Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America 9781512823172

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Stories Written on the Body
CHAPTER 1 Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted Colonial Interpretations, Indigenous Tattoos
CHAPTER 2 The “Ill Effects of It” Reading and Rewriting the Cross-Cultural Tattoo
CHAPTER 3 Pricing the Part Economies of Violence and Stories of Scalps
CHAPTER 4 Playing Possum: Scalping Survivors and Embodied Memory
EPILOGUE Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations
NOTES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Citation preview

­Under the Skin

EAR LY AMER ICAN STUDIES Series editors: Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

­UNDER THE SKIN Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early Amer­ic­ a

Mairin Odle

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Research in this volume was funded by the Society of Colonial Wars Fellowship in Memory of Kenneth R. LaVoy Jr.  Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Odle, Mairin, author. Title: Under the skin : tattoos, scalps, and the contested language of bodies in early America / Mairin Odle. Other titles: Early American studies. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: Early American studies | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022007570 | ISBN 9781512823165 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Tattooing—United States—History—18th century. | Scalping— United States—History—18th century. | Tattooing—Social aspects—United States—History—18th century. | Scalping—Social aspects—United States— History—18th century. | Indians of North America—Social life and customs. | United States—Civilization—To 1783. Classification: LCC GT2346.U6 O46 2022 | DDC 391.6/5097309033—dc23/eng/20220304 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007570 Hardcover ISBN 9781512823165 eBook ISBN 9781512823172

CONTENTS

Introduction. Stories Written on the Body

1

Chapter 1. Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted: Colonial Interpretations, Indigenous Tattoos

13

Chapter 2. The “Ill Effects of It”: Reading and Rewriting the Cross-­Cultural Tattoo

44

Chapter 3. Pricing the Part: Economies of Vio­lence and Stories of Scalps

68

Chapter 4. Playing Possum: Scalping Survivors and Embodied Memory

92

Epilogue. Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations

113

Notes 123 Index 157 Acknowl­edgments

165

INTRODUCTION

Stories Written on the Body

John Long, a trader, interpreter, and occasional scout for British forces, proudly claimed in his 1791 Voyages and Travels an expert familiarity with Native socie­ties, particularly the Mohawk town of Kanehsatà:ke, near Montreal, and the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) communities north of the G ­ reat Lakes. Having “quitted the regiment to enjoy my favorite Indian life,” Long wrote, he traveled to join the Mohawk village on the shores of Lake of Two Mountains, “carry­ing a scalp as a trophy of my ser­v ices.”1 Although he explained, for unfamiliar readers, that scalping was “a mode of torture peculiar to the Indians” and that while usually fatal, “death does not always ensue,” Long neither accounted for where (or whom) the scalp had come from nor indicated any par­tic­u­lar concern in justifying his possession of it. While scalping could prompt heated accusations and violent recriminations from both Americans and Britons, the relatively casual mention by Long also demonstrates how deeply embedded the practice had become in Anglo-­American imaginations and military procedure. In his memoirs, Long asserted that his cultural fluency with Native languages and practices extended into an embodied transformation: “If accidentally a stranger came among us (­unless I chose to be noticed), no one could distinguish me from the Indians. Presuming on my appearing exactly like a savage, I occasionally went down in a canoe to Montreal, and frequently passed the posts as an Indian.”2 In 1777, he took a job as interpreter for a trade expedition north of the G ­ reat Lakes, and while stopping over in Pays Plat on Lake Superior, was offered adoption by an Ojibwe leader named Madjeckewiss (sometimes spelled Matchekewis). He accepted: “Though I had not under­gone this ceremony, I was not entirely ignorant of the nature of it, having been informed by other traders of the pain they endured. . . . ​I determined, however, to submit to it, lest my refusal of the honor intended me should be

2 Introduction

attributed to fear, and so render me unworthy of the esteem of ­t hose from whom I expected to derive ­great advantages, and with whom I had engaged to continue for a considerable time.”3 The “pain” to which Long referred was a tattooing that took place over several days. He described the procedure in a detached, third-­person voice, explaining that an artist used gunpowder mixed with ­water to draw a design on “the person to be ­adopted . . . ​­after which, with ten ­needles dipped in vermilion, and fixed in a small wooden frame, he pricks the delineated parts, and where the bolder outlines occur he incises the flesh with a gun-­flint.” The resulting tattoo would be red and blue, a result of the gunpowder and vermilion pigments. When the tattoo was complete, Long wrote, “they give the party a name; that which they allotted to me, was Amik, or Beaver.”4 The memoir’s somewhat oblique description leaves unclear w ­ hether the design of Long’s tattoo corresponded with his new name or even w ­ hether the pro­cess was as painful as he had anticipated. But it is clear that he regarded it as an honor. He also viewed it as an exchange, the receipt of a tangible benefit that he made “return for” in gifts of “scalping-­k nives, tomahawks, vermilion” and other goods to Madjeckewiss and the rest of the community.5 Long may have been unusual, but he was not alone. Many ­others in early Amer­i­ca had physical appearances that had been altered as a result of interactions with new and unfamiliar p ­ eople. Such individuals found their marked flesh the focus of reactions ranging from curiosity or sympathy to suspicion or even revulsion. W ­ hether tortured or ornamented, violently or intimately marked, ­t hese early American bodies ­were rich and troubling archives of ­human experience. ­Others used the symbolism associated with such marks, and such marked bodies, for their own military, po­liti­cal, or cultural purposes. Across seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century North Amer­i­ca, contests for power took tangible effect on the bodies of newcomers and Natives alike, and that corporeal evidence was closely scrutinized. The colliding cultures of early Amer­i­ca paid close attention to the unfamiliar appearances of strangers: they needed to. Failure to understand the intentions and alliances of other ­people could be deadly, or at the very least a missed opportunity for trade, cooperation, or alliance. Atlantic communities therefore produced elaborate descriptions of bodily difference—­written, oral, and visual. Such observations w ­ ere often more revelations of a society’s own cultural standards than accurate depictions of the ­peoples they purported to describe.6 But what happened when observation was taken a step further and individuals altered their own or o ­ thers’ bodies? Attempts to decode



Stories Written on the Body 3

the exteriors of o ­ thers could, and often did, develop into efforts to change that exterior. As part of their contests for power, colonial and Indigenous socie­ ties made many attempts to transform one another’s appearance: changing clothes, cutting hair, piercing or stretching ears (or removing earrings), and applying (or removing) paint and makeup, as well as deploying a range of violent acts that maimed, mutilated, or marked both the dead and the living. The enslaved might be branded, war captives might have fin­ger joints removed, and t­ hose punished for crimes might have ears or noses cropped. ­There ­were other marks, less consciously crafted by ­human hands yet still legible: scars and blindness from smallpox, rotting noses from syphilis. Th ­ ese traces on the body could prompt panic and hostility, or curiosity and research, or desire, mockery, or won­der. Most notably, they prompted new stories about which types of difference mattered—­and how to create, or erase, t­ hose differences. In an Atlantic world of competing empires, colonies, and socie­ties, how bodies ­were treated was integral to the articulation of imperial ideologies, even as individual bodies marked moments of re­sis­tance and self-­fashioning. Studying the marks of collective and personal experience on early American bodies makes vis­i­ble to us a world of signs that could indicate affiliation, alienation, conflict, and commodification. In a world characterized by increasing long-­distance travel, imperial expansion, and the circulation of stories about and images of strange p ­ eople and places, crucial questions existed: Who are you? What are your allegiances? And what does your appearance tell us, not just about you but about the ­people you have met and the places you have been? This work primarily addresses moments when the integrity of colonizing bodies (regularly conflated with the integrity of entire colonizing cultures) was disrupted by instances of t­ hese newcomers acquiring marks from Native Americans—­voluntarily or violently.7 While the propensity of Eu­ro­pean newcomers to regard Native cultural signifiers as a set of flexible symbols to take up, repurpose, or reject at ­will has been well documented, the malleability of appearance could cut both ways.8 Indigenous customs—­and in par­ tic­u ­lar, intimate and painful practices that remade the body, w ­ hether by vio­lence or by ornamentation—­could be co-­opted as ideological resources by colonizing socie­ties, but Native p ­ eoples w ­ ere equally attentive to the power­ ful messages that such marks might send. Contests for power often took the directly forceful forms of warfare and murder: efforts to destroy bodies. Changes in appearance might be far more subtle incorporations of new symbols, new styles, and new trade goods: efforts

4 Introduction

to enhance bodies. This book explores both vio­lence and adornment, approaching them as interrelated moments of transformation. ­Under the Skin focuses on the painful and permanent changes of scalping and tattooing: two practices that settler newcomers closely associated with the Indigenous socie­ ties of North Amer­i­ca. Despite (or ­because of) their associations with Indigeneity, both w ­ ere a­ dopted by newcomers, who in turn assigned their own meanings to the marks, scars, and trophies produced by tattoos and scalp-­ taking. In a time and place where relationships between Indigenous and colonizing socie­ties ­were complex and unresolved, the interplay among dif­ fer­ent cultural norms and beliefs about the h ­ uman body meant that t­here was rarely a single, clear-­cut interpretation of, say, a tattooed hand or a living but scalped individual. Indeed, ­there is rarely a single way to read a scar or mark ­today. This book, then, is about embodied experience but also the creation of narratives to explain ­t hose experiences. The narratives considered ­here are accounts of personal experience, rumor-­ mongering, works of po­liti­cal propaganda, literary productions, ­legal and philosophical frameworks, and assertions of scientific expertise—­sometimes several of ­these at once. They are also largely the stories of settlers in the En­ glish colonies in eastern North Amer­i­ca and, ­later, settlers in territories claimed by the early American republic. ­These stories, to be clear, are not the only story written on the body that one might find in early Amer­i­ca, and my purpose ­here in foregrounding them is not to uncritically elevate them but to study their role in the generation and perpetuation of settler logics. By settler logics, I mean narratives emerging from colonial discourse, which delineate Native socie­ties in such ways as to produce racialized identities and which purport to naturalize and legitimize the claims of newcomers.9 Within t­ hose narratives, as scholars have noted, “the settler-­state depends on images of indigeneity even as it eliminates indigenous subjects”—­but further than that, I would argue, the colonization of North Amer­i­ca has used not only Indigenous imagery but has made complex, even contradictory, appropriations of embodied markers of “Indianness” right down to the level of the skin.10 ­These physical transformations and the stories told about them ­matter a g­ reat deal if we want to better understand how Anglo-­A merican ideas of h ­ uman difference developed and changed, as well as how t­ hose ideas ­were slotted into—or derived from—­colonial attempts to assert dominance over Indigenous ­peoples. In considering ­these settler logics, this work focuses on accounts by ­those who might—­over the timespan covered by this book—be described as En­glish,



Stories Written on the Body 5

British, Anglo-­American colonists, or, a­ fter the founding of the United States, white Americans. That so many terms uneasily and unevenly describe t­hese similar but not interchangeable groups highlights the slipperiness of national, ethnic, or cultural identities: one of the very concerns that prompted so much scrutiny of bodily markings in early Amer­i­ca. A focus on a single Eu­ro­pean colonial proj­ect is necessarily an incomplete picture: the North American borders of such empires tended to be paper-­thin, particularly in the face of power­ ful Indigenous polities to whom such territories actually belonged. The borders ­were also porous: individuals moved across bound­aries as travelers, traders, captives, and fighters, while information circulated in rumors and conversations, private letters, newspapers, translated texts, and reproduced images. My emphasis on En­glish and colonial Anglo-­American sources derives, in part, from questioning the shorthand of comparative colonialism that has asserted that British colonies ­were particularly resistant to adopting ele­ments of Indigenous cultures compared to supposedly more malleable colonial socie­ ties such as New France.11 Given the cultural exchange and contestation of Eu­ ro­pean empires in North Amer­i­ca, assessing that claim of British uniqueness means also looking at non-­Anglophone materials and particularly, given the geographic proximity and major imperial strug­gles over the Northeast, French sources. I therefore occasionally use the term Euro-­A merican to describe wider colonial American populations. A work that fully incorporated all the major colonial powers in North Amer­i­ca and their adoption, rejection, and reinterpretation of Native body modification practices would be epic, and I have not attempted it ­here; however, ­Under the Skin does compare British and French experiences with tattooing and scalping where pertinent. Foregrounding the narratives and bodies of Euro-­Americans in this work pre­sents ethical complexities. I am conscious that placing accounts of suffering, scarred, and transformed colonial bodies at the center of this text risks treating appearance as spectacle and, even more impor­tant, risks seeming to validate the very idea of settler victimization to which ­t hese accounts ­were often put. Scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have observed the preoccupation of much research with collecting the “pain narratives” of subaltern communities, arguing that Indigenous suffering is all too often regarded in such accounts as a marker of authenticity and as an experience requiring recognition by outsiders. This book is unavoidably about vio­lence, about contests for power that marked both bodies and minds. But I have attempted, as Tuck and Yang put it, to turn “the gaze back upon power, specifically the colonial modalities of knowing persons as bodies to be differentially counted,

6 Introduction

v­ iolated, saved, and put to work.”12 To do so means looking carefully at the stories colonial actors told about their own bodies and the bodies of Native ­peoples and taking them seriously—­but as narratives, not facts. Colonial understandings of t­ hese bodily practices w ­ ere sometimes informed by the experiences and knowledge of Native interlocutors or reflective of a­ ctual Indigenous cultural values; however, a work that explored scalping and tattooing while rooted in Indigenous perspectives and methodologies would have a very dif­fer­ent emphasis. I have cast a wide net in researching this book, drawing on sources describing body modification within Algonquian socie­ties of Roanoke and coastal Carolina, as well as ­those in what is currently New ­England and the Canadian Maritimes, including Wampanoag, Massachusett, Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, and Wabanaki ­peoples; Anishinaabeg ­peoples of the G ­ reat Lakes, including Odawa (Ottawa), Ojibwe, and Potawatomi communities; the Lenape (Delaware); the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations); the Shawnee; the Cherokee; and other Native nations east of the Mississippi River. This proj­ect attempts to describe some of the broad under­lying meanings of tattooing and scalping as they w ­ ere historically practiced among this diverse range of Native socie­ties, while acknowledging both Indigenous communities’ right to opacity around culturally significant practices and the need for additional scholarship that considers ­these markings firmly within their specific cultural contexts.13 I have instead focused on how bodily modifications penetrated colonial skin and colonial imaginations.

* * * The body conceptually links the small and large, the intimate and the systematic, the public and personal. In the Atlantic world, the ­human body sometimes appeared to be one of the only ­t hings newly introduced socie­ties had in common. Indeed, perceived continuities between shared bodily meta­ phors enabled colonists and Native Americans to establish alliances that could be made part of the natu­ral order through expressions of mutual humanity. But overlooked cultural specificities of bodily meta­phors and experience could also create misunderstandings, while differences in physical appearance could be deployed to insist on a natu­ral order that ranked capabilities and place in life. Variances in physiognomy could prompt a disavowal of physical similarities and lead instead to articulations of ideas about h ­ uman difference rooted in the flesh. As historian Nancy Shoemaker notes, the body



Stories Written on the Body 7

appeared to be a “mutually intelligible language” but also “became the means to or­ga­nize new understandings of difference.”14 The history of the body as a field draws on a number of intersecting lines of inquiry, reflecting the body’s meaning as both a discursive construction (with bodies acting as signifiers and meta­phors) and as a tangible object (with physical embodiment acting as a site of experience or subjectivity).15 Rather than acting as a surrogate for any one category of analy­sis, histories of the body that encourage an intermingled study of gender, sexuality, and race not only more accurately reflect the historical entanglement of such themes; they can productively generate more than the sum of their parts. Discursive studies of the body have been more readily undertaken than t­ hose attentive to historical embodiment, in part ­because of the greater number of sources addressing the body as a communicative sign system.16 However, as historian Kathleen Brown notes, “Although it is saturated in culture, the body is also subject to the dictates of its own logic: that of a physical being, vulnerable to sickness and death despite ­human efforts at intervention and interpretation.”17 It is worth noting that early Amer­i­ca and its Atlantic cir­cuits of exchange saw a proliferation of printed material, both textual and visual, documenting the imprint of power on the body—­and clearly associating the marks on skin with forms of impression, puncturing, and engraving made on paper, clothes, and metal.18 The era’s understandings of cutaneous signs relied heavi­ly on notions of “reading” the h ­ uman body, and throughout this work I attempt to take seriously the notion of body as text without losing sight of t­ hose physical logics that Brown describes. Body modifications are a means of engaging both the discursive body—­the body as i­ magined, categorized, or represented—­and the material body, the practices shaping physical h ­ uman experience. The marks examined h ­ ere are t­ hose that, in their literal inscription in flesh, held stories of both bodily pain and close physical proximity between individuals receiving and inflicting them.19 A sharp needle might enter the skin, or a sharp knife might lift it. As critic Elaine Scarry has noted, pain possesses a deep certainty for the individual experiencing it but might appear subjective, even ephemeral, from the outside. Nonetheless, the material fact of external damage or modification of the flesh lends cultural beliefs (such as ­those about social identities and hierarchies of power) a realness and certainty despite the distance between seeing pain and feeling it oneself. Scarry has noted how the infliction of pain might result in the undoing or silencing of potential communication.20 My work shows that the difficulty of conveying bodily experience—­t he impossibility of describing sensation so that one’s

8 Introduction

listeners or readers might fully translate it into their own skin—­was productive not only of frustration but also of elaboration: efforts to draw analogies, find comparisons, and focus the attention ever more closely on marked flesh.21 Tattooing and scalping ­were both permanent and painful marks: one often voluntary, the other decidedly not. Equally impor­tant, they ­were—in the eyes of colonial observers—­both strongly associated with Native physical appearance and regarded as revealing crucial aspects of Native socie­ties, although what ­t hose crucial ele­ments w ­ ere thought to be changed over time and encompassed a number of contradictory claims. Euro-­A mericans debated vari­ous questions: ­Were Indigenous tattoos an admirably clear-­cut system of honorifics or a sign of foolish vanity? Was scalping a repulsively brutal act whose perpetrators ­were fundamentally uncivilized or another tactic to be added to the newcomers’ arsenal? Regardless of interpretation, on non-­Native bodies both marks w ­ ere thought to be clear signals of interactions with Native individuals. And among Native ­peoples, the meaning and symbolism of both practices shifted over time as they w ­ ere a­ dopted and transformed by colonizing socie­ties. Placing ­these quite dif­fer­ent body modifications in conversation with one another tells a wider story than considering a single practice in isolation. It demonstrates that scalping came to claim an ever-­larger territory in Anglo-­ American imaginations, becoming nearly metonymic with Nativeness by the late eigh­teenth ­century; tattooing, on the other hand, continued to intrigue but—in part due to its shifting association with Pacific socie­ties—­dwindled in perceived prominence as a marker of “American” bodies. Tracing the two practices together also shows how physical alterations could tell many stories and pre­sent many messages—­and how ­t hese distinct practices received additional import from the overlapping, intertwined way they ­were regarded in early Amer­i­ca. British soldiers, for example, might describe tattoos as “wounds,” as I discuss in Chapter 2, in part b ­ ecause tattoos w ­ ere conceptually linked with other more violent marks with Native origins, such as scalping scars. Bodies rarely carried a single message; instead they functioned as palimpsest, with layers of experience interacting as they w ­ ere viewed by o ­ thers or narrated by the self.

* * * This is an episodic study rather than a linear and comprehensive one, using what one scholar has called a “net of narratives” to capture a small sliver of



Stories Written on the Body 9

marks and their stories.22 Each chapter steps into a par­tic­u­lar time and place, following Anglo-­A merican settlement in eastern North Amer­i­ca from the earliest explorations of coastal “­Virginia” to Mas­sa­chu­setts and the mid-­ Atlantic, and then to trans-­Appalachian outposts. The work revisits a chronological and geo­graph­i­cal narrative of early Amer­i­ca often taken for granted, looking instead at the embodied intimacy of cultural encounters in order to illuminate shifting colonial ideas, practices, and policies. Chapters  1 and 2 consider tattooing, a practice with a deep history in Eu­rope, before turning in Chapters 3 and 4 to scalping, a practice unfamiliar to most Eu­ro­pe­ans but with clear parallels to their own forms of trophy-­taking and ritual vio­ lence. In both sections, the first chapter takes a broad view, considering how ­these Indigenous practices ­were ­shaped by cross-­cultural interactions, documenting how newcomers interpreted ­t hese marks, and addressing how each was incorporated into colonial epistemologies while being transformed in practice. The second chapter in each section looks more closely at individual narratives by and about marked individuals, exploring how their marks affected what their ­bearers already believed about themselves—­their religious, po­liti­cal, and personal allegiances, their power and status—­and what ­others said about them. Unfamiliar ­faces and bodies could impel narrative or resist it. The visual and cultural hybridity of marks made them fascinating and troubling to early Americans, belying as they did the stability and permanence ­people sometimes hoped to assign to cultures, religions, or race— or even to find in their own flesh. Chapter 1 considers some of the earliest En­glish observations and interpretations of Native North American markings: the watercolors made in 1585 by John White during an En­glish exploratory voyage to the Carolina Outer Banks. White’s attentiveness to the tattoos worn by Carolina Algonquian ­peoples reflected En­glish interest in determining how status and hierarchies ­were demarcated physically and visually. His watercolors became the source material for an extremely popu­lar set of engravings produced by the Flemish-­ German artist Theodor de Bry, which w ­ ere published alongside a description of the “new-­found land of ­Virginia” written by another member of the voyage, the scholar Thomas Harriot. Such early En­glish interpretations of Native tattoos regarded t­ hese marks as communication systems needing interpretation, comparable (if not exactly parallel with) writing. Th ­ ese early encounters became negotiations about how to define writing and reading: negotiations that ­were themselves routed through vari­ous writing and reading techniques. Engagement with Indigenous media systems, particularly

10 Introduction

tattoos, may have prompted Harriot, in turn, to develop a universal phonetic alphabet. Chapter 2 compares the tattoos on British, colonial American, and French soldiers taken captive or a­ dopted by Native socie­ties and contrasts them with the interpretations Native converts to Chris­tian­ity gave their own tattoos. This chapter explores how, in par­tic­u­lar, men with military experience, both of Native and of Eu­ro­pean descent, interpreted their tattoos. Soldiers and officers ­were one of the most likely colonial groups to receive Native tattoos—­ sometimes as a curiosity or memento of their travels, at other times as part of diplomatic outreach and alliance-­building. Their tattoos could be expressive of voluntary allegiances or of unwanted affiliations. This chapter also considers intersections of religion and military life on the bodies of warriors. Eu­ro­pean soldiers sometimes mixed their tattooed cosmologies, for example, wearing both Christian crosses and Native super­natural symbols such as horned snakes. Their Native American counter­parts, on conversion to Chris­tian­ity, sometimes reformulated their understandings of their own tattoos, insisting that their marks of success as warriors w ­ ere no longer to be spoken about. Chapter 3 investigates the consequences of colonial agreements introducing bounties for Native scalps, arguing that the offer of a price for this body part dramatically reshaped the scale and significance of the practice of scalping. Examining how bounties transformed an Indigenous trophy-­ taking practice into a financial incentive for vio­lence, this chapter studies how scalps w ­ ere priced, displayed, and circulated by looking closely at some of their earliest uses in late seventeenth-­century New E ­ ngland. Scalp bounties s­haped diplomatic relations and prompted debates about the ethics and tactics of North American warfare. They often became a key setting for broader colonial discussions about how to value Native p ­ eople: as ­labor, as consumers, as military allies—or as body parts. In par­tic­u ­lar, fears of fraud reflected Anglo-­A merican ideas about the unknowability of scalp origins, even as government bounty protocols relied on assumptions about the age, gender, and ethnic origins of t­hese body parts. Narratives ­were required from bounty petitioners to prove that scalps ­were taken legitimately, in lieu of other reliable evidence. Increasingly by the eigh­teenth ­century, a practice that had been employed to create bonds of affiliation and economic exchange between colonists and Natives instead created alienation, as colonies moved to make bounty offers available only to white colonists. Chapter 4 studies narratives by and about scalping survivors. Survivors of this seemingly deadly act w ­ ere not uncommon in early Amer­i­ca, and their



Stories Written on the Body 11

numbers grew in the late eigh­teenth ­century with increased colonial American encroachment on lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains and the resulting violent conflicts with Native nations. Survivors’ bodies attracted a ­great deal of attention as living memories of violent conflict, and stories about their injuries functioned in a number of roles: as po­liti­cal propaganda, exercises in empathy, or even medical case studies. Building on the ­earlier chapter on bounties, this section investigates the broader obsession with this specific act of symbolic vio­lence in early Amer­i­ca, which prompted such anx­ i­eties that settlers prided themselves on preserving loved ones’ corpses intact rather than allowing them to be scalped, and spurred elaborate efforts by both Natives and settlers at revenge and retrieval of the taken scalp. As payment for scalps became widespread, the transformation of body parts into commodities provoked an additional fear—­t hat a h ­ uman subject might be changed into an object. American settlers who might insist on the exchange value of African bodies ­were outraged that money might be supplied for parts of theirs. Descriptions of scalping and scalping survivors from the late eigh­ teenth ­century and beginning of the nineteenth ­century also fit with what has been called the “pornography of pain” in the era’s lit­er­a­ture, with the culture of “sensibility” creating a deep fascination with reading and vicariously experiencing accounts of physical suffering.23 Tattooing was widely commented on by colonial observers but only acquired by a l­ imited number of individuals, who assigned quite disparate and personal interpretations to their marks. By contrast, scalping was both commented on and structurally a­ dopted into colonial systems of warfare. The wide-­scale Anglo-­American use—­and condemnation—of scalping compared to the intimate particularities assigned to tattooing suggest the distinctive roles each practice held in the imaginations of newcomers. In a brief epilogue, I consider the legacies and afterlives of the narratives American settlers developed about both tattooing and scalping. Cross-­cultural markings have acted, and continue to act, as residual memories in American culture, recalling past scenarios of vio­lence or peaceful accommodation according to the needs and desires of t­ hose invoking them. But like memory, markings combine permanency and malleability. This flexibility lends itself to their ongoing deployment: for scalping, as a widespread trope extending across film, tele­ vi­sion, and sports, and for tattooing, as a continued site of settler-­colonial appropriation as well as Indigenous cultural revitalization.

* * *

12 Introduction

What one scholar calls “colonization’s material under­pinnings” rely largely on the most material artifact of all: the ­human body, whose ability to be transformed by contact with ­others makes it a pivotal site to observe cultures colliding, coexisting, or being transformed.24 Body modifications in early Amer­i­ca have often been dismissed as curiosities rather than as keys to understanding the hopes and fears of ­t hose living in a world of vio­lence and profound cultural change. Altered individuals and their stories w ­ ere not just curiosities; they embodied a type of cultural boundary crossing that concerned ­t hose responsible for policing be­hav­ior and social norms.25 A tension existed between marks that ­were constitutive of identity and ­those that w ­ ere intended to undo or destroy an identity. The transfer of allegiances—or the appearance of such, as signaled by an altered bodily form—­might be deeply threatening to societal order and personal relationships. Attempts by ­people to change their decisions or to restore an identity that had been attacked required explaining to themselves and ­others what significance they attached to their markings. What did it mean to have a body part violently taken into another person’s possession? How might marks acquired by a person while living in a foreign society have been treated by their compatriots: as rejections of their socie­ties of origin, dangerous symbols of false religion, curious but inconsequential decorations? Competing pos­si­ble interpretations made storytelling a vital part of the experience of being marked: the possessor of the marked body insisted on the validity of their subjective understanding, while o ­ thers e­ ither agreed or countered with their own ideas about what such marks meant. In exploring the physical, emotional, and social impacts of bodily transformation, we have to grapple with the lived experience of the past. Th ­ ese marks followed p ­ eople, acting as reminders of their past: while “the frontier” might have moved on, scalping scars remained; tattoos tagged along as their ­bearers left North Amer­i­ca for Eu­rope. Cultural conflict, contest, and occasional coexistence altered the ­faces and flesh of historical actors. By considering how ­these marked individuals, their stories, images, and even their body parts circulated in the early American Atlantic world, ­Under the Skin reveals that the transformative impact of bodily change acted, for residents of early Amer­i­ca, as compelling visual and literary shorthand for the painful, even violent intimacies of contact.

CHAPTER 1

Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted Colonial Interpretations, Indigenous Tattoos

In the watercolor, a w ­ oman stands with one foot hooked b ­ ehind the other leg, her arms curved upward over her chest, hands resting on her shoulders. She gazes outward at the viewer, parallel dotted lines extending along her cheekbones, three vertical lines on her chin. A dark “V” in the center of her forehead and geometric bands encircling her bicep and calves complete her detailed tattoos. In addition to t­ hese marks, she is dressed simply in a fringed, knee-­length skirt made of skin and a blue beaded necklace. The painter did not rec­ord this w ­ oman’s name, labeling the piece, “One of the wyves of Wyngyno”—­one of the wives of Wingina, the chief ruler of the island of Roanoke. The watercolorist, an En­glishman named John White, wrote no other information about the sitter or her appearance. His title for the painting reflected his own society’s assumptions about gender and status, describing the ­woman solely through her relationship to an elite man. But for all that White failed to see, what he chose to rec­ord was also significant. This portrait, along with ­others made during the same journey, would be closely studied by many in E ­ ngland and be the inspiration for copies viewed widely throughout Eu­rope. As viewers attempted to read the physical appearance of Native Americans, some focused on what they perceived as the “writerly” nature of tattoos, attempting to decipher the messages such marks might carry and questioning what tattooing said about the individuals and socie­ ties that practiced it.

* * *

Figure 1. Watercolor portrait by John White of an elite w ­ oman of the Pamlico River region, tattooed on her face, arms, and legs. White described her as “one of the wyves of Wyngyno,” referring to Wingina, the werowance of Roanoke. Undated watercolor [c. 1585]. © The Trustees of the British Museum, all rights reserved. Museum registration number 1906,0509.1.17.



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 15

In July 1585, John White stood aboard a ship named the Tyger and watched the coast of North Amer­i­ca edge over the horizon. He had accompanied a similar voyage the previous year, but this time he had an additional reason to closely observe the landscape.1 He, along with several other members of the expedition, had been given specific ­orders to document crucial information about the plants, animals, landscapes, and p ­ eople they might encounter. As gentleman-­limner (or watercolor painter) for the voyage, White was expected to assist in mapping both the unfamiliar American terrain and the unfamiliar appearance of its p ­ eople.2 He was joined by Thomas Harriot, mathematician, scientist, and scholarly polymath, who was charged with learning and translating local languages as well as writing an account of the region’s natu­ral history and its cultures. Harriot’s account, published a few years ­later ­under the title A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of V ­ irginia, was meant both as a report for the voyage’s sponsors and as an advertisement for potential investors in ­future colonial efforts. The exploratory expedition, ­u nder the sponsorship of Sir Walter Raleigh, made landfall in the Outer Banks of what is now known as North Carolina—­a land known to its native Algonquian communities as Ossomocomuck. Several years l­ater, Harriot described the expedition’s arrival: “Wee came unto a Good bigg island, the Inhabitant[s] therof as soone as they saw us began to make a ­g reat an horrible crye, as ­people which never befoer had seene men apparelled like us. . . . ​Suche was our arrivall into the parte of the worlde, which we call V ­ irginia, the stature of bodye of which ­people, their attire, and maneer of livinge . . . ​I ­will particullerlye declare unto you.”3 Harriot’s words, like White’s paintings, ­were tasked with describing the bodies of newly encountered ­people, and exploring the significance of physical appearance in cross-­cultural settings.4 In their drawings and descriptions of Native tattoos, the chroniclers of this En­glish expedition attempted to translate such markings and explore their limits as a communication system. En­glish attention to Algonquian tattoos demonstrates that early En­ glish colonists did not see the Native socie­ties of the Amer­i­cas as exclusively oral cultures but rather as possessing complex media forms that they saw as analogous but not equivalent to their own writing. Such efforts to find and ascribe legibility could also function as a means of making ­people and places easier to colonize.

* * *

16 Chapter 1

During such cross-­cultural encounters, the outward appearances of new ­peoples attracted careful scrutiny. Judgments about the intentions, capabilities, and cultures of strangers started at the surface of their bodies. For early modern Eu­ro­pe­ans, observations of ­people w ­ ere as much a form of navigation as observations of wind and ocean currents might be: both ­were means of understanding where exactly one was in the world.5 Travelers ­were urged to make systematic observations, writing, drawing, and collecting samples where pos­si­ble. John White was expected to create maps of coasts and towns, paintings of animals and plants, and portraits of newly encountered p ­ eople. While White’s exact ­orders no longer exist in the rec­ord, the directions given to the artist and surveyor for a proposed 1582 expedition, Thomas Bavin, w ­ ere likely similar. His instructions requested that Bavin draw, among other ­things, “the figures and shapes on men and woeman in their apparrell as also their manner of wepons in ­every place as you s­ hall finde them differing.”6 Given the space limitations and expenses faced by early exploratory voyages, the inclusion of an artist might seem like a luxury.7 But artists w ­ ere crucial for recording information that was more clearly documented in images than in writing, particularly the costuming and appearance of foreign bodies. Such depictions also enabled firsthand interpersonal encounters to be interpreted and shared with t­ hose at a distance. Face-­to-­face ­embodied readings, potentially intense in affect, could thereby be translated—­a nd moderated—­and thus conveyed to o ­ thers with no immediate knowledge of new ­peoples, through books, artwork, or spoken accounts. Art and text complemented one another in early modern ethnographic accounts. Indeed, visual authority often took pre­ce­dence over textual, in part ­because audiences for ­these works ­were not universally literate. The sixteenth ­century in Eu­rope saw the emergence of a class of images designated by terms like contrafacta (counterfeit) and ad vivum (from the life): terms implying images ­were “uninterpreted nature” that recorded “­t hings and events as they ­were witnessed by the eye, not as they ­were composed by the artist.” As art historian Michael Gaudio notes, this insistence that visual sources ­were neutral and unmediated was an “untenable yet hugely productive claim.”8 The untenable nature of the idea is itself flagged by the uneasy flexibility of “counterfeit” in early modern En­glish usage. It was often a positive term, simply indicating a close portrayal or repre­sen­ta­tion, yet by the late sixteenth c­ entury was beginning to acquire negative connotations in some contexts, indicating deceit and forgery.9 Images w ­ ere no more unmediated than text, but such ideas ­were power­f ul and generated close attention to multiple media forms



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 17

by Eu­ro­pean readers and viewers as they pondered how best to convey information. Efforts to inventory novel aspects of unfamiliar socie­ties ­were intended to cata­log the distinguishing characteristics of a ­people: how to tell who was from one nation or another. They ­were also attempts to interpret individual intent: a stranger’s potential for vio­lence or for trade and po­liti­cal alliance. Mapping p ­ eople meant, especially, mapping their self-­presentation, including dress, gesture, hairstyles, and bodily adornment. In early modern Eu­rope, t­ hese aspects of appearance that could be manipulated ­were often held to provide valuable insights into the culture and social status of their ­bearers—­perhaps more so than bodily characteristics that might be innate.10 Clothing and body modifications (­whether temporary or permanent) showed what ­people valued enough to change and how they wished to be perceived by ­others. Such ele­ments also seemed to require the most translation. Particularly during initial meetings, when spoken communication seemed difficult or impossible, appearance and gesture provided much of the available knowledge.11 At the same time, b ­ ecause items such as clothing and hairstyles could be modified, ­t here was always the possibility that physical appearance could be deliberately manipulated to deceive observers, making accurate observations and analy­sis crucial.12 In Native Amer­i­ca, similar attentiveness was paid to the crucial information supplied by the dress and body modifications of strangers. The Carolina Algonquian communities who met John White and the other En­glishmen on the 1585 voyage would have carefully examined their hairstyles (devoid of the asymmetrical scalp locks and topknots their own adult men usually wore), their pox scars (which Native ­people would soon, devastatingly, acquire), their jewelry and attire. Their interest in colonists’ clothing was apparent in one early miscommunication. During their efforts at ­human and geographic mapping, members of the Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe voyage of 1584 had reported that the land was called Wingandacoa. But a few years ­later, in an updated interpretation, Sir Walter Raleigh reported that “when some of my ­people asked the name of that Countrie, one of the Salvages answered Wingandacon which is to say, as you weare good clothes, or gay clothes.”13 Arthur Barlowe had also noticed Native interest in his crew members’ bodies, which he imputed to differences in skin tone: “They wondred mervelously when we ­were amongest them, at the whitenes of our skinnes, ever coveting to touch our breastes, and to view the same.”14 What Barlowe understood as won­der at “whitenes” may have been an investigation of En­glish bodies for

18 Chapter 1

identifying marks, with Algonquians looking for information that could be concealed by Eu­ro­pean clothing. Special scrutiny was given to permanent body modifications that decorated the skin: what Bavin’s o ­ rders had called “the figures and shapes on men and woeman.” Such marks required commitment, signaling something impor­tant enough that physical pain and changing one’s appearance forever was worth it. They ­were also cultural emblems, “consciously assumed markers” of self-­presentation, that seemed harder to falsify or misrepresent than jewelry that might be taken off or paint that might be washed away.15 Attempting to learn what such bodily signs communicated was a pressing concern for both newcomers and natives, as urgent as learning a stranger’s “manner of wepons.” The mapping efforts of cross-­cultural encounters could be considered a pro­cess of translation on several levels—­not just efforts to learn what ­others ­were saying but also attempts to make the unfamiliar legible and manageable within one’s own cultural norms. Issues of language and translation function as meta­phors for the broader pro­cesses of colonization, mapping new places and p ­ eoples into familiar categories. Controlling language and even defining its forms acted as crucial parts of the contest for linguistic, cultural, and po­liti­cal power in early Amer­i­ca.16 Early North American encounters between colonizing groups and Native Americans ­were therefore negotiated via an embodied form of reading, and one of the most vis­i­ble sign systems available for such translation was tattooing. Tattoos have historically been a widespread practice in Native North American socie­t ies, performing a range of symbolically power­f ul, communicative work within and between ­human communities, as well as with other-­t han-­human persons or super­natural beings.17 Tattoos traditionally enacted a range of cultural work both through the chosen iconography and the act of tattooing, which took ritualized form in both religious and secular ceremonies. The functions of tattooing have varied widely among Native American socie­t ies, from signaling military honors and marking life stages to accessing sacred power, communicating with other-­t han-­human persons, and enabling the per­for­mance of gender roles. While direct archaeological evidence for tattooing in the coastal Carolinas has been difficult to trace, a number of items found in sites across the Southeast are thought to be parts of tattooing bundles: ­needles, pigment, scrapers and paddles, even stamps to apply imagery. H ­ uman figurines at several sites show ornamentation analogous to the tattooing depicted on members of southeastern Native



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 19

groups in early Eu­ro­pean sources.18 Tattoos by their very nature, as some anthropologists have argued, demand to be read, particularly by ­t hose outside of the b ­ earer’s circle of close f­ amily and friends. Alfred Gell writes that tattooing “is always a registration of an external social milieu,” noting that “style in self-­presentation presupposes a degree of intersubjective ‘otherness’ which is equally inconsistent with solitude, and with a social universe constituted wholly of intimates.”19 Tattooing therefore became a locus for conversations among and between Eu­ro­pean and Native socie­ties about language, communication, and meaning. As a communication system written on and carried within the body, tattooing concretely linked early modern efforts to interpret body modifications and to translate unfamiliar languages or scripts, while complicating emergent Eu­ro­pean discourses of text and image as a complementary but distinct binary.20 The term tattoo did not enter Eu­ro­pean lexicons ­until the late eigh­ teenth c­ entury; much of the seeming invisibility of early modern tattooing has less to do with a lack of source material and more with the plentitude of terms used to describe it.21 Many of the words used in English-­language accounts w ­ ere meta­phors derived from other practices—­including the preparation of parchment for script; the cutting, embroidering, and crafting of cloth; and the stamping or branding of goods, animals, and ­people—­and the significance of such words is discussed in greater detail ­later in this chapter. Notable, however, is the lack of a single unambiguous term for the practice, further emphasizing that within colonizers’ communication systems, tattoos called for both text and image to describe what a tattoo appeared to convey to Native Americans in a single mark. Neither text nor image alone seemed sufficient to convey the full complexity of a tattoo in colonial accounts, raising the question for some observers as to w ­ hether their own communication systems ­were insufficient or flawed. The paintings made by John White, the writings produced by Thomas Harriot, and the subsequent texts and images deriving from and building on their proto-­ethnographic observations all grappled with the significance of the tattoos on Native p ­ eople, hoping to acquire reading knowledge of t­ hese bodily manuscripts. Part of the power of tattooing in ­t hese cross-­cultural conversations derived from the fact that it was not new to the En­glish, despite their lack of a single term for the practice. The British Isles had their own history of tattooing (described l­ ater in this chapter) as well as previous experiences with foreign captives and travelers who had such marks. Indeed, White’s and Harriot’s interactions with the Algonquian communities of Ossomocomuck ­were likely

20 Chapter 1

not their first encounters with tattooed ­people of the Amer­i­cas. Less than a de­cade previously, En­glish expeditions to the Arctic led by Martin Frobisher had kidnapped at least four Inuit with hopes of using them as interpreters and with the intention of displaying them to impor­tant patrons. John White painted portraits of ­t hese captives, images that ­were included in the same bound volume as his watercolors of Algonquians. A tattooed Inuk ­woman known as “Arnaq”—­a term likely meaning “­woman” rather than her true name—­died shortly a­ fter Frobisher’s return to Bristol in the fall of 1577, but not before White and at least one other artist, Cornelis Ketel, had painted her and her infant child. Her facial tattoos, which included blue dots across her cheeks and lines on her chin, also prompted written commentary from En­glish scholars. William Camden would ­later describe the Inuit as having “black hair, broad ­faces, flat noses . . . ​t he w ­ omen painted about the eyes and balls of the cheek with a blue colour like that of the ancient Britons.”22 Familiarity with captives like Arnaq would have primed White, Harriot, and other En­glish observers to expect tattooing on Native Americans and to interpret such markings in light of their own national histories (“like that of the ancient Britons”) and their own expectations about the ways that bodies might tell stories.

* * * Studies of the role of literacy and writing in encounters between Indigenous socie­ties and colonizing ones have traditionally emphasized the introduction of alphabetic writing by Eu­ro­pe­a ns and its subsequent impact on Native knowledge and communication systems.23 Such studies have too often assumed a clear division between, on the one hand, literate Eu­ro­pe­ans, and on the other, the supposedly “primary oral cultures” of Native p ­ eoples; they typically have expected colonists to reject Native media forms as backward and insufficient or to simply ignore them. Yet colonists, as well as armchair travelers reading and learning about the Amer­i­cas, showed g­ reat interest in understanding Native media systems such as tattooing and employing that knowledge for their own purposes. Rather than focusing solely on the reception and repurposing of Western forms of alphabetic writing, literacy, and codex production among Native socie­ties, we might examine the role of Indigenous sign systems and languages in cross-­cultural efforts at communication and in shaping Eu­ro­pean thought.24

Figure 2. Watercolor portrait by John White of an Inuk w ­ oman and her infant child, kidnapped by Martin Frobisher and brought to Bristol in the fall of 1577. The piece, labeled by White as “Arnaq and Nutaaq,” shows faint tattooing on her cheeks and chin. Undated watercolor [c. 1585]. © The Trustees of the British Museum, all rights reserved. Museum registration number 1906,0509.1.30.

22 Chapter 1

Definitions of literacy and writing are, unsurprisingly, deeply contentious. While some have defined writing as “visual repre­s en­t a­t ion of spoken language,” ­others have argued for the inclusion of semasiographic systems, wherein signs represent ideas, not language or words: musical and math notations are examples.25 A number of pictographic systems in the Amer­i­cas are considered semasiographic yet are not representative of spoken language. As “marks made upon a material base for the purpose of recording, storing, and communicating information,” tattoos along with other Indigenous sign systems, such as wampum ­belts, winter counts, and khipu (knotted string devices used by Andean socie­ties including the Inca Empire), could meet basic requirements to be considered literacies, although all are also distinguished by their “character as pro­cess rather than as repre­sen­ta­ tion.”26 Indeed, writing may be too narrow a conceptual lens for many Native media systems, which often operated in settings where art and writing ­were a blended idea or which required per­for­mance or ritual pro­cess to convey their full content.27 Simply b ­ ecause Harriot and White interpreted tattoos as texts (at least in part) does not mean that we should not remain attentive to the complexity of tattooing as a media form, work of art, and ritual pro­cess operating well beyond “writing.” ­There is far more to the lived experience of such a mark than a “reading” analogy allows for, not least ­because of the embodied and sensory qualities of a tattoo; it can fade, stretch, become infected, be removed, be ignored, or be rejected. Yet it is worth acknowledging that Eu­ro­pean reactions to Indigenous tattoos and other sign systems often did involve hierarchical comparisons of writing systems and analy­sis of Indigenous practices by ranking their similarities and dissimilarities to Eu­ro­ pean modes of communication. Translation h ­ ere should be understood, therefore, as operating both as an expansive concept referring to the ability to decode or decipher the information held by body modifications and as a more precise usage referring to instances of early modern Eu­ro­pean treatment of tattoos as written sign systems that could be interpreted. This framework would not have been incomprehensible to early modern ­peoples, even Eu­ro­pe­a ns who prized their alphabetic writing systems and printing presses as g­ reat accomplishments of civilization.28 The earliest Eu­ro­pe­ans in the Amer­i­cas (who ­were not themselves uniformly literate) rarely interpreted Native tattoos as mere marks of irremediable savagery, nor did they automatically dismiss them as insignificant. Rather, such travelers investigated Indigenous marks as a potential language.



