The Wild Frontier (20 page)

Opechancanough immediately threatened revenge, even though he had told the settlers only a few months before that “he held the peace so firme, the sky should fall [ere] he dissolved it.”
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He knew that the lucrative tobacco crop had brought too many settlers to Virginia. By
1622, Indian hunting grounds and even the Indian way of life had been impaired by the settlers. The Morgan incident made up his mind. Only 2 weeks after Nemattanow’s death, Opechancanough directed an attack against settlements and plantations along the James River; on the first day alone, 347 men, women, and children were killed out of a population of only 1,200.
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Governor Wyatt called a peace conference. Opechancanough and several hundred Indians attended, and Wyatt tried to poison all of them. Some 200 became violently ill, and “many, helpless, were slaughtered,”
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but Opechancanough escaped.
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(The poisoning led to the complaint of the Virginia Company noted earlier, to the effect that the colonists had gone too far.)

Opechancanough signed a peace treaty with the settlers in 1632, but 12 years later, in 1644, he attacked again, this time killing 500 out of the 8,000 settlers. At the time of this attack, he was about 100 years old, very feeble, blind, and had to be carried on a litter. He was captured for the last time. Governor Berkeley ordered that he be treated with courtesy, but a guard shot him in the back, killing him.
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As so often occurred in conflicts between settlers and Indians, both sides were losers. Opechancanough brought about not only the bankruptcy of Virginia, but also the end of the Powhatan Confederacy. Chief Powhatan’s successor, Necotowance, granted the settlers the legal right to the lands they had occupied.
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Father Isaac Joques was a missionary to the Mohawk. He was captured in the 1630s, whereupon his thumb was amputated and presented to him. He publicly offered it to God as a sacrifice, but one of his comrades told him to stop because otherwise the Indians might force it into his mouth and compel him to eat it. He flung it away. Cutting off an ear, a strip of flesh, or a finger and making the victim eat it was a “usual torture.”
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In 1632, the Delawares killed 32 Dutch settlers at Swaanendael on Delaware Bay.
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The settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony learned that the Indians, presumably Pequots, flayed some prisoners alive with “ye shells of fishes,” cut off the members and joints of others piecemeal and broiled them on the coals, and ate clumps of the flesh of others in their sight while they lived.
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A group of settlers in Massachusetts was killed in 1637. One was put to death by roasting.
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In retaliation, in May 1637 Captain John Mason led an expedition that took an Indian prisoner who answered the English interrogation
with mockery. The soldiers tied one of his legs to a post, pulled on a rope tied to his other leg, and tore him apart. Captain Underhill shot the Indian as an act of mercy.
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Other atrocities were committed by the settlers (sometimes with the help of other Indians). In June 1637, an army composed of 240 English colonists, 1,000 Narragansets, and 70 Mohegans made a night attack on a Pequot town near the Mystic River in Connecticut, burned the town, and killed its 600 inhabitants. Many of the casualties were women and children who burned to death. The governor said it was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire. Some Pequots were later trapped in a swamp and surrendered. The adult male captives were killed, the boys sold to the West Indies, and the women and girls parceled out to the settlers as slaves.
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Toward the end of the Pequot War in 1637, the English received the severed heads of Pequots from surrounding Indian tribes.
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In the first year of the Beaver Wars, a war party of 100 Iroquois met 300 Hurons
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and Algonquins. Normally Indians did not attack unless they had substantially superior numbers, but Iroquois (Oneida) chief Ononkwaya persuaded the Iroquois to attack anyhow. Only 4 or 5 Iroquois survived, one of whom was Ononkwaya, and they were killed by torture. His execution was reported by a Jesuit missionary.

Ononkwaya was roasted, but did not flinch. When the Hurons believed him dead, one of them scalped him. He leaped up, grabbed some burning sticks, and drove the crowd back. He was pelted with sticks, stones, and live coals. He was thrown into the fire, but he leaped out with a blazing brand in each hand and ran toward the Huron town. The Hurons tripped him, cut off his hands and feet, and again tossed him into the fire. He crawled toward the crowd on his elbows and knees glaring at them ferociously. They rushed forward and cut off his head.
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In 1639, the Hurons captured 113 Iroquois. Some were from war parties. Others were casual travelers. All 113 were burned to death.

A Dutch Staten Island farmer was killed in 1641 by a group of Raritan Indians, a subtribe of the Delawares. The Dutch then offered bounties for Raritan scalps or heads.
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The Wappinger Indians asked Dutch governor Willem Kieft in 1643 for help against the Mohawk, who were trying to get tribute from them. Kieft instead turned the Mohawk loose on the Wappingers, who killed
70 and enslaved others. Kieft then sent Dutch soldiers to Pavonia, the present site of Jersey City, to murder the surviving Wappingers, mostly women and children, whom the Mohawk had not harmed. They returned bearing the severed heads of 80 Indians. The soldiers and settlers used them as footballs on the streets. Thirty prisoners were tortured to death “for the public amusement.” The night became known as the Slaughter of the Innocents.
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The governor had a houseguest both before and after the slaughter. His name was David Pietersz de Vries, an artillery master. He could see the firing in Pavonia from the residence that night and hear the shrieks of the Indians. He learned that the soldiers had taken babies from their mothers’ breasts, hacked them to pieces in the presence of their parents, and thrown the pieces in the fire and in the water. Some babies were thrown in near the shore, and when their parents jumped in to save them, the soldiers would not let them come back to land, and they drowned. The next day some survivors came in to beg for food and get warm. They were murdered and tossed in the water. When de Vries returned to his country home, survivors straggled by with hands or legs amputated. Some were “holding their entrails in their arms.”
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Kieft mismanaged the Indians and pursued policies of exterminating them, thereby provoking a full-scale war. He was dismissed as governor and succeeded by Peter Stuyvesant. On his return voyage to Europe, he was lost at sea.
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A number of crimes against Indians, including murder, were committed by the Dutch in New Amsterdam. A pamphleteer charged that a Hackensack Indian was publicly tortured by Dutch soldiers, skinned in strips, fed his own flesh, flayed from his fingers to his knees, castrated, dragged through the streets alive, and put on a millstone, where his head was beaten off.
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The authorities ignored these crimes. Finally, some Dutch went to Staten Island to kill all the Indians they could find. The Indians were quick to retaliate.

