The men are taught the operations of war from a very early age. Every morning, all the lads who are above seven years old and upward, and have not been admitted among the men, are taken to some distance from the village, where they are divided into two opposing bodies, each under the command of an experienced warrior. They are armed with little bows, arrows made of grass stems, and wooden knives stuck in their belts. In their heads they slightly weave a plaited tuft of grass to represent the scalp-lock.
The two parties then join in sham combat, which is made to resemble a real fight as much as possible. When any of the combatants is struck in a vital part, he is obliged to fall as if dead, when his antagonist goes through the operation of scalping with his wooden knife, places the scalp in his belt, utters the wild yell, and again joins in the battle. As no one may fight without a scalp-lock, the fallen adversary is obliged to withdraw from the fight. This goes on for an hour or so, when the mock fight is stopped, and the lads are praised or rebuked according to the skill and courage which they have shown, the number of scalps at the belt being the surest criterion of merit.
It is well known that after a battle the American Indians torture their prisoners, and that they display the most diabolical ingenuity in devising the most excruciating torments. Still, there has been much exaggeration in the accounts of this custom. They do not torture all their prisoners, selecting only a few for this purpose, the others being absorbed into the tribe by marriage with the widows whose husbands have been killed in battle, and enjoying equal rights with the original members of the tribe.
Neither is the torture practised with the idea of revenge, though it is likely that vengeful feelings will arise when the victim is bound to the stake. Superstition seems to be at the root of the torture, which is intended to propitiate the spirit of those members of their own tribe who have suffered the like treatment at the hands of their adversaries. The doomed warrior accepts his fate with the imperturbable demeanor which is an essential part of a North American Indian’s character, and, for the honor of his tribe, matches his endurance against the pain which his enemies can inflict.
Tortures too terrible even to be mentioned are tried in succession; for when the victim is once bound to the stake, the Indian never has been known to relent in his purpose, which is to extort acknowledgments of suffering from the captured warrior, and thereby to disgrace not only himself but the tribe to which he belongs. He, in the meanwhile, prides himself on showing his enemies how a warrior can die. He chants the praises of his tribe and their deeds, boasts of all the harm that he has done to the tribe into whose power he has fallen, ridicules their best warriors, and endeavors to anger them to such an extent that they may dash out his brains, and so spare him further torture. He will even laugh at their attempts to extort cries of pain from a warrior, and tell them that they do not know how to torture.
One remarkable instance of endurance in a captured Creek warrior is told by Mr. Adair. The man had been captured by the Shawnees, and forced to run the gauntlet naked through all the tribe; he had been tied to the stake, and was horribly tortured with gun-barrels heated redhot. All the efforts of his enemies only drew from him taunts and jeers, to the effect that the Shawnees were so ignorant that they did not even know how to torture a bound prisoner. Great warrior though he was, he had fallen into their hands through some fault in addressing the Great Spirit, but that he had enough virtue left to show them the difference between a Creek and a Shawnee. Let them only unbind him, and allow him to take a redhot gun-barrel out of the fire, and he would show them a much better way of torturing than any which they knew.
His demeanor had excited the respect of the Shawnees, and they unbound him and took him to the fire, in which were lying the redhot tubes. Unhesitatingly, he picked up one of them with his bare hands, sprang at the surrounding crowd, striking right and left with this fearful weapon, cleared a passage through the astonished warriors, and leaped down a precipice into the river. He swam the river amid a shower of bullets, gained a little island in its midst, and, though instantly followed by numbers of his disconcerted enemies, actually succeeded in getting away. In spite of the injuries which he had suffered, and which would have killed an ordinary European, he recovered, and lived for many years, the implacable foe of the Shawnees.
A somewhat similar adventure occurred to a Katahba warrior, who was pursued by a band of Senecas, and at last captured, though not until he had contrived to kill seven of them. A warrior of such prowess was guarded with double vigilance, and he was brought to the Seneca village for the torture, after having been beaten at every encampment through which the party had passed.
As the torturers were taking him to the stake, he, like the Creek warrior, burst from his captors, and flung himself into the river, swimming across in safety. He paused for a moment on the opposite bank to express emphatically his contempt for the pursuers who were crowding down the bank and into the river, and then dashed forward so fast that he gained nearly a day’s journey upon the foremost of the pursuers.
Five of the enemy pressed upon him, and, though naked and unarmed, he deliberately waited for them. At night, when they were all asleep, not having thought a sentry needful, he crept up to the party, snatched one of their tomahawks, and killed them all before they could wake. He scalped them, clothed and armed himself, invigorated his wasted frame with food, and set off to the spot where he had slain the seven foes as he was first pursued. They had been buried for the sake of preserving their scalps, but he found the place of burial, scalped them all, and not until then did he make for his home, which he reached in safety.