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 23

Tattoos might be written on the body rather than on paper, but they nonetheless conveyed impor­tant messages. Attention to colonists’ efforts to read Native tattoos calls for a conscious inversion of traditional models, reframing cross-­cultural encounters as mutual and multivalent reading experiences rather than as a unidirectional imposition of literacy by Eu­ro­pe­ans. Fascination and confusion with foreign communication systems was a common experience in the early modern Atlantic.

* * * In addition to a growing familiarity with global tattooing practices through the voyages of captives like the Inuk w ­ oman Arnaq, Europe—­Britain in particular—­had its own domestic practices of tattooing, as mentioned e­ arlier. While it was unusual, tattooing was known well enough to have even permeated the unconscious, appearing in the dreams of the scholar John Dee. In 1579, Dee noted in his private diaries that he had had a “dream of being naked, and my skin all overwrowght with work like some kinde of tuft mockado, with crosses blew and red; and on my left arme, about the arme, in a wreath, this word I [read]—­sine me nihil potestis facere.”29 Dee, who was often consulted by Queen Elizabeth and members of her court for his alchemical knowledge, recorded the dreams he found particularly significant: the vision of his skin “overwrowght” with a blue and red pattern like mockado (an imitation velvet) and the biblical verse “without me ye can do nothing” must have invited further reflection and interpretation.30 In addition to the mystical tattoos of alchemists and scholars like Dee, late sixteenth-­century En­glish observers had two major tattooing parallels to connect with Native practices: the tattoos supposedly borne by ancient Britons, particularly the Picts, and the tattoos received by contemporaries at several pilgrimage sites throughout Eu­rope and the ­Middle East, of which Jerusalem was the most prominent. Early modern pilgrims to the Holy Land could receive a “Jerusalem cross” to commemorate their visit, often choosing to be marked on their hand or arm with this vis­i­ble symbol of their pious journey.31 Many hoped that the tattoos would provide them safe passage on their return voyages. Even ­after the Protestant Reformation, travelers from ­Great Britain continued to make pilgrimages, with some ­going on to receive tattoos at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem or in Bethlehem.32 William Lithgow, a Scottish courtier to James VI and I, claimed to have received an unusually elaborate tattoo

24 Chapter 1

in Jerusalem in 1612. His travel account explained that he had joined other pilgrims at the site of Christ’s tomb in having “ingrave[d] on our severall Armes . . . ​t he name of Jesus, and the Holy Crosse.” He went further than the other members of his party, however, and had the tattooist add “the four incorporate Crowns of King James, with this Inscription, in the lower circle of the Crowne, Viuat Iacobus Rex,” paying the tattooist “two Piasters” for his ser­v ices.33 Lithgow’s arm therefore told a story both of Christian faith and of fealty to a British (and Protestant) king. ­These intersecting commitments, he claimed, had made him subject to torture at the hands of Spanish officials in the city of Malaga. Having arrested him on his return voyage from Jerusalem on suspicion of spying, Lithgow’s captors, he wrote, discovered his tattoo and “gave direction to teare asunder, the name and Crowne . . . ​of that Heretike King” inscribed u ­ nder “the marke of Jerusalem.”34 Wrapping a cord around his arm, they pulled the rope tightly back and forth u ­ ntil the skin had been abraded entirely, even cutting into the flesh and tendons of his arm. ­Others, including writer Thomas Coryat, received similar pilgrimage tattoos (with much less suffering) in the first de­cades of the seventeenth ­century. One of his travel companions, Edward Terry, described how Coryat had gotten both wrists tattooed: the left with a Jerusalem cross and the right with a cross, three nails, and the words “Via, Veritas, Vita.” Terry recalled that Coryat had been proud of the “indelible Characters” of his arms and had often invoked “­t hose words of St. Paul, written to the Galatians. . . . ​I bear in my body the marks of Lord Jesus.”35 While Coryat had sought out the markings, other travelers from the British Isles politely begged off, for example, Fynes Moryson: “When our consorts at Bethlehem printed the signe of the Crosse with inke and a pen-­k nife upon their armes, so as the print was never to bee taken out, wee would not folow them in this small ­matter, but excused our selves.”36 Moryson’s stated rationale for avoiding tattooing was that “being to passe home through many kingdomes,” he wished to avoid marks by which he “might bee knowne”—­a caution that Lithgow’s story suggests was wise. Such accounts demonstrate that pilgrimage tattoos likely would have been exotic for British travelers, yet a familiar enough concept that it could be readily applied to understandings of Native markings. En­glish authors—­particularly advocates of colonization—­drew even more frequent comparisons between the body modifications of Native Americans and t­ hose of the ancient Picts. The British, among all the Eu­ro­pean socie­ties interacting with marked bodies overseas, placed the most emphasis in connecting such body modification to examples within their own domestic

Figure 3. William Lithgow’s tattoos: a Jerusalem cross and the crowns of Scotland and ­England, united by the reign of King James. William Lithgow, The totall discourse, of the rare adventures, and painefull peregrinations of long ­nineteene yeares travailes from Scotland, to the most famous kingdomes in Eu­ rope, Asia, and Affrica (London: J. Oakes, 1640). Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

26 Chapter 1

histories.37 ­These analogies w ­ ere intended to signal to readers a chronological continuum between the history of the British Isles and the pre­sent (and f­ uture) of the New World. While t­ here is debate about the historical extent of tattooing among the Picts and insular Celts, British writers of the late sixteenth ­century believed it was one of their primary characteristics, frequently citing Roman accounts of the detailed tattoos they observed on the conquered ­peoples of Britain. In William Camden’s Britannia, first published in Latin in 1586 and then in En­ glish in 1610, the Picts ­were described as deriving “a name drawne even from their bodies, for that by the artificiall pricking therein of small holes with a needle, the workman wringing out the juice of greene grasse, encloseth the same within, that their Nobilitie and Gentry thus spotted, may carrie t­hese starres about them, in their painted pownced [limbs], as badges to be knowen by.”38 The frontispiece to John Speed’s 1611 Historie of G ­ reat Britaine had at the center of the image an ancient “Britaine” with a mustache, spear, and faint tattooing across his chest, while the text included numerous references to the “artificiall incisions of sundry forms” worn by Britain’s “Barbarians.” “Neither do ­t hese savage Nations repute any ­t hing a greater testimonie of their patience,” Speed wrote, “then by such durable skars to make their lim[b]s drinke in much painting and colour. ­These skarres by Tertullian are termed Britannorum stigmata, The Britaines markes.”39 Images of ancient Britons as painted and “pownced” ­were likely influenced by reports of tattooed Indigenous Americans, much as interpretations of Native tattooing ­were, in turn, s­ haped by British perceptions of their ancestors as ­people “artificially incised.” From the perspective of ­t hose promoting colonization efforts, t­ hese comparisons w ­ ere meant to be encouraging: just as the Romans had brought civilization to the barbaric Picts, so too might the Native p ­ eoples of Amer­i­ca be brought such benefits by the Picts’ 40 own descendants. In de Bry’s edition of the Report the connection between British past and American pre­sent was made explicit; the volume concluded with an appendix of five images of “the Pictes which in the olde time did habite one part of the g­ reat Bretainne.” Following immediately a­ fter the main body of the text, with its images and discussion of Native Americans, the plates, with their introductory text by engraver and publisher Theodor de Bry, drew clear links between the two socie­t ies. De Bry wrote, “The painter of whom I have had the first [images] of the Inhabitans of ­Virginia, give me allso thees 5. Figures [following] . . . ​which I would well sett to the ende of thees first Figures, for to showe how that the Inhabitants of the g­ reat Bretannie have

Figure 4. An ancient Briton depicted with tattoos of animals and geometric patterns, from the frontispiece in John Speed, The History of ­Great Britaine ­under the conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (London: William Hall and John Beale, 1614). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

28 Chapter 1

bin in times past as savage as t­ hose of V ­ irginia.”41 The comparison worked to the f­ avor of the Algonquian p ­ eoples. In the Report’s plates, the Picts could be read visually as far more barbaric than the Algonquian. They wore no clothing, the better to display their full-­body tattoos; the Pictish man is shown with only a b ­ elt on which he has a “[scimitar] or turkie soorde,” while his other hand grasps both a spear and a severed head.42 Their body ornamentation, rather than the more subtle geometric or abstract patternings depicted on Native arms and legs, was expansive and pictorial. Images of owls, lions, “sum fearefull and monstreus face,” or sun, moon, stars, “griffon heades,” and elaborate flowering plants grew dizzily profuse from neck to feet on the Picts.43 Their markings are itemized in the text rather than explained or translated, as is attempted with the Algonquian tattoos. This absence of explanation could suggest a number of interpretative possibilities: the communicative potential of Pictish tattooing might have been thought to have been so apparent as to make translation unnecessary, or it might have implied that the marks possessed l­ittle symbolic meaning, only a love of embellishment. A difference in intent likely mattered too: the commentary on the Algonquians held practical implications for potential colonists, while that on the Picts drew historical and meta­ phorical connections. Gordon Sayre has argued that tattooing could be perceived in the early modern period as “the negative limit of clothing,” possessing “the vanity of ornament without the utility or modesty of clothing.”44 In the Report, however, it is the Picts’ tattooing, not that of the Algonquians’, which best meets this description. This ornament, it is implied, may be the more truly savage in that it does not perform the same useful tasks of social organ­ization and differentiation that Harriot ascribed elsewhere in the text to Algonquian tattoos. Alternatively, the two sets of images may not have been intended as a hierarchy of value so much as a means of drawing two distinct comparisons with con­temporary En­glish culture: the Picts’ lavish art with the elaborate ornamentation seen on gilt armor and costuming for court; the Algonquians’ designs with the signaling of social status and role performed in Eu­rope by seals, signets, and armorial devices.45 Such ideas and associations—­Britain’s deep past, con­temporary pilgrims’ expressions of faith, the heraldry of rulers and elite families, and the body modifications of global voyagers—­influenced the images and texts created by En­glish explorers who hoped to map the language inscribed on tattooed Indigenous bodies. John White’s paintings and Thomas Harriot’s account of

Figure 5. Engraving by Theodor de Bry (­after a watercolor by John White), “The trvve picture of one Picte,” from Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of V ­ irginia (Frankfurt, 1590). Courtesy of the John Car­ter Brown Library.

30 Chapter 1

their visits to villages around Pamlico Sound are some of the few sources on coastal Carolina Algonquian tattooing. Yet they need to be approached with many of the same cautions as other ethnographic sources, with the understanding that they reveal as much about what White and Harriot expected or hoped to see as they do about the lived experiences of the Native subjects of the portraits. Close consideration of White’s watercolors and Harriot’s writings, as well as the large number of repurposed, recycled, and modified images and descriptions based on t­ hose works in the de­cades following, provides insight into En­glish reactions to Native tattooing systems as they explored the communicative potential of permanent ink.

* * * Of the seventy-­five images in White’s extant collection of watercolors, four are portraits of tattooed ­women: all Carolina Algonquian who lived in the communities surrounding Pamlico Sound. None of the elite Algonquian men shown in individual portraits are depicted with what definitively can be said to be tattoos—at least one is extensively ornamented with body paint—­ although men in some group images appear to have tattoo markings.46 The watercolor medium makes it pos­si­ble to distinguish color and therefore, to an extent, ­whether designs ­were tattooed or painted. Body paint could be red, white, or black, while tattoos ­were often made with carbon-­based inks that produced black, grey, or dark blue images.47 In perhaps the best known of White’s paintings, a portrait of a male werowance (or chief), White’s caption makes clear that the man’s elaborate dress is for a specific event, describing the picture as “the manner of their attire and painting them selves when they goe to their generall huntings, or at their solemne feasts.”48 Elite ­women, all described by White as married to werowances, are the individuals most prominently tattooed in his series of watercolors.49 As described at the beginning of the chapter, “one of the wives of Wingina” was depicted with grey-­black dotted and striped tattoo patterns on her face, legs, and arms, as well as bands of tattoos on her upper arms and calves. A V-shape between her eyes, marks at her ­temple, two rows of dots beneath her cheekbones, and chin stripes all mark her face, with the chin markings, in par­tic­ u­lar, evoking a style of ­women’s facial tattooing quite widespread across North Amer­i­ca. The other three portraits of elite Carolina w ­ omen show similar styles of tattooing, although with differences that likely reflected regional variations.50 Another portrait, that of “a chiefe Herowans [werowance’s] wyfe

Figure 6. Watercolor portrait by John White, “A chiefe Herowans [werowance’s] wyfe of [Pomeiooc] and her ­daughter of the age of 8 or 10 yeares,” depicting detailed facial, neck, and arm tattoos on the w ­ oman. Undated watercolor [c. 1585]. © The Trustees of the British Museum, all rights reserved. Museum registration number 1906,0509.1.13.

32 Chapter 1

of [Pomeiooc] and her ­daughter,” shows an adult ­woman with nearly identical facial tattoos to ­t hose of Wingina’s wife. Her arm bands are of a dif­fer­ent pattern, and she has no calf bands. In addition to several necklaces of copper, bone, or pearl beads, she appears to have a multistrand “necklace” tattooed across her neck and upper chest.51 White’s depiction of coastal Algonquian tattooing as practiced in a distinct manner among ­women—­and illustrated with marks quite dif­fer­ent from ­t hose shown in de Bry’s in­de­pen­dently designed engravings—­has corroboration from other accounts. George Percy, a colonist at Jamestown, wrote soon ­after his arrival that “the w ­ omen kinde in this Countrey doth pounce and [raze] their bodies . . . ​w ith a sharpe Iron, which makes a stampe in curious knots,” while John Smith observed that some of the w ­ omen “have their legs, hands, breasts and face cunningly imbrodered with diverse workes.”52 As ­brother to Harriot’s patron, the earl of North­umberland, George Percy would have likely studied Algonquian language with Harriot prior to his departure for ­Virginia in late 1606.53 Percy went on to describe Algonquian practices of painting their bodies “with artificiall knots of sundry lively colours, very beautifull and pleasing to the eye, in a braver fashion than they in the West Indies.”54 At the beginning of the seventeenth ­century, “bravery” often referred to embellishment or adornment, sometimes with connotations of ostentatiousness but equally likely to refer to something legitimately worthy of interest. Percy’s positive assessment of Algonquian tattooing—­and his evaluation of how it compared to body ornamentation he had viewed in the West Indies—­demonstrate that White and Harriot w ­ ere not the only colonial promoters treating tattooing as a crucial source of information. Significant differences appear between what White depicted and emphasized in his watercolors and in the engravings modeled on t­hose images created a few years ­later by artist and printer Theodor de Bry for the ­Report. De Bry’s images had a much wider viewership than their original source material. While a portfolio of White’s paintings likely circulated among members of Raleigh’s elite circle, the engravings made by de Bry’s workshop for his set of volumes publishing and illustrating accounts of vari­ous New World voyages (known collectively as simply Amer­i­ca) ­were im­mensely popu­lar and widely distributed across Eu­rope.55 Harriot’s Report, originally published in London in 1588 as a small pamphlet, was republished by de Bry in Frankfurt in 1590, in French, German, Latin, and En­glish and with elaborate, expensive engravings based on White’s watercolors. The Report, therefore, was incorporated into the much larger Amer­i­ca.



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 33

While White’s portrait paintings focused on ­women with tattoos, de Bry’s engravings showed men and ­women alike with elaborate designs: more delicate, detailed, and greater in number than in the original paintings. This heightened emphasis on tattoos is, in part, a result of differences in medium; engraving highlights the line and tactility of tattooing rather than distinguishing the color of body paints as the watercolors do. It should also be understood as part of de Bry’s choices in translating White’s images for a wider audience in order to promote colonization efforts. The engravings in the Report showed even more of the Algonquians as tattooed than in White’s paintings—­ emphasizing that the inhabitants of the New World ­were highly ornamented and in possession of a distinctive sign system. As o ­ thers have noted, de Bry’s workshop also altered the proportions and facial features of Native figures, lengthening foreheads, shortening hands and feet, and generally reshaping bodies to match popu­lar Eu­ro­pean aesthetic preferences of the era.56 In the Report, tattoos on Algonquian bodies demonstrated a sophisticated system of social status, as well as the apparent presence of leisure time to create detailed adornment. Harriot reported that dif­fer­ent tattoo styles could distinguish ­people from vari­ous communities around Pamlico Sound. “Their foreheads, cheeks, chinne, armes and leggs are pownced,” he wrote about the elite ­women of Secotan. “About their necks they wear a chaine, ether pricked or paynted.”57 Yet in other towns such as Dasemunkepeuc, the ­women, while “attired, and pownced, in suche sorte as the woemen of Roanoac are,” w ­ ere dif­fer­ent in appearance ­because “they weare noe [wreaths] uppon their heads, nether have they their thighes painted with small pricks.”58 Harriot’s efforts to describe precise distinctions between communities did not always align with White’s notebook captions, reflecting dif­fer­ent memories and interpretations.59 For example, the ­woman Harriot said was from Dasemunkepeuc, a town on the mainland coast opposite the island of Roanoke, was identified in the correlated sketch by White as being from Pomeiooc, a dif­fer­ent village. And while Harriot reported that it was the ­women of Roanoke who wore wreaths on their heads and tattooed their legs, which corresponded with White’s painting, de Bry’s subsequent engraving based on that image labeled her as a “doughter of Secota.”60 Such anomalies reflect the uncertainties and confusion faced by even close observers like White and Harriot as they attempted to make interpretations of body modifications and attire the key ele­ ments of their ethnographies of the communities around Pamlico Sound.

* * *

34 Chapter 1

The language used by Harriot to describe tattooing—­pouncing, pricking, and rasing—­were common En­glish terms for the practice ­until the late eigh­teenth ­century, along with words like pinking, listing, cutting, engraving, and embroidering. Such words had multiple and ambiguous associations with art, fashion, and writing. Juliet Fleming notes that “pounce” in par­tic­u­lar was “associated with writing as well as with face-­painting” and could refer to “powder used to dust cheeks, transfer embroidery designs through a perforated pattern or prepare parchment to receive writing.”61 Harriot wrote that the w ­ omen of Secotan had “their foreheads, cheeks, chinne” and limbs “pownced.”62 Other sixteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean accounts described ­peoples of the Amer­i­cas as being “painted” or “pricked” (or in French, piquer), with skin “inlaid in a strange fashion,” covered in “curious knots” or “antique work.”63 Describing tattooing as pouncing or engraving meant that early modern En­glish vocabularies of writing and art-­making inflected how body modifications w ­ ere seen and interpreted. Pinking, in turn, carried connotations of the excesses of fashion, referring to the slashing of fabrics to reveal skin or other fine fabrics under­neath.64 Similar analogies of embroidery or inlay drew comparisons between tattooing and elaborately decorated clothing or jewelry—­both evoking the often-­feminized l­abor of adorning the body and suggesting that socie­ties with tattooing conflated flesh and fabric, temporary beautification and permanent enhancement. To “rase,” or “raze,” could mean both to erase by scraping or to mark by scratching or cutting—­useful ambiguities applied to tattooing. Peter Martyr, in reference to the supposed ease of converting natives of the Amer­i­cas to Chris­tian­ity, had claimed they ­were “like as rased or unpainted t­ables . . . ​apte to receave what formes soo ever are first drawen theron by the hande of the paint­er.”65 Imagining Native Amer­i­ca as tabula ra­sa—an unpainted surface that might be easily written on to suit new arrivals—­was crucial for promoters of colonization such as Martyr. ­Great significance was attributed to the material properties of inscribed objects—­“profound surfaces”—in both Eu­ro­pean and Native American cultures.66 Native media forms, especially tattoos, ­were enmeshed in the particularities of their material existence; full communication of a mark’s message required an individual’s bodily presence and physical context. In Eu­ rope, the early modern book made knowledge portable and exchangeable but did not function as a disembodied text: the location and materiality of writing mattered. Rather than denying or ignoring the physical nature of a



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 35

written-­upon item, Elizabethan E ­ ngland paid close attention to the meaning it conveyed. Definitions of writing in ­England w ­ ere malleable and expansive well into the mid-­seventeenth c­ entury, and the page was not the only location for text. Words ­were written on walls and on clothing, and as Fleming has argued, settings “where ­matter [appeared] to bind thought” ­were common, with “an inscription [taking] the form of the implement” on which it appeared, or ascribing par­tic­u­lar intent or potential to the item.67 Such ideas mattered b ­ ecause, for En­glish newcomers to the Amer­i­cas, they potentially granted the same logics of communication to Native practices as to Eu­ro­pean ones—­even as this apparent familiarity with similar practices may have encouraged greater misinterpretation rather than less. Bound­a ries between page and skin ­were suggestively blurred during the 1585 expedition’s meetings with Algonquian communities, highlighting the ways that skin, as Fleming has written, could act “as a writing surface on which ideas are enmeshed in m ­ atter.”68 Harriot reported that he had attempted to explain the Bible to several villages, with this result: “And although I told them the booke materially & of it self was not of any such vertue . . . ​but only the doctrine therein contained; yet would many be glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke over all their body with it; to shewe their hungry desire of that knowledge which was spoken of.”69 While insisting that his listeners understood that the contents of the Bible, not the material object, was what was valuable, Harriot described their physical engagement with the book in ways that evoked a sense of transfer between paper and flesh and that might have reminded readers of Native propensities for inscribing knowledge within the surface of the skin.

* * * Harriot’s observations implied the need for prospective colonists to be familiar with differences in tattooing and other bodily modification so that they could properly distinguish p ­ eople by their geographic and po­liti­cal regions. Considering the images and text in this light prompts a consideration of the Report as not only a solicitation to colonization but as something of a diplomatic brief. While the majority of the Report’s readers would never visit the Carolinas in person, potential colonists may have studied the text with the intention of learning about the communities they might encounter—­ and in d ­ oing so, sidestepping the engagement with Native in­for­mants that

36 Chapter 1

allowed Harriot and White to produce their accounts in the first place. This account and o ­ thers like it enabled long-­d istance readings of foreign bodies, which might bypass or mute some of the intensity of firsthand embodied meetings. The images in the Report might have been indistinguishable for some of its more casual readers, yet attentive audiences would have seen the work as a key to visually differentiate between p ­ eoples with quite dif­fer­ ent be­hav­iors, politics, and intentions t­oward colonists—­revealing a belief that descriptive accounts of appearance might, in their own fashion, provide transparent knowledge of o ­ thers’ identity. The final image of an Algonquian in the Report makes explicit the claim that tattoos could be a Native communication system that Eu­ro­pe­ans might learn to translate. This engraving has no parallel in White’s extant paintings (although de Bry’s workshop may have worked from an original that has since been lost). It may have been a stand-­a lone creation of the engraving workshop, as it operates quite differently from White’s known paintings of Algonquians: conceptually functioning more like a map than a portrait.70 Rather than a portrait of an individual from a specific village and class status, this illustration, “Marckes of Sundrye of the Chief Mene of V ­ irginia,” operated as a visual vocabulary list: indexing Algonquian tattoos to place and to social group. An Algonquian man stands with his back to the viewer in classical contraposto, leaning on his bow in his left hand and loosely holding two arrows in his right, which point inward and rest against his shoulder—­a visual cue that should remind the viewer of the pro­cess of tattooing. An abstract design of two crossed triangular points is prominently marked on his upper back. Harriot wrote, in text under­neath the plate, that such marks w ­ ere “rased” on men’s backs “wherby it may be knowen what Princes subjects they bee, or of what place they have their [origin]. For which cause we have set downe ­t hose marks in this figure, and have annexed the names of the places, that they might more easelye be discerned.”71 The engraving also contains, distributed across the plane of the image as if detached from the subject’s skin (as Michael Gaudio has pointed out), a schema or map of seven dif­fer­ent marks that Harriot claimed to link to vari­ous chiefs among the coastal Algonquian communities.72 For example, Harriot explained, “The marke which is expressed by A belongeth tho Wingino, the cheefe lorde of Roanoac. That which hath B is the marke of Wingino his ­sisters husband.” He grouped C and D with leaders of Secotan, and E, F, and G with “certaine cheefe men” in Pomeiooc and Aquascogoc.73

Figure 7. Engraving by Theodor de Bry, “Marckes of Sundrye of the Cheif Mene of ­Virginiva,” from Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of V ­ irginia (Frankfurt, 1590). Courtesy of the John Car­ter Brown Library.

38 Chapter 1

This image differs significantly from the ­others in the Report. Throughout Harriot’s text, ­women from dif­fer­ent communities ­were distinguished by the bodily location of their tattoos (­whether on their calves, arms, or ­faces), yet the a­ ctual imagery or significance of their tattoos went undiscussed. Only this illustration focuses on the style and meaning of tattoos, and it does so in order to determine men’s social affiliations. Although Harriot pinpointed stylistic choices as significant distinctions, he made no comment on why specific marks ­were chosen to represent specific “Princes”—­leaving the pictographic content, in that sense, untranslated. Arguably, this decision treated the “marckes” as functioning like abstract signs, invisible in some of the same ways that the shape and form of alphabetic letters became invisible to their users, their design subsumed within their meaning. Individual agency in choosing or creating their tattoos was muted in Harriot’s passive-­voice description: the tattooed “have marks rased,” possibly as an imposition by the elites whose “subjects they bee.” Such a claim would have strengthened the Report’s assertion of orderly society among the Algonquians, demonstrating the power of their po­liti­cal hierarchies and the ability of their rulers to compel the remaking of their subjects’ bodies. Indeed, given that the early modern world was full of examples of rulers ordering the marking or maiming of subjects and subjugated ­peoples alike, this would not have seemed unusually despotic but rather as an expression of fealty (similar to Lithgow’s tattoo honoring King James) and corroboration of a ruler’s rightful authority. Harriot also decoupled tattooing from its pos­si­ble linkages with heathenism, claiming the practice was an “industrie” “which . . . ​hath god indued them withal although they be verye ­simple, and rude.” He wrote that “most thinges they sawe with us,” including “bookes, writing and reading . . . ​­were so straunge unto them . . . ​t hat they thought they w ­ ere rather the works of gods then of men, or at the leastwise they had bin given and taught us of the gods.” Yet even while outlining a comforting narrative to Eu­ro­pean readers about the impressiveness of Eu­ro­pean technologies, Harriot suggested that Native p ­ eoples too might possess God-­granted (and presumably therefore appropriate) technologies.74 Harriot’s implied claim to have accurately acquired the ability to translate this Algonquian textual form has to be approached, of course, with doubt since the gaps in his translation abilities are noted at other points in the Report. He wrote, for example, that for “want of perfect utterance in their language” he was unable to explain Christian concepts fully to his Native hosts, a rare



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 39

acknowl­edgment of the linguistic and cultural gaps that early encounters strug­gled to bridge.75 More frequently, however, Harriot’s writing was authoritative in tone, telling readers how to understand “the naturall inhabitants” of the Carolinas by dress, manners, and their “marckes.” The assertion that White’s images w ­ ere “counterfeited according to the truth” (in the now obsolete sense of “counterfeit” as closely imitating and accurately portraying by an image), as well as such clear pronouncements by Harriot, belied the inherently interpretative nature of their translations.76 Ethnographic evidence suggests that men in a number of southeastern Native groups had tattoos, despite their minimal presence in White’s watercolors. Despite ambiguities and blurriness, some of the smaller figures in White’s group paintings of groups can be seen to show coastal Carolina Algonquian men with tattoos, but not with the same detail as in his portraits of elite ­women. In contrast to White’s focus on ­women’s tattooing, de Bry’s illustrations for the published volume emphasized the tattooing of Algonquian men. The decision in Harriot’s text and the accompanying engravings to stress the legibility of men’s tattoos—as clear signs of po­liti­cal allegiances—­ over ­those of ­women may have been heightened by a tendency to regard male Indigenous bodies, with their capacity for military mobilization and their presumed po­liti­cal command, as crucial, even primary, objects of translation. Certainly, coastal Algonquian men and ­women chose tattoos—or had tattoos chosen by their communities—­that identified them both personally and collectively: as members of a ­family or kin network, as affiliates of a religious society, as citizens of a polity, as markers of class status or signs of having under­gone such life transitions as warfare or childbirth. Yet t­ hose choices ­were in all likelihood largely opaque to early En­glish investigators. Native individuals ­were closely involved in providing (or refusing) context and explanations that Eu­ro­pean authors such as Harriot occasionally utilized and occasionally ignored. At least two Algonquian interpreters spent the winter of 1584–1585 at Durham House, Raleigh’s estate, teaching Harriot their language and learning his.77 ­These two men, Manteo and Wanchese, may have discussed the symbolism of their communities’ tattooing practices with Harriot, or they may not have. Regardless, the “Marckes” image seems to reflect the priorities of colonists rather than Indigenous understandings; White’s paintings, de Bry’s engravings, and Harriot’s writings ultimately tell us less about the significant information embedded in Native tattoos than that they w ­ ere significant to Eu­ro­pean observers. Understanding the po­liti­cal and social allegiances of Native men may have seemed an impor­tant enough goal

40 Chapter 1

to drive de Bry and Harriot to extrapolate from l­imited information and to create the “Marckes” plate. Indeed, the visual rhe­toric of the “Marckes” image might be understood as an intensification of the claims made by the work as a ­whole: that Native ­peoples w ­ ere fundamentally knowable as well as tractable.78 That, according to Harriot’s text, the “Lordes” of “­Virginia” w ­ ere not only able to command their subjects but to physically remake them meant that readers ­were presented with a set of signs they might imagine interpreting and an image of hierarchy and power into which they might hope to insert themselves. For advocates of colonization, tattoos held an ambiguous status, representing both a barbaric manner of bodily ornamentation and a sophisticated signal of hierarchies and status among Native socie­ties and their own Eu­ ro­pean ancestors. Native American tattooing was described as pouncing, comparable to the preparation of parchment for writing. Might the tattooed body, then, be considered a manuscript? Or was it a published text, having been engraved and indelibly marked for the world to see? In comparing tattoos to alphabetic scripts or in acknowledging their communication potential, Eu­ro­pean observers w ­ ere making an assessment of commonalities, not necessarily of equality. Efforts to interpret Native sign systems ­were not necessarily a full embrace of ­t hose systems but rather an engagement with how t­ hese systems might prove useful for colonial efforts. While early En­glish colonists may have wanted to read tattoos, it is less clear that they wanted to be “written upon” with them; evidence of colonists willingly or unwillingly marked with Native tattoos is sparse u ­ ntil many years ­later, as the following chapter describes. That said, cross-­cultural attempts to interpret unfamiliar literacies did sometimes spark creative, syncretic responses, relativizing Eu­ro­pean understandings of their own writing systems. Harriot, inspired by his interactions with Algonquian speakers and Algonquian textual forms, was the first En­glish scholar to devise a nonalphabetic attempt at a universal script. He developed a phonetic writing system that, he hoped, could represent the sounds of any language. It was, as he wrote, “an universall Alphabet” that could express “the lively image of mans voice in what language soever” and was inspired by “occasion to seeke for fit letters to expresse the Virginian speche.”79 His development of a phonetic script was a creative response to the inadequacies of the Roman alphabet to encompass the sounds of the Algonquian languages he was attempting to learn—­a nd an idea that may have been



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 41

inspired by seeing Algonquian pictographs and tattoos as alternative textual practices. While the script’s characters do not directly resemble the tattoo designs recorded by White or de Bry, the cross-­cultural motivation for their creation and the foreignness of the marks’ appearance may have been linked in the minds of acquaintances familiar with Harriot’s proj­ect. A ­ fter Harriot’s death, his manuscripts related to the universal alphabet ended up in the care of mathematician John Pell. Pell reportedly described the characters of Harriot’s script as looking “like Devills”—­a parallel to similar remarks made by fearful colonists about what they saw as the sinister appearance of Native ­peoples.80 In addition to the alphabet, Harriot is thought to have produced an English-­A lgonquian dictionary, since lost. His expected role in the colonial proj­ect included not only personally learning to speak and translate languages but crafting materials that o ­ thers might use to do the same. An unattributed manuscript entitled “­Virginia: A Vocabulary with severall Phrases of Speech in ­Virginia,” cata­logued in the Sion College library, was likely authored by Harriot—­but was destroyed in the G ­ reat Fire of 1666.81 The Report’s attentiveness to Native communication systems suggests an effort to find interpretative commonalities. Similarly, Harriot’s design of a universal alphabet could be understood as the rescue of “lost” Algonquians through the bestowal of writing, but it might also be seen as a rescue of lost colonists from an alphabet inadequate for the transcription of Algonquian language. If “Marckes of Sundry of the Cheif Mene” “stages a writing lesson upon the body of an American Indian,” as Michael Gaudio has claimed, it is as much a writing lesson for Eu­ro­pe­ans as it is for Natives.82 Stadial linguistic models that presumed alphabetic writing as a peak development ­were not the primary Eu­ro­pean conception of writing in the late sixteenth c­ entury. At the same time, the “writing lesson” staged in Amer­i­ca did not mean that the En­glish viewed Native media forms as commensurate with Eu­ro­pean technologies of alphabetic writing and the codex but rather as comparable—­analogous but not equivalent. If anything, the era discussed languages and communication through a religiously inflected lens: the failure and incompleteness of all con­temporary language forms compared to the divine, universal tongue originally available to humanity.83 The seventeenth ­century saw continued En­glish attention to Indigenous tattooing but a declining colonial engagement with such marks as a form of writing. While this may have resulted from a growing En­glish understanding of Native tattoos as in­de­pen­dent sign systems with their own significance,

Figure 8. Thomas Harriot’s proposed phonetic script “to expresse the Virginian speche.” Reproduced by kind assistance of the Governing Body of Westminster School, London.



Pownced, Pricked, or Paynted 43

it is more accurate perhaps to say that En­g lish authors increasingly circumscribed and delimited their ideas of Indigenous writing in ways that justified colonial expansion. Drawing on the writings and images produced by early expeditions like t­hose at Roanoke allowed En­glish promoters of colonization to interpret tattoos in ways that contained the marks and their interpretative potential.84 Native pictographs, scripts, and tattoos appeared repeatedly in colonial texts and documents, often functioning as individual signatures on land deeds or rec­ords of trade debts. Colonial ac­cep­tance of such marks as signatures can therefore be seen to si­mul­ta­neously affirm the ­legal and cultural legitimacy of Native communication systems and, in many instances, to rewrite them in the ser­v ice of undermining Native sovereignty. Harriot’s own seemingly contradictory arguments—­claiming that the Algonquian did not possess “letters . . . ​to keepe recordes of the particularities of times past” even as he carefully translated the implications of their “marckes”—­foreshadowed ­later colonial debates over w ­ hether cross-­cultural tattoos ­ought to be read as wounds or badges of honor, signs of masculine honor or signs of weakness.85

CHAPTER 2

The “Ill Effects of It” Reading and Rewriting the Cross-­Cultural Tattoo

Describing the arrival of a detachment of 950 Canadian fighters to Fort Ticonderoga in the fall of 1758, French army officer Louis-­Antoine de Bougainville observed that ­these ­were “the good kind, almost all voyageurs.” “One recognizes them easily by their looks,” he wrote, explaining that “all of them are tattooed on their bodies with figures of plants and animals. . . . ​One would not pass for a man among the Indians of the Far West if he had not had himself tattooed.”1 When Bougainville looked for expertise, he looked to voyageurs’ bodies—­reading their appearances as a sign of their valuable relationships with Native communities and of their masculine courage, a quality apparently assessed by their Native friends and allies. Bougainville’s positive assessment of the reinforcements could, albeit reluctantly, accommodate their adoption of a Native system of body modification. They “passed for men” with the “Indians of the Far West” and with Bougainville too. And yet even as Bougainville acknowledged the masculinity and military usefulness of the reinforcements, he recorded in his diary countless criticisms of what he, like many other elite officers from the metropole, viewed as the “failure of cultural fidelity” among the inhabitants of New France.2 Bougainville was alarmed by what he described as “barbarous” be­hav­ior by the colony’s Native allies, whom he referred to as “monsters” and “a necessary evil.”3 Although wishing privately that the need for colonial Canadian and Indigenous fighters could be “dispensed with,” Bougainville’s statements and actions reflected the complex relationship that Eu­ro­pean officers and soldiers, as well as colonial fighters, held with the culture and practice of Native warfare. This relationship was intimately bound up with bodily per­for­mances of masculinity.4 Even as Bougainville grumpily wrote that “one is a slave to



The “Ill Effects of It” 45

Indians in this country,” he acknowledged that “in this sort of warfare it is necessary to adjust to their ways.”5 As aide-­de-­camp to the French commander in chief, the Marquis de Montcalm, Bougainville understood the necessity of facilitating good relationships with allied Native nations by following their diplomatic protocols, as did most French and some British officials in North Amer­i­ca. As exasperated as some colonial officials might have privately professed themselves by the time and money spent on adequately adhering to diplomatic protocols and rituals, including the adoption of individuals into Native tribes, they could not reject such practices outright without rejecting “access to the privileges and responsibilities of a reciprocal” network of real or fictive kin, “which might include rights to pass through tribal territory, access to trade, and assistance in war.”6 Indeed, some officials, for example, Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern British colonies, ­were regarded as particularly successful in mobilizing allied fighters as a result of their willingness to change their appearances. Cadwallader Colden mused that Johnson had been able to recruit Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) fighters for British war plans largely ­because of his “compliance with their humours in his dress & conversation,” while Johnson’s opponent Bougainville fretted over the same ­thing: “General Johnson has gone to the Five Nations to try to get them to raise the hatchet against us. . . . ​[He] speaks their language, has their manners and style, is painted in war paint like them.”7 Bougainville himself had been ­adopted by the Turtle clan of the Kahnawake Mohawk in 1757, a ritual that usually would have incorporated ele­ments of physical transformation to signal the adoptee’s new identity.8 Marking an adoptee’s new place within the social order often took the form of changing the individual’s clothing, painting his or her skin, cutting or restyling hair, or granting permanent markers of community belonging, such as tattoos.9 Although Bougainville l­ater complained to his ­mother, “[I am] an ugly Iroquois,” he never publicly admitted to having received any permanent body modifications, ­either willingly or unwillingly—­but other Eu­ro­pe­ ans and Euro-­Americans did.

* * * This chapter explores a sample of such cross-­cultural tattooings in the latter half of the eigh­teenth ­century, focusing in par­tic­u­lar on narratives from fighting men who participated in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and associated

46 Chapter 2

contests. While the previous chapter concentrated on En­glish sources, h ­ ere French narratives are also considered, in part b ­ ecause French officers frequently reflected on the role of tattooing in conducting diplomacy with Native allies. As Anna Friedman has noted, by comparison to the French, relatively few En­glish nationals or colonial Anglo-­Americans “appear to have transculturalized or gotten tattooed” by Natives during the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries.10 However, the era’s sources complicate any simplistic dichotomy that assumes the French w ­ ere culturally flexible and the British intrinsically intolerant of changing their bodies. Rather, both French and British sources expressed feelings about Indigenous body modifications—­ tattooing in particular—­that ranged from curiosity and admiration to revulsion and anxiety.11 Newly tattooed Euro-­Americans offered complex, often ambiguous interpretations of their bodily markings, s­ haped by concerns about just how closely cultural identity and bodily integrity might—or might not—be intertwined. On bodies of Eu­ro­pean origin, tattoos ­were particularly contested and complicated signs: they might mark individuals as especially skilled in intercultural communication and diplomacy, or they could mark persons as potentially damaged, tainted, or ­limited by their experiences. For fighting men in par­tic­u­lar, such stories ­were bound up with the ways that scars and marks could signal masculine valor—or its absence. Some proudly reported their tattoos as symbols of personal merit, earned for martial or diplomatic expertise; o ­ thers judged them as undesirable evidence of attempted acculturation by Native captors. Still ­others deemed them troubling injuries or stigmas. The individual stories considered in this chapter demonstrate that cross-­ cultural tattoos—­Native texts on Eu­ro­pean bodies—­were permanently inscribed hybridities, constant and yet constantly in flux. They ­were open to interpretation by a variety of audiences, with their legibility unstable and dependent on both audience and location. As described in Chapter 1, early En­ glish discussions of Native tattooing often contemplated ­whether such marks should be treated as writing and how they should be translated. By the eigh­ teenth c­ entury, a wider set of conversations developed about the functions of tattooing and the value—or discredit—­that Euro-­Americans might receive from Native tattoos, all of which raised questions about what such marks said about the p ­ eople who bore them, the p ­ eople who created them, and w ­ hether such stories ­were immutable. Th ­ ere was rarely a single, conclusive answer: a “conceptual instability” reinforced by, and perhaps intrinsic to, the position of the tattoo as “a mark which is neither quite inside nor quite outside the



The “Ill Effects of It” 47

skin.”12 What was read one way in a Native North American community might have been deciphered in an entirely dif­fer­ent fashion in Britain or France or in a colonial settlement. In some intriguing instances, Native men also indicated that the relationship between their tattoos and their personal identities had shifted as a result of engagement with Euro-­Americans, particularly missionaries. W ­ hether they saw their marks as truly having acquired dif­fer­ent significance or ­whether they ­were refusing to provide private or personal meanings for outside audiences is explored at the end of this chapter, with their narratives providing a necessary counterpoint to ­those of colonial soldiers and captives with very dif­fer­ent interpretations of bodily marking. Fighting men, both Euro-­A merican and Native, w ­ ere a population especially interested in and attentive to tattoos, both ­because they regularly encountered tattoos on the bodies of allies and opponents and ­because, in turn, they associated t­ hose tattoos with expressions of masculinity and a status system rooted in Native practices of war. Consideration of the dif­fer­ent contexts in which such men received tattoos and the varied responses they and o ­ thers had to t­hese marks can help elaborate the complex signifying power of permanent body modification in early Amer­i­ca. The proj­ect of colonization required settlers to read Indigenous bodies and then to attempt to rewrite t­ hose stories, ­either in their own flesh or in the bodies of Native ­people, even as Native socie­ties pushed back with their own rewritings and remakings.

