Indian Warfare
Mr. Johnston had spent the last fall and winter in the regions beyond Lake Superior, towards the forks of the Mississippi, where he had been employed as American agent to arrange the boundary line between the country of the Chippewas and that of their neighbours and implacable enemies, the Sioux. His mediation appeared successful for the time, and he smoked the pipe of peace with both tribes; but during the spring this ferocious war has again broken out, and he seems to think that nothing but the annihilation of either one nation or the other will entirely put an end to their conflicts; “for there is no point at which the Indian law of retaliation stops, short of the extermination of one of the parties.”
I asked him how it is that in their wars the Indians make no distinction between the warriors opposed to them and helpless women and children?—how it could be with a brave and manly people, that the scalps taken from the weak, the helpless, the unresisting, were as honourable as those torn from the warrior’s skull? And I described to him the horror which this custom inspired—this, which of all their customs, most justifies the name of savage!
He said it was inseparable from their principles of war and their mode of warfare; the first consists in inflicting the greatest possible insult and injury on their foe with the least possible risk to themselves. This truly savage law of honour we might call cowardly, but that, being associated with the bravest contempt of danger and pain, it seems nearer to the natural law. With regard to the mode of warfare, they have rarely pitched battles, but skirmishes, surprises, ambuscades, and sudden forays into each other’s hunting-grounds and villages. The usual practice is to creep stealthily on the enemy’s village or hunting-encampment, and wait till just after the dawn; then, at the moment the sleepers in the lodges are rising, the ambushed warriors stoop and level their pieces about two feet from the ground, which thus slaughter indiscriminately. If they find one of the enemy’s lodges undefended they murder its inmates, that when the owner returns he may find his hearth desolate; for this is exquisite vengeance! But outrage against the chastity of women is absolutely unknown under any degree whatever of furious excitement.40
This respect for female honour will remind you of the ancient Germans, as described by Julius Cæsar: he contrasts in some surprise their forbearance with the very opposite conduct of the Romans; and even down to this present day, if I recollect rightly, the history of our European wars and sieges will bear out this early and characteristic distinction between the Latin and the Teutonic nations. Am I right, or am I not?