Scalped

My mother Alberta Wyatt related it to me. This story took place south of Lake Michigan before the U.S. Constitution was written. At that time the area where Ohio now lies was a wilderness claimed by Massachusetts and they called the territory The Northwest.

A few settlers lived there in three log cabins and they lived off the land. They were related to each other through marriage or birth. They lived close together for mutual protection and social reasons. It is easy to get lonesome when there are no cities or towns close by. There were friendly Indians to be found, but the Indians were not always perfect friends. Native American teenagers enjoyed whooping it up occasionally.

Indian warriors were called savages by the newspapers. Actually, the Native Americans were not as savage as the settlers who possessed guns. The Indians had only crude weapons. They did not learn to scalp until after they were taught by white men. White men scalped Indians to collect bounties from early American white governments. Before the white men came the young braves enjoyed playing war games against other tribes. Usually war games were not very dangerous. One of their favorite games was to get three or four warriors together and sneak up close to an enemy tribe during the night. Just before daylight each boy would go into the teepee of a sleeping enemy brave, touch him, and then run away hopefully without getting caught. If a boy was captured the enemy tribe would torture and make fun of him. Usually nobody was killed. Sometimes the game was played more seriously. Instead of just touching, they gave the sleeping person a whack on the head and cut a piece of scalp with hair on it to carry on their belt. Men who had been scalped spent the rest of their lives sleeping with one eye open and stayed armed all the time. Some even went to shaving their heads so they wouldn't get scalped again.

My mom told me stories she heard from her grandparents. "Sometimes a few Indians would walk into a settler's cabin and stand against the wall. They used sign language and rubbed their bellies to ask for food. The family fed them, and the visitors usually left in peace. At other times Indians would sneak up and steal things from the yard or even come inside the door or reach through a window to swipe goods. They felt very fortunate when they were able to steal metal utensils like pots, pans, and kettles. These treasures were hard to come by in the wilderness. Stealing from other tribes or from the settlers was risky business. After a successful raid the boys had a party, shared their loot, and bragged. They made up songs about themselves and how much danger they had faced."

"On rare occasions the settlers were raided by a bunch of braves. Usually this happened only after the tribe had been insulted by white men. Sometimes a raid could be predicted. One day some Indians were out behind the settler's pig pens making sounds like pigs squealing. When the settlers walked out to see what was happening, the warriors shot at them using bows and arrows. The white men ran back and warned everybody, "We'd best get ready for a raid. They already shot at us out by the pigs."

The women and girls gathered up the pots and pans and ran to the lake to bury them in the sand. As they ran back home one of the older girls tripped and hit her head on a rock as she fell. One of the young braves spotted her as she lay on the ground. Running to her, he reached down with his crude knife, grabbed some hair in the middle of her scalp and cut off some of the skin including the roots of her hair. The brave was screaming something in Indian and holding the scalp high as he ran away.

"The young scalped lady was one of my ancestors who lived a long useful life. But, she had a bald spot the size of a quarter for the rest of her life. Her hair never grew back, and she proudly showed the bald spot to kids and told them the whole story. Curiously, she was never angry with the young man who had scalped her."