* * * Discussing the markings on Native bodies, and in some cases acquiring their own, gave Eu­ro­pe­ans opportunities to describe and confront their own concerns with the decoration of the h ­ uman body and to think about how hierarchies ­were demarcated physically and visually. The complex position of tattooing in Eu­ro­pean thought meant they could be si­mul­ta­neously regarded by a single author as “a fantastic caprice” and yet “certainly not barbarous.”13 Some denounced them as physically or morally dangerous, while ­others defended them as sophisticated signifiers of social status. Volatile and contested signs, tattoos w ­ ere nonetheless regarded by both their advocates and detractors as significant ele­ments of New World martial masculinity. Eu­ro­pean observers frequently analogized Native tattoos to ­either coats of arms, which identified their ­bearers as members of a ­family or a nation, or

48 Chapter 2

as signatures, which identified p ­ eople as individuals. Efforts to interpret Native pictographs overlapped with readings of bodily markings. In some instances ­t hese “coats of arms” or “signatures” ­were not located exclusively on ­human skin but ­were also inscribed on objects in the landscape, signaling not only an individual’s or a community’s presence but a claim to territory and an assertion of military strength.14 In Jesuit missionary Joseph-­ François Lafitau’s two-­volume 1724 Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains, for instance, the author reproduced sample messages left on trees by victorious parties of fighters. In the third plate of his second volume, Lafitau included a copy of one of Theodor de Bry’s Picts, standing alongside two Native men.15 One of the men, tattooed with images of the sun on his chest and abstract patterns on his arms and legs, watches the other man carve images onto the trunk of a tree. The Picte ancien, Lafitau explained, was a historical parallel to the sau­ vage who marked and was marked with “les Peintures Caustiques & Hieroglyphiques.” By the eigh­teenth ­century, the description of Indigenous symbols as “hieroglyphic” in nature was widespread in Eu­ro­pean travel writings. Antoine le Page du Pratz, a Louisiana colonist writing in the 1720s, also discussed Native tattoos: “­Those who distinguished themselves by some exploit of importance get a club pricked on their right shoulder and beneath we see the hieroglyphic sign of the defeated nation; ­others are pricked according to their tastes.”16 Hieroglyphic, a term connoting distances both temporal and geographic, also suggested to eighteenth-­century writers the exotic mysteries of as-­yet-­ undeciphered scripts.17 In describing tattoos as hieroglyphs, Euro-­American authors acknowledged t­ hese marks as having communicative meaning, yet continued to distinguish them from alphabetic writing. Lafitau’s didactic image, showing Indians both tattooed with “hieroglyphics” and carving similar marks into a tree is a crucial example of colonial interpretation. The engraving depicts a moment of activity—­the two men inscribing their message—­and si­mul­ta­neously abstracts the dendroglyphic marks in order to show them in greater diagrammatic detail below. The carvings on the tree identified a fighter named Two Feathers, Lafitau claimed, as well as his tribe (“de la Nation de la Gruë” or the Heron tribe) and his clan (“de la famille du Bœuf fauvage,” or the Bison clan).18 Other symbols indicated the number of war parties he had led, the number of warriors in the par­tic­u­lar sortie being commemorated, and the number of scalps and prisoners taken. Crucially, the marks not only identified their maker, they represented him, in the sense of

Figure 9. Engraving comparing the “hieroglyphiques” of Native Americans—­ used both on ­human bodies and on landmarks such as trees—to the tattoos of a “Picte ancien” (modeled ­after the 1590 engraving by Theodor de Bry). Joseph-­ François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps . . . (Paris, 1724). Courtesy of the John Car­ter Brown Library.

50 Chapter 2

standing in for his physical body and thereby maintaining his presence in the landscape. By drawing a self-­portrait of his tattooed face and chest, Lafitau argued, Two Feathers asserted his victory to all who knew “his hieroglyphic symbol” (“son symbole Hieroglyphique”):19 The Indian, then, to make his portrait draws a s­ imple line in the form of a head, hardly putting any marks on it to denote the eyes, nose, and other parts of the face. In their place, he traces the marks tattooed on his face as well as t­ hose engraved on his chest and which, being peculiar to him, render him recognizable not only to ­t hose who have seen him but also to all t­ hose who, knowing him only by reputation, know his hieroglyphic symbol, as formerly in Eu­rope a person was distinguished by his coat of arms and ­today we distinguish a ­family by their armour.20 Lafitau may have in­ven­ted the details of the story of Two Feathers, intending it more as a reading primer for his audience than a direct transcription from a living tree (or man). His premise, however, was consistent with the conceptions of other Eu­ro­pean writings about Native markings: that an individual might be identified by his tattoos, and just as impor­tant, that his actions might be communicated through marks that could readily transfer between skin, tree, or the page of an observer’s book. While the story of Two Feathers was inscribed on a tree in Lafitau’s account, he implied that it would also be transferred—­and added to—in the form of new tattoos on the man’s body. The number of enemies he had killed or captured would be marked in tattoo, creating correspondences between the immobile sign in the landscape and the traveling account carried in the flesh. Eu­ro­pean interpretations of Native tattoos, when not describing them as coats of arms, frequently claimed they ­were honorifics equivalent to military medals. Joseph de La Porte wrote from Louisiana, “When they have distinguished themselves in combat, they are decorated with some figures engraved on their flesh of which they are more proud than we are at home of military certificates and ranks.”21 Yet such analogies often assumed that Indigenous tattoos ­were a transparent set of signifiers, even when Eu­ ro­pean military medals w ­ ere nothing of the sort. Badges, medals, and ribbons could be earned by specific deeds, earned by years of ser­v ice, given in commemoration of a specific b ­ attle, or received as inheritance, among many possibilities. While the sheer number of awards might be impressive to the



The “Ill Effects of It” 51

untrained eye, and the basic signifiers of rank likely familiar to many members of society, the details of their ­bearer’s military ­career might only be legible to other soldiers. Outsider interpretations of Native tattooing often began and ended at accumulation. While Lafitau claimed to translate a subtle and detailed story of Two Feather’s sortie from his inscriptions, other authors recorded tattoos as the bluntest pos­si­ble rec­ord of death counts. In one instance, Jesuit writer Jérôme Lalemant described an encounter with “the Captain General of the Iroquois, surnamed Nero by our Frenchmen.” The nickname was intended to link this man’s “notorious cruelty” with that of the infamous Roman emperor, Lalemant explained; the Iroquois Nero was reputed to have killed sixty ­people “with his own hand, [keeping] the tally of t­ hese on his thigh, which consequently appears to be covered with black characters.”22 Le Page du Pratz similarly noted that tattoos could rec­ord individual actions, explaining that among the Natchez, young men might “have their nose pricked but no other part till they are warriors, and have performed some brave action, such as killing an ­enemy and bringing off his scalp.” Le Page du Pratz placed such marks in a wider po­liti­cal and military context, however, adding, “­Those who have signalized themselves by some gallant exploit, cause a tomahawk to be pricked on their left shoulder, under­neath which is also pricked the hieroglyphic sign of the conquered nation.”23 ­W hether tattoos signaled one’s cruelty or bravery depended, of course, on the eye of the beholder—­yet e­ ither way the mark made achievements and actions permanent. And in ­these commentaries it was nearly always his tattoos, his achievements. While tattoos w ­ ere—in most Indigenous communities—­found on men and w ­ omen alike, the emphasis of many male Euro-­American commentators was on tattooing’s connection with expressions of skill and leadership in typically masculine activities such as warfare and hunting. Euro-­American observers noted Native w ­ omen’s tattooing, but assumptions that w ­ omen’s tattoos w ­ ere chosen exclusively for reasons of personal adornment led many authors to overlook the symbolic richness of the practice. They rarely assigned ­women’s tattooing the qualities of identification and honorific that they presumed the practice held for men. Jean-­Bernard Bossu, for example, wrote that ­women would “bear the pain with the same courage as the men . . . ​to appear more beautiful to them.”24 By largely setting w ­ omen’s tattoos aside as a ­matter of aesthetics, Euro-­American authors ensured that the proj­ect of interpreting tattoos remained a consideration (and contest) of martial masculinities.

52 Chapter 2

Not only could the tattoo mark a male b ­ earer’s bravery and skill by commemorating battlefield success; a tattooed body in itself—­regardless of gender—­a lso signaled that person’s courage for undergoing the painful procedure, as Bossu noted. A tattoo thereby acted as a double signifier, carry­ing meaning both in the content of its imagery and in the mere fact of possessing the mark. Tattooing connoted the pain and bravery of its inscription, as well as reminding viewers of the painful and brave accomplishments of war that ­were often held to be prerequisite for earning it in the first place. As anthropologist Alfred Gell notes, “The basic technical schema of tattooing”—­ the puncturing, an insertion of a foreign substance, the letting of blood, the permanence of the marks—­holds “certain elective affinities between a finite range of cultural meanings and this pos­si­ble means” of expressing them. In other words, the act of tattooing, with its resemblance to the act of wounding (or being wounded), primed Euro-­American observers to think of war, and the honors received in war. Tattooing, with ­t hese meta­phorical linkages to bloodshed, scarring, and contact with foreignness, closely resonated with preparations for and commemorations of warfare. Indeed, tattooing and scalping w ­ ere, for men in many Native socie­ties, closely linked: one might generate the other. Taking a scalp during a b ­ attle might be honored by a tattoo, while at the same time the tattoo might be proof, if captured, of e­ nemy status and therefore elicit further vio­lence. In inflicting pain, tattooing prepared the body for ­f uture inflictions of pain, including torture. Tattooing might symbolically reinforce the skin or act as a locus for harm-­deflecting powers, accessing and channeling spiritual energies.25 The torture of captured prisoners has often been interpreted by anthropologists as a means of ritually removing their identities and capturing their spiritual powers; we might also consider it to be a means of directly contesting the marks of status inscribed on their bodies.26 In some instances, the stories that tattoos revealed might change the outcome of capture, ­either protracting the tortures one might undergo or avoiding them altogether.27 For example, James Adair, a deerskin trader in the Southeast, claimed that a captured warrior of the “Anantooèah” (Seneca) was killed quickly with a tomahawk, rather than slowly tortured, as a ­favor—­because his tattoos impressed his Shawnee captors with the man’s history of courageous deeds. Adair claimed one of the Shawnee had persuaded the ­others in his war party to kill the man swiftly, in order to “[pay] a regard to bravery, even in one, who was marked over the body with war streaks, at the cost of many lives of their



The “Ill Effects of It” 53

beloved kindred.”28 The captive’s tattoos provided material evidence of past transgressions against the Shawnee, directly shaping the choices they made about his fate. The idea of tattoos as accurate and unfakable signs of one’s accomplishments and status—­what lit­er­a­t ure scholar Gordon Sayre has called “meritography”—­appeared frequently in both French and En­glish colonial lit­er­a­ture, where it acted as a useful trope to critique Eu­ro­pean systems of social status and military rank. The idea of earning a permanent and vis­i­ble mark of achievement might have been particularly intriguing for ­those, such as enlisted soldiers, who ­were often shut out of routes to advancement that relied on ­family connections or personal fortune.29 The idea of a symbol that conveyed the story of one’s achievements and that could only be earned, not inherited, prompted many writers to reflect on the best means to know someone’s quality and capabilities. Rather than the seemingly arbitrary and inherited status assigned in Eu­rope to noble titles and genealogies, status among Native Americans was thought to accrue to ­t hose who distinguished themselves. Distinguished actions in turn produced individuals who ­were visually distinguished with tattoos. The comparisons between tattoos and military medals could be quite specific. One Louisiana soldier, Jean Bernard Bossu, drew connections between the tattoo he claimed to have received among the Arkansas (Quapaw) and the croix de Saint-­Louis, a well-­k nown French military honor. The order of Saint-­Louis was created by King Louis XIV in 1693 as a society honoring brave ser­v ice by military officers. While it required at least a de­cade of ser­v ice and Catholic faith for eligibility, the order of Saint-­Louis was unusual in that it did not require that candidates be members of the nobility. Members of the order received an enameled cross on a ribbon, to be worn on their chest, with elaborations in the decoration based on rank: chevalier, commandeur, and Grand-­Croix. In 1750, an edict determined that ­after three successive generations of a ­family had received the honor, the title of knight could become hereditary. By the latter half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, the order was commonly awarded to t­ hose meeting the minimum requirements yet remained a notable sign of rank and prestige among French troops. Officers awarded the croix de Saint-­Louis would therefore have carried on their bodies a valuable symbol of their recognized merit. Both so-­called medal chiefs—­Native leaders who received ceremonial medals or gorgets from the French or English—­and French military men who received the croix “at times passed down their prized symbols of authority to f­ uture

54 Chapter 2

generations . . . ​creating a martial lexicon that each side could understand and appreciate.”30 Indigenous leaders may have regarded t­ hese honorifics as functioning in parallel fashion to their own bodily markings, but they ­were unlikely to have viewed them as fully equivalent. A tattoo, unlike a medal, could not be inherited, as Bossu’s account explained. “It confers a type of knighthood on only t­ hose who have done extraordinary deeds,” he wrote, and “even the sons of chiefs are not held in special consideration ­unless they are as brave and virtuous as their ­fathers.” In order to insist on the authority and integrity of tattoos, Bossu recounted what would happen “if anyone should take it into his head to have himself tattooed without having distinguished himself in b ­ attle.”31 By describing (and possibly inventing) an incident in which a tattoo was not an honest sign of merit, Bossu attempted to outline the exception that proved the rule—­and to heighten the honor and significance he ascribed to his own tattoo. As a naval officer, Bossu made three trips to Louisiana between the 1750s and 1770s.32 His Nouveaux voyages aux Indes Occidentales (1768) mixed his own observations with other writers’ accounts and with folkloric, fabulistic storytelling. Bossu’s account of his adoption and tattooing by the Quapaw sometime in the 1750s may well have been exaggerated, even in­ven­ted, but it revealed a profound interest in how prestige was signaled within and across cultures, as well as how colonial authority might be asserted by selectively incorporating ele­ments of Native culture. “I have been made a warrior and a chief,” Bossu announced. He claimed that having been a­ dopted, “a deer was tattooed on my thigh as a sign” of his new role.33 Bossu compared his tattoo to that of an Osage man he met near Fort de Chartres, who had killed an enormous “serpent” (possibly an alligator) that “had done a ­great deal of damage” in Osage territory. The man’s accomplishment was acknowledged by a tattooed “impression” of the creature upon his body.34 While Bossu had done nothing of the sort, his bravery in having “submitted to this painful operation with good grace” and his “effort . . . ​to remain impassive” ­were presented as their own justification for his mark of merit: “The spectators,” he bragged, “told me that I was a real man.”35 Having a tattoo, according to Bossu’s circular reasoning, was proof of meriting one—­except when it was not. Bossu contrasted ­t hose who w ­ ere granted their tattoos with community approval, such as the Osage man who had killed the serpent and himself, with anyone who might “take it into his head to have himself tattooed without having distinguished himself.” An honorific could not be self-­awarded, as Bossu’s allegorical tale attested:



The “Ill Effects of It” 55

I knew an Indian, who, although he had never done anything outstanding in defense of his tribe, de­cided to have himself tattooed with one of ­t hese marks of distinction. . . . ​This show-­off wanted to pass himself off as a valiant man so that he could marry one of the prettiest girls of the tribe. . . . ​The warriors, who w ­ ere indignant upon seeing a coward display a symbol of military merit, called an assembly of war chiefs to deal with this bit of audacity. The council de­cided, in order to prevent such abuses which would remove the distinction between courageous men and cowards, that this false hero who unjustly decorated himself with the tattoo of a tomahawk, without ever having struck a blow in ­battle, would have the design torn off him, skin and all, and that the same would be done to all o ­ thers like him.36 This violent correction by the community to the unjust imposition of a “false hero” (faux brave) was supposedly forestalled by Bossu, who “offered through pity to make French medicine” and claimed he could remove the man’s unmerited “meritography” painlessly. Giving the man opium mixed with maple syrup, he then applied crushed cantharides (blister beetles) and plantain leaves to the tattoo. “The skin and the tattoo came off. . . . ​This type of operation amazed the medicine men.”37 The procedure that Bossu narrates is plausible, but the anecdote is more allegorical than realistic. In erasing a supposedly unerasable Native sign with “French medicine,” Bossu not only wrote himself into a trickster-­like role but asserted colonial power to rewrite individual status: both his own and that of the man on whom he operated. His ability to shape identity as temporary and reversible—­adopting ele­ments of a Native culture while reserving the right to undo them, holding himself in­de­pen­dent of any broader social claims implied by his mark—­suggested a similar ability to alter the very pro­cesses by which power, honor, and authority w ­ ere defined. At the same time, Bossu’s offer to remove the mark painlessly may have reinforced the social shaming of this man; his unwillingness to undergo hardship to receive the honor of tattooing would likely have seemed redoubled by his unwillingness to suffer for its removal. Bossu followed his story of the faux brave with a parallel story of a French officer who de­cided to “award himself” the honor of the croix de Saint-­Louis in order to win the hand of a young ­woman whose ­mother had “said that she would approve the marriage only if the officer w ­ ere decorated” with the order. The fraud was discovered when a se­nior officer complained to their commander that the ju­nior officer had received the croix before he had. The

56 Chapter 2

young man was arrested, “sentenced to have the cross taken from him, to be degraded, and to be imprisoned in a fortress for twenty years.” Bossu concluded, “Although Eu­ro­pean customs seem to differ greatly from t­ hose of the Indians, they are often quite similar.”38 Bossu was likely adapting and elaborating on a story he had heard about Jean-­François-­Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, who had written his own account of French colonial Louisiana two de­cades ­earlier.39 ­After describing the tattooing practices of the Natchez, Dumont had added, “This lasts for life, although I myself, having had a Croix de Saint Louis tattooed on my left arm when I was young, found the secret to erase it.”40 Dumont thereby described a mark that seemingly v­ iolated both French and Native social regulations, awarding himself an unmerited croix and d ­ oing so via a form of body modification that he, like other French military men, claimed was closely policed by Native communities. The flexibility and mutability of dress made it pos­si­ble for claims such as Bossu’s and Dumont’s to go untested. W ­ hether t­ hese men had never been tattooed in the first place, had successfully removed their tattoos as they had claimed, or remained tattooed but with their markings concealed by norms of Eu­ro­pean dress, the power­f ul ability of clothing to remake identity made even permanent inscriptions dependent on context.41 The absence of images of Eu­ro­pe­a ns with cross-­cultural tattoos from the Amer­i­cas in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries is notable. While a number of French, British, and American-­born men ­were depicted in paintings and engravings (particularly during the mid-­to late eigh­teenth c­ entury) with attire and accoutrements that blended Eu­ro­pean and Native fashions, none of the officers, soldiers, and captives discussed ­here appear to have had their tattoos documented visually. This may have been ­because they did not actually have tattoos—or it may have resulted from a desire for concealment. Standards of polite pre­sen­ta­tion in clothing made it unlikely that Eu­ro­pean or Euro-­American men would reveal much skin in a portrait beyond face and hands. The possibility of concealed markings that might be selectively revealed—­a disguised identity—­was part of what made such travel narratives compelling for readers, even as the implications of hidden or erased associations undermined the very idea extolled by Bossu and ­others: that of a transparent system of status and identity. The veracity of Bossu’s and Dumont’s tales is less impor­tant than what such stories suggest about the role of tattooing in marking status



The “Ill Effects of It” 57

and accomplishment in cross-­cultural relations. Soldiers and even officers may have hoped to use Native forms of honor to strengthen their relationships with Indigenous allies, but they may also have hoped to secure status that seemed frustratingly out of reach in opaque, closed hierarchies within their Eu­ro­pean socie­ties. If one could not readily achieve the croix de Saint-­ Louis through standard routes of advancement, one could attempt to earn ac­cep­tance by “the warriors and men of valor” in an Indigenous community through tattooing—or even inscribe one’s own “croix” in the skin, subverting two status systems at once. Such stories show that even as Euro-­American military men a­ dopted t­ hese body modification practices, they w ­ ere reshaping the symbolism, material culture, and significance of such marks.

* * * Tattooing as a material practice was increasingly hybrid: Eu­ro­pean trade goods such as gunpowder w ­ ere used for new pigments alongside traditional Native needle instruments such as sharpened fish teeth, while imagery from more than one culture might mingle on a single body. Symbolic practice, material culture, iconography—­even the bodies eligible to be marked—­changed as a result of cross-­cultural engagements. Increasingly, such syncretic tattoos ­were permanently affixed to the bodies of Native, Eu­ro­pean, Euro-­American, and métis individuals alike. Lieutenant Henry Timberlake noted in his 1765 travel account that it was popu­lar among the Cherokee to have “their skins stained with gun-­powder, pricked into it in very pretty figures”; Dumont had written that the Natchez largely used cinnabar, vermilion, or willow charcoal as tattoo pigments but added that t­ here ­were “some who use gunpowder, but this c­ auses an itchy rash in the flesh or on the skin.”42 Even this apparent drawback may have been a valuable characteristic for a ritual so much associated with per­for­mances of martial masculinity; enduring the physical discomfort reportedly caused by gunpowder ink would likely have been an experience closely intertwined with the meta­phor summoned by embedding explosive firepower within the flesh. While charcoal was a traditional source of pigment, vermilion and gunpowder w ­ ere Eu­ro­pean imports. Metal ­needles and leather-­working awls provided by traders ­were also incorporated into tattooing practice.43 A 1720 account by an anonymous French officer of the marine implicated another officer in a provocative rumor: “A man of breeding whose name you

58 Chapter 2

would recognize,” as the author put it, had tattoos “of the Virgin and baby Jesus, a large cross on his stomach with the miraculous words which appeared to Constantine [in hoc signo vinces] and an endless number of marks in the savage style,” and, the author added, “a snake which passed around his body and whose tongue pointed ­toward an extremity which I ­w ill leave you to guess.”44 This account is thought to refer to Jean-­Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a colonial governor of Louisiana; another source, authored by Jean-­ François Bertet de la Clue Sabran, had asserted that Bienville had serpent tattoos. “Mr. de Bienville who is the general of the country has all of his body covered in this way and when he is obliged to march to war with them [Indians] he makes himself nude like them. They like him very much but they also fear him.”45 The implied sexual connotations of the placement of the officer’s snake tattoo, juxtaposed with Christian iconography, would have been expected to scandalize readers. As Gilles Havard has written, tattooing, with its suggestion of physical intimacy with Native ­people, eroticized the body of a cou­ reur de bois (a term referring to fur traders and cultural go-­betweens, literally “wood runners”) or soldier in the eyes of Eu­ro­pean viewers.46 The connection between tattooing and moral laxity was reflected in a letter from a ­father to a recently enlisted son, which urged, “­Don’t lose yourself in libertinage. . . . ​ Be careful not to be silly enough to get pricked, I forbid you to do so.”47 The anonymous officer’s body mingled marks in “the savage style” with images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and crosses. N. de Diéreville, a surgeon visiting the Acadian Peninsula in 1700, similarly noted that local Natives and “a few Frenchmen” “have themselves marked u ­ nder the skin . . . ​with Vermilion & gunpowder, which are never mixed. . . . ​A ll kinds of Devices are reproduced, Crosses, Names of Jesus, Flowers; anything in fact that may be desired.”48 The incorporation of new symbols did not mean, of course, that their meanings transferred intact. Missionary Chrestien Le Clerq had enthusiastically written a de­cade before Diéreville of widespread use of crosses among the Mi’kmaq, citing the symbol’s presence as evidence the Mi’kmaq ­were well disposed to Chris­tian­ity and claiming they wore it “religiously upon their bodies.” Yet a four-­pointed cross held preexisting significance within many Native socie­ties, and the symbol continued to be deployed in rituals outside of Christian ceremony.49 What Le Clerq saw as an embrace of his faith may have been a reassignment of value to a preexisting symbol, or a means for tattooed Mi’kmaq to carry traditions on their bodies without facing criticism from missionaries. Similarly, the interpretation of mingled Native and



The “Ill Effects of It” 59

Eu­ro­pean imagery requires attention to their mutual context—­t heir very proximity within the flesh of an individual.

* * * Admiring discussion of Native tattoos as honorifics was frequent in travelers’ and soldiers’ descriptions, even if the praise was at times qualified by suggestions that the practice was degenerate, physically dangerous, or sexually libertine.50 A handful of unusual examples, however, suggest alternative interpretations of tattooing w ­ ere emerging over the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Aspects of t­ hese narratives suggest changes in tattooing’s significance (as interpreted by both Euro-­Americans and Native Americans), connected to the growing hybridity in the practice—­not just in the fact that Euro-­American bodies ­were now being tattooed but in the circumstances u ­ nder which t­ hose par­tic­u­lar bodies might be marked: involuntarily. Henry Grace was a British soldier deployed to Nova Scotia during the Seven Years’ War. Captured by a Mi’kmaq party while he was on guard duty, Grace spent several years in their com­pany, traveling through the G ­ reat Lakes region and down the Mississippi before being eventually purchased by a French Canadian. On returning to E ­ ngland, Grace wrote an account of his travels and his captivity, published in 1764, which concluded with an appeal to “the Consideration of the Humane and Benevolent.”51 He explained that having been denied a pension, he was, in his words, “driven to the utmost Extremity, and, having been bred to no Trade, have no Way to get my Living but by Day-­Labour, of which I am very incapable, by the Wound which I received in my Right Arm.” This wound that prevented him from working was a tattoo. During his long journey down the Mississippi, Grace and his captors had visited a group of Chickasaw. Their bodies ­were, as Grace put it, “pricked with Thorns in the Shape of all Sorts of wild Beasts and Snakes.” While living among them, Grace was, in his opinion, “treated as cruelly as ever before,” b ­ ecause they marked him in a similar fashion. One Day ­after they had eat heartily, they called for me, and some of them fastened on a Stick four or five white Thorns which w ­ ere very long, and, tying my right Arm to a Tree that was blown down, pricked it to such a Degree, that the Flesh worked above the Skin, and then they rubbed their Indian Paint in it till it swelled as big as my Leg.

60 Chapter 2

Still they had no Mercy on me, but made me cut Wood, make Fires, and fetch W ­ ater. . . . ​They never looked at my Arm, though in so bad a Condition that I could sleep neither Day nor Night, and I feel the ill Effects of it to this Hour, not having the same Use of it as I have of the other.52 “The ill Effects” of Grace’s tattoo likely operated si­mul­ta­neously on several psychosomatic levels. Tattooing truly could be dangerous to one’s physical health: risks included infection and blood loss. “Ordinarily, all ­those who have themselves tattooed get the fever,” Dumont reported.53 Grace’s report of swelling and pain does suggest an infection, and long-­term effects on his health cannot be discounted. In a number of instances, however, commentary on the physical danger of tattooing was blended with moral critique. When it “covers a g­ reat part of the body, it is dangerous,” wrote one missionary, “especially in cold weather; and—­either through some sort of convulsion, or for some other reason—it has caused the death of more than one, making him a martyr to vanity.”54 Tattooing in early Amer­i­ca meant forcing dangerous substances—­foreign to the body on multiple levels—­into broken flesh. The meta­phorical power of that act was not lost on observers or participants such as Grace. Breaching the boundary of the skin—­a barrier, however porous, between the individual and the world, as well as between the familiar and foreign—­meant a quite literal stigma that Grace did not want.55 Grace’s physical pain and ­mental discomfort at receiving the tattoo ­were therefore difficult to separate. For him, this signal of his cross-­cultural encounter was both unwanted and unremovable. He described it as part of a general pattern of cruel treatment that included repeated r­ unnings of the gauntlet during his captors’ stops in vari­ous Native nations and having his nose broken ­after he was struck in the face with the severed head of another British soldier killed by the Mi’kmaq. Any lingering physical or ­mental effects from ­these events, however, w ­ ere not discussed in Grace’s narrative. In his recounting, the tattoo was a far worse injury, inflicted and then ignored by his Mi’kmaq captors and now permanently a part of his life. While bruises and broken bones could heal, and memories of violent or frightening incidents could be perhaps repressed or kept to oneself, a tattooed arm might become vis­i­ble and raise questions. Captivity narratives produced by colonists, soldiers, or other agents of empire frequently reflected themes of bodily anxiety—­about eating, sexual contact, or vio­lence, among other



The “Ill Effects of It” 61

t­ hings—­and fears of transformation at the hands of foreign O ­ thers. As Robbie Richardson notes, “If the body can no longer be relied upon as a marker for Otherness, the stability of the Self is compromised, and the enduring wounds and scars brought about by captivity are reminders of this.”56 Tattoos, in par­tic­u­lar, w ­ ere evidence of cultural contact beyond violent conflict—­ signals that Native socie­ties and Eu­ro­pean interactions with them ­were more complicated than ­simple narratives of conquest. Tattoos, unlike bruises, are a complex symbolic regime of bodily ornamentation, deliberately chosen by ­either the tattooist or the tattooed. Therefore, Grace’s refusal to assign additional meaning to his tattoo—­beyond the pain of its inscription—­was unusual. Many other writers expressed a ­great curiosity in interpreting and describing sign systems of Native tattoos, yet Grace did not report what the image or design of his tattoo was or what symbolic intent, if any, he ascribed to the mark. Indeed, it is arguably b ­ ecause tattoos carry a wide range of significance that Grace attempted to delimit and constrain the interpretation of his own marking to a story of torture, to circumscribe alternative narratives that might have further undermined his British identity. While Grace firmly asserted his relief at returning to Britain, his recitation of the ongoing “ill Effects” caused by his tattoo suggest that his inscribed body remained a source of discomfort, continuing to unsettle his permanent reentry into his home society. Eastern Woodlands Native groups do not appear to have generally employed tattooing as a punishment or as a sign of enslavement.57 Both Adair’s and Bossu’s accounts suggest that tattoo removal, not application, was a means of punishing someone who had ­v iolated community standards of honor. The large numbers of Euro-­American captives held in Native communities during the Seven Years’ War, however, may very well have prompted a shift in attitudes about tattooing outsiders, with the practice becoming disconnected from ceremonies of adoption or integration. Efforts to forcibly rewrite or undermine colonial identity may have superseded efforts to encourage transculturation. Henry Grace did not read his tattoo as “meritography” or as a form of personal identification. Grace instead interpreted the mark as an effort by the Chickasaw to cause him pain, nothing more. If his hosts w ­ ere attempting to honor him in some fashion or adopt him, he may have entirely misread their intent. Alternatively, he may have knowingly rejected such attempted assimilation as itself a type of cruelty that might prevent him from fully reentering British life even a­ fter his captivity had ended.58

62 Chapter 2

* * * Thomas Brown, a colonial soldier captured on the shores of Lake Champlain in January 1757, was also tattooed in novel fashion. Taken captive by a party of Native Americans (unidentified in Brown’s account, but likely Ottawa59) and their French allies, Brown was urged by the French commander to lead them to Fort William Henry, which was then held by the British, and show them where they might use ladders to scale its walls. Brown refused, saying, “I was not to be bought with Money . . . ​[to] assist in destroying my Friends.” The French and Indian attempt went forward with the assistance of two other British prisoners, less scrupulous than Brown, but the venture failed. Brown and his Native captors then set off to Montreal. He was put to work pulling a heavy sled loaded with provisions. About halfway through the journey, Brown claimed to have charmed his captors by gallantly telling three Native ­women in the party he wished he could pull them on his sled and that this gesture pleased them enough that they freed him from pulling the sled at all.60 The next morning, as he wrote, they “cut off my Hair and painted me, and, with ­Needles and Indian-­ink, prick’d on the back of my Hand the Form of one of the Scaling-­Ladders, which the French made to carry to Fort William Henry. I understood they ­were vex’d at the French, for the Disappointment.”61 What the tattooed ladder meant to ­t hose granting it is unclear. Brown attributed his bodily transformation and improved treatment to having pleased the Ottawa. While he was given less difficult tasks, he apparently remained a prisoner. The following day, another captive who “foolishly resisted” having his hair cut in the same manner as Brown was tortured and burnt by the party, and Brown drew a clear connection between the man’s unwillingness to modify his body and his subsequent death.62 If the tattoo’s design was that of a ladder, as Brown believed, it would have permanently linked his identity within his captors’ community to the assault on Fort William Henry and Brown’s own uncooperative role in it—­a bit of symbolism that may have been meant as humorous, ironic, mocking, or ­simple historical fact. W ­ hether his captors blamed Brown or the French for the failed attack on the fort, their decision to seemingly commemorate a military failure by inscribing it on the body of their captive is intriguing. In contrast to Grace, who associated his tattoo with pain and physical impairment, Brown interpreted his mark in the context of other, less painful, remakings of his body, such as changing his clothes and hairstyle. Brown explic­itly framed his experiences with the Ottawa as a time of “constant Peril”



The “Ill Effects of It” 63

and “being an Eye-­Witness of divers Tortures, and shocking Cruelties,” but he did not describe their permanent marking of his skin as a type of torture, as Grace had. Both men lacked clear choice in receiving their tattoos, which challenges us to consider how tattooing might align with—or disrupt—­other aspects of identity often seen as volitional and performative. Unlike tattoos selected by their b ­ earers, which might reflect personal characteristics, aspirations, or significant affiliations, the tattoos of Grace and Brown ­were chosen by o ­ thers and their interpretations would be inevitably s­ haped by that circumstance. While both men’s tattoos ­were received ­u nder less-­t han-­voluntary circumstances, the two soldiers explained their experiences quite differently. A bodily per­for­mance of masculinity, for Brown, might have incorporated his tattoo as evidence of his success in surviving captivity rather than a sign of his transculturation. Following his redemption from captivity, Brown would have been able to recount the story of the tattooed ladder with reference to his loyalty to his fellow Anglo-­Americans and how he was “not to be bought.” Grace, on the other hand, had no such reassuring explanation for his altered appearance, making it more challenging to unify a narrative of martial masculinity with the injury he had received from tattooing. ­These multiple meanings highlight the conceptual instability of tattoos on non-­Native bodies, while also revealing that even the individuals bearing such marks w ­ ere often unable to read their own bodies in complete or unambiguous fashion. The practice, in being performed on ­t hese new bodies—­new not just in ethnicity or nationality but also in social status, as prisoner-­captives—­may have also been developing new symbolic meanings or uses. Instead of a mark of honor or esteem that was valued in part ­because of the pain of acquiring it—as Jean-­Bernard Bossu had found his tattoo—­t he tattoos of t­ hese men ­were neither requested nor expected, nor did they come with the apparent privileges that other commentators had perceived. While tattooing might still have been a means for Eu­ro­pean and Euro-­American soldiers to “pass for a man” among Native communities, as Bougainville had suggested, some tattooed individuals assigned it an alternate significance as a punishment or a mockery.

* * * While ­t hese Euro-­A merican accounts of adoption and forcible tattooing are prominent demonstrations of the changing nature of tattooing in early

64 Chapter 2

Amer­i­ca, tattooed Native Americans also needed to make sense of the shifting interpretations of their body modifications prompted by cultural entanglements. The symbolism, material culture, and frequency of tattoos and other adornments ­were changing, sometimes as a result of missionary criticism, sometimes due to the introduction of new sources of inks and n ­ eedles, and sometimes in response to fash­ion­able trends. In his 1788 History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, Moravian missionary John Heckewelder claimed that many practices of bodily ornamentation—­especially permanent ones—­were in decline among the Native communities of the Ohio country. “The cutting of the ears, which formerly was practised among the Indians, is now no longer so common with them,” he wrote, explaining that fewer individuals w ­ ere choosing to stretch their earlobes or cut their outer ear cartilage. Their reasoning, however, seemed to be less about missionary pressure or Euro-­A merican influences and more about practical considerations: keeping stretched or cut ears in perfect shape was difficult. Heckewelder explained, “They often lose that part of their ear which is separated from the solid part, by its being torn off by the bushes, or falling off when frost-­bitten. . . . ​Now the custom of cutting them is nearly if not entirely disused.” Other practices, like plucking facial hair, remained consistent, he argued. Tweezing beards, body hair, and even most of the hair on the crown of the head was done primarily so “that they may have clean skin to lay paint on, when they dress for their festivals or dances, and to facilitate the tattooing themselves, a custom formerly much in use among them. . . . ​They say that e­ ither painting or tattooing on a hairy face or body would have a disgusting appearance.” Heckewelder went on to claim that tattooing, at least, had become less common in the region in recent de­cades, but he noted that “as late as the year 1762, when I resided at Tscorawas on the Muskingum, tattooing was still practised by some.” Twenty-­five years prior to his writing, then, Ohio villages had still had individuals receiving prominent tattoos—­but ­whether ­t hose individuals ­were actually fewer in number than in previous de­cades or ­whether p ­ eople w ­ ere continuing to be tattooed but in less elaborate or less publicly vis­i­ble ways is difficult to assess. Naturalist William Bartram similarly implied that tattooing was most elaborate—­and most frequently found on—­older Native American leaders by the 1770s, when he traveled extensively through the Southeast. In his Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indi­ ans, Bartram noted that “the most beautiful painting now to be found among the [Muscogee Creek], is on the skin and bodies of their ancient chiefs and



The “Ill Effects of It” 65

micos. . . . ​­These paintings are admirably well executed, and . . . ​seem like mez­ zotinto, or very ingenious impressions from the best educated engravings. They are no doubt hieroglyphics, or mystical writings or rec­ords of their tribes or families, or of memorable events.”63 Despite or perhaps ­because of this perceived decline in the practice, tattooing retained its power to fascinate newcomers. Heckewelder’s account included a detailed story about a Lenape man he had met in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the 1750s. This el­derly Lenape man had come to live among the Christian Native community in Bethlehem and his appearance, Heckewelder remembered, “could not be viewed without astonishment.” Although the man was covered with scars where he had “been struck and pierced by the arrows of the ­enemy,” it was other tangible marks of pain that the missionary had found so intriguing. Heckewelder was fascinated to see that the Lenape man’s body had “not a spot to be seen . . . ​ but what was tattooed over with some drawing relative to his achievements,” and he further emphasized the totality of the markings by carefully itemizing the sites on the man’s body where he had observed tattoos: “On his w ­ hole face, neck, shoulders, arms, thighs and legs, as well as on his breast and back.” Viewing “the ­whole together,” he claimed, “struck the beholder with amazement and terror.”64 The Lenape man had been baptized with the name Michael in 1742. Other names he had previously gone by ­were not recorded by Heckewelder, yet the missionary remained curious about the life this man had led before joining the Bethlehem community. Heckewelder wrote about Michael’s richly inscribed body, “in short, the w ­ hole of his history was t­ here deposited.” This assertion, that Native history could be found on the exterior of the body, drew on a long-­standing notion that presumed Indigenous p ­ eople and their socie­ ties did not possess complexities or contradictions and that a straightforward, surface interpretation was sufficient. In many ways Heckewelder’s statement echoed Thomas Harriot’s assertion, two hundred years e­ arlier, that tattoo “marckes” revealed which “Princes subiects” the men of Roanoke w ­ ere—­and might “easelye be discerned” by perceptive outsiders. In this instance, however, the outsider making such a pronouncement ran into a conundrum: he could not claim to read the history “deposited” on Michael’s skin. The missionary, having asked the convert about the acts of war that prompted his tattoos, found that Michael refused to discuss them. He told Heckewelder that “being now taken captive by Jesus Christ, It did not become him to relate the deeds he had done while in the ser­v ice of the evil spirit; but that he was

66 Chapter 2

willing to give an account in the manner in which he had been conquered” by his conversion to Chris­tian­ity.65 This Lenape man used the language of captivity and conquest to describe his religious conversion, and in so d ­ oing made the reading of his body off-­ limits to the Moravian missionary questioning him. The text on his skin remained vis­i­ble, but the context of his story was kept opaque. The Lenape man’s tattoos of his achievements in war ­were attached to an embodied self who now claimed to have left all that ­behind him or at least refused to discuss it with a missionary. Setting and audience w ­ ere likely crucial determinants of when and ­whether Native American men would evoke the stories ­behind their tattoos. Stories of war might best be shared with male audiences—­ particularly with other men with fighting experience. Heckewelder was a man, but an outsider and a missionary rather than a fighter, and such ­factors may have played a role in Michael’s polite sidestepping of his curiosity. Attending Michael’s funeral in 1756, Moravian bishop George Loskiel, Heckewelder’s superior, commented, “The serenity of his countenance, when laid in his coffin, made a singular contrast with the figures, scarified upon his face when a warrior.”66 Loskiel seems to have assumed that the man he knew as a Moravian convert and the warrior that man had been ­were a continuous, coherent self: the incongruous surface characteristics that revealed the body’s past only serving to highlight the “true Christian” Michael had become. W ­ hether Michael saw himself that way is less clear. It is pos­si­ble that he continued to ascribe g­ reat value to his tattoos or to invoke their stories for other audiences; as I suggest above, his language of conversion might have been a means of flattering a missionary and politely diverting his questioner from what might have seemed like an overly personal or inappropriate topic. Yet Michael’s par­tic­u­lar metaphor—­t hat he was now captive to a new master, Jesus Christ—­pre­sents another possibility: that he saw a chasm between his former and current selves that could not bridged.67 While the missionaries saw his tattoos as something remarkable but that ultimately could be over­ looked in ­favor of what they saw as more reliable evidence of Michael’s character, for Michael himself the tattoos may have been, if not entirely vacated of meaning by the pro­cess of conversion, perhaps made inaccessible by his new faith. He may have truly chosen to give up the stories associated with his achievements, and by no longer performing or giving voice to his tattoos would have indicated they belonged to another person. By the late eigh­teenth ­century, tattoos in early Amer­i­ca ­were permanent hybridities, constant, and yet constantly in flux—­open to interpretation by a



The “Ill Effects of It” 67

variety of audiences, with their legibility unstable. What was “readable” one way in a North American Native community might have been deciphered in an entirely dif­fer­ent fashion in Britain, France, or a colonial settlement. For non-­Native soldiers who received Indigenous tattoos, such bodily markings might enhance their claims to martial masculinity—or, for someone like Henry Grace, might undermine them. For Native men such as Michael, religious conversion might rewrite the significance of their tattoos—or it might not. For Brown, Grace, Bossu, and other Euro-­Americans claiming to be tattooed, their marks w ­ ere productive of narrative: requiring explication and elaboration to make readers see what they needed them to see in their embellished skin. Michael’s tattoos also produced a narrative, albeit one crafted by ­others: the Moravians holding him up as an exemplary convert deployed what ­were, to them, undecipherable hieroglyphics to insist that the state of one’s soul mattered far more than the appearance of one’s skin. W ­ hether Michael’s own narrative, deliberately withheld, would have made the same claims is not known.

CHAPTER 3

Pricing the Part Economies of Vio­lence and Stories of Scalps

On a small island in the Merrimack River, in what is now New Hampshire, a statue depicts a pensive-­looking ­woman with an axe in one hand and what appears to be a rumpled handkerchief in the other. The statue, unveiled in 1874, commemorates Hannah Duston, a Haverhill, Mas­sa­chu­setts, colonist taken captive during an Abenaki raid in 1697. Taken north and traded to a small ­family group near where the statue is now located, Duston, with the assistance of two other captives, used a tomahawk to kill ten men, ­women, and c­ hildren while they slept. The statue clutches not a handkerchief, but ten scalps.1 Nineteenth-­century mythologizing made Duston’s violent escape well known in the United States and resulted in the construction of at least three monuments in her honor, including the island statue. Duston’s creation as a celebrated heroine had every­t hing to do with her gender and with her maternal role; as Barbara Cutter has argued, her femininity allowed her vio­lence to be defined as “innocent” and “defensive”—­a story that the late nineteenth-­ century United States also wished to tell itself about its continental and overseas expansion. In such myth making, Duston’s scalp-­taking was largely treated as a hot-­headed act of reprisal: revenge by a furious m ­ other for the killing of her infant during the raid on Haverhill. Yet her act needs to be understood as a choice calculated according to an explicit economy of vio­ lence. Attention to the unusual and spectacular nature of this incident has obscured that Duston was not an anomaly but rather an exemplar, carry­ing out a colonial policy that articulated a relationship between body parts, financial rewards, and Indigenous dispossession. Scalp bounties offered by Mas­sa­chu­setts and other En­g lish colonies took an Indigenous tactic and



Pricing the Part 69

Figure 10. The Boscawen, New Hampshire, monument to Hannah Duston, erected in 1874, depicts her holding a small axe and a fistful of scalps. Photo­graph courtesy of Marc Nozell.

cultural practice and repurposed it in such a way as to flatten and anonymize indigeneity. Rewards from the colonies incentivized not only scalping but the crafting of par­t ic­u ­lar stories about scalping: narratives that filled in ­t hose same spaces of anonymity and uncertainty that scalps generated. Duston was feted as a heroine in the days following her return, as well as centuries l­ater. According to Cotton Mather, she and the other former captives “received Fifty Pounds from the General Assembly of the Province, as a Recompence of their Action; besides which they Received many pre­sents of Congratulation from their more private Friends, but none gave ’em a greater Tast of Bounty, than Col­o­nel Nicholson, the Governour of Mary­land, who hearing of their Action, sent ’em a very generous Token of his Favour.”2 This financial reward for a bold act of vio­lence reflected a growing pattern across the En­glish colonies by the last de­cades of the seventeenth century, as did Mather’s valorized retelling of Duston’s experience.3 Colonial

70 Chapter 3

governments regularly offered bounties for Native American scalps, with scales of value and procedures for reimbursement, and made storytelling a crucial ele­ment in the evaluation of such trophies. Much as the previous chapter described the ways that fighters and captives made accounts of tattooing a crucial locus for contesting—or performing—­ideas of martial masculinity, this chapter explores the way that scalps and the bounties offered for them elicited stories that colonial authorities attempted to script and control. Scalp bounties w ­ ere a means of waging war against Native groups, using the possibility of reward to induce volunteers and enlisted soldiers to do the defensive work of the En­g lish colonies. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, New ­England’s wars with Native communities resulted in a large number of enslaved Indigenous captives, whose commodified ­labor benefited the colonies while their forced removal from their families, polities, and lands enabled further En­glish expansion.4 Bounties, with their assignment and codification of financial value to h ­ uman body parts, attempted in turn to make violent death yet another means for colonies and individuals to profit from Native bodies.5 Scalp bounties w ­ ere significant not only as a widely a­ dopted tactic of conquest but also b ­ ecause the complexities and ambiguities of their creation and enforcement demonstrate how seemingly fine-­g rained regulations wielded blunt biopo­l iti­c al power.6 Bounties drew a border between ­those deemed disposable—­those targeted by state-­authorized vio­lence—­ and ­t hose who ­were not. That border was malleable, a power­ful tool in the hands of authorities who asserted the right to assign scalps and the stories associated with them to t­ hose categories. Financial and rhetorical values derived from the ways that age, gender, and “­enemy” status might be read into a small piece of skin and hair. ­These objects, and the narratives crafted around them, ­were deployed by colonies in such a way as to create “Indian” as an expansive category: one whose bound­aries would be determined by colonial authorities. Rewards for scalps ­were intended to establish clear accounts of vio­lence and to justify scalping victims’ deaths as befitting t­ hose of legitimate enemies. Scalps ­were tangible items with uncanny associations, proving ambiguous to “read” for ­either proof of death or individual, tribal, or ethnic identity. Authorizing agencies both fretted over and exploited ­t hose ambiguities. With distinctions of value often assigned to the age and gender of the scalped individual—­qualities likely difficult for colonists to determine from the object alone—­fears of fraudulent claims came to shape the reward system.



