Indian Tribes

[Walker357]

I'm not sure the Illini got wiped out. From your description, they sound just like what we have in Springfield and Chicago. :m2c:

 

[Birdwatcher]

Well, in the interest of equal time, here is Eckert's account of what happened to one pregnant young Iroquois woman in 1774 at the hands of a party of White men after she and her relatives had been peacefully invited to their camp ...

"...Her face was battered almost beyond recognition, and then she had been hung by her outstretched wrists between two saplings. Evidently while still alive, she was then scalped and disemboweled, and her nearly full-term infant son removed from her body. This child had also been scalped and stabbed and then tossed aside..."

The woman being the sister of the prominent Mingo Chief Talgayeeta (Logan), previously a noted friend of the Whites. Quite a lot of Whites were subsequently slain as a consequence of that despicable and horrible act, mostly I expect by those Indians, like those Whites, who were most inclined by nature to do violence anyway.

Birdwatcher

 

[Zonie]

As anyone who reads of the late 1600s thru the mid 1700s will tell you, several of the Northeastern tribes were not only cannibalistic but had a penchant for slowly roasting unlucky people for more than a day over low fires before disembowelling the victim(s) (if they were lucky).

 

[Hota]

Old Salt, could you send me an ISBN # for the book you referenced?

 

[Birdwatcher]

As anyone who reads of the late 1600s thru the mid 1700s will tell you, several of the Northeastern tribes were not only cannibalistic but had a penchant for slowly roasting unlucky people for more than a day over low fires before disembowelling the victim(s) (if they were lucky).

True enough. Less well publicised are the cases of hundreds of captives who were kindly treated and who often preferred to stay with their Indian families (ya, I know, others were less well treated but easily enough were very well handled to counter the theme of this thread). Less well publicised too are the hundreds of cases of quiet intermarriage such that by the time of Andy Jackson it was often hard to tell which side was supposed to be the Indians.

Before the epidemics hit we have tribes of many thousands of individuals (20,000+ in the case of the Cherokee alone) and numerous accounts of traders coming and going and settling among. Sort of a disjunct between that and the bloody images we are inundated with.

Let us return to Boone for a minute, captured a FOURTH time by the Shawnees in a time of bloody warfare and STILL spared and adopted. Or for that matter Kenton at about the same time, sentenced to execution but spared again.

Tecumseh's family is probably better documented than any Indian family of that era, and the picture that emerges is one of a close family group repulsed by torture. Are we to believe that this family was not representative of very many? On the other hand Tecumseh's own brother was at that time burning Delaware "witches" in villages along the Ohio, much as Europeans had done for centuries previous.

Eckert is an invaluable source. Of course he writes historical *fiction* and was probably wrong on the Blue Jacket thing but he has distilled hundreds of historical accounts for the rest of us.

If we are playing a sort of historical tit for tat I'll see ya your torturing cannibals and raise ya Eckert's account of the Moravian massacre; ninety-two bound and helpless Christian Indians methodically slaughtered after their White Pennsylvania Militia captors had deliberated their fate overnight....

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"...As the door opened [Chief] Abraham gave a loud call, awakening those of his followers who were asleep and telling them to come their knees and sing with him the Twenty-third Psalm. The... voice of Abraham did not last long, Bilderback, without a word, stepped up behind him and swung his mallet in a heavy blow that caved in the entire back of the Chief's skull... Bilderback cut away the scalp and held it aloft triumphantly while his men cheered...

The psalm-singing continued as Bilderback moved along... methodically felling and scalping others in succession, each blow making a hideous smacking sound...

Following the fourteenth execution the fat officer handed his mallet to Private George Bellar... Bellar carried on... using both hands to bring the mallet down with such heavy blows that that often bits of skull and gray matter spattered on his clothing...

[In another hut] The squad of executioners were led by Capt. William Welch. Without any preliminary discussion, pulled a tomahawk from his belt and killedseven women and children in quick succession... Nathan Rollins... had previously had his father and uncle killed by marauding Indians; he now took his vengeance by successively tomahawking 19 of the women and children, but when he finished he sat down and wept..."

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Illuminating reads are the sort of antics our own much-romanticised Irish and Scottish ancestors used to practice upon one another back home until essentially flattend out of existence as free people by the invading English (and Scottish in the case of the Irish), the English then perpetrating cruelties of their own (we Irish tend to remember the latter but conveniently forget all about the former).

The point of all this being I guess that I do believe when we discuss Frontier history that the torture should not be forgotten, but neither should all the other myriad events of the time that involved quite different experiences.

Birdwatcher

 

[Jack Walker]

Toughest, I would say the Susquehanocks of the 17th century. They were a very large, muscular and violent people.
Meanest, I would go with Huron,Shawnee and the Munsee Delawares.
If I were moving through the trees, I would be worried about all of them! :thumbsup:

 

[oomcurt]

Kinda strange....whenever the indians tore up a white settlement or military force it was called a massacre, but when the whites did the same to the indians it was called a victory.....

 

[rifleshooter2]

Remember the winners write the history books.

Andy