Scalped: The Bloody Truth

A scene on the frontiers as practiced by the "humane" British and their "worthy" allies / Wm. Charles

  Lithograph from Library of Congress

The Enoch Brown event might have been America's first school massacre.  Certainly this event was the first to inflict the gruesome custom of scalping on a room full of school children.

That the Indians took scalps was not surprising. But searching the history of frontier Pennsylvania, the discovery that the settlers on the frontier could collect a bounty for Indian scalps was a shock.  Christian scalpers? Could this be true?

Henry James Young, archivist for Pennsylvania State writes, "It is abundantly clear that Pennsylvania’s government proclaimed general bounties for Indian scalps on three occasions, in 1756, in 1764, and finally in 1780".  Pennsylvania was not the first. New England colony had been buying Indian scalps through the first half of the 1700's."
 

Scalp bounty proclamation, Pennsylvania Gazette, 12 July 1764, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center, University of Pennsylvania.n

"WE HAVE thought fit, and do hereby offer a Reward of THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS for ever, Indian Prifoner, or Tory aiding in Arms with them, and a Reward of Two THOUSAND AND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS for every Indian Scalp,
Given Order of the Council, under the Hand of His Excellency JOSEPH REED,Eirf President, and the Seal of the State, at Philadelphia, the Twenty-fiecond Day of April, in the year of our Lord One' fnhoufd Seven Hundred and Eighty. (1780)

In 1780 Tory or Indian prisoners would fetch a handsome bounty.   This is a serious amount of money. Three thousand dollars is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 in todays dollars.

Young says, “Had it not been for the handsome rewards offered for scalps by the white men's governments, the vindictive and gruesome practice might never have spread. It did spread, however, over most of the United States….. "

Scalping was not a custom peculiar to American soil. The practice was known in some European, Asian and African cultures.  Of course it was hard to know if the trophy hair was male or female or from an enemy or friendly head. Still taking a scalp was so much more convenient than taking a whole head as a trophy and offered proof that the victim was dead, though not always. There was an occasional scalped survivor, as in the case of schoolboy, Archie McCollough.

Most Americans believe that scalping was an American Indian practice used to terrorize innocent white settlers.  The truth is more complex;  both sides participated in this bloody custom. The colonists offered bounties for Indian scalps to whom ever harvested them. Later colonists offered bounties for Tory scalps, and vice versa. Offering bounties was an act of war, only slightly less aggressive than actually wielding the knife.  

Source: A Note on Scalp Bounties in Pennsylvania, Henry James Young, Pennsylvania History vol. 24, no. 3, July 1957 

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