Pricing the Part 71

While officials w ­ ere concerned about paying for the “wrong” scalps, their be­hav­ior tacitly acknowledged the usefulness of doubt. Scalping could be used against any Native—­whether man, ­woman, or child—­t hus targeting both formally designated enemies and allied or neutral parties. The tenuous link between a scalp and a specific individual along with the flexible nature of bounty payments meant that colonial officials could si­mul­ta­neously disavow scalping when the wrong ­people ­were targeted, while also deploying the tactic in expansive ways to recruit fighters and control Native mobility. The practice thus laid the groundwork for colonial formations of “Indianness” as an identity and a status that could be reduced to an anonymous scalp. While scalp bounties ­were implemented at vari­ous times and places throughout British North Amer­i­c a, New France, and New Spain, this chapter focuses on the emergence and codification of the practice in late seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­century New E ­ ngland in order to highlight the changing cultural significance of scalping as it became incorporated into colonial practices of war.7 The region is significant too for the ways it has become closely intertwined with American originary myth; accounts like Duston’s have had long-­term cultural resonance when told as acts of righ­teous vio­lence—­with scalping playing a central role in the power of such stories. Initial En­glish efforts to insist on such trophies as severed heads gave way first to accepting and ­later to requesting scalps. A parallel shift occurred among t­ hose who w ­ ere encouraged to pursue bounties: colonies initially offered rewards largely to Native allies but, ­later, increasingly attempted to incentivize Anglo-­American colonists to pursue them. The introduction of bounties that offered money or trade goods in exchange for scalps linked an Indigenous trophy-­taking practice to the colonial economy, making scalping an act of monetarily incentivized warfare practiced by both Native and colonial fighters. In this way, long-­standing Indigenous norms of scalp-­taking in warfare—­which regarded scalps as objects with power­ful spiritual and po­ liti­cal significance, as well as sources of individual distinction for t­ hose who acquired them—­had mutual and syncretic influence with long-­standing Eu­ ro­pean ideas about the symbolic impact of trophy-­taking and the use of payment to recruit fighters. With that also came the colonial adoption and transformation of an impor­tant performative narrative practice: one’s account of a ­battle and one’s acquisition of the power­f ul object of a scalp became a required ele­ment to receive colonial awards.

72 Chapter 3

Scalp bounties made their formal appearance in the legislation of the En­g lish colonies during the 1670s but emerged from two much older traditions: taking war trophies and offering rewards for an ­enemy’s capture or death. For the purposes of this chapter I consider a bounty to be a formal offer, usually from a government but one that might also come from an individual or group, with terms outlined in advance and with a standardized framework of incentives, as compared to rewards or gifts that w ­ ere not standardized or clearly outlined in advance. That said, this distinction was at times blurred by arbitrary awards that did not match the specified amounts listed in legislative or executive acts, as well as by petitions from bounty seekers—­discussed ­later in this chapter—­that initiated offers rather than responded to incentives. Exchanges of gifts and goods for body parts w ­ ere pre­sent from the earliest moments of conflict and alliance between Natives and colonists in New ­England, and drew on a long Native history of building alliances through such exchanges, as well as a long Eu­ro­pean history of rewards for corporeal remnants.8 Colonists initially attempted to compel Native allies to conform to Eu­ro­pean trophy-­taking practices but found t­ hese efforts unsuccessful. This became apparent during the Pequot War of 1636–1638, when colonists from Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay and Plymouth allied with Narragansett and Mohegan ­peoples to attack the Pequot. Despite repeated En­g lish requests for Pequot heads, the Native allies continued to bring severed hands instead of or in addition to heads; the En­glish, meanwhile, continued to accept them.9 The En­glish lacked the power, in this early major conflict, to require the presented body parts to take a specific form. Natives presenting severed body parts to the En­glish received gifts including cloth, sugar, and gunpowder. ­These exchanges ­were not standardized, however, and remained haphazard.10 Yet by the end of the seventeenth ­century, the En­glish colonies had transitioned from reluctantly accepting scalps to specifically requesting them, appropriating this Native trophy-­taking practice in the ser­vice of their military goals.

* * * Scalping is trophy-­taking by means of cutting and pulling off the hair and skin of the head. Osteological evidence from sites around the world has demonstrated the ancient and widespread nature of the practice, including in the Old World. By the era of early modern Eu­ro­pean colonization, however, Eu­ro­pe­ans would have had l­ ittle to no con­temporary acquaintance with the



Pricing the Part 73

practice.11 While novel to newcomers in the Amer­i­cas, scalping was unusual only in its particulars; its role as ritual trophy-­taking would have resonated with other dismemberment practices that ­were widespread in Eu­rope.12 Scalping was widely, although not universally, used in North American Indigenous warfare, where it functioned both as a tangible proof of martial success and as a means of acquiring the spiritual strength and courage of the vanquished.13 The scalp itself was a power­ful object that might be worn, danced with, or displayed on palisades and homes. While understandings and ceremonial treatment of scalps differed widely, in many regions scalps ­were crucial parts of mourning—­taken in order that the soul or spirit of the scalped person might accompany a deceased community member (often a relation of the scalper) on their journey to the afterlife. In some communities, including t­ hose of coastal Algonquian in the Northeast, scalps and other severed body parts might also be presented as gifts connecting leaders, affirming or creating alliances and perhaps even facilitating spiritual adoptions between the parties.14 The En­glish chose to interpret gifts of heads, hands, and scalps as tribute rather than as an exchange implying alliance. This perception may have been reinforced by the largely unidirectional nature of the body-­part exchange, since the En­g lish accepted but rarely presented severed heads or hands to their Native allies.15 When t­ hese allies gave severed body parts to local En­ glish leaders, colonists chose to read the act as a symbol of deference, even dismissively comparing their allies to hounds waiting for their hunters. During the Pequot War, one writer described trophy-­taking Narragansett at Mystic Village as “waiting [for] the fall of the Pequets, (as the dogge watcheth the shot of the fouler to fetch the prey),” claiming that ­t hese En­glish allies then “fetched” Pequot “heades, as any w ­ ere slaine.”16

* * * ­ fter the Pequot War, t­ hese colonial comparisons of Indians and hunting A hounds ­were reanimated by En­glish attempts to employ Natives for a dif­fer­ ent type of war: the extermination of New E ­ ngland’s wolves. The economies of vio­lence that developed around wolf eradication proj­ects would set other impor­tant pre­ce­dents for scalp bounties. In 1637, Roger Williams wrote to John Winthrop with a suggestion to further subdue the now-­defeated Pequot and make them useful to the En­g lish. Having been dispersed among the English-­a llied tribes of the region, the surviving Pequot should be required,

74 Chapter 3

Williams wrote, to send wolves’ heads to the governor as a yearly tribute.17 While his specific proposal was not a­ dopted, similar demands w ­ ere made on other Native groups: several treaties of alliance required the annual pre­sen­ ta­tion of a certain number of wolf heads or pelts to the En­glish.18 Colonists also offered incentives in attempts to enlist wolf hunters, offering bounties for heads, ears, and pelts and explic­itly encouraging Native men to participate. Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay offered one bushel of corn or three quarts of wine to any Indian who brought in a wolf’s head in the early 1640s, while Plymouth provided a “coat of trading cloth” in 1651 and l­ater tacked on half a pound of powder and two pounds of shot.19 Mas­sa­chu­setts rec­ords also show a small number of o ­ rders authorizing cash payments to Indians for wolf pelts ­under ­later bounties.20 Yet the very ste­reo­t ypes that prompted colonists to enlist Indians as wolf hunters—­notions that Natives ­were power­f ul killers—­ also fortified anti-­Native prejudices that would shape the terms of ­later scalp bounties. Colonists may have hoped Native participation in wolf bounties signaled a broader adoption of En­glish culture, in addition to En­glish notions of monetary value. This was in part ­because awards for pelts offered money and trade goods for items carry­ing significant po­liti­cal symbolism among southern Algonquian ­peoples. Black wolf hides, in par­tic­u­lar, ­were exchanged among the region’s sachems as what one colonist, trader Thomas Morton, called “an assurance of reconciliation,” in order to reset diplomatic ties and ease tensions.21 Morton noted the high number of beaver skins—­forty—­t hat Natives might pay for “one of t­ hese black Wolfes skinnes” and described the trade as an opportunity to turn an animal regarded as a “discommodity” throughout “Countries of Christendom” into an object “worthy, the title of a commodity.”22 Morton’s claim that a “discommodity”—an incon­ve­ nience or trou­ble—­could be transformed into a profitable and valuable good (in this case, converting the hide of a “pest” predator into the highly desirable pelts of another animal) suggests a type of colonial arithmetic at work. ­W hether colonies offered bounties for wolf pelts or ­human scalps, they ­were implicitly undergirded by a logic that sought profit in eliminating “discommodities.” An elaborate set of bureaucratic procedures developed around wolf bounties. Such rules ­were intended to prevent fraud, ­whether in the form of repeated reimbursements for the same animal or the passing off of dogs and puppies as young wolves. To collect an award, a hunter needed to pre­ sent the wolf’s severed head to a local official, swearing an oath stating that



Pricing the Part 75

the animal had been killed within town bound­aries and that the animal was, in fact, a wolf. The official was required to “cut both the ears off” the wolf in front of witnesses (to prevent fraudulent resubmission of the same head) and to then supply the bounty seeker with a receipt, which when produced to the town trea­surer was to be exchanged for payment.23 By 1694, the legislature had ordered that “a competent number of blank certificates,” using standardized wording, ­were to be printed and distributed to each town to ensure uniformity in the receipts. The wolf heads w ­ ere then e­ ither to be buried in an unmarked location or put on display in a public place. Such regulations w ­ ere thus impor­tant models for the scalp bounties that followed. They set a clear procedure for submitting body parts, ­human or animal, for reward; initiated a system to prevent fraud; and used commercial incentives to motivate a form of killing that the government was other­wise unwilling or unable to take on. At the same time, wolf bounties achieved a degree of bureaucratic efficiency that scalp bounties in the colonial period did not reach, with preprinted receipts and a uniform procedure for payments.24 As scalp bounties developed, it appears that they in turn influenced the be­hav­ior of wolf hunters—so much so that in 1717 Mas­sa­chu­setts reproved local officials for receiving “the pate or scalp of a wolfe” instead of the full head, which could lead to the “evil consequence” of fraud.25

* * * En­g lish analogies comparing Native allies to loyal hunting “dogges” could devolve into more dangerous parallels for their Indigenous neighbors during times of conflict. John Underhill had called the Pequot “roaring lions” in 1638, while Mary Rowlandson described her captors during King Philip’s War (1675–1676) as “hellhounds” and “wolves.”26 The logical outcome of such an analogy was clearest, however, in 1703, when following a Native raid on Deerfield, Reverend Solomon Stoddard argued that Indians “act like wolves and are to be dealt withal as wolves.”27 The short distance from hound to “hellhound” could rapidly transform Natives from valued hunters to hunted predators. ­Whether presenting wolves’ heads or h ­ uman scalps, Natives who pursued the New E ­ ngland colonies’ rewards—or responded to their coercion—­walked a complicated path. Metacom, chief sachem of the Wampanoag, known to colonists as King Philip, agreed in a 1671 treaty with Plymouth to send five wolves’ heads to the governor ­every year: an act the colony understood as

76 Chapter 3

submission to their authority and that from Metacom’s perspective would have offered yet more evidence of po­liti­cal encroachment by New E ­ ngland officials.28 A few years l­ater Plymouth would instead be offering o ­ thers a price for Metacom’s head. The conflict that would come to be known as King Philip’s War saw the first implementation of formal scalp bounties by the En­glish colonies; this followed several de­cades of wolf bounties and the pre­ce­dent set by the Pequot War’s unsystematic but widespread rewards for body parts. One of the first wide-­scale, standardized colonial awards for scalps was offered to the Narragansett, initially En­glish allies in the conflict. According to Nathaniel Saltonstall, they ­were promised “that for ­every Indians Head-­Skin they brought, they should have a Coat, (i.e. Two Yards of Trucking Cloth, worth five Shillings per Yard ­here) and for e­ very one they bring alive two Coats; for King Philips Head, Twenty Coats, and if taken alive: Forty Coats: ­These went out, and returned in fourteen days time, bringing with them about Eigh­teen Heads in all.”29 It is significant that Philip’s entire head, not his “Head-­Skin,” was still wanted by the En­glish for proof of his death.30 Since Philip was the leader of their Wampanoag adversaries, his capture was valued by the colonists still more highly, as it would enable the En­glish to perform a power­f ul ritual of public execution. The ­actual head of someone regarded as a head of state mattered a g­ reat deal in En­g lish bodily symbolism, carry­ing far more significance than the scalps colonists continued to call “head-­skins.” The En­ glish w ­ ere well used to offering bounties for enemies of state, including traitors; this specific request for Philip’s head therefore can be understood as reinforcement for colonial claims that Philip was in “rebellion” rather than a sovereign leader conducting war against them. Colonial authorities ­were not as invested in the individual identities of other Wampanoag fighters. Saltonstall’s account remained ambiguous as to what, exactly, the Narragansett presented for their rewards—­describing them as returning with “Eigh­teen Heads” rather than “Head-­Skins.” Nonetheless, this formal bounty was the first to make “Head-­Skins,” not heads or hands, the preferred exchange medium for the majority of fighters.31 By explic­itly endorsing the suitability of scalps as war trophies and proof of death, colonists w ­ ere taking up a Native practice rather than attempting to enforce their own norms of trophy-­taking. ­There are several possibilities as to why scalp bounties emerged in the form they did and at the moment of King Philip’s War. The sheer scale of the conflict and the large number of



Pricing the Part 77

casualties may have prompted combatants to increasingly prefer lightweight and easily transportable scalps to other body parts.32 Scalps w ­ ere also more easily preserved and kept on long-­term display (although this seems not to have concerned the residents of Plymouth, where Philip’s head was prominently displayed on a stake for years a­ fter the war). The hard-­pressed colonial governments also could not afford to alienate much-­needed Native allies by trying to compel unfamiliar modes of fighting and trophy-­taking. Further, colonists may have come to recognize scalping’s close relationship to honor and spiritual power in Native war practices and hoped to utilize that to strike greater blows to e­ nemy morale. Ultimately, while colonial authorities had the power to issue a bounty, they relied on the preferences and practices of fighters to make the awards meaningful and matched rewards to be­hav­iors already in place. Scalp bounties therefore should be seen as a hybrid development, combining colonial financial incentives for conducting war with an Indigenous trophy-­taking practice. In ­every conflict with Native Americans following King Philip’s War, the response of the New ­England colonies was to issue scalp bounties. However, while allied Natives remained eligible for the scalp bounties, colonial governments relied on their in­de­pen­dent military activities less and less. Instead, they began to prefer authorizing ranger companies (which, indeed, frequently incorporated Native men as scouts, guides, and enlistees), as well as encouraging individual colonists to pursue the rewards.33 Native allies had initially been the primary harvesters of scalps and body parts for the colonies, acting in colonial eyes as “dogges” who would hunt and track both wolves and ­human “hell-­hounds.” Colonists increasingly became the principal audience for the government’s recruitment and “encouragement”—­ with Indians as the predators that needed eliminating.

* * * Over the course of several wars between the New ­England colonies and the Wabanaki Confederacy, from the 1690s through the early 1700s, a ­legal and cultural framework for scalping—­and paying for scalps—­emerged within the En­glish colonies, particularly Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay. Increasingly, scalp bounties codified the pro­cess by which prices ­were assigned to deaths and rewards claimed. The language of the acts shifted with nearly ­every legislative session as leaders tried to hammer out impor­tant concerns including efforts to determine the relative price and exchangeability of scalps—­based on the age,

78 Chapter 3

sex, and ethnicity of the person they ­were from—­and, as a direct result of ­these changing terms, the need to regulate fraud. Unlike wolf bounties, which made ­little distinction among wolves (other than offering smaller sums for pups than adults), scalp bounties forced administrators to create and police distinctions: they did not intend for all ­human scalps to be interchangeable, nor ­were all ­humans intended targets of this vio­lence. Distinctions ­were thus introduced between scalps that ­were and ­were not eligible for reward, meaning that narrative evidence—or at least narrative claims—­about scalps’ origins became an expected and impor­tant part of the pro­cess. In the years ­after King Philip’s War, bounty offers followed an increasingly routine format. Initial variations, however, indicate which issues colonial authorities would strug­gle to address. A 1690 offer, made during King William’s War (1689–1697), came about only a­ fter a request for “encouragement” from a Lieutenant Elisha Andrews and o ­ thers. It neither explic­itly required the pre­sen­ta­tion of scalps to authorities nor ­limited bounty targets to Native enemies, instead granting twelve pounds for each of “the comon Enimy Franch and Indeans” ­either killed or captured.34 Successive colonial acts would largely limit their rewards to the death or capture of Native Americans, and would solely ask for Native scalps. Many of t­ hese acts integrated bounty offers for scalps with authorization for enslaving and selling captives, particularly ­children. The 1690 act promised volunteers not only rewards for the dead but also that they “be allowed what benifitt” they could make of “Weomen and ­Children and plunder” taken during their expeditions.35 Bounties therefore expanded the New ­England market in Natives to include both the living and the dead. Wide-­scale enslavement and deportation of captured Natives during King Philip’s War had enabled colonists to financially profit from the removal of Indigenous ­people from the landscape. Scalp bounties w ­ ere another means ­toward the same result. In contrast to the accelerating pro­cess of commodification applied to enslaved persons during this period, where financial value was located in the productive and reproductive ­labor of living bodies, the creation of a market for scalps was a novel instrumentalization of dead bodies. Scalps in this era do not appear to have been traded for other goods in an open marketplace and so w ­ ere not fully fungible commodities per se. A scalp’s economic value remained dependent on its social link to the person who had produced the object: that individual needed to pre­sent both the scalp and the story of its acquisition in order to receive money for them. While scalps



Pricing the Part 79

could pass from hand to hand and retain much of their uncanny, emotive power, without narrative context a scalp’s monetary value, at least, was harder to justify. Acts ­after 1690 continued to promise volunteers the right to keep or sell ­t hose they captured as slaves or, increasingly, required that captives be sold out of the region but promised volunteers the profits from t­ hose sales. As New En­glanders grew more and more fearful of keeping enslaved Natives living among the very ­people who had taken them captive, mandatory sales of slaves outside of the province w ­ ere instituted.36 Scalp-­hunting expeditions, then, ­were also slave-­hunting expeditions. A 1694 bounty moved closer to what would become the standardized style for Mas­sa­chu­setts bounties. Titled “An Act for Encouraging the Prosecution of the Indian E ­ nemy, and preserving such as are Friends,” it raised the reward for “­every Indian ­great or small” that volunteers should “kill or take and bring in Prisoner” to fifty pounds.37 For enlisted soldiers, however, the reward was only ten pounds’ bonus pay. As bounties became more frequent, such tiered incentives aimed primarily at the creation of volunteer ranger groups ­were introduced. Volunteers without pay received the highest awards for scalps, while volunteers ­under pay by the provincial government and enlisted men received proportionally smaller bounties b ­ ecause they received other compensation or assistance from the government in the form of arms, equipment, or food provisions. While contracted soldiers w ­ ere guaranteed income, self-­organized bounty hunters “­were paid only if, and to the degree that, they ­were successful; irregulars ­were paid only for their accomplishments, not their ser­v ice.”38 While the 1694 act began to formalize a structure of rewards for volunteers and enlistees, it presented another unresolved prob­lem for colonial administrators. The act’s promise of fifty pounds for “­every Indian g­ reat or small” seemed likely to encourage ranger groups to focus on killing or capturing easier targets, such as ­women and ­children, rather than directing their efforts ­toward arms-­bearing adult men—­since all ­were equally valuable u ­ nder the provisions of the act. Someone must have raised this issue. In 1695, when the act was renewed, a ranking was introduced instead. Adult men e­ ither dead or alive continued to be valued at fifty pounds, but the reward “for any Indian ­woman or young person judged to be u ­ nder the age of fourteen . . . ​­shall be henceforward twenty five pounds and no more.”39 By the 1697 renewal of the act, the age limit for childhood had dropped to ten, with awards for c­ hildren correspondingly dropping to ten pounds.

80 Chapter 3

Awards for adult w ­ omen had risen back to fifty pounds.40 ­Children remained defined as t­ hose ten years of age or u ­ nder for the next several renewals of the act, but distinctions between men and w ­ omen occasionally dis­appeared entirely, as in the 1703 act authorizing forty pounds “for each Scalp of the Indian ­Enemy, above ten years of age.”41 Fluctuating age limits and changes in price suggest ongoing discussions among the acts’ framers about which ends justified this par­tic­u­lar tactical means; how to define and circumscribe the targets of bounties would pre­sent perpetual difficulties for colonial administrations attempting to deploy them.42 By 1706, bounties took on a stable form that they would retain with ­little alteration for the rest of Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). They specified that an “Indian e­ nemy or rebel” was male and raised the age of childhood to twelve years. ­Women and ­children ­under twelve w ­ ere to be made prisoners, of whom their captors had “the benefit” of their sales.43 The more gradations and differentiations based on age and gender introduced into the bounties, the greater the possibility for fraud and, perhaps counterintuitively, the greater lumping together of “Indians” as an expansive group identity defined largely by ­enemy status and vulnerability to state-­authorized vio­lence. As a broad classification, “Indian” placed a presumptive ­enemy status onto Native p ­ eople: bounties assumed allies w ­ ere the exception, not the rule, and nearly demolished the idea of “noncombatants.”44 The acts rarely provided detailed guidance about who was considered a target, with few geographic or tribal designations. In some instances, ­enemy status was defined spatially—­ for example, being an Indian on “the westward or right hand of the common and usual road or highway leading from Boston to Rehoboth.”45 The gaps and ambiguities of identification within such clauses functioned as a grant of power: soldiers, volunteer rangers, or even an armed individual held the militarized right to define and target an ­enemy. Given the frequency with which colonists protested they could not visually distinguish Native allies and so-­called “praying Indians” from t­ hose they ­were at war with—­Nathaniel Saltonstall had written that the En­g lish “cannot know a Heathen from a Christian by his Visage, nor Apparel”—­the vagaries of bounty language could have deadly consequences for anyone perceived as “Indian.”46 In an incident in 1676, Samuel Sewall reported that a young man at Salem, “when fowling, saw one by a pond with black hair, and was thereat frighted, supposing the person to be an Indian, and so shot and killed him: came home flying with the fright for fear of more Indians. The next day [the victim was] found to be an En­glishman shot dead. The Actour in prison.”47 While he apparently did



Pricing the Part 81

not attempt to scalp the person he shot, the perpetrator’s assumptions about physical appearance (“black hair” made one an Indian) ­were lethal. With the possibility of rewards for difficult-­to-­identify scalps, the risk of such vio­lence would be even greater for Native ­people.

* * * Protocols for punishing fraud swiftly followed the introduction of bounties but seemed more about allaying colonial anx­i­eties (and disavowing official culpability) than effectively constraining or directing vio­lence. The very nature of scalps prompted such considerations. How might officials know whose hair and skin lay on the ­table in front of them? Officials strug­gled to make ­those determinations. While scalps, in their appearance and pre­sen­ta­ tion, could certainly provide impor­tant clues about their origins, the ability of the governor and Executive Council to ascertain the circumstances of their acquisition was open to doubt—­a fact both useful and troubling to colonial authorities. As rewards w ­ ere subdivided into vari­ous categories and regulations ­were refined, the potential—­a nd the incentive—­for deception became greater. ­A fter the 1690 Act, general rewards for French scalps w ­ ere not issued again, although payments for specific individuals would occasionally be authorized. Scalps w ­ ere therefore supposed to only be t­ hose of Indians, and ­enemy Indians at that. How the council was supposed to make that determination was, perhaps deliberately, unclear. Pay scales distinguishing between age and gender presented another conundrum: how ­were officials to know the difference between male and female scalps or ­t hose above the age of childhood versus t­ hose below—an age that fluctuated from year to year in the bounty acts? Multiple options for profit, via enslavement or scalping, presented rangers with a set of financial calculations based on their own classifications of Native bodies—­particularly t­ hose of c­ hildren.48 The temptation for volunteers to pre­sent a scalp as coming from a young man capable of bearing arms rather than a child must have been high, given the difference in reward and prestige.49 Fear of fraud led to the institution of several basic practices. Scalps, as well as prisoners, had to be delivered in person, generally to the governor and council, in order to “grant a Debenture upon the Trea­surer” for payment of the reward. If “any person or persons s­ hall produce any Scalp not being an Indians Scalp, or the scalp of some Indian, being not bonâ fide slain in

82 Chapter 3

Ser­vice as aforesd with intent to deceive,” the punishment was three months’ imprisonment and a fine of double the reward amount.50 Half of the fine went to the government and the other half to the informer who revealed the fraud. ­Because fines correlated to the original rewards, punishment for fraud again set a price scale based on age and gender: falsely claiming that a scalp was an adult man’s would cost one more than claiming it was anyone ­else’s. The possibility of this type of fraud cannot be fully dismissed. By the end of Queen Anne’s War volunteers w ­ ere being awarded a hundred pounds per scalp, while soldiers continued to only receive ten. Collusion between soldiers and volunteers to pre­sent a scalp taken by a soldier as having been instead obtained by the volunteer, for example—­then splitting the pay at fifty pounds apiece—­can be plausibly i­ magined, if not confirmed. Th ­ ere is, however, concrete evidence of a dif­fer­ent sort of fraud: robbing the graves of Native allies. In one such incident, Mohicans from the “praying town” of Stockbridge enlisted with British forces against the French during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), only to face insults and threats, and fi­nally to discover that some in the colonial forces had dug up a Mohican grave and desecrated the body in an attempt to collect a scalp bounty.51 ­There is no evidence of individuals being punished ­under ­t hese statutes for defrauding Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay with false scalping stories, although swindles relating to the nonpayment of bounty offers and related payments w ­ ere occasionally reported. In one instance, Isaac Wonno, “an Indian,” petitioned the provincial council in 1726 for assistance, claiming that “Nine Months pay due to him for his Ser­v ice” had been taken by another member of his com­ pany, “one Moses Markham . . . ​­under pretence of an Order from the Petitioner, Which was for his Scalp Money only.” Wonno insisted that he had only authorized the transfer of his “Scalp Money” to Markham, not his entire back pay. Five pounds was granted Wonno “in Consideration of the Loss of his Eye,” an injury he had received while in ser­v ice, and no further action seems to have followed his petition.52 As Brian Carroll has explained, scalp bounties w ­ ere “for many rangers and their families the only money they would receive for their ser­vice”: t­ hose who w ­ ere indentured servants would have their base pay disbursed directly to their masters, while ­t hose who w ­ ere in debt would have signed over their wages to creditors. Perhaps two-­t hirds of the New ­England Natives in provincial muster rolls w ­ ere e­ ither indentured or indebted, meaning that scalp bounties and rewards for captives would have been especially crucial income for Natives who had joined ranger units or taken up other military ser­v ice.



Pricing the Part 83

Many never received their full pay, in some cases through theft by commanding officers or t­hose holding their indentures and in other cases through bureaucratic indifference. In one such case, rangers ­under the command of Col­o­nel John Gorham received no rewards for Mi’kmaq prisoners and scalps taken in 1744, despite Gorham’s repeated petitions to the Mas­sa­chu­setts General Court and Governor William Shirley. In 1747, Gorham took out a notice in the Boston Gazette begging his “Indian Soldiers” and their families and heirs to “desist coming or sending any O ­ rders” for the rewards they w ­ ere due, as he had “not as yet received one Farthing for the Scalps.” He would, he insisted, “inform all Claimers” when the bounty had been obtained. By the time that Gorham died in late 1751, however, the bounties remained unpaid.53

* * * Bounties, while supposedly distributed according to precise guidelines, varied dramatically from the legislation’s numbers in practice. Awards ­were subject to the judgment of the governor and Executive Council, and reflected not the s­ imple, cold precision of the promised pay scales but the degree of interest that could be generated by the physical trophies and the stories that accompanied them. Unlike wolf bounties, with their preprinted receipts, scalp bounties turned to—­indeed, relied on—­the flexibility of narrative in determining awards. Scalps ­were material evidence of desired vio­lence, but determining their value required stories in addition to the object. Stories, through their accumulation of persuasive detail and pre­sen­ta­tion of petitioners’ needs, spoke to t­ hose disbursing the awards in a dif­fer­ent way than trophies of hair and skin. The desire for narrative tacitly acknowledged the ambiguity of scalps as objects with ­human identities. Fears of fraud gave stories relevance; officials who could not judge the licit or illicit origins of a scalp believed they could judge the veracity of a claimant’s story. In other words, scalps w ­ ere a type of forensic evidence that required testimony in order to be fully evaluated. While some claimants may have directly received money during or as an outcome of t­ hose meetings, they usually also had to submit petitions to the General Assembly, reiterating their tales and requesting a disbursement of funds. Several such petitions filed within a few months of one another in 1704 demonstrate the vagaries of the reward system. John Shipley of Groton submitted a request in October of that year, recounting how he and thirteen men encountered “Indians to the number of about twenty.”54 Shipley’s account was

84 Chapter 3

well crafted: he built suspense by describing how their Native opponents “made several shott” at them, then revealed the main antagonist: “one lusty stout Indian with a holland shirt on” who ran up alongside Shipley and some of the other colonists. “As soon as he had fired yr Petitioner fired,” Shipley wrote, but the story then became complicated. Shipley fired “a slugg,” while another of the En­glishmen “fired a Bullet . . . ​whereupon the sd Indian fell down and cryd out.” Afterward, the man “was found dead, a slugg and bullet in his Body,” presenting the prob­lem of determining which colonist had killed him and who, therefore, was eligible for the reward. Having “sent up” the man’s scalp to “his Excellency,” Shipley “humbly” set his case before his readers, hoping he would be “allowed such Encouragement for his Ser­v ice herein as the Law allows or as yr Excellency and Hons in ye Wisdoms ­shall deem meet.”55 ­A fter the council read the petition, it was sent down to the House of Representatives for action. The representatives resolved that four pounds be paid to the petitioner but also that “the like sum” be allowed to a “Samuel Butterfield, who this House is Inform’d, did also assist in the killing of the Indian mentioned . . . ​and that no other or further Sum be allowed for the killing of the sd Indian.”56 Perhaps b ­ ecause uncertainty over who had actually killed the man had undermined the legislature’s enthusiasm for the case, John Shipley and Samuel Butterfield received much smaller sums than the pos­si­ble forty pounds described by the bounty then in effect.57 Another petition the next month similarly demonstrated how the circumstances found in a story could disrupt the set formulas of bounties. Captain Thomas How wrote on behalf of his com­pany of thirty men, describing their recent defense of Lancaster “from the insults of [the] cruel and barbarous” French and Indian ­enemy.58 ­After the ­battle, Captain How explained, “on the spots where several barns w ­ ere burnt, the bones of Sundry of the e­ nemy yt ­were slain by your petitioner & Com­pany” w ­ ere found. In addition, he suggested that “many more supposed to be wounded” had been carried away by their comrades, making it—at least to him—­“very clear and plain . . . ​of the enemies being slain.” ­There was an incon­ve­nient sticking point, though: “Your Petitioner and Com­pany recovered no Scalps.” The petition concluded with his hope that their “Honours . . . ​would please to consider the premises, and Grant them such compensation as in your Wisdome s­ hall deem mete.” The officials de­cided to overlook the requirement that scalps, as tangible evidence, be presented. They granted Captain How and his men ten pounds “to be equally Distributed . . . ​as a Token that this Court Takes notice of, and



Pricing the Part 85

well accepts, their good Ser­v ice.”59 Ten pounds was the full amount to be granted to enlisted forces for a single adult man’s scalp, indicating the Legislature believed How’s assurances that the com­pany was responsible for Native casualties but perhaps not the “many” and “sundry” that he described.

* * * Twenty years ­later, another conflict known as ­Father Râle’s War, or Lovewell’s War, (1722–1725), would exemplify how the implementation of scalp bounties had reshaped New E ­ ngland’s wars against Native powers—as well as with other colonial powers. ­Father Sébastien Râle was a French Jesuit living among the Abenaki of Norridgewock, a community along the Kennebec River. Râle was widely believed by the En­glish to be directing and encouraging Native hostilities against the province. In 1720, the House of Representatives, calling Râle an “Incendiary,” offered 100 pounds “to any Person that s­ hall apprehend the said Jesuit . . . ​& ­shall bring him to Boston.”60 ­After one failed attempt to capture the priest, Mas­sa­chu­setts then increased the award to two hundred pounds.61 The legislature added bounties on Native scalps, first sixty pounds, then revised upward to a hundred pounds, as a further incentive for rangers.62 A second raid on Norridgewock in August 1724 was a catastrophe for the village. Râle was shot in the doorway of his cabin, while many Abenaki ­were killed as they fled their homes. While neither award offer had explic­itly called for Râle’s death, the volunteers responding to the bounty w ­ ere not careful to capture him alive. One of the raid’s leaders, Captain Johnson Harmon, returned with twenty-­eight scalps, including “the Fyars [friar’s].” He complained that a ­great many more Abenaki bodies had been swept away in the river before the companies had the opportunity to take their scalps.63 Harmon presented the twenty-­seven Native scalps to Lieutenant Governor Dummer and members of the council, receiving 405 pounds to be distributed among his men. He then “made oath that the other Scalp was the Scalp of Sebastian Ralle, a Jesuit, who . . . ​obstinately resisted the Forces,” and the council granted an additional 100 pounds to Harmon’s forces for “the destruction of the sd Sebastian Ralle.”64 As this attack demonstrated, scalping could threaten or police individuals of Eu­ro­pean descent as well as Native ­people. That the rangers received payment for the “destruction” of Râle, a Frenchman, was unusual, although not unheard of. The bounty act of 1690 had promised rewards for killing or

86 Chapter 3

capturing the “comon Enimy” ­whether French or Indigenous, although subsequent legislation had targeted only “Indians” for scalping. Throughout the eighteenth-­century imperial strug­gles between Britain and France, both powers proved willing to scalp their Eu­ro­pean opponents as well as their Native ones. In several such instances, British authorities deployed the ambiguity of interpreting scalps—of identifying them by race or national origin—to police ethnic and geopo­liti­cal bound­a ries between Canadians and Natives. While much of the Acadian peninsula had been ceded by France to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, and other Indigenous communities did not recognize the transfer; British attempts to assert military control over the region and to displace Mi’kmaq and Acadian residents in ­favor of their own Protestant settlers resulted in repeated outbreaks of war in the 1720s, 1740s, and 1750s. In 1744, the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, Paul Mascarene, approvingly noted that the deployment of “wood Rangers” from Mas­sa­chu­setts had “kept off the Indian Ennemy who in small partys rov’d continually about.” A few months ­later, locals wrote a letter to Mascarene and his council protesting the violent impressment of Acadians into ser­v ice as guides and pi­ lots for the rangers—­a nd anxiously inquiring about ­whether they ­were in danger of being scalped. They had heard, the families wrote, that the New En­glanders meant “to destroy all the inhabitants that had any Indian blood in them, and scalp them, [and] that as t­ here was a g­ reat number of Mulattoes amongst them . . . ​who ­were allied to the greatest families, it had caused a terrible alarm.” In acknowledging their ties of kinship to Indigenous communities, Acadians also acknowledged their vulnerability to being targeted by the same tactics as their relations. Mascarene’s response gave vague assurances that the inhabitants had nothing to fear “provided they continued steadfast . . . ​and behaved like faithful subjects”: ­after all, he reasoned, if the New En­glanders intended to treat “all who had any Indian blood in them . . . ​as enemies,” they would have already done so. The British reply did not fully refute Acadian fears, implying that if they w ­ ere insufficiently “faithful,” their protections might be revoked. It also insisted that they ­were obliged to guide the rangers “to find . . . ​out” Natives—­and in this way attempted to fissure any pos­si­ble alliances between t­ hese interrelated communities.65 Fifteen years ­later, General James Wolfe would authorize rangers outside of Québec to scalp “Canadians dressed like Indians” as well as the Native allies of New France.66 Such choices demonstrate that proximity to Nativeness—in physical appearance, kinship or marriage, residency in Native communities, or as in



Pricing the Part 87

Râle’s case, po­liti­cal and military alliance—­could make Eu­ro­pean enemies “scalpable” in the eyes of British governmental and military authorities.

* * * In 1724, in response to the killing of ­Father Râle and the Norridgewock villa­ gers, some Abenaki launched a counterattack against the town of Dunstable, taking captives. E ­ very member of a rescue party sent a­ fter the captives was killed, except for a man named Josiah Farwell. Soon a­ fter, Farwell, Jonathan Robbins, and John Lovewell petitioned the Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay government to provide “Incouragement suitable” for volunteer companies to fight Natives on the northern frontier.67 Claiming to represent at least forty or fifty interested men, they requested five shillings a day for each soldier “in case they kill any ­enemy Indians & produce their scalps” while engaging in “Indian hunting one w ­ hole year.” They added that if they brought in any scalps they w ­ ere “desirous to submit to what the Government s­ hall see cause to give them (over and above their wages) as a reward.”68 The General Court responded quickly, approving the plan while editing it. They offered only half the amount of wages initially proposed by the petitioners (two shillings and sixpence per diem) and ordered that the volunteers “subsist” themselves, provisioning their group without government assistance. The only exception was that the government would supply arms for any allied “Maquas” (Mohawk) or other Native men who might be willing to join the group. The incentive for producing a scalp, however, was enormous: “the sum of one hundred pounds for each male scalp.” With the offer announced, Lovewell raised an initial com­pany of around thirty men, with himself as captain, Farwell as lieutenant, and Robbins as ensign. The com­pany left their communities in late November but found no sign of Native Americans ­until December 19, when they killed one man and took a youth prisoner. A few weeks l­ ater, the Boston News-­Letter reported with satisfaction the return of Lovewell’s party, describing their entry into the city with “a Scalp of an Indian Man and a Captive (being a Lad of about 15 years of age) . . . ​for which good Ser­v ice, and for their further Encouragement, the Honorable the Lieut. Governour and Council was pleas’d to give them Fifty Pounds over and above One Hundred & Fifty Pounds allow’d them by Law.”69 The com­pany’s success, as well as their unexpected bonus, ensured that a second expedition filled out quickly, with the financial incentives and bragging rights presumably major inducements. By the end of January, a second

88 Chapter 3

expedition of eighty-­seven men had departed ­under Lovewell’s command. Several weeks ­later, the group followed tracks from the site of a recently abandoned dwelling, trailing a small party “till about 2 ­o’clock in the morning” and then, according to Lovewell’s expedition journal, “came upon their Wigwams & killed Ten Indian Men, which w ­ ere all that w ­ ere t­ here, & not one escaped alive.”70 This massacre in the ­middle of the night meant a windfall for the com­ pany. Not only w ­ ere the scalps of the ten men collectively worth one thousand pounds, to be divided among the com­pany, but their guns and other items w ­ ere taken as plunder and resold. The quality of the dead men’s personal belongings was held up by En­glish colonists as proof that the party “had a design upon our Frontier Towns.”71 This supplementary evidence was used to justify the killings and to thereby validate the scalps for bounties. Samuel Penhallow wrote that the captured weapons sold for seven pounds apiece, ­because they ­were almost new—­evidence, he argued, that the French ­were supplying the Native groups of the area with arms.72 That relatively new guns ­were worth seven pounds each while scalps w ­ ere worth a hundred pounds demonstrates what a fortune bounty-­hunting could represent for t­ hose pursuing it. On their return, the com­pany reportedly marched into Dover “in triumph,” the scalps “stretched on hoops and elevated on poles,” and then proceeded to Boston, where Lovewell presented the scalps to the lieutenant governor and council.73 This remarkable performance—­parading stretched scalps on the streets of colonial towns—­suggests that Indigenous practices ­were being ­either ­adopted or at least accommodated by En­g lish forces. Stretching on hoops, drying, and painting scalps w ­ ere all common means of preserving and ornamenting t­ hese impor­tant objects among Algonquian communities of the Northeast. Such an action implies ­either that Lovewell’s party included Native enlistees who undertook the pro­cess or that the colonial recruits had themselves embraced it, perhaps perceiving it as a blow to ­enemy morale. The enthusiastic reception given to Lovewell’s com­pany in Dover and Boston indicates that colonists largely felt admiration, not aversion, for the appropriation of such techniques. One thousand pounds was disbursed to the com­pany for the scalps. Other men ­were recruited for a third, much smaller expedition. Few ­were veterans of the previous two parties; many of ­those, having landed a windfall, returned to their farms to prepare for spring planting rather than to continue what for most was the seasonal occupation of scalp-­hunting. Lovewell’s newest



Pricing the Part 89

com­pany returned to the field on April 15. L ­ ittle was heard from them for almost a month. Then a letter from Dunstable arrived, reporting that the com­pany had been attacked, with Lovewell wounded and lost, and only a few of the group had returned. In the end, only twelve men from Lovewell’s com­pany survived being ambushed by almost a hundred Abenaki near Pequawket. Lovewell was not one of them. His corpse would itself be scalped by Abenaki fighters. Mas­sa­chu­ setts Bay had made “Indian hunting,” as Lovewell had called it, a potential source of profit, but it had not eliminated the possibility of Indigenous re­sis­ tance. Lovewell’s expedition became New E ­ ngland legend almost immediately ­after it occurred, with posthumous lauding of the com­pany as heroes while their profiteering motives ­were obscured. Yet looking at the estate rec­ord of Lieutenant Jonathan Robbins, who was fatally wounded at Pequawket, the economic place of scalp-­hunting becomes clear. According to his w ­ idow, his personal estate was worth approximately sixty-­nine pounds, of which twenty-­ four pounds and ten shillings—­one-­third—­was from “his Wages & Scalp Money.”74 While the third expedition was a deadly disaster for most of Lovewell’s com­pany, the narratives it provided for colonial audiences ­were as valuable, in their own way, as the bounty money that men such as Robbins had pursued. In New ­England memory, the events at Pequawket ­were primarily a story of defensive strug­gle against an ambush with overwhelming odds—in short, a massacre perpetrated by the Abenaki, with Lovewell a martyred hero.75 Scalping was a theme in many colonial tales about the incident, but as a Native tactic that d ­ ying En­glishmen sought to avoid rather than as the very motivation of Lovewell’s expeditions: to stalk, kill, and mutilate ­people for reward. A few days ­after news of the com­pany’s devastating defeat reached Boston, Reverend Thomas Symmes delivered a sermon “occasion’d by the Fall of the Brave Capt. John Lovewell” and “the Late Heroic Action” of his com­pany. In an accompanying “Historical Account,” Symmes claimed that Lieutenant Robbins, mortally wounded, had urged his companions to flee without him. Robbins “desir’d t­hey’d Charge his Gun and leave it with him, (which they did) for says he, The Indians w ­ ill come in the Morning to Scalp me, and I’ll kill one more of ’em if I can.” Another injured member of the party, Solomon Kies, announced to a companion, “If it be pos­si­ble, I’ll get out of the way of the Indians, that they mayn’t get my Scalp.”76 Colonial accounts focused on such stories: valiant efforts to subvert the

90 Chapter 3

violent intentions of Natives. Scalping was primarily described as a threat that Lovewell’s men sought to avoid at any cost, rather than an act they had intended to profit from. In his sermon, Symmes called for volunteers to return to the site and “cover the Dust, the Valuable Dust, of our Gallant Soldiers”; ­doing so would protect the bodies of expedition members from mutilation and their own potential conversion into “valuable” bounty objects.77 In many ways, the direct military contributions of scalp-­hunting groups such as Lovewell’s mattered far less than the rhetorical and narrative contributions that scalp bounties provided to colonial governance. The stories bounty petitioners supplied alongside severed scalps w ­ ere crucial tools of colonial authority: they assigned value to lives and created bound­aries between ­those who ­ought—­and o ­ ught not—to be priced by the part. As Thomas Morton had written about wolf bounties, rewards turned “discommodities” into objects of financial worth. Payments similarly affirmed a fictive legibility for scalps, with officials choosing to agree that the h ­ uman remains in front of them ­were from enemies, ­were legitimately acquired, and ­were worth an agreed-on price. Ultimately, state-­authorized scalp bounties can be understood as one instantiation of a settler-­colonial “logic of elimination”—­stories that insist on the marginalization and attempted erasure of Native p ­ eople in order that settlers might access territory. As the following chapter discusses, such “logic” also lends itself to settler claims of a rightful inheritance of land, supposedly earned by their suffering, as well as settler uses of Indigenous practices (or cultural signifiers, including scalping, tightly intertwined with i­magined ideas of “Indianness”) as a po­liti­cal and rhetorical resource. It is not a coincidence that some of the most popu­lar or well-­remembered narratives of New ­England scalp bounties—­accounts that reemerged or became even better known in the nineteenth ­century—­featured victimized or martyred colonists. Hannah Duston’s narrative framing was as a w ­ oman driven to defensive, necessary vio­lence by the death of her newborn, and that of Lovewell’s militia as gallant soldiers turned into “Valuable Dust.” Scalp bounties functioned as part of the “logic of elimination” not only by directly encouraging deadly attacks on Native ­people but also by providing rewards that in many instances ­were used to acquire land and facilitate the expansion of En­glish settlement.78 Following Hannah Duston’s return to Haverhill with ten scalps, she received many “pre­sents of Congratula­ tion,” as Cotton Mather had put it, including twenty-­five pounds from the Mas­sa­chu­setts government. The reward followed a petition by Duston’s hus-



Pricing the Part 91

band Thomas requesting “recompense” not merely for his wife’s “extraordinary action” but also for having lost “his Estate in that Calamity wherein his wife was carryed into her captivity.”79 Thomas Duston bought ten acres of land in Haverhill a few months ­after the General Assembly voted to grant his petition. The land, as one local historian of Haverhill ­later noted, appeared to have been bought “with the scalp money”—­meaning that the Dustons could be understood as exchanging one token of Native dispossession for another.80 Years l­ater in 1739, Joseph Neff, the son of Duston’s fellow captive Mary Neff, petitioned the General Court for a land grant, claiming that his m ­ other had been inadequately recompensed for her role in taking the scalps and killing “divers Indians.”81 The court granted Neff two hundred acres of land. The Dustons and Neffs converted their scalp-­taking into lands near Haverhill, but other colonists also benefited from their act in ways that expanded En­g lish claims outward, to the site of the vio­lence itself. In 1725, as John Lovewell’s ranger groups conducted their own scalping expeditions, families from Duston and Neff’s town of Haverhill established a colonial town at what is now Penacook, New Hampshire—­t he same site where Duston, Neff, and Samuel Leonardson had killed and scalped two men, two ­women, and six ­children.82 Not long afterward, Lovewell’s w ­ idow and c­ hildren, as well as the families of many o ­ thers killed in his expedition, would also be granted tracts of land in the same region.

