Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/142

122 deprived of the scalp-lock before burial, the soul that animated the body is forbidden all entrance upon the Happy Hunting Grounds, all share in the life hereafter. In confirmation of this, we are told of the eagerness shown by the Indian warrior to obtain the scalp of the slain, as if it insured for him the greater excommunication; and also of the risks which they will run to reclaim the bodies of their fallen friends on the battle-field, to save them from the fatal knife. But whether we regard the scalping-knife as the instrument of a wanton cruelty, or as darkly associated with a revengeful superstition, in either view of it, it is the symbol of the barbarity of savagism.

There are two passing hints to be dropped on this matter, if so be that any one may regard them as relieving its horror. First, the Indian warrior magnanimously dressed and elevated the crowning tuft of hair on his own head, so as to make it every way convenient to the clutch and knife of his enemy. Second, we must admit — shall we say, to our shame? — that the white man, after he had become skilled in the ways of Indian warfare, did not scruple to adopt the red man's practice of scalping the dead. There are official papers preserved on our State files, in which our magistrates offered bounties for Indian scalps to their own soldiers and to our red allies; and these papers show a tariff of prices for the tuft from the head of a man, a woman, or a child. The bounty for a scalp to a regular soldier was ten pounds; to a volunteer, twenty pounds; to patrol parties, fifty pounds. More than all, these bounties were claimed, paid, and receipted. An heroic woman of New Hampshire, Hannah Dustin, received payment for ten, which she had taken off with her own hand. More noteworthy still is the fact, that while the benevolent and pacific William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, had declared the person of an Indian “sacred,” never to be harmed, his own grandson, when succeeding to the government, in the stress of Indian warfare, offered, in 1764, in a proclamation,