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Scalping is the act of removing the scalp, usually with the hair, as a portable proof or trophy of prowess in war. The practice has been known in Europe, Asia and Africa. Scalping is also associated with frontier warfare in North America, and was practiced by Native Americans and white colonists and frontiersmen over centuries of violent conflict.
Scythia
Scalping was practiced by the ancient Scythians of Eurasia. Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote of the Scythians in 440 BC: "The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a quantity of these scalps together."
Northern Europe
Scalps were taken in wars between the Visigoths, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century according to the writings of Abbott Emmanuel H. D. Domenech. His sources included the decalvare of the ancient Germans, the capillos et cutem detrahere of the code of the Visigoths, and the Annals of Flodoard.
North America
According to historian James Axtell, there is no evidence that the early European explorers and settlers in the Americas were familiar with this practice of the Scythians, or that they ever taught scalping to Native Americans. There is clear evidence, says Axtell, that the practice of scalping existed long before Europeans arrived, primarily in North America. The theory that Native Americans learned the practice of scalping from Europeans first appeared in the 1690s and is still professed by some writers and activists, but this belief is not supported by most academic scholars.
It is believed that contact with Europeans widened the practice of scalping among Native Americans, since some Euro-American governments encouraged the practice among their Native American allies during times of war. For example, in the American Revolutionary War, Henry Hamilton, the British Lieutenant-Governor of Canada, was known by American Patriots as the "hair-buyer general" because it was believed he encouraged and paid his Native American allies to scalp American settlers. When Hamilton was captured in the war by the Americans, he was treated as a war criminal instead of a prisoner of war because of this. However, both Native Americans and American frontiersmen frequently scalped their victims in this era.
During the destruction of the Navajo homeland in 1863, carried out under the order of General James Carleton, a bounty was put out on Navajo livestock as a means to deplete their winter food supply. Some of the men extended this bounty to the deaths of Navajo men and consequently began cutting off the knot of hair fastened by a red string which the Navajos wore on their heads. There was another occasion during the extermination and displacement of the Santee Sioux, "The Sioux Indians must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state" (Governor Ramsey) . A failed retaliation led by the Santee on the blue coats in 1862 near Wood Lake, led to another incident of mutilation to defeated Indians. Big Eagle, a Santee Chief, had this to say: "We lost fourteen or fifteen men and quite a number were wounded. Some of the wounded died afterwards, but I do not know how many. We carried off no dead bodies but took away all our wounded. The whites scalped all our dead men - so I have heard". After the event the company's commander General Sibley was impelled to issue this order: "The bodies of the dead, even of a savage enemy shall not be subjected to indignities by civilized and Christian men."
External link
References
- Axtell, James. "Scalps and Scalping" from Encyclopedia of North American Indians
- Answering Myths about American Indian Science (Takes the view that scalping was probably introduced to Indians by Europeans)
- Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee - Dee Brown (1970)
"Scalping"