CHAPTER 4

Playing Possum Scalping Survivors and Embodied Memory

Captain Samuel Neilson was furious that agents of the Pennsylvania government would try to negotiate peace with the “Indians.” Meeting two colonial messengers near Bethlehem in 1758, in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, Neilson declared that he would never trust t­ hose Indians who had allied themselves to the colony, and even threatened to kill them if he ever came across any of them. According to the messengers, he had announced, “Let them come on what Occasion or with what Pretence soever, he would kill them without asking Questions.” As for any colonists who attempted to ­settle a treaty with Native representatives, he angrily wished that they might be “scalped but not killed . . . ​t hat thereby they and ­others might be convinced we had no friends among the Indians.”1 The specificity of Neilson’s vision—­his notion that the treachery and malevolence of Native allies would be revealed by a mutilating but not fatal act of scalping—is striking. His remarks suggest that not only did he find the possibility of surviving scalping plausible, he found such survivors to be useful symbols of his worldview: that relations between colonial and Native communities w ­ ere intrinsically hostile. In Neilson’s interpretation, the appearance of such individuals—­with their distinctive scars—­supplied immediate visual evidence supporting his argument about the inevitability of cross-­ cultural vio­lence. Th ­ ose who disagreed with him, he suggested, merely needed to view the wounded bodies of scalping victims (or, perhaps, experience the mutilation themselves) to see living, breathing proof of his claim that the colonists “had no friends among the Indians.”

* * *



Playing Possum 93

Scalping had a strong grip on many imaginations beyond Captain Neilson’s in late eighteenth-­century Amer­i­ca. Accounts by colonial observers frequently portrayed it as a distinctively Indigenous form of vio­lence, and an act that was proliferating in frequency rather than declining, as tattooing was. Scalping was both gruesome and freighted with symbolism, prompting many to deploy particularly overwrought rhe­toric in describing it. Reverend Samuel Davies, in 1755, had proclaimed, “Can h ­ uman nature bear the horror of the sight! See yonder! the hairy scalps clotted with gore!” Preaching to a group of V ­ irginia volunteers preparing to head to the front, Davies asserted that the “savages” who would commit such atrocities “are not men; they are not beasts of prey; they are something worse; they must be infernal furies in ­human shape.”2 While the imagery and language describing scalping often focused, as Davies did, on the act of violent trophy-­taking—­and on the object, hair and skin severed from the body—­a subset of stories also addressed a counterpart to the severed scalp: ­people, missing part of themselves, living on and struggling to come to terms with it. Scalping survivors therefore prove surprisingly vis­i­ble in early American accounts of warfare, where they turned up not only as curiosities but as ideological props, used to make claims about Indian brutality, the necessity of total war, and the ultimate righ­teousness of settler vio­lence—­which was framed as a defensive response to ­t hese horrific injuries on the body politic. Writers such as Warren Johnson, ­brother to Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson, commented on the frequency with which this seemingly lethal violent act did not kill its intended victims. As Johnson wrote in his journal in 1760, “­There are many Instances of both Men & ­women recovering a­ fter being Scalped[;] they pull it off from the back of the head.”3 ­Others went further in detailing the physical appearance of survivors, such as fur trader John Long, who reported, “­There are instances of persons of both sexes, now living in Amer­i­ca, and no doubt other countries, who, a­ fter having been scalped, by wearing a plate of silver or tin on the crown of the head, to keep it from cold, enjoy a good state of health, and are seldom afflicted with pains.”4 While a metal cap or cover may have prevented infection or irritation to sensitive scar tissue, it seems of doubtful efficacy in keeping one’s head warm. Long’s knowledge may have been second­hand or may have reflected uncertainty around the best medical treatment for such an injury. For such survivors, the cost was being physically marked in a permanent and unmistakable manner. The scars of scalping, ranging from relatively

94 Chapter 4

small patches on the crown of the head to almost complete removal of the hair—­even down onto the forehead—­were proof not just of a violent experience but of a par­tic­u ­lar form of cross-­cultural vio­lence. Survivors w ­ ere marked yet again by their newfound notoriety and the community’s interest in their wounded bodies. While ­t hese individuals might have been able to cloak their scars u ­ nder hats or wigs—­a nd many did, out of what seems to have been both physical and psychological discomfort—­k nowledge of the incidents circulated quickly. Indeed, the coverings themselves might only draw further attention to the scars, as in the case of the metal plates that John Long reported on survivors. Scalping survivors regularly turned up in the newspapers, pamphlets, histories, and fiction of early Amer­i­ca. Narrations of their experiences brought them into the public eye, where their scars could be interpreted by ­others. ­Those interpretations wrestled with the complexity of survival: ­were individuals lucky to live, or tragically impaired? ­Were they stronger (or braver or more clever) than their assailants, or did their wounds indicate a fundamental vulnerability of the settler body politic? In prompting such questions, survivors both underlined the significance of and unsettled the stories attached to scalping as a par­tic­u­lar act of vio­lence: their bodies ­were read, and violently written upon, by competing sets of narrators. Corpses, of course, communicate a ­g reat deal within or between socie­ ties, in their display and desecration, or their honoring and interment.5 So too might pieces of the ­human body. Scalps, as objects that might be removed from persons ­either living or dead, presented a discomfiting array of interpretative options. As Angela Rosenthal has written, “Hair occupies an extraordinary position, mediating between the natu­ral and cultural” in much the same way that it is “both of, and without the body—at once corporeal and a mere lifeless extension.”6 This duality would have been heightened in scalps, which ­were both biological remains (pieces of skin and hair) and cultural products (objects requiring technique, preparation, and pre­sen­ta­tion). The scars on survivors ­were inflected by both ele­ments; they ­were bodily damage and attacks on a part of the self closely linked to individuality, gender, social status, and personhood. Scalping survivors ­were ­people who had not quite died, and in that regard they held a complex, even uncanny, position. This chapter explores the circulation of stories about a se­lection of scalping survivors, looking at incidents from large-­scale conflicts including the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution as well as from smaller but



Playing Possum 95

no-­less-­v iolent clashes like that prompted by a surge of white settlements in Tennessee in the 1780s. How wounded individuals, their communities, their antagonists, and their descendants responded to t­ hese experiences reveals profound differences in the reception and circulation of survivors’ accounts, revealing the po­liti­cal and social decisions shaping how mutilated bodies ­were studied, mourned, and remembered in the early years of the United States. Survivors ­were living remnants of cross-­cultural vio­lence, embodied memories that could be summoned to fulfill community needs but not readily repressed when ­others hoped to forget. Several narrative threads ­were common in accounts of scalping scars: they could be regarded as honorable war wounds, a sign of Providence, a shameful mark of the community’s failure to protect its own, or an uncertain mingling of all of the above. Survivors w ­ ere placed on a spectrum between victim and hero, an assessment inflected by age, gender, and the circumstances of the vio­lence. Yet even in accounts where the scalped person was portrayed as brave, clever, and even heroic, t­ here was an anxious intensity in asserting a meaning to their continued existence. The complicated reactions both of survivors and their communities to their scarring experiences w ­ ere due to doubts about just who ­t hese stories belonged to: was it the triumphant story of the survivor, taking action and making the decision to survive, as many of them often claimed? Or was it a story that perpetrators had written on the body, changing the narrative to one of powerlessness and victimhood? Was survival a gift from God or a means of demonstrating divine dis­plea­sure? Who controlled this act and its outcomes? The stories and scars of individual survivors became a way for t­ hose viewing and writing about them to imagine and think through their own fears and concerns about being changed—or permanently marked—by the new spaces and p ­ eoples they w ­ ere living among. The stories and appearances of scalping survivors could ­either challenge or reinforce a community’s—­and an individual’s—­self-­conception: they might e­ ither assert strength in overcoming an ordeal or be reminders of life’s fragility. Wounded bodies of opponents, as Elaine Scarry has noted, “lend the aura of material real­ity to the winning construct” of a conflict.7 In other words, wars are strug­gles over ideological claims, with wounded and dead bodies serving as the evidence of a claim’s power or its weakness. Even for victors, however, wounded bodies of one’s own community members could sow doubt. Scalped individuals who w ­ ere horrifically injured yet survived allowed for the continued contestation and reprisal of conflicts, even a­ fter wars ended or active zones

96 Chapter 4

of conflict moved elsewhere, away from ­t hese injured individuals and their communities.

* * * In August 1763, a group of 114 Pennsylvania colonists passed through Fort Augusta, the British garrison at the Forks of the Susquehanna, announcing their intention to attack and destroy some Native towns farther up the river. The men stationed at the fort attempted to dissuade them, since ­t hose they targeted—­Munsee Delaware villages located at a place called the ­Great Island—­were publicly friendly to Pennsylvania. The colonists ignored the garrison leadership and pressed onward, but soon became separated into groups in the confusion of nightfall and the fears that they ­were surrounded by hostile Natives in the dark. Two days ­later, one group, led by a man named George Allen, returned with a number of furs, trade goods, and four scalps.8 Their stories ­were initially triumphant yet vague, but it soon emerged that the group had stumbled across three Native men returning from Bethlehem with trade goods (the same town where Samuel Neilson, a few years prior, had insisted that t­ hose in f­ avor of peace should be scalped). A ­ fter the colonists took the three men prisoners, they changed their minds and de­cided instead to kill and scalp them in hopes of receiving a bounty. Originally George Allen had ordered that the prisoners be taken back to Fort Augusta, where they would “deliver them up to the commander.” ­Others in the group angrily objected: “I told him if we do that perhaps they w ­ ill let them go, or send them to Philadelphia, where they would be used better than ourselves by the Quakers.” One of the men l­ater recalled how they had overruled Allen: “Said Allen, would you kill them yourself, for you can get no person ­here to help you; t­ here is enough said I that w ­ ill help me to kill them.”9 What t­ hese colonists did not mention to the residents of Fort Augusta as they showed off the ­rifles, clothing, trade goods, and scalps they had acquired was that one of the scalps belonged to a man who was still alive somewhere in the woods near the G ­ reat Island of the Susquehanna. One of the men in the party had returned to the dead bodies in order to plunder further clothing and trade items. As he began to remove one man’s legging, the colonist was shocked when the supposed corpse jumped up and fled, bleeding profusely. So “surprised at his raising from the dead” ­were the members of the party that they failed to give pursuit.10



Playing Possum 97

This Native man would ­later recount that he used moss and his remaining legging to bind his wound, as he reportedly said, “to keep the hot sun from beating in upon his brains.”11 His name, like that of the officer in charge of the colonists, was given in vari­ous sources as “George Allen.” The two men, assailant and survivor, ­were almost certainly known to one another, and their shared name suggests the possibility that they may have even swapped names in ­earlier times as a sign of friendship.12 The survivor ­later “threatened to take revenge on George Allen, his name sake, and James Gallaher, not that they ­were worse than the ­others, but ­because they ­were the only persons he was acquainted with” among his attackers, but ­t here is no evidence that he ever had the opportunity for reprisal.13 The Pennsylvanians would go on to receive “one hundred Pounds in ful for the Premiums allowed by the Government” for the scalps, which w ­ ere reported as four in number rather than three: the discrepancy suggested that the group had subdivided one of the scalps in order to fraudulently inflate their reward. Most colonial accounts described the Native George Allen and his two murdered traveling companions merely as “­Enemy Indians.”14 The payment of the official bounty and the assertion of the Native men’s “­enemy” status indicated that most Pennsylvanians accepted the paper-­t hin narrative put forward by the attacking party. Accounts of settler survivors of scalping dominated colonial media, muting—or rewriting—­those of Native survivors. While colonial survivors often became minor celebrities, receiving pensions or awards for their suffering, Native survivors such as Allen w ­ ere nearly invisible to the colonial eye. Even colonists appalled by the incident seemed unaware at the time that one man had survived. The attack at Munsee Hill prompted outrage among Quakers and their allies in Philadelphia, yet the event was reported as if all three men had been killed. It “has raised in me a very high Resentment,” wrote Charles Read indignantly, “the destroying in cool Blood three Indian Guides . . . ​equals any t­ hing we have met with.”15 The survival of the Indian known as George Allen would not be widely known among white Americans u ­ ntil his story was published over forty years ­later in a book entitled A Se­lection of Some of the Most In­ter­est­ing Narratives of the Outrages Committed by the Indians. The irony of including this man’s story of horrific wounding at the hands of vigilante settlers in a work promising “outrages committed by the Indians” seems to have gone without remark. Scalping was so deeply associated with Native vio­lence and brutality in the settler imagination that it was nearly impossible for white Americans to see Allen’s story in the same sympathetic, tragic, or even heroic

98 Chapter 4

frames that they used to interpret their own experiences, or to acknowledge that this was a story of colonial rather than Indigenous acts of vio­lence. This Native man almost certainly recounted his version of events more fully to his f­ amily and community, but that version was not to be found in In­ter­est­ ing Outrages.

* * * Anglo-­American survivors w ­ ere often thoroughly documented, particularly by the physicians treating their wounds. Survivorship was a role not only contested between a wounded individual and his or her assailants but between ­t hose causing the wound and t­ hose attempting to cure it. Captain James Gregg was stationed at Fort Stanwix in New York during the Revolutionary War. In October 1777, Gregg and two fellow soldiers had left the fort in order to hunt pigeons when they ­were attacked by an unidentified party of Natives who shot and scalped them. Gregg, ­after regaining consciousness, reportedly directed his dog to get help, since his two companions ­were dead. Through its barks and whines, the animal attracted the attention of nearby fishermen who then rescued Gregg and brought him back to the fort. This story of animal “fidelity and sagacity” and ­human suffering was recorded in the military journal of James Thacher, a surgeon accompanying the American army during the war. Thacher had Gregg ­under his care during his long rehabilitation and was interested in his recovery from his severe wounds. Thacher wrote, “He was a most frightful spectacle, the ­whole of his scalp was removed.” Thacher provided a detailed description of how the captain had been shot, tomahawked, and scalped, and had suffered “extreme agony” and “exquisite distress” from his wounds. “A military hospital is peculiarly calculated to afford examples for profitable contemplation,” the doctor commented, explaining that “trepanning fractured skulls” and “dressing the most formidable wounds, have familiarized my mind to scenes of woe.”16 The doctor not only described the physical nature of the wounds he treated but also the moral context needed for judging injuries and making “profitable contemplation” of the spectacle provided by the ill and wounded. Thacher’s account of Gregg’s injuries and recovery was prefaced by a description of two other soldiers ­under his care. One, a “brave fellow,” had “received a musket ball in his forehead” that had not struck with enough force to enter his skull, making it pos­si­ble for the surgeon to successfully remove the ball and for the soldier to heal. Thacher took the location of the wound as evidence of



Playing Possum 99

the man’s heroism: “No one can doubt but he received his wound while facing the e­ nemy. . . . ​But in another instance,” the doctor explained, “a soldier’s wound was not so honorable; he received a ball in the bottom of his foot, which could not have happened u ­ nless in the act of r­ unning from the ­enemy.” The physical location and circumstances of a wound mattered a ­great deal: “This poor fellow is held in derision by his comrades . . . ​for having the mark of a coward.”17 Dr. Thacher therefore distinguished between wounds received while “facing the e­ nemy” or acquired while “­running from the e­ nemy,” yet Gregg’s unusual injuries w ­ ere harder to place within ­t hese narratives of bravery or cowardice. Gregg was certainly an object of sympathy for his doctor—an “unfortunate man” who “suffer[ed] extremely”—­but his story remained distinct from Thacher’s musings about his other military patients, a curious anecdote about distress and bodily damage rather than proof of heroism. ­Battle wounds might be read more clearly as signs of the sacrifices of war and of the decisions made by their b ­ earers to e­ ither face or flee the fighting. The surgeon’s study of his scalped patient had a less clear-­cut narrative about the significance of this “frightful spectacle” beyond attention to physical suffering. Thacher ultimately concluded, in almost jocular language, that Gregg was eventually “well satisfied in having his scalp restored to him, though uncovered with hair.”18 Additional accounts from individuals familiar with Gregg suggest that he was not, in fact, well satisfied, or fully recovered from his experience. Sarah Osborn Benjamin, seeking her late husband’s military pension in 1837, gave a deposition recounting her travels with the army as a cook and washer­woman. Her husband had served as a sergeant ­under James Gregg, who had eventually returned to command ­after a long convalescence. In her account, Sarah Benjamin mentioned that she had been well acquainted with her husband’s commanding officer and relied heavi­ly on descriptions of this distinctively scarred individual in testifying to the accuracy of her memory.19 Benjamin recounted about Gregg that she had “repeatedly [seen] the bare spot on his head where he had been scalped by the Indians.” More strikingly, she recalled that “Captain Gregg had turns of being shattered in his mind and at such times would frequently say to [her], ‘Sarah, did you ever see where I was scalped?’ showing his head at the same time.”20 Benjamin’s testimony suggests an image of Gregg wandering the army encampment in search of listeners and viewers. By repeatedly telling the story of this life-­shattering experience, Gregg may have hoped to fi­nally make sense of his ordeal. In

100 Chapter 4

Gregg’s own efforts to interpret the “spectacle” that he had become, he seized on a seemingly trivial detail and, in his recounting of his story, claimed that his escape was due to the initial blow of the tomahawk glancing off the button of his hat. It is impossible to untangle w ­ hether Gregg’s “turns of being shattered in his mind” ­were the result of physical damage caused by tomahawk blows, psychological distress and trauma, or a combination of ­factors.21 Sarah Benjamin added l­ ater in her deposition that Gregg, “on account of infirmities, did not go out much to do duty.”22 Physically well enough to return to ser­v ice yet not completely healed in e­ ither body or mind, the captain would have reminded other soldiers who encountered him of a discomfiting, traumatic incident. His wounded body and “shattered” mind likely reinforced conclusions that his story was not a triumphant one. Gregg’s account had him being saved by the accident of a hat and the actions of a loyal dog rather than by his own efforts—­a lthough the story would shift over the course of nineteenth-­century retellings. The “Adventure of Captain Gregg” published in the 1850s by John Chapin, for example, crafted a far more heroic tale, describing its protagonist as “possessed of an iron constitution” and “despising the [Indian] foe.” Although “he suffered a hundred deaths” in his convalescence, he recovered and “lived a convincing witness of the barbarity of the savage red man.”23 The Child’s Picture Book of Indians, published in Boston in the 1830s, hewed more closely to Thacher’s original narrative in recounting Gregg’s story, treating it as one among many tales that “rec­ord[ed] the scattered evidences” of “the aborigines of North Amer­i­ca . . . ​[and] their singular traits of character.” Scalping was a significant theme in this text aimed at young readers: the book included short versions of Hannah Duston’s captivity and scalp-­taking, as well as Lovewell’s fight, and an entry exclusively on the “Indian mode of scalping.” This description was placed on the preceding page to the story of “Captain Greg,” its close proximity providing vivid fuel for readers’ imaginations: “With a knife they make a circular cut from the forehead quite round the head, just above the ears. They then take hold of the skin with their teeth, they tear off the w ­ hole hairy scalp in an instant, with wonderful dexterity. This they dry and preserve as a trophy, to show the number of their victims. They have a method of painting on the dried scalp dif­ fer­ent figures, to designate the sex and age of the victim, and also the manner and circumstances of the murder.”24



Playing Possum 101

This visceral explanation evoked an animality in both the assailant and the one being attacked: one holding and rending skin with their teeth, the other a source of a “hairy scalp.” It also invoked the scalp as a page or a canvas, carry­ing a story: a story about “the victim” but not composed or narrated by him or her. When, just a page ­later, the account of Gregg’s injuries described him as “robbed of his scalp, and suffering extreme agony from his numerous wounds,” readers would have found it hard to miss the juxtaposition between the story a survivor might tell, and one that a scalp might speak.

* * * In February 1782, near a fort on the site of what would ­later be named Nashville, David Hood was shot, scalped, and left for dead by a party of “Indians” other­wise unidentified in the sources. Hood, despite his injuries, attempted to rise and escape back to the fort. Instead, he stumbled back across the same war party, who promptly set upon him again, “making sport,” as local history put it, “of such a dead man.”25 The next morning, he was found by residents of the fort. When asked if he “­wasn’t dead” yet, Hood supposedly replied, not if he could have “half a chance.” Hood recovered by summer. Local folklore described him as “a man raised from the dead” who was looked on with “curiosity and interest,” and he was soon nicknamed the Opossum, for his supposed success in playing dead. He reportedly joked about his deliberate “hoodwinking” of his attackers and the advantage his scalping had given him, since in his words “the savages” could no longer “get another trophy,” he said, or “jerk [him] by the hair of the head.”26 Between the late 1770s and early 1790s, Hood was joined in his status of scalping survivor by ­others more briefly mentioned in local histories of ­middle Tennessee: Richard Lancaster, Frederick Calvit, Joel Staines, Jesse Maxey, Rebecca Sevier, Elizabeth Casteel, Ann Bush, an “M. Baldwin,” and a young girl only described as “Miss Dunham.” Still ­others ­were left unnamed, treated largely as a collective repository of memories of Tennessee’s violent past. Scalping presented “so ­little danger to life,” in the words of one ­later local observer, that “­t here w ­ ere fifteen to twenty persons who for years survived the rude and bloody treatment.”27 None of ­t hese individuals appear to have been well known outside of their local communities during their lifetimes. But their stories and their collective presence resurfaced in numerous regional histories published in the m ­ iddle de­cades of the nineteenth ­century.28

102 Chapter 4

Scalping survivors, permanently and distinctively scarred, often found themselves marked yet again by their newfound notoriety and the focus of  ­others—­neighbors, distant readers, even their descendants—on their wounded bodies. “As a recital was sometimes requested” of David Hood’s “recollection of the transactions, he did not refuse to gratify the curiosity of inquirers.”29 While Hood seemed to relish his fame, other survivors proved “reluctant to talk about it,” and “few of them would untie their head-­ handkerchief, or remove the skull-­cap, and subject their pates to manipulation and inspection.”30 Perhaps relatedly, no portraits of scalping survivors appear to have been made prior to the advent of photography. Scalping itself was fertile ground for visual depiction, ­whether in paintings, po­liti­cal cartoons, or the edges of maps, yet images of scalping scars on specific living persons seem to have been avoided, possibly due to this reluctance. The appearance of survivors in narrative archives juxtaposes sharply with their visual absence. Th ­ ese w ­ ere not p ­ eople e­ ager to relive their suffering or to act as spectacles, yet their repeated mentions in ­these community narratives meant that their memories w ­ ere associated foremost with the event they might wish to move beyond. It is notable that several of the best-­k nown and best-­documented survi­ vors, at least during the late eigh­teenth c­ entury, w ­ ere men—­while some of the best-­k nown incidents of scalping itself w ­ ere about settler w ­ omen. During the American Revolution, the death and scalping of Jane McCrea by Native allies of the British became an infamous tale, repeated (and embellished) by pro-­American partisans to depict British and Native forces alike as capable of appalling vio­lence against noncombatants—­and of betrayal. McCrea had been engaged to a Loyalist and had been traveling to join him at his garrison in upstate New York when she was killed, reportedly by the same party that had been assigned to escort her to British lines. Depictions of McCrea’s death, both written and visual, emphasized her youth, beauty, and vulnerability. The most famous, an 1804 oil painting by John Vanderlyn, showed her kneeling and gazing upward in terror, with her arms and, crucially, her hair gripped by two warriors preparing to strike her with their tomahawks. Vanderlyn’s painting was originally intended to accompany Joel Barlow’s epic poem The Columbiad (1807), which highlighted McCrea’s death as an example of British perfidy; her fiancé sees “her gory scalp, their horrid prize of blood” and demands “Are ­these thy trophies, Carleton!”—­a reference to Sir Guy Carleton, governor of Quebec. Many versions of the incident highlighted McCrea’s “long lustrous hair, which could

Figure 11. The death and scalping of Jane McCrea during the American Revolution became a well-­known story, pop­u­lar­ized by American partisans as ­supposed evidence of Native American brutality and British duplicity. John Vanderlyn (American, 1775–1852), The Murder of Jane McCrea, 1804. Oil on canvas, 32.5 × 26.5 in. (82.6 × 67.3 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Purchased by subscription, 1855.4. Photography: Allen Phillips/ Wadsworth Atheneum.

104 Chapter 4

reach to the floor when she stood up”—­variously reported as blonde, “darker than a raven’s wing,” or even red—­and some claimed that McCrea’s fiancé ­later recognized her scalp being carried into the British encampment.31 The closely intertwined association of hair with feminine beauty and sexual desirability suggested how scalping could be seen as a par­tic­u­lar attack on gender roles, as well as on per­for­mances of social status and civility.32 Claims that McCrea’s scalp was distinctive and readily identified reflected an ideologically motivated shift in logic from the claims of ­earlier colonial authorities (discussed in Chapter 3) that scalps ­were ambiguous markers of identity. While insisting that it was difficult, even impossible, to accurately distinguish between the scalps of Native foes or allies, eighteenth-­century colonial sources suggested that white hair was readily differentiated and that the tresses of individual persons—­particularly white ­women—­could be identified. By the mid-­eighteenth ­century, Native sources ­were also making claims about identity that relied on tangible, tactile properties of hair. In 1742, a trader recounted that a group of Shawnee searching the bags of their Miami visitors had found “two Scalps in them, that by the Softness of the Hair did not feel like Indian Scalps, they wash’d them clean, and found them to be the Scalps of some Christians.”33 While the stylings of hair—­its cut and ornaments—­were seen by the earliest En­glish arrivals in Amer­i­ca as crucial evidence of Indigenous “presentment of civility,” as William Strachey had put it in 1612, the biological qualities of hair—­color, thickness, texture—­g rew in importance in the eigh­teenth ­century, becoming regarded as a key marker of racial difference. Carolus Linnaeus’s pivotal 1758 classification of ­humans in his Systemae naturae distinguished between europaeus, americanus, asiaticus, and afer va­ri­e­ties of Homo sapiens by—­a mong other ­t hings—­whether their hair was long and blond, straight and black, or “frizzled.” Notably, Homo americanus was also characterized by Linnaeus as one who “paints himself with fine red lines,” placing tattooing practices alongside physiological distinctions as a mark of racial difference.34 The recognizability of individual scalps became a touchstone of ­later eighteenth-­century captivity narratives. Particularly during the Seven Years’ War and then during the post-­Revolutionary vio­lence that marked American expansion into the lower Ohio Valley and Tennessee, settlers described encounters with scalps that w ­ ere Euro-­A merican—­a nd as a result of that classification, scalps regarded as identifiably someone’s. John McCullough, captured by the Delaware in western Pennsylvania in 1756, at the age of eight,



Playing Possum 105

described the initial moment when he and his younger b ­ rother w ­ ere accosted by the raiding party as “more like a dream than any t­ hing real.” A ­ fter being taken to a Delaware encampment, McCullough’s attention was caught by two men who had left the group e­ arlier, returning with “the war halloo. . . . ​They had a scalp with them, by the color of the hair I concluded it had been my ­father’s.” He was mistaken: “It was the scalp of the man they killed the morning before they took us,” his captors told him, and he watched as the men divided the scalp in half and then dried it at the fire.35 Elizabeth Baker’s 1792 captivity in a Coosada village (in what is currently central Alabama) was similarly defined, in her telling, by the central presence of her parents’ and siblings’ scalps, which the villa­gers confronted her with. As an eleven-­year-­old traveling from V ­ irginia into Kentucky in 1784 with her aunt and u ­ ncle, Keturah Moss came across the aftermath of an attack on a previous settler party. Her account vividly emphasized the sight of a scalp with blonde ringlets that she and her s­ isters had seen in a tree. While not linked with an individual’s name, the scalp nonetheless carried significant stories of race, gender, and age.36 In narratives like t­ hese, such highly vis­i­ble settler scalps presented American readers with a reminder that their identities—of whiteness, of masculinity or femininity, of social status—­were vulnerable to attack and even to dismantlement. Eighteenth-­century satirical prints and cartoons frequently used images of dismemberment to evoke imperial disintegration or societal rot, and scalps hanging in trees or waved in the f­aces of captives would have invoked such imagery. To be scalped brought personal identity into question; collective po­liti­cal or cultural identities might also be undermined.37 Many survivors seemed unwilling or uninterested in making their experiences a more public story than they already ­were: scalping was already an involuntary exposure. For David Hood, however, being scalped made him a local celebrity. Hood insisted on his own role in saving himself, claiming to have deliberately feigned death in order to deceive his attackers, and thereby asserting an identity as a clever “opossum” and not a victim. Yet the nineteenth-­century commentaries by Tennessean writers—­themselves ­either aged members of the settler generation or their c­ hildren and grandchildren—­ clearly wondered about how to assign agency to survival. One author worried that Native attackers perhaps did not always intend to kill, as they “always scalped when they could, repeatedly inflicting this mark of dishonor with . . . ​ ­little danger to life.”38 Another explained in a history book intended for white American ­children—­“for Tennessee Boys and Girls”—­that “Indians . . . ​would

106 Chapter 4

sometimes scalp w ­ omen and c­ hildren, whom, for some reason, they did not choose to kill.”39 Some in the community wondered w ­ hether their attackers actually intended for them to live, as a sign of Indigenous military strength and a warning to other trans-­Appalachian settlers. This was not an unreasonable speculation, since t­ here was evidence that Native Americans did, on occasion, deliberately scalp with the intention of sustaining life.40 The naturalist John Lawson had written in 1709 about the Native socie­ties of Florida: “When they take any Prisoners, (if the En­glish be not near to prevent it) [they] sculp them, that is, to take their Hair and Skin of their Heads, which they often flea [flay] away, whilst the Wretch is alive.” John Stewart, a Scottish man living among the Creek and Chickasaw at the beginning of the eigh­teenth ­century, went further, arguing that some Indian captives ­after being scalped had “hot fire ashes and ambers” put on their wounds and w ­ ere then sent back to their communities to show them this “badge of [their] value.”41 The s­ tories and meanings attached to a person’s survival might be very dif­fer­ent if their survival was intended by their assailants to be a humiliating warning rather than a failure of their assailants to complete their goal of murder. Strength of body—­a nd strength of ­w ill—­might have been what had preserved t­ hese ­people, it seemed to observers, or perhaps they had not r­eally been “preserved” at all but rather detached from part of themselves, their bodily integrity disrupted, and the ­will of another imposed on them. The stories of scalping survivors raised questions about the degree to which one’s fate was actually within one’s control, while their scars prompted consideration about what survival meant when it was so marked. Such speculations muted any triumphalism associated with survival, suggesting that the damaged bodies of community members, even if alive, might act—as one local wrote—as “proofs of their [Natives’] daring and of our [American settlers’] cowardly or inactive character.”42 How survivorship was performed mattered—­whether one was stoic, humorous, or s­ ilent about one’s mutilation became a key part of the stories around such individuals. But the contestation was not only between a survivor and his or her assailants but also between t­ hose causing—or curing—­the wound. W ­ hether an individual survived through the deliberate intentions of Native fighters or through the interventions of medicine mattered a ­great deal in considering the symbolic and practical implications of such stories. Physicians ­were key actors in ­t hese stories, sometimes, like James Thacher, even creating the narratives that o ­ thers then read. Like James Gregg, David



Playing Possum 107

Hood and the other scalping survivors of ­middle Tennessee became medical oddities, written about by their physicians. Their stories circulated both ­because they fascinated early American audiences and ­because doctors publicized them. In 1806, Dr. Felix Robertson of Nashville submitted a brief article entitled “Remarks on the Management of the Scalped-­Head” to the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, reporting on the technique his f­ather, James Robertson, a prominent early leader of the ­middle Tennessee settlements, had employed in treating several scalped persons, including David Hood.43 The elder Robertson had learned in 1777 from a Doctor Vance to trepan the exposed skulls of t­ hose who had been scalped, boring holes through the bone with an awl.44 Robertson argued that this prevented the decay of the bone. He also described the dressings and ointments he applied to the skin as it healed, explaining that the cure was “remarkably slow, generally taking two years” or more. James Robertson claimed to be responsible for David Hood’s recovery, as well as that of several ­others, through his medical intervention.45 Their survival, then, could be portrayed as a success of scientific information networks and settler cooperation rather than a graphic indication that their fates ­were in the hands of Native opponents. In waiting ­until 1806 to publish a description of his ­father’s method of treating scalp wounds, Robertson contributed an early draft to local history, providing the names of many of the scalping survivors who would take prominent supporting roles in stories of Tennessee’s white settlement written by their descendants in the early to mid-­nineteenth ­century. Their medical histories became part of the exchange of knowledge within a community of medical prac­ti­tion­ers, both as the hands-on transfer of technique that James Robertson had acquired from Doctor Vance and the written description circulated by his formally credentialed son. Felix Robertson’s report also extended his imprimatur as an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania to his ­father’s informal training and methods. Scalping survivors could be both objects of medical interest and focal points for more sentimental narratives that gave a face to a conflict. Michelle Burnham has argued that the tears generated by captivity narratives and frontier romances brought early national readers into a sympathy with endangered white heroines which “obscure[d] the vio­lence of racial displacement.”46 Burnham writes that in frontier romances of the era, “the narrative of Amerindian nations always observes the melancholic rhe­toric of ‘too late,’ while the narrative of the American nation always claims the

108 Chapter 4

pleas­ur­able rhe­toric of ‘just in time.’ ”47 The stories and bodies of scalping survivors, ­whether male or female, similarly mingled both temporalities, emphasizing the “too late” of the victim’s physical damage while also asserting the “just in time” rescue and recovery of the individual. Survivors ­were transformed into memories while still alive, embodied signs of past vio­lence. The stories—­and scars—of trans-­Appalachian settlements became crucial ele­ments of early American lit­er­a­ture, deployed within numerous novels and plays as part of national mythmaking. One, the 1837 novel Nick of the Woods, or, The Jibbenainosay by Robert Montgomery Bird, made scalping its central act of vengeance by the mysterious Nick, an unknown vigilante regarded with awe and fear by the Kentucky settlement he guards and the Native communities he terrorizes. “More like a devil nor a mortal man,” the Nick of the Woods kills and scalps e­ very Native he finds, leaving their bodies marked with “a knife-­cut, or a brace of ’em, over the ribs in the shape of a cross.”48 Set in the 1780s along the Salt River, the novel tells the story of two newcomers, Roland Forrest and his cousin Edith, who in their attempt to travel between settler stations are attacked by a group of Shawnee. Roland and Edith’s erstwhile guides include a h ­ orse thief, the d ­ aughter of a “renegade” white man living among the Shawnee, and a Quaker hunter mocked by the other Kentuckians as “Bloody Nathan” for his pacifist beliefs. In the attempt to f­ ree Edith, who has been taken captive by Wenonga, the “Black Vulture,” it is Nathan who kills the Native leader and reveals himself to be the terrifying Nick of the Woods, pursuing a long campaign of revenge against the “Indians” who killed his Quaker f­ amily many years ­earlier. Bird’s hostile depiction of Native Americans was intended, in part, as a response to the romantic portrayals of them in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. In the preface to the novel’s 1853 edition, Bird argued that such books “had thrown a poetical illusion over the Indian” rather than depict “violent, debased, brutal” Native Americans “in war—or the scalp-­ hunt—­when all the worst deformities of the savage temperament” w ­ ere revealed.49 Bird had himself made a detailed study of works about the western settlements, including James Hall’s “The Indian-­Hater,” Timothy Flint’s memoir of Daniel Boone, and o ­ thers. He had attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1820s—­graduating two de­cades a­ fter Felix Robertson—­and made several western tours in the following de­cade at the urging of medical friends from Kentucky. Indeed, Bird’s diligent study of the region’s stories raises the possibility that he may have read Robertson’s account of David Hood and the other Tennessee scalping survivors in the



Playing Possum 109

Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. His interest in the topic is clear within the novel itself, where the experience of scalping—­t he fear of being scalped, the desire to scalp o ­ thers—­drives the actions of both Kentuckians and the Shawnee forces led by Wenonga. Edith’s scalp, in par­tic­u­lar, is an imperiled object. When she is first captured by Wenonga, Nathan attempts to convey to Roland the danger she is in by suggesting, “Friend! thee kinswoman’s scalp is already hanging at his girdle!” The villainous Richard Braxley, intent on marrying Edith in order to acquire her inheritance, threatens her by invoking the scalplocks hanging in Wenonga’s cabin, claiming that only he can save her from the same fate: “Know, fair Edith, that you are now in [Indian] hands . . . ​­t here is not one of them who would not rather see t­ hose golden tresses hung blackening in the smoke from the raf­ters of his wigwam, than floating over the brows they adorn—­Look aloft: ­t here are ringlets of the young and fair, the innocent and tender, swinging above you!”50 For a reading audience primed on stories and images of Jane McCrea’s death, Edith’s “golden tresses” would have identified her through a racialized vision of white womanhood as innately “innocent and tender” and perennially endangered by proximity to Nativeness. Within the text, scalping not only represents the external threat posed by Native Americans to the settler subject; it reveals key qualities of individual characters. Following the novel’s climactic ­battle, a Kentuckian shows off a red handkerchief and a scalp taken from “the Injun feller” who had attempted to flee with a fainting Edith. He tells the assembled fighters, “The everlasting big rascal that was a carry­ing off madam . . . ​I jist blazed away at him, right bang at his back . . . ​and had the scalp off his ‘tarnal ugly head,’ ” displaying to all a scalp of black hair. Edith then reveals that it was Richard Braxley, not a Native American man, who had attempted to kidnap her. “It war’n’t a white-­man?” cries the young man, “dropping his prize in dismay.”51 Braxley’s “renegade” alliance with the Shawnee has undone his claims to whiteness, apparently making him visually indistinguishable from the Native fighters pursued by the Kentuckians. While his fate fills the novel’s hero “with horror at . . . ​a fate so sudden and dreadful” (and his scalp, tossed aside by his killer, is no longer regarded as an appropriate trophy once revealed to be an American’s), Braxley’s death and mutilation are implied to be fit punishments for his willing closeness to Indians and his attempted vio­lence to Edith. Nathan, the Quaker whose mild demeanor conceals his secret identity as the violent Nick of the Woods, suffers from “epileptic fit[s] brought on by

110 Chapter 4

overpowering agitation of mind.” During one such seizure, his leather cap falls off, revealing scalping scars: “A horrible scar disfigured the top of his head, which seemed to have been, many years before, crushed by the blows of a heavy weapon; and it was equally manifest that the savage scalping-­k nife had done its work on the mangled head.”52 Nathan is the only survivor of the attack that killed his entire f­ amily. His scalping scars are concealed—­and then revealed—­within the text, paralleling the disclosure of his true character as the ferocious Indian-­hating vigilante.53 Indeed, the revelation that Nathan is Nick, or the “Jibbenainosay,” is prompted by the sight of the scalps in Wenonga’s cabin. Anonymous frightening objects to Edith, they are identifiable to Nathan as the scalps of his dead wife and c­ hildren. Freeing himself from where he has been tied up, he seizes the scalps and “thrust[s] the bundle into his bosom,” declaiming, “The chief ­shall see the Jibbenainosay! . . . ​Thee sees the destroyer of thee race,” before killing and scalping Wenonga.54 Nathan’s recovery of “the locks and ringlets of his own murdered ­family”—­and perhaps even his own scalplock, although the novel does not specify that—­might be understood as an assertion of settler power. W ­ hether the act recasts his injury and his suffering into a triumphant form of what David Hood called “playing possum” is, however, inconclusive. Nathan does not rejoin white society at the end of the novel, instead leaving the Salt River settlements with his dog, “­going no man knew whither.”55 The tension inherent in the settler proj­ect—­the imperative to make oneself “native” to a place by attempting to exclude and erase Indigenous ­people—is echoed by the tension in Nathan’s role: savior and sociopath, unable to fully integrate into Kentucky life. The book’s conclusion leaves open two possibilities: that having achieved his vengeance, Nathan ceases to be the Jibbenainosay, or that he shifts his campaign of terror elsewhere as an ongoing agent of US expansion.

* * * For an American reading audience in the late 1830s, scalping had become synecdoche, encapsulating the entire experience of frontier conflict in a single act of vio­lence. White Americans portrayed scalping as distinctively “Indian” and uniquely savage, highlighting it as both ubiquitous among Native socie­ties and the worst sort of war atrocity. Within popu­lar works such as Nick of the Woods, the lurid threat of scalping both underlined the vulnerability of the settler body politic and asserted the necessity and inevitability of



Playing Possum 111

violent conquest of Native populations. Th ­ ese connections stuck, obscuring both the rapid American adoption of scalping as a tactic and other acts of vio­ lence generated by the early United States’ forcible seizure of Indigenous lands. Scalping, both real and threatened, was a power­f ul trope in eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century recountings of conflict between Indians and American settlers. Survivors both underlined and unsettled the significance attached to this par­tic­u ­lar act of vio­lence, with their bodies telling complicated and overlapping stories. W ­ hether their scars w ­ ere seen as signs of heroic effort or shocking symbols of weakness, white American scalping survivors provided a visual and textual shorthand justifying vio­lence against Native communities. The spotlight on injured white bodies obscured, to the vision of their communities and their descendants, the possibility of similarly injured Native bodies, or redefined them as merited reprisals. The lingering memories among Tennesseans of their scarred pre­de­c es­s ors si­mul­ta­neously shrouded and shored up support for the settler colonialism that impelled such vio­lence. It also mediated the identities of ­t hese individuals through their mutilation, transforming their existence into a means for ­others to explore their own fears about being changed—or permanently marked—by the new lands they had settled in and the new ­peoples they had settled among.

