill and skin Tecumseh: ‘I hope [helped] Kill Tecumseh and hope Skin him and brot Two pieces of his yellow hide home with me to My Mother & Sweet Hart’ (Townsend 1955: 337). Some veterans of the War of 1812 seem to have kept such mementos for the rest of their lives: one of them produced what he said was a piece of Tecumseh’s skin when he was interviewed in 1886 (Sugden 1985: 180–81; Sugden 1997: 378–80).
According to a nineteenth-century Wyandot historian who interviewed Indians who had fought in this battle, the dead Indian whose body was mutilated was not Tecumseh but another whom the soldiers had mistaken for him. Moreover, he wrote, many soldiers boasted of having personally killed Tecumseh and taken parts of his body as trophies, including soldiers who could not possibly have done so.
‘I killed Tecumseh; I have some of his beard’ one would say; ‘I killed Tecumseh,’ another would clamour; ‘I have a piece of his skin to make me a razor strop!’ none of these bragadocias were in the last battle, in which the brave Chief received his mortal wound. (P.D. Clarke 1870: 115)
If Clarke’s account is accurate, many of the soldiers clearly viewed such trophy-taking as not merely acceptable but admirable. Clarke himself seems to have had no doubt that they had mutilated a dead Indian for trophies, though he denies that the victim was Tecumseh. But it is certainly possible, as he suggests, that soldiers’ claims to possess memorabilia of the death of Tecumseh were often quite fraudulent, and that many of the objects they purported to be the dead chief’s bodily relics were nothing of the sort.
Furthermore, all of these claims or reports of trophy-taking need to be understood in their historical context. In York in England, five years before the death of Tecumseh, a fortune teller called Mary Bateman was sentenced to hang for the murder of some of her clients, with the judge ordering that her body be anatomized. After she was hanged, her corpse was put on display at Leeds General Infirmary, which charged the public 3d a head to view it. Two and a half thousand people came, netting the hospital some £30. The surgeons dissected her body, sent her skin to a tannery, and distributed it in small pieces for souvenirs, in accordance with what a contemporary writer described as ‘a custom in Yorkshire’ (Rede 1831: 56). Items described as pieces of her skin were still being offered for sale as good luck charms in the Yorkshire town of Ilkely in the 1890s (Potter 1993: 163). The part of a human tongue I mentioned in the last chapter, listed in 1867 as part of a private collection of curiosities, was hers according to the collection’s catalogue.
What is particularly distinctive about settler culture in North America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is the way that collecting practices such as these, concerned with commemorating crime and punishment, were recontextualized within the cycles of atrocity and mutual reprisal in border warfare. It was as if these practices of retributive justice were taken out of the anatomy rooms of hospitals and medical schools and out of the libraries and cabinets of private collectors, and re-imagined as acts of war, a context in which they could serve as a reply to real or imagined atrocities of Indians. In this form they acquired new dimensions of meaning which their European precursors largely lacked. Besides being militarized, they also became strongly racialized and, in a certain sense, democratized.
These new features were evident in the reported treatment of the body of Tecumseh. This was not a typical act of scalping, in which the trophy is credited to one person. Rather, a large group of men claimed to have shared out small pieces of skin among themselves. In this respect, it resembled the treatment in Britain of the bodies of executed murderers such as William Burke or Mary Bateman. It expressed a collective agency. And, according to those who claimed to have carried out this act, they treated only Tecumseh’s body in this way. It was his specific identity as a notable and celebrated person that had made pieces of his skin valuable to them. The Kentucky militiamen who boasted of having scalped and mutilated him, and taken pieces of his ‘yellow hide’ home to their mothers and girlfriends, would therefore have been able to portray this behaviour in two alternative ways. On the one hand, the act they described was sufficiently similar to the practices of the Indians, including Tecumseh’s own men, that it could be made to seem an act of revenge, an indulgence in the Indians’ own savagery, as if the perpetrators were simply members of one tribe fighting another on equal terms. At the same time, it was similar enough to the conventional treatment of the body of a heinous murderer during and after anatomization in Britain and North America at the time as to appear a mere variation upon normal Euro-American judicial practices. In other words, the militiamen could just as reasonably have represented their actions as the execution of justice upon a criminal, with themselves as the state’s representatives or instruments: that is, as the effect of the power of the state, or of the law, acting through them.
Perhaps only the first of these views was available to the surviving members of Tecumseh’s confederacy. The Iroquois, for instance, certainly retaliated when they found their dead mutilated. On one occasion during the War of 1812, British officers remonstrated with some of their Indian allies for having mutilated the corpse of an American soldier. The Indians replied that they were simply reciprocating what was being done to them. As one of them put it: ‘If the Big Knives when they kill people of our color leave them without hacking them to pieces … we will follow their example’ (Benn 1998: 85).