In 1644 the Susquehannocks, aided by settlers from New Sweden, fought Maryland militia. The Susquehannocks took 15 prisoners. They tortured 2 of them to death.
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There was a Jesuit mission in Huron country. The priest was Father Antoine Daniel. In 1648, just after he had concluded mass, it was learned that enemy Iroquois were coming. Apparently everyone wanted to be baptized, so Daniel remained to baptize all who wished it. He urged them to escape, promising to remain to continue with the baptisms. The Iroquois attacked, shot Daniel, hacked his body apart, and threw it in the flames of the burning town.
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In 1649, some Hurons who had escaped from another town under Iroquois attack warned the Indians in the New York town of St. Louis to flee. All who could did, leaving 80 to their fate. Two Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, remained behind to baptize. After a fierce battle, the Iroquois captured the town, burned it, and tortured and beat the survivors, especially the 2 priests. The torture included a mock baptism in which scalding water was poured over their heads.
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In 1655, a Delaware Indian woman was caught pulling peaches from the tree of a settler, who then shot and killed her. He in turn was ambushed and killed by her family. Soon about 2,000 armed Indians walked into town, terrifying the city. The Indians destroyed houses, killed indiscriminately, and took 150 settlers captive before leaving town.
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In 1659, Stuyvesant called for a parley during a fight with the Esopus Indians. Their chiefs entered the town of Wiltwyck for the peace conference. The Dutch killed them as they slept that night. The Indians then took 8 Dutch soldiers captive and burned them alive.
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The sachem of the Wampanoag Indians
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s was Metacom. His father was Chief Massasoit, who was very helpful to the Pilgrims. The settlers called Metacom King Philip. He was incensed with the settlers’ treatment of his people, however, and tried to organize a rebellion to oust the British from New England. When the British tried 3 Christian Indians of his tribe in 1675, then hanged them, King Philip went to war. This war, called King Philip’s War, lasted from 1675 to 1678. The Nipmuc, Narraganset, and other tribes joined him. More than 1,000 settlers were killed. The settlers eventually won due to superior numbers and firepower. They were aided by Indian allies from 4 tribes: the Massachusetts, Mohegan, Niantics, and Wampanoag. The war went against Philip. His wife and 9-year-old boy were captured and later, together with hundreds of other Indians, sold into slavery in the West Indies and Spain for the going rate, 30 shillings a head. This happened even though the preacher John Eliot, who was known as the Apostle to the Indians, opposed it. Eliot’s view was that “to sell souls for money seemeth to me a dangerous merchandise.”
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Cotton Mather said, “It must have been as bitter as death to him [King Philip] to lose his wife and only son, for the Indians are marvelously fond and affectionate toward their children.”
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Philip’s other
relatives were killed. A Wampanoag warrior named Alderman counseled surrender. Philip killed him with his own hands. In 1676 Alderman’s brother deserted, led the militia to Philip’s hiding place, then killed King Philip. Captain Benjamin Church, who had headed the successful settler army, described how

In this war, it has been said, “the Puritans distinguished themselves by wholesale massacres of noncombatants that could scarcely be credited if not for the fact that it is the Puritans themselves who record them, with relish.”
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Three tribes, the Wampanoag, the Nipmuc, and the Narraganset, were nearly wiped out.
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King Philip was succeeded by Annawan. When confronted by soldiers, he surrendered, ending the war. He was tried in Plymouth and sentenced to death. Captain Church had come to respect Annawan and argued for his life, but while Church was away, a mob seized Annawan and beheaded him. He was the last leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy.
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Atrocities in the war were committed by the Indians as well. Author Howard Mumford Jones related that during King Philip’s War, the Indian atrocities consisted of

In 1675 a group of militia went to Philip’s own village, which was deserted. They found the heads of 8 settlers staring down at them from poles.
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A group of settlers went on a peace mission to the Nipmucs. The Nipmucs attacked them, killing several. The mission retreated to the town of Brookfield, where there was a garrison. The Nipmucs were close behind, and not all the militia reached the safety of the garrison. One was captured and decapitated. His head was kicked among the Indians, then stuck on a pole in front of his own home.
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That same year, 2 Massachusetts towns, Middleborough and Dartmouth, were attacked by Indians who

The subject of scalping is perhaps the most notorious one related to the American-Indian War. Around 1721, a delegation of Cherokee presented the king of England with 4 scalps of Indian enemies. The king was reported to have said he was “graciously pleased to accept.”
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The Pueblos had a Scalp Chief.
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There is some disagreement concerning why scalps were taken. The earlier practice was to take the entire head as a trophy, but of course that was a little awkward, especially if there were several, so eventually just the scalp was taken.
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The Timucua tribe of Florida took arms and legs as well as scalps.
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Tribes in the St. Lawrence area stretched the skin of the dead man’s face on hoops.
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Another view about why scalps were taken is that Indian religion held that a scalped person could not enter the happy hunting ground. If your enemy is scalped, he or she won’t be there to bother you.
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A third view is that scalping was for the purpose of releasing the spirit of the victim.
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