EPILOGUE

Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations

A 1780 e­ tching published in London claimed to depict “Yankee-­Doodle, or the American Satan.” Many po­liti­cal cartoons of the Revolutionary era ­were full of visual puns, grotesque vio­lence, and figures announcing their perfidy in lengthy speech b ­ ubbles. But this image—­a self-­portrait of its engraver, American Joseph Wright—­shows only a subdued-­looking young man, hands stuffed in pockets, frowning slightly at the viewer. The title, “American Satan,” suggested a gibe at British depictions of rebelling Americans as brutishly violent—­indeed, as evil incarnate. Under­neath the portrait, a short epigraph elaborated on Wright’s idea: “Ask me what provocation I have had/that strong antipathy good bears to bad./ Pub. By Ebenezer Scalpp’em on the Banks of the Ohio.” Wright’s assertion—­that American “Yankees” ­were provoked to what­ever vio­lence they engaged in by the “bad” deeds of ­others—­was given an extra jolt by his use of the unsubtle pseudonym of “Ebenezer Scalpp’em.” His defiant embrace of a backcountry persona heightened the contrast between his own quiet portrait and the brutal images that invocations of scalping could summon. In suggesting that British depictions of American vio­lence w ­ ere overwrought, Wright made scalping part of the joke. The ­etching defended Americans not by denying their actions but by minimizing and justifying them as result of a natu­ral “antipathy” ­toward the truly wicked: Wright could have had Native Americans, the British Empire, or both in mind as the source of American “provocation.” The cartoon was influenced both by Wright’s personal experience and by reports of the brutalities of the American war. ­Earlier in 1780, he had submitted a portrait to the Royal Acad­emy’s exhibition that had caused a public uproar for its aggressively pro-­American stance. Entitled Mrs. Wright Mod­ eling a Head in Wax, the painting had depicted his m ­ other, the well-­k nown

Figure 12. Satirical self-­portrait by Joseph Wright, “Yankee-­Doodle, or the American Satan.” Undated ­etching [c. 1780]. © The Trustees of the British Museum, all rights reserved. Museum registration number 1868,0808.13339.



Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations 115

wax sculptor Patience Wright, modeling the head of King Charles I while the current monarchs, King George III and Queen Charlotte, looked on. The unsubtle reference to Charles’s beheading at the hands of a previous revolution was not lost on viewers, and the resulting scandal ensured that Wright never again exhibited a painting at the Royal Acad­emy.1 Wright’s resentful self-­portrait offered a defense of his artistic skills and of his politics. That his persona of “Ebenezer Scalpp’em” came from “the Banks of the Ohio”—in real­ity, Wright was from New Jersey—­was no accident: scalping and the American interior ­were closely intertwined in British and American imaginations. Recent events in the American war had made scalp-­taking a prominent and hotly contested point of propaganda—in par­ tic­u­lar, the American capture of Vincennes, an Illinois Country fort on the banks of the Wabash, and the imprisonment of Henry Hamilton, the British officer defending it. Hamilton, the lieutenant governor at Detroit, was alleged to have purchased settler scalps from his Native allies and had become widely reviled as the “Hair-­Buyer” in the American press. Following his surrender of Vincennes to George Rogers Clark and his American forces in February 1779, Hamilton was sent as a prisoner to V ­ irginia. Th ­ ere he was kept in irons and confined to the Williamsburg jail rather than receiving the more cordial treatment usually accorded to e­ nemy officers. Hamilton was denounced by the V ­ irginia Council for reportedly offering “standing rewards for scalps, but . . . ​none for prisoners.”2 The accusations and rumors ­were exaggerated but reflected some amount of truth: Native allies frequently presented British officers, including Hamilton, with scalps and ­were in turn presented with trade goods, ammunition, and weapons, including scalping knives (often produced in En­glish manufacturing centers such as Sheffield and Birmingham).3 At the same time, Americans made scalping a key tactic of their own, prompting counter-­denunciations by the British. During the siege of Vincennes, Clark’s forces captured a small group of Native and French American men, British allies who had approached the garrison unaware of the ­American arrival. Four of the men, all Native, w ­ ere publicly tomahawked—­and scalped— in full view of the besieged fort. Hamilton’s account implicated Clark personally in the deed, claiming that the American leader had spoken to him afterward with “hands and face still reeking from the h ­ uman sacrifice in which he had acted as chief priest” and that Clark had ordered the scalps prominently displayed outside of Hamilton’s now-­surrendered headquarters. He also

116 Epilogue

described the men as having been “butchered in succession, tho at the very time a flag of Truce was hanging out at the fort and the firing had ceased on both sides”: a detail highlighting the American vio­lence as appalling not only in its bloodiness but in its defiance of Eu­ro­pean norms of warfare.4 Furthermore, the British commander charged, Clark had ordered the scalping of a fifth member of the party, a French American militiaman named Francis Maisonville. Maisonville was not killed but rather subjected to public torture; according to Hamilton, Clark had “ordered one of his p ­ eople to take off his [Maisonville’s] scalp, the man hesitating, he was threatened with violent imprecation, and had proceeded so far as to take off a small part when the Col­o­nel thought proper to stop him.” In response to t­ hese reports, Clark defended the scalping and murder of the four Native captives in terms similar to the “provocation” claimed by Joseph Wright’s Yankee Doodle: he wrote that the treatment was “proper” given “that the Cries of the W ­ idows and Fatherless on the Frontiers that they had occationed now Required their Blood from my Hands.”5 Clark deflected any responsibility for Maisonville’s torture, however, and blamed some of his “lads” for being “so inhuman as to take part of his scalp.”6 Maisonville was sent to the same V ­ irginia prison as Hamilton and died by suicide ­there a year ­later. It is difficult to imagine that his physical suffering—­and his marked, scarred appearance, forever linked to his unwilling role in Clark’s brutal stagecraft—­did not play at least some role in heightening his ­mental torment. ­These competing accounts of scalping—­who did it, and to whom, and ­under what circumstances the scalps themselves ­were handled, displayed, or circulated—­were another battlefront on which British and American partisans made claims about the righ­teousness of their respective ­causes.7 It is not surprising that a violent tactic should become such an object of scrutiny during a long and bloody war, but it is also no accident that so much attention was given to scalping, an act closely associated with Indigenous warfare and Indigenous bodies, while largely fixating on the adoption of the strategy by non-­Indigenous actors. In debates about who was deemed civilized, the cross-­ cultural usage of Native practices was presented as meaningful, even revelatory, in defining British or American character. Indeed, in 1781, the Philadelphia Freeman’s Journal argued that “the Britons are the same brutes and savages they ­were when Julius Caesar invaded them above 1800  years ago.” Claims of continuities between the ancient ­peoples of the British Isles and Native socie­t ies of the Amer­i­c as had been a popu­lar narrative in En­g lish writings since the earliest years of their



Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations 117

overseas expansion, and particularly emphasized similarities in bodily ornament between the “painted” Picts, who carried “artificial incisions of sundry formes . . . ​deeply imprinted within their bodies,” and tattooed Native Americans.8 Such parallels, which had once been invoked by promoters of empire to claim a natu­ral Indigenous affinity for En­glish culture—­and an easy capacity among Natives for cultural transformation—­were now put forward instead as a rationale for American in­de­pen­dence from a brutish British culture. Although tattooing might seem quite distant from the military and cultural strug­gles of the war, it emerged alongside scalping as a point of rhetorical critique. American authors gestured to a supposedly shared history of tattooing between Britons and their Native allies to prove an innate barbarity in their opponents. As the writer for Freeman’s Journal put it, Americans could not have anything in common with “so bloody, so barbarous a nation.” British partisans, unsurprisingly, disputed the notion of their own civilizational inferiority to the rebelling colonies, insisting in turn that Americans possessed a “savageness unknown to Eu­ro­pe­ans” and that their lack of “humanity” was evident from the first b ­ attles of the war, “written in indelible characters with the blood of the soldiers scalped . . . ​at Lexington.” While ­t here is no substantial evidence for the claim that British regulars ­were scalped at Lexington, the rapid adoption of this rumor as seeming fact demonstrates how meaningful both British and colonial American sources found the invocation of scalping and other forms of body modification to be.9 Stories and images of physical transformation and cultural metamorphosis are closely intertwined, making it unsurprising that an era of revolutionary upheaval was marked by contests over the meaning of bodily appearance. Both British and American accounts during the war for in­de­pen­dence insisted on their own vulnerability and innocence in the face of uncivil, even brutish opponents—­with the novel addition that ­t hose opponents ­were no longer exclusively Native nations but one another.

* * * Settler-­colonial socie­ties sometimes insisted on fundamental commonalities between their cultures and ­t hose of Native Americans, or regarded individual adoptions and acknowl­edgments by Native nations as an honor. At other times, they violently rejected any cultural parallels or imputed supposedly “savage” be­hav­ior to their enemies. This seemingly contradictory be­hav­ior can be explained by the larger structures of settler colonialism,

118 Epilogue

which encourage newcomers to romanticize as well as reject indigeneity. Settler identities require a blend of cultural malleability and resiliency. By that I mean that settler colonialism encourages the acquisition of t­hose ele­ments of indigeneity that allow newcomers to feel at “home” in the lands of ­others, while circumscribing, erasing, and—­perhaps most impor­tant—­ emphasizing other practices that are held up as seeming proof of Indigenous lack: lack of civility, lack of sovereignty, lack of au­then­tic indigeneity.10 Tattooing and scalping, two powerfully symbolic embodied practices, ­were—­a nd continue to be—­readily repurposed for both ideological roles in American culture. At times they have been incorporated as an ideological and practical resource for settler-­colonists, and at ­others they have been rejected as supposed evidence of Native inferiority or barbarity: two sides of the same coin. As a result, anti-­Indigenous ste­reo­types and prejudices ­were (and are) often contradictory and muddled. This is in part b ­ ecause a diverse set of newcomers encountered a diverse continent of socie­ties; it is also b ­ ecause, as critic Ann Laura Stoler has written, “Racisms gain their strategic force, not from the fixity of their essentialisms, but from the internal malleability assigned to the changing features of racial essence.”11 The attempted erasures and substitutions of entire populations that early settler colonialism demanded are echoed by American culture’s metonymic substitution of scalping as a stand-in for Native vio­lence and “savagery,” while its use as a tool of colonial management and Native dispossession is buried or elided. The intense attention given to this specific act of vio­lence carried onward into nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century American popu­lar imaginations, appearing in media ranging from Victorian pulp fiction to Hollywood Westerns. Tattooing also retained its power to inspire a mix of fascination and disquiet. In the nineteenth ­century, tattooing was increasingly invoked as a sign of white American vulnerability in the face of foreign cultures—­a mark of white captivity to be resisted, and if it could not be avoided, to be made a spectacle. Assertions that tattoos received from Indigenous socie­ties w ­ ere evidence of diplomatic expertise or martial prowess largely retreated in ­favor of elite claims that tattoos correlated with criminality and social inferiority. Only with the so-­called Tattoo Re­nais­sance of the late twentieth ­century did positive (albeit still often exoticized and misunderstood) depictions of Indigenous and cross-­cultural tattooing regain prominence in American pop culture. When and how ­either appears in ­these sources tells us how myths about Indigenous savagery or cultural atavism are sustained and how fantasies of Indigenous erasure rely on a



Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations 119

simultaneous deployment and disavowal of Nativeness by settlers and their descendants. Scalping, with its power­ful story-­telling properties and the uncanny items it produces (both severed scalps and scalping victims alike), continued to be an irresistible subject for American popu­lar culture in the nineteenth ­century. Scalping and its survivors ­were prominent motifs in frontier narratives, following that amorphous concept across the continent and across the c­ entury: from the early national fascination with Kentucky and Tennessee, to Mississippi tall tales and accounts of Rocky Mountain fur traders, and then the captivity narratives, raids, and b ­ attles of the wars for the West, fought between an expansionary United States and Native nations across the G ­ reat Plains, the Southwest, and California.12 In each of t­ hese places and times, scalping’s evocative imagery was deployed to depict an irrational, all-­ consuming, yet ultimately futile Indian hostility to American settlement. Such stories prioritized settler victimhood while justifying the adoption of vigilante personas such as “Ebenezer Scalpp’em” or, as discussed in Chapter 4, the Nick of the Woods. Native tattooing also retained American interest, particularly in narratives where it was treated as a marker of white captivity rather than adoption or voluntary alliance with Indigenous communities. One of the best-­known captivity narratives of the nineteenth ­century was that of Olive Oatman, who received facial tattoos while living among the Mohave for five years. Oatman gave public lectures following her return to white society, with broadside advertisements, widely circulated photos, and newspapers all reporting on the distinctive spectacle of her tattooed face. Her marked appearance was part of the attraction for audiences and readers, raising as it did questions about Oatman’s integration into Mohave society. ­Were her tattoos signs of captivity, even enslavement, or evidence of adoption, even marriage? The ambiguities of her appearance and her cultural loyalties prompted a ­great deal of scrutiny that Oatman both profited from and appeared to have been discomfited by; ­later in life she reportedly wore a veil in order to hide her face. The inviolable bounds of white ­women’s bodies and the impermeable bound­aries of the nation—­t horoughly conflated in nineteenth-­century Amer­i­ca—­were both challenged by the dark lines on Oatman’s chin and arms.13 If American bodies might be remade into Native ones, racial, gendered, and personal identities might also be malleable, even tenuous.

* * *

Figure 13. Broadside advertising Olive Oatman’s lecture tour, highlighting her tattooed face. “Five Years Among Wild Savages.” Undated broadside [c. 1860]. Courtesy Newberry Library, Chicago, Everett  D. Graff Collection of Western Americana.



Narrative Legacies and Settler Appropriations 121

This differing frequency of depictions of scalping and tattooing reflects the relative significance that the two acts came to hold in the American settler imaginary. If tattooing might be understood primarily (if not exclusively) as a means of acculturating a body into a community—­while scalping functioned as a means of permanently marking a body outside of belonging—­ then the distinct stories around each practice as well as the rationales for their places in American culture become clearer. Scalping became deeply imbricated in governmental administration and military practice, while also producing shocking po­liti­cal messages in the circulating form of survivors and scalps themselves. Tattooing, on the other hand, remained part of personal narratives of change—or re­sis­tance to change—­but largely avoided the same sort of incorporation into the formal structural policies of settler states. However, tattooing’s con­temporary popularity reveals that Indigenous and cross-­cultural tattoos, while less vis­i­ble in mainstream film and media than might be expected, continue to have profound symbolic resonance, ­whether they are found on Native or non-­Native bodies. Many Indigenous socie­ties are reintegrating body modification practices as part of their cultural heritage, and in d ­ oing so are taking up traditional tattoo imagery (and in some cases, traditional methods) as an art form, a means of community revitalization, and a marker of membership and belonging.14 ­Women’s tattoos, in par­tic­u­lar, are experiencing a resurgence.15 Many Native nations have proactively sought to uphold the cultural responsibilities associated with their patrimony, requiring their own artists to receive permission and education from community elders before becoming traditional tattooists, while attempting to educate non-­Natives about the stakes b ­ ehind such marks. The Traditional Cultural Advisors Committee of the Osage Nation even issued a press statement in 2017 explaining the sacred significance of the Osage Spider symbol and noting that no one in over a ­century had earned the right to tattoo another person with the mark, urging tattooists to refrain from using it.16 At the same time, unauthorized use of Indigenous artwork or tribally specific and culturally significant symbols remains rampant in the tattoo industry, while exploitative and ste­reo­t ypical “Indian” imagery (including dreamcatchers, skulls in headdresses, and sexualized “Indian maidens”) remains widely available.17 In her discussion of w ­ omen’s pain narratives, the critic Leslie Jamison has observed, “The wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it—­that obstructs one’s vision of o ­ thers’ suffering rather than sharpening empathic acuity.”18 Jamison’s words might remind us of the ways

122 Epilogue

in which Anglo-­American society has extracted its own meanings from ele­ ments of Native cultures, with l­ ittle attention to their original nuances or to the painful historical episodes to which they are connected. Settler scars have acted as blinders, limiting the ability to see an ongoing history of vio­lence in spaces beyond theatrical reenactment and the ability to view marks of community belonging as anything other than a means of enriching individual identities. Over and over, American stories have been made true—or at least, made real—by being written upon bodies. A legacy of treating white bodies as unmarked—or rather, as incapable of being meaningfully marked in any way that affected their claims to whiteness—­derived precisely from a long history of experiences that did mark such individuals with evidence of their interactions with colonized Indigenous or non-­European p ­ eoples. Theories about ­human identity that insisted on permanent and corporeal characteristics of race r­ ose to prominence by the end of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Such ideas ­were ­shaped by the colonial engagements of previous centuries, but whereas early colonial proj­ects emphasized the utility of Native practices (­whether understood, misunderstood, or simply co-­opted) in furthering colonization efforts, a significant settler preoccupation from the late eigh­teenth c­ entury onward would be to circumscribe the possibility of cultural transformation. While white elites w ­ ere increasingly (albeit with varying degrees of success) distinguishing their selves from their corporeality, o ­ thers, including Native Americans, had their bodies and their claims to selfhood ideologically linked by claims of permanent difference: anatomizing their collective bodies into a singular racial identity as proof that they could not access po­liti­cal and social equality within settler states. Cross-­cultural bodily markings played, and continued to play, a crucial role in this pro­cess, a role intensified by their simultaneous physical permanency and ideological malleability.

NOTES

Introduction 1. John Long’s voyages and travels in the years 1768–1788, ed. Milo Milton Quaife (Chicago: R. R. Donnelly & Sons, 1922 [1791]), 31. 2. John Long’s voyages and travels, 46. Long’s experimentation with masquerade and identity not only took the form of playing Indian as he made his way along the river but also of “charivaris”—­loud community serenading and playful harassment of newly married ­couples—in Canadian settler villages. For more on masquerade’s relationship to selfhood, see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 3. John Long’s voyages and travels, 60. 4. John Long’s voyages and travels, 64. 5. Madjeckewiss worked closely with British forces across the Lakes region, including Arent Schuyler DePeyster, commandant at Michilimackinac. He was involved in raids in 1779 on George Rogers Clark’s American forces in the Illinois Country and joined a joint British–­ Native American assault on St. Louis the following year. DePeyster, like Hamilton, personally accepted scalps from allies; Moravian missionary David Zeisberger reported seeing Delaware leader Captain Pipe deliver some scalps to the commandant in 1781. It is likely that Madjeckewiss was similarly linked into this trade of scalps with British officers including DePeyster and Hamilton. David A. Armour, “Madjeckewiss,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–­, accessed August 1, 2020, http://­w ww​.­biographi​ .­ca​/­en​/­bio​/­madjeckewiss​_­5E​.­html. 6. On the articulation of ideas of bodily difference in the Atlantic world, see Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-­Century North Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Joyce Chaplin, Subject ­Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-­American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Karen Kupperman, Indians and En­glish: Facing Off in Early Amer­i­ca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Jennifer  L. Morgan, Laboring ­Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Martha L. Finch, Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New E ­ ngland (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Heather Miyano Kopelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-­Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

124

Notes to Pages 2–7

Press, 2000); and Ignacio Gallup-­Diaz, Eu­ro­pean Expansion and Repre­sen­ta­tions of Indigenous and African ­Peoples: A Distorted Vision (New York: Routledge, 2020). 7. My analy­sis attends to traditions of bodily practice and repre­sen­ta­t ion originating on both sides of the Atlantic, attempting to complicate notions of Eu­ro­pean ­peoples as unmarked. Rather than treating modes derived from or acceptable to Eu­ro­pe­a ns as a lack of marking, such practices need to be viewed as unfamiliar and culturally distinctive for ­t hose encountering them for the first time. As Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have noted, “The centrality of the body in the articulation of imperial ideologies and in the often fraught dynamics of cross-­cultural contact” meant that the bodily integrity of individual colonists was often equated with the cohesiveness of the body politic. Ballantyne and Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 5. 8. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 9. On the ways “categorical forms of recognition and misrecognition” structure colonial claims, see Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (2007): 67–80; on settler logics, see the foundational works of Patrick Wolfe, including “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409, as well as Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016). See also Jean M. O’Brien, “Tracing Settler Colonialism’s Eliminatory Logic in Traces of History,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 249–255; and Ashley Glassburn, “Settler Standpoints,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 399–406. 10. Tate LeFevre, “Reproduction, Re­sis­tance and the Logics of Difference: Indigenous Culture as Po­liti­cal Resource in the Settler-­State,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2013): 137. A note on terms: Native and Indigenous are generally used throughout this work to describe ­actual ­peoples and socie­t ies in North Amer­i­ca, while my use of Indian is intended to signal an ­imagined, racialized category. 11. For a nuanced consideration of the par­tic­u ­lar propensity of former British colonies ­toward settler colonialism, see Nancy Shoemaker, “Settler Colonialism: Universal Theory or En­g lish Heritage?” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 369–374. Shoemaker convincingly suggests that settler colonialism emerged as a “forward-­looking ideology devised to motivate En­g lish imperial expansion in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (369). 12. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “R-­Words: Refusing Research,” in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, ed. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn, 223–248 (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), 241. 13. See also Christopher Parsons’s thoughtful remarks on the ways that traditional scholarly approaches may ask us “to complete a colonial appropriation, rather than simply analyze it.” Rachel Herrmann, “Q&A with Christopher Parsons,” Junto, May 29, 2019, https://­early​ameri​ canists​.­com​/­2019​/­05​/­29​/­qa​-­with​-­christopher​-­parsons​/­. 14. Nancy Shoemaker, “Body Language: The Body as a Source of Sameness and Difference in Eighteenth-­C entury American Indian Diplomacy East of the Mississippi,” in A Centre of Won­d ers: The Body in Early Amer­i­c a, ed. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter, 211–222 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). As Shoemaker illustrates, meta­phors of nursing a child, speaking to a b ­ rother or an u ­ ncle, or claims that male negotiators w ­ ere acting “like ­women” relied on ideas about gender roles that did not always align across cultures. Growing uses of language that described Natives as red and Euro-­Americans as white



Notes to Page 7

125

or­ga­nized bodily appearance in a single manner that meant very dif­fer­ent t­ hings to Native Americans and Euro-­A mericans. Such an example suggests that gendered analy­sis, particularly in its intersections with studies of race, has been productive in illustrating the ways in which p ­ eople in early Amer­i­ca attempted to divide and delimit the universality of the body into categories of difference. 15. Foundational works in the history of the h ­ uman body include Norbert Elias, The Civiliz­ ing Pro­cess, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994); Michel Foucault, Dis­ cipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977); and Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978). The focus of much of the field’s initial scholarship on Eu­ro­pean ideas about civility and containment to the exclusion of the colonial context for the making of modern bodies has been critiqued by, among ­others, Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Th ­ ings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and Saidiya  V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For recent examples of histories of bodily symbolism, see Sarah Covington, Wounds, Flesh, and Meta­phor in Seventeenth-­Century ­England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Christopher Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Jennifer Putzi, Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination: Lit­er­a­ture and Health in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); and Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). For examples of histories that engage sensory perception and lived experience, see Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early Amer­i­ca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Phila­ delphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 16. Kathleen Canning has suggested that some feminist scholars, in par­t ic­u ­lar, ­were slow to engage theoretically with the body due to perceptions that engagement with physical embodiment reinforced biological essentialism. Canning, “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History,” Gender and History 11, no. 3 (1999): 501. The need to integrate the mutual inf luences of discourse and embodiment has led Barbara Duden to note that “one of the historian’s most tenacious ­mental habits is the strict separation of biology as an immutable sphere of life from society and culture as spheres that are variable and changeable over time.” The body’s modern assignment to biology and insistence on its physiological stability particularly impede historical understandings of the early modern body, which Duden has suggested was constructed (and therefore experienced) as permeable, porous, relatively undifferentiated internally, strongly interactive with the environment, and easily transformed. See Duden, The ­Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-­Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), vii. 17. Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early Amer­i­ca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 3. 18. For more on the intellectually generative “semantic reach” and “linguistic proximity” of terms about marking, see Katherine Dauge-­Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020), 3–4.

126

Notes to Pages 7–15

19. On the documentation and interpretation of pain in early Amer­i­c a, see Elaine Forman Crane, “ ‘I Have Suffer’d Much ­Today’: The Defining Force of Pain in Early Amer­i­c a,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early Amer­i­ca, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Frederika J. Teute, 370–403 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997). 20. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 21. The mediation of the archives confronts our ability to access the interiority of many, if not all, of the historical actors in the Atlantic world—­but this also prompts acknowl­ edgment of the power dynamics shaping their lives down to the level of the recorded physical sensations of individual bodies. Noting that even one’s experience of oneself is to an extent constructed, Richard Fox has made a useful and provocative argument for the knowability of past lives: “Their own felt experience was always interpreted experience, so that the interpretation they offered publicly to ­others (and thereby in the surviving historical rec­ord to us) gives us direct access to at least part of their own immediate experience.” While scholarship cannot, perhaps, recover what it felt like to be a marked individual in early Amer­i­ca, we can explore what they thought it felt like, at least as far as they ­were able to engage physical feeling in words and actions. See Fox, “Intimacy on Trial: Cultural Meanings of the Beecher-­Tilton Affair,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, 103–134 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 106. 22. Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Eu­rope (Brooklyn: Zone, 2007), 10. 23. See Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-­ American Culture,” Journal of American History 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 303–334. 24. Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 1. 25. For an example of one such cultural go-­between, see James H. Merrell, “ ‘The Cast of His Countenance’: Reading Andrew Montour,” in Hoffman, Sobel, and Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly, 13–39.

Chapter 1 1. No full rec­ord exists of t­ hose who made the 1584 fact-­fi nding voyage to the New World ­under the command of Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, but many speculate that both Thomas Harriot and John White ­were members. See Kim Sloan, “An Elizabethan ‘Governour’ in V ­ irginia,” in A New World: ­England’s First View of Amer­i­ca, 23–50 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 41. David Beers Quinn asserts that it was “likely . . . ​that Harriot accompanied the 1584 venturers” to assess w ­ hether his navigational instruction was effective, and he notes that White claimed in 1590 to have made five voyages to Amer­i­ca, which would have made the one in 1584 his first. If Harriot did not accompany the 1584 voyage, it makes his acquisition of at least basic language skills in Roanoke Algonquian dialects (from Manteo and Wanchese, two Algonquian men who ­were brought to ­England by Amadas) in the months between September 1584, when the Amadas and Barlowe voyage returned with the two Native men, and the April 1585 departure of the second expedition all the more impressive. However, Manteo and Wanchese ­were reportedly able to communicate in some En­g lish by December 1584, making such rapid acquisition of languages by both parties over



Notes to Pages 15–16

127

the winter of 1584–1585 impossible to rule out. See Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 21–23; and Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 37. 2. Limning would have been perceived as a fine art, suitable for gentlemen, in comparison to other forms of painting and craftwork that would have seemed the purview of tradespeople. White’s own well-­to-do status may have been seen by voyage planners as an impor­tant credential that made him an appropriate artist for painting the portraits of the Algonquian elites they met. See Katherine Coombs, “ ‘A Kind of Gentle Painting’: Limning in 16th-­ Century E ­ ngland,” in Eu­ro­pean Visions: American Voices, ed. Kim Sloan, 77–84 (London: British Museum, 2009). 3. Where necessary for reading clarity, I have silently substituted th for the thorn (y), switched u and v, i and j, expanded abbreviations, and have made bracketed corrections to spellings that might confuse readers. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 414–415. Harriot’s claim that the Native communities of Roanoke had never before seen “men apparelled like us,” even if in reference to the 1584 voyage rather than the 1585 one, is almost certainly incorrect. Eu­ ro­pe­a ns had been visiting the region for nearly sixty years, with Verrazano coasting the Outer Banks in 1524. Michael Leroy Oberg, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 33. 4. The central text of Harriot’s Briefe and True Report was first published in 1588 as an unillustrated tract. It was also printed in 1590 in Frankfurt, in a multilingual and lavishly illustrated edition, by Theodor de Bry as the first part of his monumental Amer­i­ca. Harriot wrote explanatory notes to accompany the illustrations for the de Bry edition, which ­were for the most part closely based on a set of John White’s watercolors. When quoting the Re­ port, Harriot’s captions for the Amer­i­ca engravings, or de Bry’s own textual commentary, I cite the editions in the document collection by Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages. When discussing the White watercolors in the chapter, the image titles I use in the text are taken from White’s own captions, but I cite the images by the plate numbers and titles used in Sloan, A New World. 5. Cynthia J. Van Zandt, ­Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early Amer­i­ca, 1580–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30. 6. The same set of instructions includes o ­ rders for an observer whose role likely paralleled that of Harriot. This individual was requested to note “the diversitie of their languages and in what places their speache beginnethe to alter. . . . ​A nd the same man to Carry with him an en­g lishe Dictionarie with the En­g lishe wordes before therin to sett downe their langage,” and perhaps Harriot deployed similar methods in studying Algonquian terms. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 52, 54. 7. On the detailed planning that early exploratory voyages and settlements entailed, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Proj­ect (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 8. Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xi. See also Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998 [1974]); Ann Rosalind Jones, “Habits, Heterologies, Holdings: Populations in Print in a Sixteenth-­C entury Costume Book,” Yale French Studies 110 (Winter 2007): 92–121; Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Re­n ais­sance Eu­rope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Surekha Davies, Re­n ais­sance Ethnography and

128

Notes to Pages 16–18

the Invention of the ­Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 9. Joyce E. Chaplin, “Roanoke ‘Counterfeited According to the Truth,’ ” in Sloan, A New World, 52. 10. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and En­glish: Facing Off in Early Amer­i­ca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 42–43. See also Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identi­ fication, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Eu­rope, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (New York: Zone, 2007). 11. During the earliest cross-­cultural contacts, when spoken communication was most difficult, such judgments may not have gotten much further than the surface of the body. Even a­ fter extended contact, however, translation and interpretation remained challenging, regardless of w ­ hether the mode of communication was oral, written, or gestural. See Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous ­Peoples in the Amer­i­cas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019). 12. See Ann  M. L ­ ittle, “ ‘Shoot That Rogue, for He Hath an En­g lishman’s Coat On!’: Cultural Cross-­Dressing on the New ­England Frontier, 1620–1760,” New ­England Quarterly 74, no. 2 (June 2001): 238–273. 13. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 117. Linguistic analy­sis by James A. Geary suggests that this updated interpretation, likely supplied by Thomas Harriot, may have been incorrect as well: see Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 854. 14. Richard Hakluyt [the younger], The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the En­glish Nation . . . (Imprinted at London by George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589), 732. In such incidents, Native Americans may have also been fascinated (and repulsed) by the relative uncleanness of the En­glish. When Barlowe and seven of his men visited a village on Roanoke island in 1584, the wife of village leader Granganimeo and her attendants carefully washed the men’s clothing and feet. Such gestures ­were both a formal sign of welcome and a reflection of Algonquian preferences for daily bathing. See Oberg, The Head in Edward Nu­ gent’s Hand, 47–48; Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 107–108; and Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early Amer­i­ca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 54, 73. 15. Kupperman, Indians and En­glish, 43. 16. “Translation was, and still is, the central act of Eu­ro­pean colonization and imperialism in the Amer­i­cas.” Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 104. 17. Tattooing is so widespread in socie­ties around the world that anthropologists and archaeologists have speculated that it may be part of a group of symbolic be­hav­iors that emerged with modern h ­ uman cognition. Aaron Deter-­Wolf argues that tattooing may prove to be “among the essential suite of behaviorally modern adaptations that diffused throughout the Western Hemi­sphere at the end of the Pleistocene along with the earliest ­human inhabitants.” See Deter-­Wolf, “Needle in a Haystack: Examining the Archaeological Evidence for Prehistorical Tattooing,” in Drawing with G ­ reat N ­ eedles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North Amer­i­ca, ed. Aaron Deter-­Wolf and Carol Diaz-­Granados, 43–72 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 46–47. For an anthropological theorization of the broad technical schema and functions of tattooing, see Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Gell describes Polynesian tattooing as “a species of po­liti­cal gesture which marked the body, tortured it, ceremonially prepared it for war and sexuality, and which made



Notes to Pages 18–20

129

it emit signs” (3). Three of the functions Gell proposes for tattooing more generally are particularly useful for my consideration of tattooing in cross-­cultural contexts: support, wherein tattooing wraps the b ­ earer in social context and relationships; individuation, where tattooing creates and marks personal identity as well as group affiliation; and registration, wherein the skin functions as a “system of ‘memory places’ . . . ​for reconstructing the person as a locus of remembered events” (36). 18. Early scholarship on Native American tattooing includes Garrick Mallery, “Picture-­ Writing of the American Indian,” in Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Eth­ nology, 1888–1889 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1893): 4–808; and Albert T. Sinclair, “Tattooing of the North American Indians,” American Anthropologist 11, no. 3 (1909). For more recent work, see Deter-­Wolf and Diaz-­Granados, eds., Drawing with ­Great ­Needles. Even between culturally contiguous Dheighan Sioux groups, James R. Duncan finds a wide range of uses for tattooing, including “to insure a long life and many descendants, to consecrate or sanctify the individual, to enumerate military honors, and to demonstrate the tattooed person’s role and place in the cosmos.” Duncan, “Dheighan Tattoos: Markings That Consecrate, Empower, and Designate Lineage,” in Deter-­Wolf and Diaz-­Granados, eds., Drawing with ­Great ­Needles, 195–214, on 197. For archaeological evidence for tattooing in the Southeast, see Benjamin A. Steere, “Swift Creek Paddle Designs as Tattoos: Ethnographic Insights on Prehistoric Body Decoration and Material Culture,” in Deter-­Wolf and Diaz-­Granados, eds., Drawing with ­Great ­Needles, 73–94; and Deter-­Wolf, “Needle in a Haystack.” 19. Gell, Wrapping in Images, 37, 298. 20. Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, “Introduction,” in Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Amer­i­cas, ed. Cohen and Glover, 1–46 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 3. I am particularly indebted to Cohen and Glover’s terminology, theorization, and historiographical overview of Indigenous literacies and media forms in the Amer­i­cas. 21. The term tattoo derives from the Tahitian word tatau, which did not enter Eu­ro­pean lexicons ­until a­ fter the first accounts of the Cook expeditions to the Pacific w ­ ere published in 1769. The practice of making permanent inked marks ­under the skin was quickly and inextricably linked to the ­adopted Polynesian word, leading to subsequent misperceptions that deed and word w ­ ere si­mul­t a­neously introduced by the crew members of the Cook voyages, many of whom had been themselves tattooed in the South Pacific. For more on the tattoos of Sir Joseph Banks and o ­ thers from the Cook expeditions, see Harriet Guest, “Curiously Marked: Tattooing and Gender Difference in Eighteenth-­Century British Perceptions of the South Pacific,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in Eu­ro­pean and American History, ed. Jane Caplan, 83–101 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000). 22. Sloan, A New World, 168. 23. For traditional conceptions in linguistic scholarship of a dichotomy between “primary oral cultures” and literate cultures (as defined by alphabetic writing and print), see, for example, Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 2002). Attention to Native reception has in some instances created a lopsided picture of encounters with material culture, presenting Native actors as puzzled or awed by Eu­ro­pean technologies while neglecting the similar reactions of Eu­ro­pe­a ns. See James Axtell, “The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 300–309. For a critique of assumptions that Native ­peoples attributed magical properties to Eu­ro­pean writing, see Peter Wogan, “Perceptions of Eu­ro­pean Literacy in Early Contact Situations,”

130

Notes to Pages 20–23

Ethnohistory 41 (1994): 407–429. For discussion of the idea of the “eloquent Indian” in colonial British Amer­i­ca, see Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Per­for­mance in Early Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000). 24. See Cohen and Glover, “Introduction,” 2. For additional reconsiderations of Indigenous literacies in the Amer­i­cas, as well as more expansive definitions of literacy, see Germaine Warkentin, “In Search of ‘The Word of the Other’: Aboriginal Sign Systems and the History of the Book in Canada,” Book History 2 (1999): 1–27; Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Matt Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New E ­ ngland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Philip H. Round, Removable Type: Histo­ ries of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early Ameri­ can Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and Sarah Rivett, “Learning to Write Algonquian Letters: The Indigenous Place of Language Philosophy in the Seventeenth-­ Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 4 (October 2014): 549–588. For a thoughtful critique of expanding definitions of writing and literacy to encompass Indigenous media, see Andrew Newman, “Early Americanist Grammatology: Definitions of Writing and Literacy,” in Cohen and Glover, eds., Colonial Mediascapes, 76–98. 25. Newman, “Early Americanist Grammatology,” 80. 26. Warkentin, “In Search of ‘The Word of the Other,’ ” 3. Warkentin notes that wampum, as a sign system, is distinguished from alphabetic writing by its “character as pro­cess rather than as repre­sen­t a­t ion,” since it requires per­for­mance by a speaker to communicate its full message (7). This conflicts with common assessments of writing systems defining written signs as being interpretable without intervention. Such models may unnecessarily privilege alphabetic systems while overlooking the complex communicative work done by systems such as wampum b ­ elts, which employ both text and rhe­toric, oral per­for­mance and material image. Consideration of t­ hese systems as Indigenous literacies should not, however, entail forcing parallels between them and alphabetic writing. Th ­ ese practices deserve investigation on their own terms rather than reductive inclusion in Eu­ro­pean frameworks. Drawing useful comparisons between media forms without conflating them is therefore a goal of this chapter. 27. In the debates over how to describe Indigenous sign systems, Andrew Newman has argued, “The terms ‘writing’ and ‘literacies’ (and ‘book’) may even push back against their radical dilation, constraining the conceptions of forms that they do not quite comprehend.” He adds, “During the colonial period the Eu­ro­pean concept of writing was more easily contained by indigenous categories than vice versa.” Newman, “Early Americanist Grammatology,” 84–85. 28. On the special status accorded to the printing press and copper-­plate engraving among the “civilizing technologies” praised by early modern Eu­ro­pe­a ns, see Gaudio, Engrav­ ing the Savage. 29. The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee, and The Cata­logue of His Library of Manuscripts . . . ​, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London: Printed for the Camden Society, 1842), 6. Available at Proj­ect Gutenberg, https://­w ww​.­gutenberg​.­org​/­files​/­19553​/­19553​-­h​/­19553​-­h​.­htm. 30. Jennipher Allen Rosecrans, “Wearing the Universe: Symbolic Markings in Early Modern E ­ ngland,” in Caplan, ed. Written on the Body, 46–60.



Notes to Pages 23–26

131

31. The acceptability of tattooing within Christian practice was and remains contested. Tattoos imposed by Roman administrators, intended quite literally to stigmatize, ­were appropriated by some Christians u ­ nder the Roman Empire as symbols of their faith in the face of persecution. Conflicting interpretations of vari­ous biblical passages could be seen as authorizing or prohibiting bodily modification. Leviticus 19:28 commands that “ye ­shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any markes vpon you: I am the Lord.” On the other hand, Paul’s letter to the Galatians concludes 6:17, “From henceforth let no man trou­ble mee, for I beare in my body the markes of the Lord Iesus.” Both quotes are from the King James Version, hereafter KJV. See C. P. Jones’s interpretation that Paul h ­ ere conveys an idea of himself as a “slave of Christ” whose ill treatment and persecution by the world has left wounds comparable to the tattoos of the enslaved. Constantine ordered an end to the practice of tattooing slaves and criminals on the face, arguing that the h ­ uman face was made in the divine image, although other tattooing continued (and facial tattooing seems to have revived ­a fter his rule). Late Antiquity church commentary on tattooing largely appears to condemn tattooing if it was part of pagan practice, while leaving open the possibility of tattoos that might be compatible with Chris­tian­ity. See Mark Gustafson, “The Tattoo in the ­Later Roman Empire and Beyond,” 17–31; and C. P. Jones, “Stigma and Tattoo,” 1–16, in Caplan, ed. Written on the Body. For more on early modern interpretations of Galatians 6:17 and “stigmatic theology” see Carolyn Muessig, The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Eu­rope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 32. Juliet Fleming, “The Re­nais­sance Tattoo,” in Caplan, ed. Written on the Body, 61–82, on 79. 33. William Lithgow, The totall discourse, of the rare aduentures, and painefull peregrina­ tions of long nineteene yeares trauayles, from Scotland, to the most famous kingdomes in Eu­ rope, Asia, and Affrica (Imprinted at London: By Nicholas Okes, and are to be sold by Nicholas Fussell and Humphery Mosley at their shops in Pauls Church yard, at the Ball, and the white Lyon, 1632), 285. Lithgow’s description of his tattoo varies between his 1614 and 1632 accounts of his travels. The e­ arlier edition mentions only the crowns, although the margin note also says he was marked with the “­great armes of Jerusalem,” while the 1632 account describes both the cross and crown, and a poem that he reportedly composed in James’s honor, all tattooed on his arm. Images are included in the l­ater editions. For Lithgow’s initial description, see A most delectable, and true discourse, of an admired and painefull peregrination from Scotland, to the most famous kingdomes in Eu­rope, Asia and Affricke (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, and are to be sold by Thomas Archer, at his shop in Popes-­head Pallace, neere the Royall Exchange, 1614), R3–­R 3v. 34. Lithgow, The totall discourse, 469. 35. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern E ­ ngland (London: Reaktion, 2001), 108. 36. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 108. 37. Joel Konrad, “ ‘Curiously and Most Exquisitely Painted’: Body Marking in British Thought and Experience, 1580–1800” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2011), 118. Compare to Katherine Dauge-­Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France (New York: Routledge, 2020). 38. William Camden, Britain, or A chorographicall description of the most flourishing kingdomes, ­England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the ilands adioyning, out of the depth of antiquitie (Londini: [Printed at Eliot’s Court Press] impensis Georgii Bishop & Ioannis

132

Notes to Pages 26–30

Norton, M.DC.X. [1610]), 115. Such descriptions ­were also intended to enhance claims about the historical unity of the British p ­ eoples, in the years immediately prior to and following James VI of Scotland’s accession to the En­g lish throne. Camden argued the Picts ­were “verie naturall Britains themselves,” not immigrants from Scythia, as Bede had claimed. 39. John Speed, The history of G ­ reat Britaine ­under the conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (Imprinted at London: [By John Beale] anno cum privilegio 1623 are to be sold by George ­Humble at the Whit h ­ orse in Popes-­head Alley, [1623]), 167. 40. On the ways that images of tattooed Picts and Native Americans mutually reinforced one another, see Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn, The American Drawings of John White, 1577–1590 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1964); and Kupperman, Indians and En­ glish, 64. 41. Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of ­Virginia (New York: Dover, 1972), 75. De Bry’s engravings of the Picts w ­ ere likely based not only on White’s watercolors but also possibly on images by Jacque Le Moyne de Morgues. See Figure 94, “A young ­d aughter of the Picts,” attributed to or ­a fter Le Moyne, in Sloan, A New World, 152, which corresponds with “The trvve picture of a yonge dowgter of the Pictes III,” in Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 80. An “original” White watercolor does not exist of this image. White’s Picts may have all been based on paintings by Le Moyne, but Sloan does not find this entirely probable. White’s paintings of a Timucuan man and ­woman of Florida are, however, thought to be copied from or inspired by Le Moyne originals. See Sloan, A New World, 158, 133. 42. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 76. In the Report, the Picts appear as lacking many ele­ments of civility, such as clothing, while they are profuse only in tattoos and tools of vio­lence. Native Americans, on the other hand, are shown as conspicuously unarmed, while their elaborate tattoos are accompanied by equally elaborate clothing that differs by gender, season, and social role. This heightened contrast served to suggest to readers that the inhabitants of the New World w ­ ere more civilized perhaps than their own ancestors. 43. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 76, 78. 44. Gordon Sayre, Les Sauvages Americains: Repre­sen­ta­tions of Native Americans in French and En­glish Colonial Lit­er­a­ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 165. 45. For White’s pos­si­ble role in designing costumes and gilt armor for the Office of the Revels, see Kim Sloan, “Knowing John White: The Courtier’s ‘Curious and Gentle Art of Limning,’ ” in Sloan, A New World, 23–38. For coats of arms, seals, and badges, see Groebner, Who Are You? particularly chapters 2 and 3. 46. See marks on the backs of male figures at the lower left and lower right in plate 11, “A festive dance,” in Sloan, A New World, 116–117. While somewhat blurred due to w ­ ater damage, ­these marks do resemble the arrow-­shaped tattoos depicted in “Marckes of Sundrye of the Cheif Mene of ­Virginia,” a de Bry engraving discussed at length ­later in the chapter. See Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 74. 47. For discussion of pigment sources, see Deter-­Wolf, “Needle in a Haystack,” 58–59 and T ­ able 2.1. Deter-­Wolf does mention the pos­si­ble use of iron oxide (ochre), vermilion, and cinnabar in some locales: all pigments that would produce red ink or paint. In White’s watercolors, all Native tattoos appear black or dark blue, except in a few instances where ­water damage or chemical oxidation have lightened the paint pigments. See, for example, plate 22, “The wife of a chief or werowance of Secotan,” in Sloan, A New World, 140–141.



