Captured by the Indians (1985, Paperback)

You can feel the fear as the Indians circle the cabin and attack. Inside the men, women, and children tremble hearing the wild whoops. They are all too soon out of powder and shot. The savages rush the cabin and plunge inside.

“In a moment the men had been shot and hacked to pieces, and the scalps ripped from their heads. One or two men were saved, to provide the Indian village with a sacrifice and a day’s wild frolic, or to be held for ransom or adopted into the tribe. The weak, the wounded, the old of both sexes were killed and mutilated. The young women and the older children, particularly the boys, were spared; these, too, were to be taken home and adopted. Babies were a nuisance – they might cry on the way back and alert any whites who might be pursuing. Gleefully the warriors popped the infants’ heads against nearby trees before the horrified eyes of the mothers.”

All too often such tragedies happened to courageous pioneers who were looking for a better life in America. Some of the captives made miraculous escapes or were so badly wounded that the Indians left them for dead, but most were horribly tortured, scalped, or burned at the stake. A few were adopted into the tribe.

Adoption was a common practice because the tribes were constantly fighting one another, slaughtering young and old, and disease and starvation claimed many lives. To replenish their numbers, Indians captured prisoners to become slaves or sometimes family members. The lot of the captive varied greatly, depending on the character of his captor. Sometimes the captive was allowed to be ransomed. Women prisoners east of the Mississippi seldom had to fear being raped, but they were often expected to marry. Indian mothers treated young captives as one of their own children, and the children often forgot their former lives and were reluctant to leave the security of their new families once their terror abated and they had become accustomed to this new way of life.

“Scalping was a brutal, painful experience, but it did always cause death.” Drimmer relates the history of this practice and its escalation during the French and Indian War. The head or other body parts were also taken as trophies of victory in combat and proudly displayed in the village.

Torture was a likely possibility, and “the squaws had a special reputation for ferocity.” Cannibalism was practiced, and sometimes the heart “was torn from the body of the victim while he was still alive.” The Iroquois “were reputed to have acquired a taste for human flesh.”

This book is the unabridged republication of Scalps and Tomahawks: Narratives of Indian Captivity and presents a fascinating historical record of frontier life and Indian culture. Drimmer includes good experiences of captives to balance the bad experiences, but the vast number of narratives he researched but did not include in this book show that the captives hated their captors, despising their brutality and savagery.