Footnote 48: Morgan, League of the Iroquois, p. 12.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 49: All except the distant Tuscaroras, who in 1715 migrated from North Carolina to New York, and joining the Iroquois league made it the Six Nations. All the rest of the outlying Huron-Iroquois stock was wiped out of existence before the end of the seventeenth century, except the remnant of Hurons since known as Wyandots.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 50: See my Beginnings of New England, chap. i.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 51: F. A. Walker, "The Indian Question," North American Review, April, 1873, p. 370.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 52: See Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, 3d ed., Stuttgart, 1849, vol. i. p. 203.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 53: "Women and children joined in these fiendish atrocities, and when at length the victim yielded up his life, his heart, if he were brave, was ripped from his body, cut in pieces, broiled, and given to the young men, under the belief that it would increase their courage; they drank his blood, thinking it would make them more wary; and finally his body was divided limb from limb, roasted or thrown into the seething pot, and hands and feet, arms and legs, head and trunk, were all stewed into a horrid mess and eaten amidst yells, songs, and dances." Jeffries Wyman, in Seventh Report of Peabody Museum, p. 37. For details of the most appalling character, see Butterfield's History of the Girtys, pp. 176-182; Stone's Life of Joseph Brant, vol. ii. pp. 31, 32; Dodge's Plains of the Great West, p. 418, and Our Wild Indians, pp. 525-529; Parkman's Jesuits in North America, pp. 387-391; and many other places in Parkman's writings.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 54: One often hears it said that the cruelty of the Indians was not greater than that of mediæval Europeans, as exemplified in judicial torture and in the horrors of the Inquisition. But in such a judgment there is lack of due discrimination. In the practice of torture by civil and ecclesiastical tribunals in the Middle Ages, there was a definite moral purpose which, however lamentably mistaken or perverted, gave it a very different character from torture wantonly inflicted for amusement. The atrocities formerly attendant upon the sack of towns, as e. g. Beziers, Magdeburg, etc., might more properly be regarded as an illustration of the survival of a spirit fit only for the lowest barbarism: and the Spanish conquerors of the New World themselves often exhibited cruelty such as even Indians seldom surpass. See below, vol. ii. p. 444. In spite of such cases, however, it must be held that for artistic skill in inflicting the greatest possible intensity of excruciating pain upon every nerve in the body, the Spaniard was a bungler and a novice as compared with the Indian. See Dodge's Our Wild Indians, pp. 536-538. Colonel Dodge was in familiar contact with Indians for more than thirty years, and writes with fairness and discrimination.
In truth the question as to comparative cruelty is not so much one of race as of occupation, except in so far as race is moulded by long occupation. The "old Adam," i. e. the inheritance from our brute ancestors, is very strong in the human race. Callousness to the suffering of others than self is part of this brute-inheritance, and under the influence of certain habits and occupations this germ of callousness may be developed to almost any height of devilish cruelty. In the lower stages of culture the lack of political aggregation on a large scale is attended with incessant warfare in the shape in which it comes home to everybody's door. This state of things keeps alive the passion of revenge and stimulates cruelty to the highest degree. As long as such a state of things endures, as it did in Europe to a limited extent throughout the Middle Ages, there is sure to be a dreadful amount of cruelty. The change in the conditions of modern warfare has been a very important factor in the rapidly increasing mildness and humanity of modern times. See my Beginnings of New England, pp. 226-229. Something more will be said hereafter with reference to the special causes concerned in the cruelty and brutality of the Spaniards in America. Meanwhile it may be observed in the present connection, that the Spanish taskmasters who mutilated and burned their slaves were not representative types of their own race to anything like the same extent as the Indians who tortured Brébeuf or Crawford. If the fiendish Pedrarias was a Spaniard, so too was the saintly Las Casas. The latter type would be as impossible among barbarians as an Aristotle or a Beethoven. Indeed, though there are writers who would like to prove the contrary, it may be doubted whether that type has ever attained to perfection except under the influence of Christianity.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 55: See the evidence collected by Jeffries Wyman, in Seventh Report of Peabody Museum, pp. 27-37; cf. Wake, Evolution of Morality, vol. i. p. 243. Many illustrations are given by Mr. Parkman. In this connection it may be observed that the name "Mohawk" means "Cannibal." It is an Algonquin word, applied to this Iroquois tribe by their enemies in the Connecticut valley and about the lower Hudson. The name by which the Mohawks called themselves was "Caniengas," or "People-at-the-Flint." See Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites, p. 173.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 56: For accounts and explanations of animism see Tylor's Primitive Culture, London, 1871, 2 vols.; Caspari, Urgeschichte der Menschheit, Leipsic, 1877, 2 vols.; Spencer's Principles of Sociology, part i.; and my Myths and Mythmakers, chap. vii.[Back to Main Text]