Notes to Pages 30–32

133

48. Plate 13, “An Indian werowance, or chief, painted for a ­great solemn gathering,” in Sloan, A New World, 120–121. For discussion of the artistic and epistemological significance of White’s watercolors, see Michael E. Harkin, “John White and the Invention of Anthropology: Landscape, Ethnography, and Situating the Other in Roanoke,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 7 (2011): 216–245. Harriot’s description of the “weroan or ­great Lorde” for de Bry’s edition suggested that “they ether pownes [pounce], or paynt” their bodies in a manner dif­ fer­ent than that of “inhabitantz of Florida,” evidence both for male tattooing and for close attention by the En­g lish to regional bodily differences. Harriot also mentioned a form of ritual bleeding or cupping that might cause some of the marks on the man’s body: “Vnder their brests about their bellyes appeir certayne spotts, whear they vse to lett them selues bloode, when they are sicke.” Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 441. 49. The implication in White’s captions, that t­ hese individuals acquired status primarily through their roles as wives, overlooked the po­l iti­c al and social power that Algonquian ­women could hold in their own right. For discussion of gender roles in coastal Algonquian communities, see Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial ­Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996), particularly chap. 2. 50. Plate 18, “A wife of the werowance or chief, Wingina,” in Sloan, A New World, 130–131. For the other portraits of Algonquians showing detailed tattooing, see plates 14, 16, and 22 in the Sloan book. Tattooing is also prominent in White’s paintings of a Timucuan man and ­woman and an Inuit ­woman, which I do not discuss ­here. See plates 19, 20, and 36 in the Sloan book. It is worth noting that Pocahontas, or Matoaka, an elite Algonquian w ­ oman of the ­Virginia Powhatans, was not depicted as having facial tattoos in her 1616 portrait by Simon van de Passe, the only known image of her made from life. She may not have had facial tattoos, they may have been covered by Eu­ro­pean cosmetics, or van de Passe may have chosen not to include them in his portrait of her. Other pos­si­ble tattoos on her arms and legs would have been covered by En­g lish clothing following her baptism, marriage, and acculturation to En­g lish practices. 51. Her d ­ aughter, described by White as “of 8 or 10 yeares” old, has e­ ither a tattoo or paint on her left cheek. Tattooing was generally not performed ­until a­ fter the recipient had reached puberty, and the mark does not correspond to any of the facial tattoos on the adult ­women, suggesting that it is likely a temporary marking. On the significance of w ­ omen’s tattooing in several southeastern and Plains socie­t ies, see Lars Krutak, “The Art of Enchantment: Corporeal Marking and Tattooing Bundles of the G ­ reat Plains,” 131–174; and David H. Dye, “Snaring Life from the Stars and the Sun: Mississippian Tattooing and the Enduring Cycle of Life and Death,” 215–252, both in Deter-­Wolf and Diaz-­Granados, eds., Drawing with ­Great ­Needles. Plate 14, “A wife of an Indian werowance or chief of Pomeiooc, and her d ­ aughter,” in Sloan, A New World, 122–23. 52. George Percy, “Discourse [1606],” in Captain John Smith: Writings with Other Narra­ tives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First En­glish Settlement of Amer­i­ca, ed. James Horn, 920– 934 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States), 931; and John Smith, “The Generall Historie of ­Virginia, New-­England, and the Summer Isles [1624],” in Horn, ed., Captain John Smith, 283. 53. Vivian Salmon, “Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) and the En­g lish Origins of Algonkian Linguistics,” in Salmon, Language and Society in Early Modern E ­ ngland: Selected Essays, 1981– 1994, 143–172 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996), 163.

134

Notes to Pages 32–35

54. Percy, “Discourse [1606],”, 926. 55. Peter Stallybrass, “Admiranda narratio: A Eu­ro­pean Best Seller,” in A briefe and true report of the new found land of ­Virginia (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press for the Library at the Mari­ners’ Museum, 2007), 9–30. D. B. Quinn argues that White made as many as six copies of the portfolio, w ­ hether in full or only selected images. The images held at the British Museum, he asserts, are one of ­t hose copies, and the archetypal studies are now no longer extant. Quinn’s basis for this argument is in part due to the inclusion of miscellaneous images within the British Museum portfolio of non-­A merican subjects, such as costume studies of Turks. For a broader explication of the relationship between the known paintings and copies, see Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 392–398. 56. Kupperman, Indians and En­glish, 42. 57. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 424. 58. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 420. 59. As Quinn suggests, Harriot likely wrote the image captions for de Bry a few years ­a fter his travels in the Outer Banks, and details may have been forgotten or blurred. Differences in his visual source materials may have also made a difference; Quinn writes, “We are presuming that Hariot wrote the notes on seeing a set of the original drawings as supplied by White to De Bry, but it may be that he used a set of early pulls of the engravings, and that De Bry’s embellishments may sometimes have misled him.” Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 414– 415, fn. 5. 60. For Dasemunkuepeuc or Pomeiooc, compare plate 16, “A wife of a werowance or chief, of Pomeiooc carry­ing a child,” in Sloan, A New World, 126–127, with plate X, “Their manner or careynge ther Childern and a tyere of the cheiffe Ladyes of the towne of Dasamonquepeuc,” in Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 53. For Roanoke or Secotan, compare plate 18, “A wife of the werowance or chief, Wingina,” in Sloan, A New World, 130–131, with plate VI, “A younge gentill woeman doughter of Secota,” in Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 49. 61. Fleming, “Re­nais­sance Tattoo,”69. 62. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 424. 63. For a sample of Eu­ro­pean sources on Native tattooing, see Antoinette B. Wallace, “Native American Tattooing in the Protohistoric Southeast,” in Deter-­Wolf and Diaz-­Granados, eds., Drawing with G ­ reat N ­ eedles, 1–42. “Inlaid in a strange fashion,” from Nicolas Le Challeux on Native Floridians (original French “marqueté”), and “curious knots” and “antique work” from John Sparke on Native Floridians, both in Wallace, “Native American Tattooing,” 6–8. 64. Other engravings by de Bry in the Amer­i­ca series highlight the textural similarities between elaborately pinked clothing worn by French explorers and the tattooed bodies of Native Floridians. 65. Edward Arber, ed., Richard Eden, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera [Peter Martyr], and Sebastian Münster, The first three En­glish books on Amer­i­ca. (?1511)–1555  A.D. Being chiefly translations, compilation, e­ tc. by Richard Eden (Birmingham, 1885), 106. See also Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth ­Century,” in Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 22–51, on 17. 66. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 86. 67. Such be­hav­ior, Fleming writes, displayed “in its esoteric literalism, an almost magical way of thinking about the physical properties of language.” Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 13.



Notes to Pages 35–41

135

68. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 83. 69. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 377. 70. Many scholars, including David Beers Quinn, have argued that another copy of White’s watercolors, now lost, must have been made for de Bry in 1588 or 1589 as source material for his workshop’s engravings. Quinn writes, “It was formerly thought that the elaborations and variations ­were wholly the work of De Bry and his fellow-­engravers, but a closer study shows that White was responsible for a considerable number of the variations from corresponding items in the British Museum set, and makes it quite clear that both derive from the lost archetype,” but he does not explain further his rationale for concluding that White introduced the variations seen in the de Bry engravings. The “Marckes” plate is clearly derived from another de Bry plate (that of “A weroan[ce] or ­great Lorde of ­Virginia”), which in turn is derived from an extant White watercolor (plate 13, “An Indian werowance, or chief, painted for a g­ reat solemn gathering,” in Sloan, A New World, 120–121). Yet, I argue, the choice to create a schematic vocabulary list rather than a portrait or group setting sets the “Marckes” plate apart from all extant White watercolors. See Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 394. 71. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 443. Harriot’s claim that tattoos ­were a sign of fealty to “princes” may gesture ­toward the real­ity that some tattoos ­were markers of clan relationships; however, his implication that high-­status men would not, therefore, have been tattooed themselves is belied by nearly ­every other source. 72. Gaudio, Engraving the Savage, 4. 73. Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 74. 74. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 443, 375–376. 75. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 375. On the “filled-in blanks” of language barriers in sixteenth-­century exploration narratives, see Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse.” Greenblatt argues that “such conventions are almost never mere technical con­ve­niences. If it was im­ mensely difficult in sixteenth-­century narratives to represent a language barrier, it is ­because embedded in the narrative convention of the period was a power­f ul, unspoken belief in the isomorphic relationship between language and real­ity” (28). Two Native interpreters, Manteo and Wanchese, played major roles in the En­g lish explorations and attempted settlement at Roanoke. ­W hether they might have supplied Harriot with information about the significance of tattoos or helped craft the “Marckes” plate remains to be explored. Michael Leroy Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful En­g lishman’: Manteo and the Early Anglo-­Indian Exchange, 1584–1590,” Itinerario 24 (July 2000): 146–169. 76. See, in par­tic­u ­lar, definitions seven and nine: “counterfeit, v.,” OED Online, December 2020, Oxford University Press, accessed March 1, 2021, https://­w ww​-­oed​-­com​.­libdata​.­lib​ .­ua​.­edu​/­v iew​/­Entry​/­42788​?­rskey​=­z7kzkd&result​=2­ &isAdvanced​=­false. 77. Oberg, “Between ‘Savage Man’ and ‘Most Faithful En­g lishman.’ ” 78. Michael E. Harkin, “John White and the Invention of Anthropology: Landscape, Ethnography, and Situating the Other in Roanoke,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 7 (2011): 236. 79. Salmon, “Thomas Harriot,” 145. 80. Salmon, “Thomas Harriot,” 145. The alphabet’s characters appear to visually derive from algebra, Greek, both normal and reversed Roman letters, and a few in­ven­ted graphs. Harriot’s use of phonemes rather than letters may be a result of his engagement with pictographic/semasiographic systems in the Amer­i­cas. 81. Salmon, “Thomas Harriot,” 158.

136

Notes to Pages 41–45

82. Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: “lost in their orality” on 15 and “writing lesson” on 5. 83. See Sarah Rivett, “Learning to Write Algonquian Letters: The Indigenous Place of Language Philosophy in the Seventeenth-­Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 4 (October 2014): 549–588. 84. Drew Lopenzina, Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 5–10. Lopenzina has argued that colonial texts are often spaces of “unwitnessing,” a type of passive repression where events and accounts that potentially undermine or delegitimate colonial narratives are not necessarily ignored but are refused, “at once noted and then immediately stricken out.” I argue that tattooing’s simultaneous role as “writing” and “not-­w riting” in colonial thought functions in much the same way. 85. Quinn, ed., Roanoke Voyages, 373.

Chapter 2 1. Edward P. Hamilton, ed., Adventures in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756–1760 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 288. Years ­later, Bougainville would again reference tattoos, this time among the Tahitians he met while conducting a circumnavigation of the globe for France. Among Tahitians, he wrote, the practice was “a mark of distinction” (une marque de distinction) similar to what he had observed among “the natives of Canada” (aux indigènes du Canada). He mused that it was common “to find this fashion of painting” (on a trouvé cette peinture à la mode) among “­peoples close to the state of nature” (chez les peuples voisins encore de l’état de nature). His published account of his Pacific travels is decidedly more positive about Tahitian customs than his unpublished North American journals ­were about Native American ones. See Bougainville, Voyage aut­ our du monde, ed. Michel Bideaux and Sonia Faessel (Paris: Presses de l’Universite de Paris–­Sorbonne, 2001), 226. 2. Christian Ayne Crouch, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 175. 3. Hamilton, ed., Adventures in the Wilderness, 142, 170. As Christian Crouch has argued, he was similarly disappointed in the Canadian colonists, “particularly in their failures to see metropolitan French culture as preferable to their own and to endorse the superiority of French officers by accepting their own subordination.” Crouch, Nobility Lost, 156. 4. Hamilton, ed., Adventures in the Wilderness, 288. For more on per­for­mances of masculinity in early American military cultures, see R. Todd Romero, Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism in Early New E ­ ngland (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2011); as well as Tyler Boulware, “ ‘We Are Men’: Native American and Euroamerican Projections of Masculinity During the Seven Years’ War,” 51–70; and Susan Abram, “Real Men: Masculinity, Spirituality, and Community in Late Eighteenth-­ Century Cherokee Warfare,” 71–94, both in Thomas  A. Foster, ed., New Men: Manliness in Early Amer­i­ca (New York: New York University Press, 2011); and Wayne E. Lee, ed., Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 5. Hamilton, ed., Adventures in the Wilderness, 170, 37. 6. Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “Gaining the Diplomatic Edge: Kinship, Trade, Ritual, and Religion in Amerindian Alliances in Early North Amer­i­ca,” in Lee, ed., Empires and Indi­ genes, 19–48, on 24.



Notes to Pages 45–48

137

7. Cadwallader Colden, “The pre­sent state of the Indian affairs with the British & French Colonies in North Amer­i­ca,” August 8, 1751, in Cadwallader Colden Papers, New York Historical Society Collections, 53 (1920), 272; and Hamilton, ed., Adventures in the Wilder­ ness, 12. 8. Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 340. Bougainville’s correspondence with his f­ amily mentioned the adoption while also making light of it, likely reflecting his disgruntlement at appearing to legitimize the entanglement of Canadian settler and Native cultures. Yet even while he disdained Native military and cultural practices, it appears likely that he fathered a child with a Shawnee ­woman living as a refugee among the Kahnawake Mohawk. Crouch, Nobility Lost, 92, 165; on Bougainville’s pos­si­ble descendants, see 179–188. 9. For a discussion of the transformative power of material culture in remaking fluid French and Native identities in seventeenth-­century colonial Louisiana, see Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). White describes the performative, bodily ele­ment in both deliberate, voluntary self-­fashioning and in the forcible adoption of captives. For captives, their “previous identities (with the exception of tattoos or other permanent markings) w ­ ere literally stripped from their bodies along with their clothes. . . . ​The identity and even the clan affiliation of the captive w ­ ere reinvented” (103). 10. Anna Felicity Friedman Herlihy, “Tattooed Transculturites: Western Expatriates Among Amerindian and Pacific Islander Socie­ties, 1500–1900,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 129. As Friedman rightfully notes, the differing frequency of non-­Western tattoos on French and En­g lish bodies may reflect differing settler demographics among captives and other potential adoptees; it may also reflect variations in the frequency and cultural significance of tattooing among Native nations in the regions claimed by En­g lish or French colonies. Evidence of tattooing among Native communities in what is now New E ­ ngland, for example, is far sparser than documentation of tattooing among the Haudenosaunee and other ­peoples surrounding the ­Great Lakes, as well as many Southeastern ­peoples. 11. It is notable, when comparing French and En­g lish examples, that while ­t here appear to be more overall examples of French cross-­c ultural tattooing, ­t here are also many scandalized commentaries by French observers, suggesting that s­ imple narratives of French ac­cep­tance of—­a nd Anglo-­A merican hostility t­ oward—­Indigenous cultural transfer are insufficient. For analy­sis of French concerns about cultural mixing and intermarriage in the colonies, see Guillaume Aubert, “ ‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (July 2004): 439–478; and Saliha Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-­Century French Colonial Policy,” American Historical Review 110 (April 2005): 322–349. 12. Jane Caplan, “Introduction,” in Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in Eu­ro­ pean and American History, xi–­x xiii (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), xv. 13. Francesco Gioseppe Bressani, “Breve Relatione d’alcune missioni . . . ,” in Reuben Gold Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (Cleveland: Burrows B ­ rothers, 1889), vol. 38, 249–251. 14. Such “signatures” might also be located on traveling objects such as war clubs, which might have been left at the scene of a ­battle or attack as an announcement of who was responsible. See Mark Alan Mattes, “War Clubs, Gunpowder Ink, and Syncretic History Writing on

138

Notes to Pages 48–50

the ­Middle Ground” (paper presented at the Society of Early Americanists Eighth Biennial Conference, Savannah, GA, February 28–­March 2, 2013). 15. For further discussion of de Bry’s Picts and the long-­standing visual associations made by Eu­ro­pean authors between tattooed ancient Britons and tattooed Native Americans, see Chapter 1. 16. The original reads, “ceux qui se sont signalés par quelque fait d’importance, se sont piquer un casse-­tête sur l’épaule droite, & au-­dessous on voit le signe hiéroglyfique de la Nation vaincue; les autres se sont piquer chacun à leur goût.” Antoine Le Page du Pratz, Histoire de la Louisiane (Paris: de Bure, 1758), vol. 2, 199. 17. Eu­ro­pean philologists w ­ ere not aware of the Rosetta Stone, which ultimately made pos­si­ble the deciphering of ancient Egyptian texts, ­until the French invasion of Egypt at the very close of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Birgit Brander Rasmussen examines Herman Melville’s use of “hieroglyphic” to describe both Marquesan tattooing and Native American petroglyphs. She notes that for mid-­nineteenth-­century authors like Melville, in the wake of Champollion’s work deciphering the Rosetta Stone scripts, “hieroglyphics could stand si­ mul­ta­neously for an ancient, mysterious, undeciphered system of writing and for the possibility of its decipherment.” Rasmussen, Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 121. 18. “Explication des Planches et Figures,” in Joseph-­Francois Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains (Paris: Chez Saugrain l’aine . . . ​, 1724), a iij. “La Nation de la Gruë” may refer to the Heron doodem (clan) of the Nipissing. See entry for “Amikwa,” in Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico Part 1: A–­M (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 30, no. 1) (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1912), 49. On Anishinaabeg kinship structures, see Heidi Bohaker, “ ‘Nindoodemag’: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern G ­ reat Lakes Region, 1600–1701,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63, no. 1 (January 2006): 23–52. 19. Native uses of trees to communicate to passersby about military victories and routes ­were described in a number of colonial texts, including a 1765 Pennsylvania account of Henry Bouquet’s expedition to Ohio Indian territories. Describing a fork on the path to the towns on the Muskingham, the work noted “several trees painted by the Indians, in a hieroglyphic manner, denoting the number of wars in which they have been engag’d, and the particulars of their success in prisoners and scalps.” William Smith, An Historical Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, in the year 1764 . . . (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by W. Bradford, 1765), 11. 20. Translation of Lafitau from Gordon Sayre, Les Sauvages Americains: Repre­sen­ta­ tions of Native Americans in French and En­glish Colonial Lit­er­a­ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 214. The original reads, “Le Sauvage donc, pour faire son portrait, tire une ligne s­ imple en forme de tête, sans y mettre presque aucun trait pour designer les yeux, le nez, les oreilles, & les autres parties du visage; en leur place il trace les marques qu’il a fait pointer sur le sien, aussi bien que celles qui sont gravées sur sa poitrine, & qui lui étant particulières, le rendent connoissable, non-­seulement à ceux qui l’ont vû, mais encore à tous ceux qui ne le connoissant que de réputation sçavent son symbole Hieroglyphique, comme autrefois on distinguoit en Eu­rope une personne par sa devise, & que nous discernons aujourd’hui une famille par ses armoires.” Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains, vol. 2, 45. 21. Joseph de La Porte, Le voyageur françois ou la connoissance de l’ancien et du nouveau monde (Paris: Chez L. Cellot, Imprimeur-­Libraire, rue Dauphine, 1769), vol. 10, 105. The original



Notes to Pages 50–54

139

reads, “Lorsqu’ils se sont signalés dans les combats, on les décore de quelques figures gravées sur leur chair, & dont ils se tiennent plus honorés, qu’on ne l’est chez nous, des brevets & des grades militaires.” 22. Jérôme Lalemant, “Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle-­France, des années 1662 & 1663,” in Thwaites, Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 48, 167–169. 23. Antoine-­Simon Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana or of the Western Parts of ­Virginia and Carolina (New Orleans: Pelican, 1947 [1758]), 346. 24. Jean-­Bernard Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North Amer­i­ca, 1751–1762, trans. and ed., Seymour Feiler (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 97. 25. Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 9, 33; and Lars Krutak, “The Art of Enchantment: Corporeal Marking and Tattooing Bundles of the G ­ reat Plains,” in Drawing with ­Great ­Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North Amer­ i­ca, ed. Aaron Deter-­Wolf and Carol Diaz-­Granados, 131–174 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). 26. See William Lithgow’s experience, described in Chapter 1, of torture at the hands of Spanish captors: vio­lence that directly targeted his tattoo professing loyalty to a Protestant monarch. 27. Stéphanie Chaffray notes how both tattooing and torture called for demonstrations of courage, while incorporating an individual (willingly, in the case of most tattoos, and forcibly by torture) into a group. “Le brûlure du corps pendant le rituel de torture pourrait donc être perçue comme une version exogène du tatouage. Dans les deux cas, le marquage du corps force le prisonnier à montrer son courage et l’imprime simultanément. On peut donc se demander si la torture serait, comme le tatouage, une façon d’intégrer le captif dans le groupe.” Chaffray, “Le corps amérindien dans les relations de voyage en Nouvelle-­France au XVIIIè siècle” (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2006), 339. 28. James Adair, The history of the American Indians; particularly ­those nations adjoining to the Missisippi [sic], East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and ­Virginia: containing an account of their origin, language, manners, . . . (London: Printed by Edward and Charles Dilly, 1775), 393. 29. Sayre, Les Sauvages Americains, 171, 174. 30. Crouch, Nobility Lost, 30. 31. Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North Amer­i­ca, 95. 32. Gordon M. Sayre, “ ‘ Take My Scalp, Please!’: Colonial Mimesis and the French Origins of the Mississippi Tall Tale,” in Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Amer­i­cas, ed. Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover, 203–232 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 214. 33. Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North Amer­i­ca, 65–66. The original reads, “Les Akanças viennent de m’adopter; ils m’ont reconnu pour guerrier & pour Chef, & m’en ont donné la marque; c’est un chevreuil qu’ils ont imprimé sur ma cuisse,” in M. Bossu, Nouveaux voyages aux Indes Occidentales: Contenant une relation des differens peuples qui habitent les environs du g­ rand fleuve Saint-­Louis, appellé vulgairement le Mississipi . . . (Paris: Chez Le Jay, 1768), 76. A similar account of tattooing as part of an adoption ceremony can be found in the writings of John Long, a British irregular during the American Revolution. As described in the introduction, Long received a tattoo from an Ojibwe community near Pays Plat in what is now Ontario and was given the name “Amik, or Beaver.” Long hoped to trade with the community and reciprocated with gifts following the tattooing “to show how much I was pleased with the

140

Notes to Pages 54–56

honor they had conferred on me.” Long, Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, Describing the Manners and Customs of the North American Indians . . . (London: Printed for the author, 1791), 48–49. 34. Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North Amer­i­ca, 94–95. 35. Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North Amer­i­ca, 65–66. 36. Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North Amer­i­ca, 95–96. 37. Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North Amer­i­ca, 95–96. Gordon Sayre, in arguing that Bossu’s account should be understood as a French precursor to the “Mississippi tall tale” genre, dismisses the plausibility of Bossu’s tattoo-­removal method: “You run l­ittle danger of erasing your tattoos,” he writes, by “applying a poultice of firefly paste and plantain leaves.” While I largely agree with his assessment of Bossu as a tall-­tale teller and a transmitter of folkloric knowledge rather than as an eyewitness reporter, Sayre is too quick to reject Bossu’s supposed procedure as in­effec­t ive. Cantharides are not, as he writes, fireflies, but blister beetles. Cantharidin is a topical irritant, derived from dried and crushed beetles of the ­family Meloidae, including a number of species found in the American South. It is still used in con­ temporary medicine to remove warts but is better known as the principal irritant (and toxin) in “Spanish fly” aphrodisiacs. Tattooing by hand does not generally push pigment as deeply into the dermis as modern electric ­needles; therefore, while Bossu’s removal treatment may seem unlikely, it is not implausible that blistering agents applied to a hand-­inked tattoo could lighten the image or scar the skin enough to obscure it. See Sayre, “ ‘ Take My Scalp, Please!” ’ 219; Lisa Moed, Tor A. Shwayder, and Mary Wu Chang, “Cantharidin Revisited: A Blistering Defense of an Ancient Medicine,” Archives of Dermatology 137, no. 10 (October 2001): 1357– 1360. Cantharides w ­ ere also mixed with sulfur, wax, and oil in Roman r­ ecipes to remove tattoos, dating from 54 CE. See Steve Gilbert, ed., Tattoo History: A Source Book—­An Anthology of Historical Rec­ords of Tattooing Throughout the World (New York: Juno, 2000), 15. 38. Bossu, Travels in the Interior of North Amer­i­ca, 96–97. 39. Arnaud Balvay argues that while a number of French colonists seem to have been tattooed, continued prejudice against the practice meant that only a few individuals self-­ identified in their writings as having tattoos. Balvay cites Bossu, Dumont de Montigny, and Chateaugué (I interpret this to refer to e­ ither Charles le Moyne de Longueuil et de Châteauguay or his son, Antoine Le Moyne, Sieur de Châteauguay; however, I have not yet found evidence substantiating Balvay’s claim that e­ ither of t­ hese men had tattoos), all of whom w ­ ere officers—­a nd two of whom claimed to have erased tattoos. Balvay, “Tattooing and Its Role in French-­Native American Relations in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury,” French Colonial History 9 (2008): 7. 40. Translation of Dumont from Sayre, “ ‘Take My Scalp, Please!’ ” 220. The original reads, “C’est pour toutte la vie, quoique moi-­même qui avoit fait sur mon bras gauche, étant jeune, piqué une croix de Saint Louis, j’ay trouvé le secret de l’éffacer.” 41. For an example of the way that clothing made or reinforced identity, see the story of Peter Williamson, who claimed to have been kidnapped from the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, as a child; sold into indentured servitude in Amer­i­ca; and ultimately to have become “king of the Indians.” Much of his claim relied on a physical per­for­mance of “Indianness,” with strategic use of Native attire and material culture, as well as facial paint—­a lthough not, as far as is known, tattoos. See Timothy J. Shannon, Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Wil­ liamson in Amer­i­ca and Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).



Notes to Pages 57–60

141

42. Henry Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake: The Story of a Soldier, Ad­ venturer, and Emissary to the Cherokees, 1756–1765, ed. Duane H. King (Cherokee, NC: Museum of the Cherokee Indian Press, 2007 [1765]), 24. Dumont quoted in Sayre, “ ‘Take My Scalp, Please!’ ” 219. 43. For archaeological evidence of tattooing pigments, ­needles, and other tools, see Aaron Deter-­Wolf, “Needle in a Haystack: Examining the Archaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Tattooing,” in Deter-­Wolf and Diaz-­Granados, eds., Drawing with ­Great ­Needles, 43– 72. Timothy Shannon writes, “The Indian fashion also ­adopted Eu­ro­pean goods for bodily decoration. Indians painted and tattooed their bodies with such traditional materials as bear’s grease and natu­ral dyes; they added to this mix with imported verdigris, which has a green pigment, and vermillion, which has a red.” Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, no. 1 (1996): 21. 44. Relations de la Louisiane, et du fleuve Mississipi (Amsterdam: Chez Jean Frederic Bernard, 1720), 14. This has been attributed to Henri de Tonti, but Gordon Sayre suggests that the text may have been a hoax or prank and that Tonti disavowed the book when it first appeared. Sayre, Les Sauvages Americains, 344. A similar report in a journal kept from 1751 to 1761 by an anonymous French soldier (known only by his initials, J. C. B.) may refer to the same individual or a dif­fer­ent officer. J. C. B. reported, “I have seen an officer who has been” marked “in this manner. . . . ​They [meaning Natives] thought well of him, and often used him as an interpreter.” J. C. B., Travels in New France. trans. S. K. Stevens et al. (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1941). 45. Jean-­François Bertet de la Clue Sabran, A Voyage to Dauphin Island in 1720: The Journal of Bertet de la Clue, trans. and ed. Francis Escoffier and Jay Higginbotham (Mobile, AL: Museum of the City of Mobile, 1974), 63–64. 46. Gilles Havard, “Virilité et ‘ensauvagement’: Le corps du coureur de bois,” CLIO: Histoire, femmes et sociétés 27 (2008): 7. 47. Quoted in Arnaud Balvay, “Tattooing and Its Role in French-­Native American Relations in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” French Colonial History 9 (2008: 6–7. 48. N. de Diéreville, Relation of the Voyage to Port Royal in Acadia or New France (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1933), 169–170. 49. Sarah Rivett, “Learning to Write Algonquian Letters: The Indigenous Place of Language Philosophy in the Seventeenth-­Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 4 (October 2014): 582–583. 50. Havard describes a mixed assessment of tattooing by Eu­ro­pe­a ns, arguing that the practice was “assimilé par la plupart des observateurs à une forme de dérèglement, de dégénérescence et d’ensauvagement.” Havard, “Virilité et ‘ensauvagement,’ ” 6. 51. Grace’s account was one of many appeals to charity or “begging pamphlets” written by veterans in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries. Often complaining of being defrauded or denied a pension, such stories also drew attention to the narrator’s embodied experience, particularly their war wounds, as a justification for their appeals. See Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2000, chap. 1. 52. Henry Grace, The History of the Life and Sufferings of Henry Grace, of Basingstoke in the county of Southhampton . . . ([Reading, UK]: Printed for the author, 1764), 42.

142

Notes to Pages 60–66

53. Dumont quoted in Sayre, “ ‘ Take My Scalp, Please!’ ” 220. 54. Francesco Gioseppe Bressani, “Breve Relatione d’alcune missioni . . . ,” in Thwaites, Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 38, 249. 55. “The surface of the body becomes, in any ­human society, a boundary of a peculiarly complex kind, which si­mul­t a­neously separates domains lying on ­either side of it and conf lates dif­fer­e nt levels of social, individual and intra-­p sychic meaning.” Terence  S. Turner, “The Social Skin,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2 (2012): 503 [reprint of Turner, “The Social Skin,” in Not Work Alone: A Cross-­Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin (London: ­Temple Smith, 1980)]. 56. Robbie Richardson, “The Site of the Strug­gle: Colonialism, Vio­lence, and the Captive Body,” in Native Americans and Anglo-­American Culture, 1750–1830: The Indian Atlantic, ed. Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings, 39–55 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 42, 48. Richardson describes the be­hav­ior of many captives as “feigning Indian”: self-­consciously performing Indian subjectivity to “ensure the survival of the British body at the expense of British identity.” 57. One source suggests an exception: Laudonnière claimed in L’Histoire notable de la Florida (1586) that at least one chief among the Timucua of Florida, rather than putting captives to death, had them instead “[marked] on their left arm [with] a ­g reat sign or brand.” So the possibility that southeastern nations occasionally used tattoos to mark a permanently degraded rather than elevated status does need to be considered. The imagery and placement of such marks was likely dif­fer­ent from tattoos intended as honorifics. René Laudonnière, Three Voyages, trans. Charles  E. Bennett (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 77. 58. Richardson, “Site of the Strug­g le,” 51. 59. Hamilton, ed., Adventures in the Wilderness, 81. 60. Thomas Brown, A Plain Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Remarkable De­ liverance of Thomas Brown . . . (Boston: Printed and sold by Fowle and Draper, 1760), 15–16. 61. Brown, Plain Narrative, 16. Bougainville commented from the French perspective on the failed attempt on Fort William Henry: “The Indians are very discontented over the last expedition, and, since they are not courtiers, they complain loudly. They even go so far as to express their thoughts in full council, but the interpreters only translate what is agreeable to the assembly.” Hamilton, ed., Adventures in the Wilderness, 99. 62. Brown, Plain Narrative, 17. 63. William Bartram, “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians,” in William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings, ed. Thomas P. Slaughter, 527–567 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1996), 533–534. 64. John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighbouring States, Memoirs of the His­ torical Society of Pennsylvania, vol. 12 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876), 206. 65. Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs, 207. 66. George Henry Loskiel, History of the Mission of the United Brethren Among the In­ dians in North Amer­i­ca, trans. Christian Ignatius La Trobe (London: Brethren Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel, 1794 [1789]), 189. See also Lars Krutak’s connection of the motifs in Michael’s facial tattoos, as described by Loskiel, to draw connections to tattoo motifs on war clubs and in the “Four Indian Kings” portraits by John Verelst. Krutak, “Tattoos, Totem



Notes to Pages 66–70

143

Marks, and War Clubs: Projecting Power Through Visual Symbolism in Northern Woodlands Culture,” in Deter-­Wolf and Diaz-­Granados, eds., Drawing with ­Great ­Needles, 95–130. 67. Richard White, “ ‘Although I am dead, I am not entirely dead. I have left a second of myself’: Constructing Self and Persons on the ­Middle Ground,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early Amer­i­ca, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Frederika  J. Teute, 404–418 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997).

Chapter 3 1. Duston appears to have been the first nonallegorical American w ­ oman to have a statue built in her honor. Barbara Cutter, “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized: Hannah Duston and the Nineteenth-­Century Feminization of American Vio­lence,” Journal of ­Women’s His­ tory 20, no. 2 (2008): 11. On the repurposing of Duston’s narrative into mass market artifacts beyond statues and monuments, see Sara Humphreys, “The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston,” Canadian Review of American Studies 41, no. 2 (2011): 149–178. On the relationship between Duston’s memorialization and material culture, including items preserved by her ­family and descendants, see Katherine Grandjean, “Hannah Dustan’s Linen: Scalping, Homespun, and the Memory of Conquest in Early Amer­i­ca” (paper presented at the joint OIEAHC-­Society of Early Americanists Conference, Chicago, June 2015). 2. Cotton Mather, Decennium Luctuosum: An history of remarkable occurrences, in the long war, which New-­England hath had with the Indian salvages, from the year, 1688 to the year, 1698. (Boston: Printed by B. Green and J. Allen for Samuel Phillips, 1699), 143. The “token” of Nicholson’s ­favor was reportedly an engraved pewter tankard, now at the New Hampshire Historical Society. Denise Ortakales, “Following in Hannah Duston’s Footsteps: Reexamining the Evidence,” Historical New Hampshire, June 2015, 31. 3. For the role of gender in shaping who was (or was not) expected to narrate their own stories and the way that Duston was repeatedly ventriloquized by male authors, including Mather, see Lorrayne Carroll, Rhetorical Drag: Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writ­ ing of History (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007). 4. On the enslavement of Indigenous ­peoples in New ­England and intersections with the trans-­Atlantic African slave trade, see Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New ­England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Linford D. Fisher, “ ‘Why S­ hall Wee Have Peace to Bee Made Slaves’: Indian Surrenderers During and A ­ fter King Philip’s War,” Ethnohistory 64, no.  1 (January  2017): 91–114; Wendy Warren, New E ­ ngland Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early Amer­i­ca (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016); and Jared Ross Hardesty, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New ­England (Amherst, MA: Bright Leaf, 2019). 5. Daina Ramey Berry has described the practice of selling the bodies of deceased slaves into the nineteenth-­century medical cadaver trade as the assignment of “ghost values”: commodification of the enslaved even ­a fter death. Her crucial work has influenced my thinking about bounties on several points. Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon, 2017). 6. For recent reexaminations of the value of concepts of biopolitics and biopower in studying early American institutions of slavery and settler colonialism, see “Origins of Biopolitics in the Amer­i­cas,” ed. Greta LaFleur and Kyla Schuller, special issue, American Quarterly 71, no. 3 (September 2019). As LaFleur and Schuller note in their introduction, as scholars have

144

Notes to Pages 70–73

turned greater attention to the ways in which value has been extracted from colonized and enslaved ­peoples, biopolitics has been seen as an increasingly relevant concept for interpreting early Amer­i­ca. Initial theorization of biopolitics as a mode of governance argued that states imposed power on their populations according to a logic of “make live, let die”—­while subsequent work placed greater significance on the “politics of disposability” and death-­ dealing wielded by such a form of state power. For early elaborations of theories of biopo­liti­cal governance, see in par­t ic­u ­lar Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004); and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). For a refocusing of such theories away from Eu­ro­pean metropoles and t­oward colonial sites of extraction, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 7. See Peter C. Mancall, “Scalp Bounties,” in Colonial Wars of North Amer­i­ca, 1512–1763: An Encyclopedia, ed. Alan Gallay, 669–671 (New York: Garland, 1996). 8. On the intersection of Native and En­g lish military cultures in New ­England, see Adam J. Hirsh, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-­Century New ­England,” Journal of American History 74, no.  4 (March  1988): 1187–1212; Ronald Dale Karr, “ ‘Why Should You Be So Furious?’ The Vio­lence of the Pequot War,” Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (December 1998): 876–909; Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New ­England Indians (Lanham, MD: Madison, 1991); Guy Chet, Con­ quering the American Wilderness: The Triumph of Eu­ro­pean Warfare in the Colonial Northeast (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2003); John Grenier, The First Way of War: Amer­ ican War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ann M. ­Little, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New E ­ ngland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Brian D. Carroll, “The Effect of Military Ser­v ice on Indian Communities in Colonial Southern New ­England, 1740–1763,” Early American Stud­ ies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no.  3 (Summer 2016): 506–536; and Gina  M. Martino, ­Women at War in the Borderlands of the Early American Northeast (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 9. Heads ­were particularly meaningful to the En­g lish in the hierarchical symbolism of the body and the state. See Regina Janes, Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Lit­e r­a­ture and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005); and Sarah Covington, Wounds, Flesh, and Meta­phor in Seventeenth-­Century ­England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). On gifts, see Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift-­Exchange in Early Modern E ­ ngland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); and David Murray, Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-­White Exchanges (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2000). 10. As Andrew Lipman notes, “The En­g lish w ­ ere too inconsistent with their countergifts for t­ hese rewards to be characterized as bounties.” Lipman, “ ‘A meanes to knitt them togeather’: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no.1 (2008): 17. 11. Herodotus and other classical authors described the Scythians of central Asia as taking scalps in ­battle; colonial commentators drew on such stories when speculating on the origins of Native Americans. See, for example, William Douglass, A summary, historical and po­liti­cal of the first planting, progressive improvements and pre­sent state of the British Settle­ ments in North Amer­i­ca (London, 1747), vol. 1, 152–153. For a discussion of scalping’s origins and the twentieth-­century misperception that scalping was introduced to North Amer­i­ca by



Notes to Page 73

145

Eu­ro­pe­a ns, see James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who In­ven­ ted Scalping,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1980): 451–472. 12. In the late sixteenth ­century, for example, En­g lish military leaders such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert deployed the severed heads of Irish fighters to intimidate local communities. As one observer described it, “None could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he must passe through a lane of heades, which he used ad terrorem.” Mancall, “Scalp Bounties,” 670. Public exhibition of severed heads or dismembered bodies of criminals and rebels was not uncommon in the seventeenth-­century British Isles, with the practice of displaying heads on London Bridge coming to an end only following the Restoration of Charles II. Richard  J. Chacon and David H. Dye, “Introduction to ­Human Trophy Taking: An Ancient and Widespread Practice,” in The Taking and Displaying of H ­ uman Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindi­ ans, ed. Chacon and Dye, 5–31 (New York: Springer, 2008), 13. For more on early modern En­g lish ideas about desecration and the treatment of the burials and bodies of Native ­peoples, see Christopher Heaney, “A Peru of Their Own: En­g lish Grave-­Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early Amer­i­ca,” William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 4 (October 2016): 609–646. 13. Evidence for scalping in the Amer­i­c as has been recovered from sites dated as early as 2500 years ago (c. 485 BCE), although signs of scalping have also been found on much older crania from sites in Eu­rope and Africa. See Chacon and Dye, “Introduction to ­Human Trophy Taking,” 6. Dye notes elsewhere that other forms of ritual trophy-­taking in eastern North Amer­i­ca, including the removal of hands and forearms, can be dated to much ­earlier periods (approximately seven thousand years ago). David H. Dye, War Paths, Peace Paths: An Ar­ chaeology of Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North Amer­i­ca (New York: AltaMira, 2009), 61–62. 14. Th ­ ere is evidence for scalp-­taking across a broad geographic and cultural range of Native North Amer­i­c a, including among Southwestern, ­Great Plains, and Eastern Woodlands communities. The properties and uses of scalps varied. Some socie­ties treated scalps as power­f ul objects of medicine that could cause and cure disease. ­Others placed scalps along trails to declare war or expressed anger ­toward enemies by desecrating their scalps. Scalps ­were used in some socie­t ies in adoption ceremonies, where they might be painted red in the same fashion as a­ dopted prisoners and then employed to symbolically reincarnate deceased relations. For one recent anthropological interpretation of scalping, see Linea Sundstrom, “The Meaning of Scalping in Native North Amer­i­c a,” in Transforming the Dead: Culturally Modified Bone in the Prehistoric Midwest, ed. Eve A. Hargrave, Shirley J. Schermer, et al., 249–261 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015). For other culturally or tribally specific examples of scalps as ritual objects, see Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, “Supplemental Data on Amerindian Trophy Taking,” 618–629; and Ron Williamson, “ ‘Otinontsiskiag ondaon’ (‘The House of Cut-­O ff Heads’): The History and Archaeology of Northern Iroquoian Trophy Taking,” 190–221, both in Chacon and Dye, eds., Taking and Displaying of ­Human Body Parts as Trophies. Andrew Lipman argues that for the En­g lish, severed heads best accomplished their symbolic work while “at rest and on display in a prominent location,” while for Native p ­ eoples of the Northeast, scalps, heads, and hands performed their meanings “while in motion” and being passed among ­people. Lipman, “ ‘A meanes to knitt them togeather,’ ” 13–14. 15. Th ­ ere are some notable exceptions, including the 1676 “gift” that Captain Benjamin Church made of Metacom’s hand, offering it to Alderman, the Native man who shot him. It is telling, however, that while Church characterized the severed hand as a “gift” that Alderman

146

Notes to Pages 73–75

could use “to show to such gentlemen as would bestow gratuities upon him,” it was actually an object that this man had earned by killing the Wampanoag leader. The En­g lish retained Metacom’s head for their own trophy display in Plymouth. Benjamin Church, Entertaining History of King Philip’s War (reprinted in The History of Philip’s War [Exeter, NH: J & B Williams, 1829; Bowie, MD: Heritage, 1989]), 125–126. 16. Philip Vincent, A true relation of the late battell fought in New E ­ ngland, between the En­glish, and the Pequet salvages (London: Printed by M[armaduke] P[arsons] for Nathanael Butter, and Iohn Bellamie, 1638), 12. 17. Such plans “linked the conquests of wolves and Indians . . . ​I ndians would subordinate wolves in order to collect the emblems of their own subordination.” Jon  T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in Amer­i­ca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 64. 18. Coleman, Vicious, 63. 19. For Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay, see Mas­sa­chu­setts Archives, University of Mas­sa­chu­setts, Boston (hereafter MA) vol. 1:3; for Plymouth see Coleman, Vicious, 60. 20. For examples of o ­ rders for payment, see MA vol. 1:9, MA vol. 1:18, MA vol. 100:93. 21. Coleman, Vicious, 47. For “assurance of reconciliation” see Thomas Morton, New En­glish Canaan, or, New Canaan: Containing an abstract of New E ­ ngland (Amsterdam, 1637), 79. 22. Morton, New En­glish Canaan, 80. See “discommodity, n.,” OED Online, March 2018, Oxford University Press, accessed December 7, 2020, https://­w ww​-­oed​-­com​.­libdata​.­lib​.­ua​ .­edu​/­v iew​/­Entry​/­53836​?­redirectedFrom​=­%27discommodity%27&. 23. “An Act for Supplying the Defects in the Act Entituled ‘An Act Encouraging the Killing of Wolves’ ” (1694), in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay  .  .  . ​Volume One (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1869), 196. 24. While t­ here was significant variability between ­actual scalp bounty payments and the promised rewards of legislative acts (disbursed amounts ­were often much lower than the indicated terms), that seems to have been less common with wolf payments. However, it is likely that awards for wolf bounties ­were also not as uniformly distributed as their ­legal frameworks implied. Native men, despite being urged by the colonies to take up this task of wolf eradication, seem to have had their trustworthiness and suitability for the awards questioned regularly by colonial officials. In 1687, one “Nimrod Indian” needed to pre­sent notes from three En­g lishmen verifying that he had killed two wolves in order to collect his bounty, an additional burden of proof apparently not required of colonists. By the beginning of the eigh­ teenth ­century, Mas­sa­chu­setts officials w ­ ere obliged to repeatedly decree that Indians w ­ ere entitled to receive the same bounties as a colonist for killing wolves; such o ­ rders implied that local officeholders w ­ ere sometimes withholding the full awards for Indian petitioners. See Coleman, Vicious, 61; Acts and Resolves, Vol. 2, 88; MA vol. 1:105–6, 112. 25. Acts and Resolves, Vol. 2, 88. 26. Coleman, Vicious, 62. For “hellhound” and “wolves” see Amy Schrager Land, ed., “A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American ­Women’s Narratives, ed. William L. Andrews, 11–65 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 33; for “roaring lions” see John Underhill, Newes from Amer­i­ca (London, 1638), in Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society Collections, 3rd ser., 6 (1837), 15. 27. Letter from Rev. Solomon Stoddard to Gov. Joseph Dudley, October  22, 1703, New ­England Historical and Genealogical Register 24 (1870): 269–270.