So far, I have viewed Europe as a source of influences on frontier North America, but it is quite conceivable that the influences may not have been entirely one way. A possible example of an effect in the opposite direction occurred at the height of the Terror, when a royalist revolt broke out among the peasants in La Vendée, a département in western France. From 1793 to 1796 an exceptionally violent and brutal civil war was fought in this region with many well documented atrocities committed by both sides (D.A. Bell 2007: 179). One I want to focus on occurred in Angers around 1794, when on a number of occasions skin was said to have been removed from the bodies of dead peasants, and used to make officers’ riding breeches (Secher 1986: 134–35). A shepherd who claimed to have witnessed this recalled that the bodies ‘were skinned to the middle of the body because they cut the skin below the belt, then along each thigh down to the ankles, so that after it was removed the breeches were partially formed; all that remained was to tan and sew’ (quoted in Secher 1986: 134). Fourteen years after soldiers in the American revolutionary army reportedly flayed the legs of dead Iroquois to make officers’ riding boots and leggings, the same practice was reported among officers in the French republican army suppressing an insurgency in their own homeland. This is surely a noteworthy coincidence. To my knowledge, neither European nor North American military personnel have committed, or been accused of committing, this particular atrocity in any other conflict.
Nor was this the only similarity between the Vendée and Sullivan’s expedition against the Iroquois. The Committee for Public Safety, in ordering ‘the destruction of farms, forests and villages’ in the Vendée (Sutherland 2003: 222), closely echoed George Washington’s orders to Sullivan to achieve ‘the total destruction and devastation of their settlements’ (Mann 2005: 56). Both campaigns were aimed at the removal of the native population and the destruction of their homes and food stocks, and both have been interpreted by some historians as early modern instances of genocide. There were even similarities in the animal terminology used to refer to the Indians and the peasants, who were labelled ‘wolves’, or their children ‘wolf-cubs’ (Beckett 2001: 26; Stannard 1992: 119).
One possible explanation of these coincidences is that some French officers knew of Sullivan’s punitive expedition against the Iroquois and used it as a model. French servicemen, including infantry soldiers, had served in the War of Independence, though not, it seems, in Sullivan’s expedition and, of course, the American Revolution was viewed as a model by French radicals.
A factor that may have facilitated a transfer of North American frontier tactics to France was the underlying similarity between the practices of war in North America and European practices, not of war – for these were indeed very different from their American counterparts - but of criminal justice. It was European penal systems which bore similarities to North American frontier warfare. If French officers did in fact carry out acts such as wearing the skin of peasant rebels, perhaps they conceptualized their actions not so much as those of war, but – like the Tennessee militiamen with the body of Tecumseh - more like the execution of the judgement of the law upon felons and brigands.
In the campaign against the Vendéeans, then, methods which had just emerged in North American border warfare may have been brought back to metropolitan France. The escalating cycles of atrocity that led eventually to men conceiving – and perhaps committing - acts such as the wearing of boots and leggings made from Indians’ skin may have shifted the boundaries between war and law enforcement not only on the colonial frontiers but at home as well.
In the previous chapter, we saw how a set of practices to do with the retributive treatment of the human body emerged in Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century at the intersection of medical science and criminal justice. At the same time, reports of similar practices among settler militiamen emerged in North America in the context of frontier warfare. They also disappear or subside at around the same time, during the nineteenth century. The Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, discussed in Chapter Eight, was perhaps the last large-scale case in which such acts were perpetrated against North American Indians.
The emergence of these reported practices in both Europe and North America, involving the making and collecting of commemorative objects of human skin, is best understood not as a coincidentally similar pair of historical processes, but as a single, interrelated set of changes happening simultaneously and being expressed in two different contexts. Not only were European societies already by that time so closely interconnected politically and economically with American Indian and other indigenous societies that their identities were all being shaped in relation to each other (Kidd 2004; Morgan 1999; Richter 2001), but more basically, there were domains of cultural symbolism in which eighteenth-century Indians and Europeans had strong mutual affinities in the first place. In creating their conceptual metaphors or models of violent power relationships, they all drew upon their conceptions of the relationship between humans and the animals which they used as a source of food and raw materials. As a consequence, when they offered violence to one another they were strongly predisposed not only to model it on the killing and consumption of animals, as they understood these activities, but also to project such behaviour onto one another. The significant differences were that American Indians derived these understandings from the context of intertribal conflicts, and Europeans derived them from the context of class conflicts, while the colonial frontier violence that connected them in North America came to combine features of both.
It was because of this that American Indian societies could seem to Europeans such as Burke and Carlyle to mirror some of the more disturbing realities of their own society’s violent class politics. The macabre crimes which they and other conservatives imputed to the French Revolution – the human tanneries, the manufacture of leg-wear of human skin, and the wigs made from the severed heads of women – were, perhaps, nothing more than propagandist fictions. But whether they were fantasies of savagery or actualities, they and the contemporaneous atrocities of frontier warfare in North America seem to have formed part of the same, shared universe of cultural symbolism.