Notes to Pages 76–77

147

28. Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, En­glish, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New E ­ ngland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 99–100. 29. Nathaniel Saltonstall, The Pre­sent State of New-­England, with re­spect to the Indian War: Wherein is an account of the true reason thereof (London: Printed for Dorman Newman, at the King’s Arms in the Poultry, and at the Ship and Anchor at the Bridg-­Foot on Southwark side, 1676), 9. A body part that Eu­ro­pe­a ns seem to not have even closely defined or conceptualized, let alone valued as a war trophy prior to contact with Native Americans, the scalp can be difficult to spot in archives, since early rec­ords frequently use terms like “hair-­skin” or “head-­skin.” Trophy-­taking practices that from context are clearly the act of scalping are sometimes described as the taking of “heads” or the tops of skulls. Saltonstall describes an En­glish expedition returning with “two Indians Heads (i.e. the Skin with the Hair on it)” (6). See James Axtell and William Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who In­ven­ted Scalping,” William and Mary Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1980): 456–461. Similar examples can be found in Spanish and French sources, such as Garcilaso de la Vega’s 1605 use of “todo el casco en re­ dondo” (“all the skull in a circle”) to describe the mutilation of members of Hernando de Soto’s expedition killed by Floridians and Samuel de Champlain’s 1604 characterization of ­A lgonquian and Innu del­e­ga­tions as dancing with and displaying on poles the “testes” (“heads”) of their enemies—­f rom context, almost certainly scalps rather than severed heads. See Thomas Peotto, “Dark Mimesis: A Cultural History of the Scalping Paradigm” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2018), 60, 143. 30. Captain Benjamin Church and his party of soldiers eventually received thirty shillings for killing Philip. Church’s son described the com­pany’s premium as “scanty reward, and poor encouragement.” It was certainly less than the two hundred shilling value of the reward that Saltonstall claimed had been offered to the Narragansett. See Samuel Drake, The His­ tory of King Philip’s War . . . ​With Some Account of the Divine Providence T ­ owards Col. Benjamin Church, by his Son Thomas Church (Boston: Howe and Norton, 1825), 101. See also Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1998), 174. 31. In 1641, during Kieft’s War, the leadership of New Netherland offered ten fathoms of wampum for each head of a Raritan, but this award made no reference to scalps. Margaret Haig Roo­se­velt Sewall Ball, “Grim Commerce: Scalps, Bounties, and the Transformation of Trophy-­Taking in the Early American Northeast, 1450–1770,” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, 2013), 77. 32. A similar argument has been made by some ethnohistorians and archaeologists to explain the development of scalping in the first place, suggesting that groups transitioned from trophy-­taking of entire heads to scalps b ­ ecause they preserved better and w ­ ere easier to transport quickly from b ­ attles. This does not explain, however, why some groups continued to prefer entire heads. See Chacon and Dye, “Introduction to H ­ uman Trophy Taking.” 33. See Brian D. Carroll, “ ‘Savages’ in the Ser­v ice of Empire: Native American Soldiers in Gorham’s Rangers, 1744–1762,” New E ­ ngland Quarterly 85, no. 3 (September 2012): 383–429, for an examination of Native participation in one ranger unit of the Mas­sa­chu­setts provincial army. As Carroll notes, leadership positions in such units ­were held by Anglo-­A mericans, with Native men serving in the rank and file—­a nd bearing the brunt of military ser­v ice’s costs: “In 1749, [John Gorham, the unit’s commander] noted that during the com­pany’s first

148

Notes to Pages 77–80

three years, three-­quarters of the Indians in the rangers ­were killed or captured, an incredibly high casualty rate for this or any era” (426). 34. MA vol. 36:218. Bounties can be seen sometimes as a proxy tactic: colonial governments often blamed the French for instigating Indian raids but ­were financially and militarily unable, or unwilling for diplomatic reasons, to directly confront the French, choosing instead to focus on the Native attacks themselves. This reward is unusual in explic­itly offering rewards for French deaths. The first authorization of scalp bounties by the government of New France has often been dated to 1688, based on the testimony of a Native man known as Magsigpen, or Graypoole, who told officials at Albany in September  1688 that the governor of Canada had promised ten beaver skins for each scalp from En­g lish colonists or their Native allies. Jean-­François Lozier is skeptical of this account and suggests that the first scalp payments by New France ­were instead offered in late 1691 or 1692 by the new governor, the comte de Frontenac, “pour animer nos Sauvages alliez à ne point se réconcilier avec l’anglois” (“to animate our allied Sauvages to not go and be reconciled with the En­glish”) with ten crowns offered per scalp. Lozier, “Lever des chevelures en Nouvelle-­France: La politique française du paiement des scalps,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 56, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 518. 35. MA vol. 36:218. 36. While it became common to require enslaved Indians to be deported, often to the Ca­rib­bean or the Carolinas, a number of petitions a­ fter King Philip’s War show colonists requesting exceptions to t­hese rules. In par­tic­u ­lar, requests to retain possession of captured Indian c­ hildren w ­ ere common, pleading the good be­hav­ior—­a nd usefulness—of ­children who ­were presumably to be kept in servitude. See MA vol. 30:200; vol. 30:223a; and vol. 30:239. See also Margaret Ellen Newell, “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New ­England, 1670–1720,” inReinterpreting New E ­ ngland Indians and the Colonial Experience: Pub­ lications of the Colonial Society of Mas­sa­chu­setts, Volume 71, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, 106–136 (Boston: Colonial Society of Mas­sa­chu­setts, 2003). Newell argues that outright enslavement and exportation declined ­a fter 1700, but I find the language of prisoner deportation seems to have remained in bounty acts for years afterward. See, for example, Acts and Resolves, Vol. 1, 594–595. 37. MA vol. 30:358a–359. 38. As Guy Chet points out, “Ever-­parsimonious colonial assemblies made liberal use of scalp bounties” as cost-­saving mea­sures, getting armed ranger units to patrol without the financial and po­liti­cal difficulties of drafting large numbers of enlistees. Bounties still required, however, that ­these volunteers work in companies ­under a proper officer and be granted a commission by the commander-­in-­chief. Such rules w ­ ere intended to ensure greater control over the groups and enable the government to direct their efforts to the areas that needed them most. Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness, 91, 104. 39. MA vol. 30:368. 40. MA vol. 30:435. 41. MA vol. 70:664. 42. In a postscript to a separate 1703 act, the governor and council ­were authorized by the General Assembly to pay three pounds for any captured Native c­ hildren u ­ nder ten in order to “have them for the redemption of our Captives.” The act ordered that the ­children be “improved to no other use or ­else they ­shall be sold beyond Sea by the Captors,” presumably to prevent officials from profiting themselves by selling the c­ hildren as slaves. It is unclear



Notes to Pages 80–84

149

­ hether this option of using captured Native ­children to redeem captive colonists was ever w used. MA vol. 71:8. 43. Acts and Resolves, Vol. 1, 594–595. The age of twelve was widely considered the age of discernment, or full moral culpability, in En­g lish civil and criminal law, while Catholic canon law understood the age of discretion—­the age at which one could renounce one’s religion—to be twelve for girls and fourteen for boys. In both colonial New ­England and New France, the age of consent for marriage was also commonly set at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys. Ann M. ­Little, “ ‘Keep Me with You, So That I Might Not Be Damned’: Age and Captivity in Colonial Borderlands Warfare,” in Age in Amer­i­ca: The Colonial Era to the Pre­sent, eds. Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett, 23–46 (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 39–40. See also Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: ­Children, Law, and the Anglo-­ American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 44. For a similar assessment of how bounties contributed to racialized notions of “Indian-­ as-­enemy,” see Ball, “Grim Commerce,” 162–163. 45. See MA vol. 30:358a–359. 46. Saltonstall, Pre­sent State of New-­England, 7. On colonial anx­i­eties relating to clothing and identity, see Wendy Lucas Castro, “Stripped: Clothing and Identity in Colonial Captivity Narratives,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 1 (2008): 104–136; and Ann M. ­Little, “ ‘Shoot That Rogue, for He Hath an En­g lishman’s Coat On!’: Cultural Cross-­ Dressing on the New ­England Frontier, 1620–1760,” New E ­ ngland Quarterly 74, no. 2 (2001): 238–273. 47. The Diary of Samuel Sewell, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1973), vol. 1, 24–25. 48. As John Grenier explains, terms like “adult” or “child” ­were “discretionary terms dependent on the judgment of the scalp hunter. . . . ​The bounties certainly erased the distinction between combatants and noncombatants.” Grenier, First Way of War, 42. 49. An impor­tant consideration, I argue, remained pre­sent in the minds of many bounty hunters: it was not only the difference between receiving a reward and receiving none, but between having performed an act deemed worthy of reward and one that was not. Accounts that emphasized unquestionable courage and fair fighting ­were impor­tant accompaniments to the pre­sen­ta­t ion of a scalp and ­were intended to corroborate the request for a reward. 50. MA vol. 30:358a–359. 51. David Silverman, “The Curse of God: An Idea and Its Origins Among the Indians of New York’s Revolutionary Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66, no. 3 (2009): 510. The murder of Indian noncombatants and allies with the goal of receiving scalp bounties happened numerous times in Pennsylvania during the Seven Years’ War as well. See Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early Amer­i­ca (New York: W. W. Norton), 2009. 52. Acts and Resolves, Vol. 11, 39. ­There ­were two men named Moses Markham in Wonno’s com­pany, one the lieutenant and the other a clerk. New E ­ ngland Historical and Genealogical Register 44 (1890): 25. 53. Carroll, “ ‘Savages’ in the Ser­v ice of Empire,” 406; quote from Gorham on 407. 54. MA vol. 30:496–497. 55. MA vol. 30:496–497. 56. MA vol. 30:496–497.

150

Notes to Pages 84–89

57. MA vol. 70:664. One sentence of the petition, which appears to describe the men’s status as volunteers or enlistees and therefore how much pay they would be eligible to receive, is illegible. 58. MA vol. 30:498a. 59. MA vol. 30:498a. 60. Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay Acts, Laws, and ­Orders, HeinOnline Session Laws Library, July 1720: 14. 61. Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay Acts, Laws, and ­Orders, HeinOnline Session Laws Library, November 1721: 126. 62. John Grenier, The Far Reaches of Empire: War in Nova Scotia, 1710–1760 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 55. 63. Grenier, First Way of War, 49. Th ­ ose participating in the initial raid on Norridgewock, frustrated at their failure to capture Râle, responded by plundering the village church and leaving a note on the chapel door threatening to kill the priest. Certainly the ranger groups felt that their actions had the tacit approval of the Mas­sa­chu­setts government; no excuses or apologies ­were made for not capturing the priest alive. See Grenier, Far Reaches of Empire, 55. 64. William Blake Trask, ed., “Letters of Col­o­nel Thomas Westbrook and ­Others, Relative to Indian Affairs in Maine, 1722–1726,” New E ­ ngland Historical and Genealogical Rec­ord 48 (1894): 156. 65. Se­lections from the public documents of the Province of Nova Scotia, ed. Thomas B. Akins (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: C. Annand, 1869): “The com­pany coming in” (149); letter from the inhabitants of ­Grand Pré, river Canard, and Pizziquid, with response from council (153–154). 66. John Knox, An Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North Amer­i­ca, for the Years 1757, 1758, 1759, and 1760, ed. Arthur G. Doughty (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1914), vol. 2, 26. 67. By the 1720s, multigenerational participation in warfare against Native Americans was becoming a tradition for some New ­England families: Lovewell’s ­father fought at the ­Great Swamp Fight alongside Benjamin Church. See Grenier, First Way of War, 38. 68. Frederic Kidder, The expeditions of Capt. John Lovewell: And his encounters with the Indians including a par­tic­u­lar account of Pequauket ­battle, with a history of that tribe; and a reprint of Rev. Thomas Symmes’s sermon (Boston: Bartlett and Halliday, 1865), 11. 69. Boston News-­Letter (Boston: Printed and Sold by B. Green, his Printing-­House in Newbury-­Street), no. 1093, January 7, 1725. That this adolescent was taken captive—­r ather than killed and scalped—is further evidence that such confrontations ­were more complex than the formulas of the bounty laws. 70. Kidder, Expeditions of Capt. John Lovewell, 16–17. 71. Boston News-­Letter, no. 1101, March 4, 1725. 72. Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-­England with the Eastern Indi­ ans . . . (Cincinnati: J. Harpel, 1859), 108. 73. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New-­Hampshire, Comprehending the Events of Sev­ enty Five Years, From MDCCXV to MDCCXC, vol. 2 (Dover, NH: Printed for O. Crosby and J. Varney, 1812), 52. 74. Kidder, Expeditions of Capt. John Lovewell, 95. ­Family members of several of ­t hose killed at Pequawket, including Lovewell’s ­w idow, petitioned the Mas­sa­chu­setts government for assistance, as did several wounded survivors. One injured man, Eleazar Davis, received a four-­pound annuity for five years, while another received a single payment of five pounds.



Notes to Pages 89–95

151

Much like scalp bounties, grants of aid for disability or for the loss of a husband or son varied widely in their amounts. 75. Robert E. Cray, Lovewell’s Fight: War, Death, and Memory in Borderland New ­England (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2014). 76. Kidder, Expeditions of Capt. John Lovewell, 34. 77. Kidder, Expeditions of Capt. John Lovewell, 70. For more on the legends that grew up around the com­pany and the treatment of Lovewell as a tragic martyr in New ­England folklore, see Cray, Lovewell’s Fight. On the erasure of Native sovereignty and per­sis­tent, ongoing presence in ­favor of accounts of settler arrival, see Jean  M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New ­England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 78. On “the logic of elimination” in settler colonialism, see Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. As Wolfe points out, “The primary motive for elimination is . . . ​access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible ele­ment” (388). 79. MA vol. 70:350; Acts and Resolves, Vol. 7, 153–154. 80. George Wingate Chase, The History of Haverhill, Mas­sa­chu­setts, from its first settle­ ment in 1640, to the year 1860 (Haverhill, MA: Published by the Author, 1861), 195. 81. Emma Lewis Coleman, New ­England Captives Carried to Canada Between 1677 and 1760 During the French and Indian Wars, vol. 1 (Portland, ME: Southworth, 1925), 343; Chase, History of Haverhill, 308–309. 82. The lands conveyed by Mas­sa­chu­setts to Lovewell’s ­family and the heirs of the other men killed in 1725 ­were in what is now Pembroke, New Hampshire, about fifteen miles southeast of the Penacook site. In 1762, Mas­sa­chu­setts would grant the ­actual ­battle site at Pequawket to a township now known as Fryeburg, Maine—­named for the initial claimant, Col­o­nel Joseph Frye, a relation of Chaplain Jonathan Frye, a member of Lovewell’s com­pany who died from his wounds following the fight.

Chapter 4 1. Charles Thomson and Christian Frederick Post to Pa. Gov. William Denny and Gen. John Forbes, June 18, 1758, Friendly Association Papers, TriCollege Libraries Archives and Manuscripts, Haverford College, 2:27, quoted in Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How In­ dian War Transformed Early Amer­i­ca (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 131. 2. Quoted in Craig Thompson Friend, “Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South,” in Death and the American South, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, 15–35 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 15. 3. Dean R. Snow, Charles T. Gehring, and William A. Starna, eds., In Mohawk Country: Early Narratives About a Native P ­ eople (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 269. 4. John Long, Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, Describing the Manners and Customs of the North American Indians . . . (London: Printed for the author, 1791), 22. 5. Erik Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-­Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 6. Angela Rosenthal, “Raising Hair,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 38 (Fall 2004): 1–2. 7. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 21. Full effectiveness of such efforts requires, I would argue,

152

Notes to Pages 95–100

both reinforcing and undercutting the material real­ity of injuries aligned with any opposing construct. Hence perhaps the veering in early American writings about Indians between passive melancholy and nearly pornographic vio­lence: minimizing vio­lence against Native ­peoples at times, dwelling on it at ­great length at other times. 8. Colonist George Allen was also among the leaders of a group of scouts “dressed as Indians, sent out . . . ​to Shamokin” in the summer of 1756. See Charles Beatty, “Journal Kept in 1756,” in William Henry Egle, History of the Counties of Dauphin and Lebanon in the Com­ monwealth of Pennsylvania: Biographical and Genealogical, 54–55 (Philadelphia, 1883). 9. Anonymous account in Archibald Loudon, A Se­lection of Some of the Most In­ter­est­ ing Narratives of the Outrages Committed by the Indians in Their Wars with the White ­People . . . (Carlisle [PA]: From the Press of A. Loudon, 1808), vol. 2, 187. 10. Anonymous account in Loudon, In­ter­est­ing Outrages, vol. 2, 188. 11. “He afterwards told, that ­r unning down the hill he fell asleep, that ­a fter he recovered, he got up to run but the skin of his face, the scalp being off, came down over his eyes so that he could not see, he then took off the leggin that was left, and bound it round his face, and when he came to a spring, he took the cold moss of the stones, laid it on his head to keep the hot sun from beating in upon his brains, and made out to get to the ­Great Island, when he recovered.” Loudon, In­ter­est­ing Outrages, vol. 2, 188. 12. James H. Merrell, “ ‘ The Cast of His Countenance’: Reading Andrew Montour,” inThrough a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early Amer­i­ca, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredricka J. Teute, 13–39 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997), 36–37. 13. Loudon, In­ter­est­ing Outrages, vol. 2, 188. 14. The fourth scalp may have been the result of a similar, unreported incident or, perhaps more likely, the product of subdividing one of the original scalps in order to fraudulently claim a larger reward. W. Patterson, receipt, August 6, 1764, Shippen ­Family Papers, Shippen ­Family Correspondence, vol. 6, 107, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 15. Charles Read, Copy of a Letter from Charles Read, Esq. . . . (Philadelphia: Printed and sold by Andrew Steuart, 1764), 5. 16. James Thacher, A Military Journal During the American Revolutionary War, from 1775 to 1783 . . . (Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1823), 135–137. 17. Thacher, Military Journal, 136. 18. Thacher, Military Journal, 137. 19. On pension applications and descriptions of disabled veterans, see Laurel Daen, “Revolutionary War Invalid Pensions and the Bureaucratic Language of Disability in the Early Republic,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 52, no. 1 (2017): 141–167; and Benjamin H. Irvin, “ ‘[A]s Witness That I Have No Hands’: The Disability Pension Application as Memory of the Revolutionary War” (paper presented at “Histories of Vio­lence: War and Memory Symposium,” Northwestern University, May 2013). 20. John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for In­de­pen­dence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 242. 21. Gregg was not the only scalping survivor to signal complex ­mental and physical trauma and distress as a result of his experience. In another incident during the Revolution, a coureur de bois named Francis Maisonville captured in 1779 at Vincennes by American forces ­under the command of George Rogers Clark was ordered publicly scalped. Maisonville was



Notes to Pages 100–105

153

partially scalped in full view of the British outpost before Clark reportedly called off his torture. Afterward, Maisonville died by suicide while being held prisoner in a ­Virginia prison. See John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 156–157. 22. Dann, ed., Revolution Remembered, 245. 23. “Adventure of Captain Gregg,” in John R. Chapin, “Indian Tales,” unbound sheets from Chapin’s Historical Picture Gallery (Boston: D. Bigelow, 1856), Newberry Library, Chicago. 24. [Citizen of New-­England], The Child’s Picture Book of Indians . . . (Boston: Car­ter, Hendee, and Co., 1833), iii–iv, 74–76. 25. A. W. Putnam, History of ­Middle Tennessee; or, Life and Times of Gen. James Robert­ son, (Nashville: Published for the author, 1859), 153. 26. Putnam, History of M ­ iddle Tennessee, 155. 27. Putnam, History of M ­ iddle Tennessee, 355. 28. Katherine Ledford observes, “The lived experiences of vio­lence in the trans-­Appalachian West and the published tales that circulated about t­ hose experiences created a collective ­mental trauma in the early nation that impacted reactions to the Appalachian and trans-­Appalachian region for years afterward”: such a claim is reflected in the generational transmission of accounts of frontier vio­lence into nineteenth-­century local histories. Ledford, “ ‘A Possession, or an Absence of Ears’: The Shape of Vio­lence in Travel Narratives About the Mountain South, 1779–1835,” in Blood in the Hills: A History of Vio­lence in Appalachia, ed. Bruce E. Stewart, 125–144 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 137. 29. Putnam, History of M ­ iddle Tennessee, 158. 30. Putnam, History of M ­ iddle Tennessee, 154. 31. Joel Barlow, The Columbiad: A Poem (Philadelphia: Fry and Kimmerer, 1807), 240. Descriptions of McCrea’s hair quoted in Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution, ed. John Richard Alden (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 496–497. Other works that made prominent use of the McCrea legend included a 1784 novella by Michel-­René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Miss McCrea: A Novel of the American Revolution, as well as a poem by Philip Freneau and histories by Mercy Otis Warren and Washington Irving. See Jeremy Engels and Greg Goodale, “ ‘Our B ­ attle Cry W ­ ill Be: Remember Jenny McCrea!’ A Précis on the Rhe­toric of Revenge,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (March 2009): 93–112. 32. “More intimate than clothing and yet more reliably prearranged than countenance, hair represents a primary means of staking a claim to social space on the occasion of first impressions.” Margaret K. Powell and Joseph R. Roach, “Big Hair,” Eighteenth-­Century Stud­ ies 38, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 83. 33. Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 637. 34. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Presentment of Civility: En­glish Reading of American Self-­Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 197; Angela Rosenthal, “Raising Hair,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 38, no.  1 (Fall 2004): 1–16; and Nina G. Jablonski, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 128. 35. “A Narrative of the Captivity of John McCullough, Esq., Written by Himself,” in Loudon, In­ter­est­ing Outrages, 301.

154

Notes to Pages 105–110

36. “Elizabeth Baker,” in J. Norman Heard, Handbook of the American Frontier, Vol. 1: The Southeastern Woodlands (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1987), 30; and W. H. Perrin, Kentucky: A History of the State, 7th ed. (Louisville: F. A. Battey, 1887), 896. 37. Nancy Isenberg, “Death and Satire: Dismembering the Body Politic,” in Mortal Re­ mains: Death in Early Amer­i­ca, ed. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, 71–90 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 38. Putnam, History of M ­ iddle Tennessee, 355. 39. Edwin Paschall, Old Times, or, Tennessee History: For Tennessee Boys and Girls (Nashville: For the author, 1869), 61. 40. Stories that Native communities scalped prisoners during torture ceremonies may have lent credence to fears that a victim’s survival was a deliberate choice by perpetrators. Widely publicized accounts of the 1782 torture and death of Col­o­nel William Crawford at the hands of a group of Wyandot, for example, emphasized that he was scalped while still alive. See “Narrative of Dr. Knight,” in Loudon, In­ter­est­ing Outrages, 17; “Captivity of Robert Eastburn,” in Loudon, In­ter­est­ing Outrages, vol. 2, 61. 41. John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh Talmage Lefler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 10. John Stewart quoted in Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the En­glish Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 185. 42. Putnam, History of M ­ iddle Tennessee, 432. 43. Felix Robertson, “Remarks on the Management of the Scalped-­Head,” Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal 2 (1806): 27–30. Robertson received his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania u ­ nder the direction of Benjamin Smith Barton, who edited the Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal. 44. Vance and Robertson met at the garrisons on the Long-­I sland of the Holston River in eastern Tennessee (a starting point for the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap), and Vance was originally from Augusta County, V ­ irginia, according to Robertson, suggesting that American medical treatments for scalping traveled west with settlers. 45. For discussion of the role of the “curious” medical case in newspapers, journals, and epistolary writing of the early Republic, see Sarah Knott, “The Patient’s Case: Sentimental Empiricism and Knowledge in the Early American Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 4 (October 2010): 658. 46. Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Lit­er­a­ ture, 1682–1861 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New E ­ ngland, 1997), 97. 47. Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment, 94–95. ­Here Burnham describes the era’s writing as taking melancholic plea­sure in descriptions of Native nations and individuals as ­dying, vanis­hing, or in geographic and cultural retreat, often recounting such patterns in the passive voice and thereby eliding causality. 48. Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods, or, The Jibbenainosay: A Tale of Ken­ tucky, ed. Cecil B. Williams (New York: American Book Com­pany, 1939), 42–44. 49. Bird, Nick of the Woods, 7–8. 50. Bird, Nick of the Woods, 254, 333. 51. Bird, Nick of the Woods, 394. 52. Bird, Nick of the Woods, 263.



Notes to Pages 110–119

155

53. For further discussion of Nathan as exemplifying the “Indian-­hater” in American lit­er­a­ture, see Klaus Lubbers, Born for the Shade: Ste­reo­types of the Native American in United States Lit­er­a­ture and the Visual Arts, 1776–1894 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 279–281. 54. Bird, Nick of the Woods, 402, 375. 55. Bird, Nick of the Woods, 376, 408.

Epilogue 1. David Meschutt, “Wright, Joseph (16 July  1756 or 1757–13 September 1793), painter and sculptor,” American National Biography, February 1, 2000, accessed February 10, 2020, https://­w ww​-­a nb​-­org​.­l ibdata​.­l ib​.­u a​.­e du​/­v iew​/­10​.­1093​/­a nb​/­9 780198606697​.­0 01​.­0 001​/­a nb​ -­9780198606697​-­e​-­1700948. 2. Bernard  W. Sheehan, “ ‘The Famous Hair Buyer General’: Henry Hamilton, George Rogers Clark, and the American Indian,” Indiana Magazine of History 79, no.  1 (March 1983): 25. 3. Hamilton’s own correspondence made note of several instances when he had received scalps, with amounts ranging from 9 to 129. Sheehan, “ ‘Famous Hair Buyer General,’ ” 14. 4. Richard White, The ­Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the G ­ reat Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 376–377. 5. White, ­Middle Ground, 376. 6. Sheehan, “ ‘Famous Hair Buyer General,’ ” 21–22. 7. See Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2016). As Parkinson argues, Clark became perceived—­ largely through the types of performative vio­lence he engaged in at Vincennes—as “a kind of super-­A merican, conflating Indian hating and patriotic ardor for the common cause” (432). 8. John Speed, The history of ­Great Britaine ­under the conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans (Imprinted at London: [By John Beale] anno cum privilegio 1623 are to be sold by George ­Humble at the Whit h ­ orse in Popes-­head Alley, [1623]), 167. 9. Freeman’s Journal quoted in Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early Amer­i­ca (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 251. On the rumors of scalping at Lexington, see Gregory Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 168. 10. Theorists who have explored the strategies and m ­ ental habits of settler colonialism include Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Poli­ tics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999); and Lorenzo Veracini, Set­ tler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 11. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 144. 12. For more on the presence of scalping survivors both in nineteenth-­century Western narratives and in con­temporary film, see Mairin Odle, “ ‘We Are All Savages’: Scalping in The Revenant,” Common-­place: The Journal of Early American Life (December  2016), http://­ commonplace​.­online​/­article​/­we​-­are​-­all​-­savages​-­scalping​-­and​-­survival​-­in​-­t he​-­revenant​/­. 13. For Oatman, see Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Jennifer Putzi, Identifying Marks: Race, Gender, and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006);

156

Notes to Pages 119–121

and Brenna Casey, “In Transit: W ­ omen, Photography, and the Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca,” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2017). 14. Emilee Gilpin, “Reawakening Cultural Tattooing of the Northwest,” Canada’s Na­ tional Observer, August  23, 2018, https://­w ww​.­nationalobserver​.­com​/­2018​/­08​/­23​/­t hese​-­five​ -­indigenous​-­tattoo​-­a rtists​-­a re​-­reawakening​-­cultural​-­practices. See also the interviews with con­temporary tattooists in Lars Krutak, Tattoo Traditions of Native North Amer­i­ca: Ancient and Con­temporary Expressions of Identity (Volendam, Netherlands: Stichting LM, 2014). 15. Inuit communities, perhaps most prominently, have growing numbers of w ­ omen creating and receiving traditional tattoos. See Angela Hovak Johnston, Reawakening Our Ancestors’ Lines: Revitalizing Inuit Traditional Tattooing (Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada: Inhabit Media, 2017); see also Inuk filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-­Baril’s documentary Tunniit: Retracing the Lines of Inuit Tattoos (Cinema Politica, 2011). In New Zealand/Aotearoa, Māori ­women are also receiving the moko kauae, or traditional chin tattoo, in increasing numbers. Nanaia Mahuta was in 2016 the first female member of Parliament to wear the moko in Parliament. Mihingarangi Forbes, “Mahuta in MP Tattoo First,” Radio New Zealand, August 9, 2016, https://­w ww​.­rnz​.­co​.­nz​/­news​/­political​/­310409​/­mahuta​-­in​-­mp​-­tattoo​-­first. 16. “Press Statement, May 2017,” Traditional Cultural Advisors Committee, Osage Nation Historic Preservation Office, https://­w ww​.­osagenation​-­nsn​.­gov​/­who​-­we​-­a re​/­historic​ -­preservation​/­t raditional​-­cultural​-­advisors. 17. Caitlin Newago, “Cultural Appropriation in the Tattoo Industry: Art or Racism?” Bi­ zaanideewin, January 25, 2020, https:// ­bizaanideewin​.­com​/ ­blogs​/ ­blog ​/­cultural​-­appropriation​ -­in​-­t he​-­tattoo​-­industry​-­a rt​-­or​-­racism. As a materialization of settler-­colonial narrative—­a tangible repre­sen­ta­tion of identity, power, and connections made and unmade—­perhaps few con­temporary tattoos are more striking than that of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. On his left bicep, Trudeau sports a large Haida raven design surrounding planet Earth. The image was adapted from artwork by Haida artist Robert Davidson, who had not given permission for his work to be used and who first learned about the tattoo when media outlets asked him for comment. Davidson initially described his reaction as being “more humoured than upset” and spoke of his optimism regarding the Trudeau administration’s pledges to improve relations with First Nations communities. Following Trudeau’s election, however, relations between his administration and Indigenous communities soured, as promises of reconciliation and environmental protection w ­ ere undermined by rapid greenlighting of a proposed liquefied natu­ral gas export terminal on Haida Gwaii, among other controversial proj­ects affecting First Nations territories across Canada. Davidson has spoken out about his disappointment, saying, “In accepting a tattoo, you commit to the values and laws that govern our nation.” One Haida local said Trudeau had presented himself “as an ally . . . ​w ith our ink on his body. We feel he’s stabbed us in the back.” Nancy Macdonald, “Skin-­Deep: The Awkwardness of Justin Trudeau’s Haida Tattoo,” Maclean’s, October 27, 2016, https://­w ww​.­macleans​.­ca​ /­politics​/­ottawa ​/­skin​-­deep​-­t he​-­awkwardness​-­of​-­justin​-­t rudeaus​-­haida​-­t attoo​/­ ; and Rosie Prata, “Haida Artist ­Behind Trudeau’s Tattoo: ‘I’m Just Appalled,’ ” Canadian Art, November 10, 2016, https://­canadianart​.­ca​/­features​/­robert​-­davidson​-­t rudeau​-­tattoo​-­statement​/­. 18. Leslie Jamison, “A G ­ rand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” ­Virginia Quarterly Review 90, no. 2 (Spring 2014), http://­w ww​.­vqronline​.­org​/­essays​-­articles​/­2014​/­04​/­grand​-­unified​-­t heory​ -­female​-­pain.

INDEX

Abenaki p ­ eoples, 68–69, 85–86, 87, 89 Acadians, 86–87. See also Canada “An Act for Encouraging the Prosecution of the Indian E ­ nemy, and preserving such as are Friends” (1694), 79 Adair, James, 52–53, 61 adoption, of Euro-­A mericans, 45, 54, 61, 119–20, 137nn8–10, 139n33 “Adventure of Captain Gregg” (Chapin), 100 ad vivum (from the life), 16 age, 70, 77–78, 82, 95, 100, 149n48; ­children, 78–80, 87, 91, 104–6, 148n36, 148n42, 149n43, 150n69 Algonquian p ­ eoples, 6, 17–18, 30–43, 127n2, 127n6, 128n14; comparison to ancient Britons, 26, 28, 30, 48, 116–17, 132n42; English-­A lgonquian dictionary, 41; interpreters, 39, 126n1, 135n75; in Ossomocomuck (Outer Banks, North Carolina), 9, 15, 19–20; scalping among, 73–74, 88, 147n29; Two Feathers, story of, 48–50, 51; ­women’s tattoos, 13–14, 30–32, 34, 38–39, 121, 133nn49–50 Allen, George (colonist), 96–98, 152n8, 152n14 Allen, George (Lenape man), 96–98, 152n11 Amadas, Philip, 17, 126n1 Amer­i­ca (de Bry), 26, 28, 32–33, 127n4, 134n64 American Revolution, 98–101, 102–4, 113–17, 152n21 Anantooèah (Seneca) p ­ eoples, 52–53 Andrews, Elisha, 78 Anishinaabeg ­peoples: Odawa (Ottawa), 6, 62–63; Ojibwe, 1–2, 6, 139n33; Potawatomi, 6 appropriation, settler-­colonial: scalping, as hybrid practice, 68–70, 77, 88, 113–17;

tattooing as, 10–11, 57–59, 66–67, 88, 121, 124n13, 156n17 Arkansas (Quapaw) ­peoples, 53 “Arnaq and Nutaaq” (White), 20–21, 23 authenticity, 5, 118 Baker, Elizabeth, 105 Barlow, Joel, 102 Barlowe, Arthur, 17–18, 126n1, 128n14 Bartram, William, 64–65 Bavin, Thomas, 16, 18 Benjamin, Sarah Osborn, 99–100 Bienville, Jean-­Baptiste Le Moyne de, 58–59 biopolitics, 70, 144n6 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 108–10 the body: bodily anxiety, 11, 60–61; bodily experience, conveyance of, 7–8, 126n21; embodied memory, 11, 95, 102, 108, 129n17, 153n28; as a field of study, 7–8, 125n16; meta­phors of, 6–7, 124n14 Boone, Daniel, 108 Bossu, Jean-­Bernard, 51–52, 53–56, 61, 63, 67, 139n33, 140n37 Bougainville, Louis-­A ntoine de, 44–45, 63, 136n1, 136n3, 137n8, 142n61 bravery (embellishments), 32 A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of V ­ irginia (Harriot), 15, 28–30, 32–34, 35–40, 41, 127n4 Britain, 1–2, 4–5; British Museum, 14, 21, 31, 114, 134n55, 135n70; history of tattooing in, 23, 24–28, 29, 48, 116–17, 132n38, 132nn41–42; Revolutionary War, 98–101, 102–4, 113–17, 152n21; Royal Acad­emy, 113, 115 Britannia (Camden), 26 Brown, Kathleen, 7 Brown, Thomas, 62–63, 67

158 Index Bureau of Indian Affairs, 93 Burnham, Michelle, 107–8, 154n47 Butterfield, Samuel, 84 Caesar, Julius, 116 Camden, William, 20, 26 Canada, 59, 86–87, 136n1, 148n34, 156n17 captivity: of Eu­ro­pe­a ns, by colonists, 115–16; language of, 65–66 captivity, of Euro-­A mericans: involuntary tattooing and, 59–63, 119–20, 141n51; narratives of, 107–8, 119–20, 154n47; scalping and, 68–69, 75, 90–91, 101, 104–5, 137n9, 137n10, 140n41, 142nn56–57 captivity, of Indigenous p ­ eoples, 20–21, 133n50; as enslavement, 70, 78–81, 83, 87, 143n5, 148n36, 148n42, 150n69; indentured servitude, 82–83 Carleton, Guy, 102 Carroll, Brian, 82 Celts, tattooing by, 26 Chapin, John, 100 Charles I, 115 Charlotte, Queen of E ­ ngland, 115 Cherokee ­peoples, 6, 57 Chickasaw p ­ eoples, 59–60, 106 “A chiefe Herowans [werowance’s] wyfe of [Pomeiooc] and her ­daughter” (White), 30–32 ­children, 78–80, 87, 91, 104–6, 148n36, 148n42, 149n43, 150n69 The Child’s Picture Book of Indians (Car­ter, Hendee, and Co.), 100–101 Chris­t ian­ity, 24, 38–39, 53, 58–59, 104, 149n43; the Bible, 35, 131n31; Indigenous converts to, 10, 34–35, 65–67, 80, 82, 142n66; missionaries, 47–48, 51, 58, 60, 64–67, 85–86 Clark, George Rogers, 115–16, 152n21, 155n7 clothing, 3, 17–18, 28, 35, 45, 56–57, 58, 140n41 Colden, Cadwallader, 45 colonialism, 12, 68, 76; bodies, colonization of, 2–4, 5–6, 26, 40–41, 55, 124n7; language and translation in, 18, 128n16; scalping narratives as justification for, 92–96, 102–4, 107, 110–11, 119, 151n7. See also appropriation; settler logics The Columbiad (Barlow), 102

communication: inscribed objects, 34–35, 48, 138n19; interpreters, 1–2, 20, 39, 128n11, 128n13, 135n75, 141; language and translation, 18, 128n16; literacies, 16–17, 20, 22–23, 40–43, 129n20, 129n23, 130nn26–27, 134n67, 135n80, 136n84; misinterpretations, 17, 35; phonetic writing system, 9–10, 40–43, 135n80; Rosetta Stone, 138n17; semasiographic systems, 22, 135n80; tattooing as, 9–10, 15, 19–20, 22–23, 36–39, 40–43, 136n84; writing, definitions of, 35 conceptual instability, 46–47 contrafacta (counterfeit), 16, 39. See also fraud Cooper, James Fenimore, 108 Coosada ­peoples, 105 Coryat, Thomas, 24 coureur de bois (cultural go-­betweens), 58, 152n21 Creek p ­ eoples, 106 croix de Saint-­Louis, 53–54, 55–56, 57 cultural fidelity, failure of, 44–45. See also identity Cutter, Barbara, 68 Dasemunkepeuc (village), 33, 134n60 Davies, Samuel, 93 de Bry, Theodor, 9, 28–29, 48–49, 132n41, 133n48, 134n59, 135n70; Amer­i­ca, 26, 28, 32–33, 127n4, 134n64; “Marckes,” 36–40, 41, 132n46, 135n70, 135n75 Dee, John, 23 de La Porte, Joseph, 50, 138n21 Delaware ­peoples, 96–98, 104–5 Deter-­Wolf, Aaron, 128n17 Diéreville, N. de, 58 discommodities, 74, 90 double signifiers, 52 Dummer, William, 85 Dumont de Montigny, Jean-­François-­Benjamin, 56, 57, 60, 140n40 Duston, Hannah, 68–69, 90–91, 100, 143nn1–3 Duston, Thomas, 90–91 ear modifications, 64 Elizabeth, Queen of ­England, 23, 35 embodied memory, 11, 95, 102, 108, 129n17, 153n28



Index 159

­enemy status, 51–52, 70, 72, 77–81, 85–87, 97 engravings, 48–50, 56, 65, 113–15. See also de Bry, Theodor Farwell, Josiah, 87 ­Father Râle’s War (1722–1725), 85–86. See also Râle, Sébastien femininity, 68, 104, 105 feminism, 125n16 Fleming, Juliet, 34, 35, 134n67 Flint, Timothy, 108 Florida, Native ­peoples of, 106, 134n64, 142n57 Folger Shakespeare Library, 27 Fort Augusta, 96–98 Fort William Henry, 62, 142n61 fraud, 10, 54–56, 70–71, 74–75, 78, 80–83, 97, 149n51, 152n14 Freeman’s Journal (journal), 116–17 French colonists (New France), 5; scalping and, 85–86, 88, 115–16, 148n34; tattooing, colonial interpretations of, 44–51, 53–58, 62–63, 134n64; tattooing, reading and rewriting across cultures, 136n3, 137nn10–11, 140n37, 140n39, 141n44, 142n60 Friedman, Anna Felicity, 46, 137n10 Frobisher, Martin, 20, 21 Gallaher, James, 97 Gaudio, Michael, 16, 36, 41 Gell, Alfred, 19, 52, 128n17 gender: femininity, 68, 104, 105; feminism, 125n16; masculinity, 39, 44–47, 51, 54, 57, 63, 67, 70, 105; scalping and, 70, 77–78, 80, 82, 95, 100, 119–20, 143n3; tattooing and, 18, 33–34, 43, 124n14, 132n42. See also men; w ­ omen George III, 115 Gorham, John, 83, 147n33 government, colonial: legislature, 77–81, 84, 85–86, 148n34, 148n42; of Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay, 72, 74, 77, 82–83, 85–86, 87–91, 150n63, 150n74, 151n82 Grace, Henry, 59–61, 62–63, 67, 141n51 grave robbery, 82 ­Great Fire of 1666, 41 Gregg, James, 98–101, 106–7, 152n21 Haida p ­ eoples, 156n17 hair stylings, 3, 17, 45, 62–63, 64, 94, 104, 153n32. See also scalping

Hall, James, 108 Hamilton, Henry, 115–16, 123n5, 155n3 Harmon, Johnson, 85 Harriot, Thomas, 19–20, 22, 65, 127n3, 133n48, 135n71, 135n75; Algonquian language, interest in, 9–10, 39, 40–43, 126n1, 127n6, 128n13, 135n80; A Briefe and True Report, 15, 28–30, 32–34, 35–40, 41, 127n4 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy or Six Nations), 6, 45, 137n10 Havard, Gilles, 58, 141n50 heathenism, 38 Heckewelder, John, 64–67 Heron ­peoples, 48–50, 51 hieroglyphics, 48–50, 65, 67, 138n17 “Historical Account” (Symmes), 89–90 Historie of ­Great Britaine (Speed), 26, 27 History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations (Heckewelder), 64 Hood, David, 101–2, 105, 106–7, 108–9, 110 How, Thomas, 84–85 identity, 12, 36, 46, 47, 63, 105, 123n2, 129n17, 142; alteration of, 65–66, 119–20; clothing as marker of, 3, 17–18, 28, 35, 45, 56–57, 58, 140n41; cultural fidelity, failure of, 44–45; “Indianness” as, 4, 70, 71, 80, 121, 122; removal of, 52–53, 55, 61, 121–22, 137n9; whiteness, 17–18, 105, 109, 118–20, 121–22, 124n7, 124n14 indentured servitude, 82–83 “The Indian-­Hater” (Hall), 108 “Indianness,” 90; comparison to animals, 73, 75, 77, 93, 146n17; as created identity, 4, 70, 71, 80, 121, 122 Indigeneity, 4, 8, 69, 118; changing symbolism of Indigenous tattoos, 64–67; cultural revitalization, 11, 121, 156n15; sign systems, 22, 33, 36–38, 39, 40–43, 130nn26–27; tattooing, of Indigenous ­women, 13–14, 20–21, 30–32, 34, 38–39, 121, 133nn49–50, 156n15; terms for, 124n10 Indigenous p ­ eoples. See individual group and tribal names inscribed objects, 34–35, 48, 138n19 interpreters, 1–2, 20, 39, 128n11, 128n13, 135n75, 141 Inuit p ­ eoples, 20–21, 133n50, 156n15

160 Index involuntary markings: tattooing, 59–63, 119–20, 141n51. See also scalping James, King of E ­ ngland, 23–24, 25, 38, 131n33 Jamison, Leslie, 121–22 Jerusalem, tattooing in, 23–24, 25, 131n33 John Car­ter Brown Library, 29, 37, 49 Johnson, Warren, 93 Johnson, William, 45, 93 Kahnawake Mohawk p ­ eoples, 1, 45, 137n8 Ketel, Cornelis, 20 Kieft’s War, 147n31 Kies, Solomon, 89–90 King Philip’s War (1675–1676), 75–77, 78 King William’s War (1689–1697), 78–79 la Clue Sabran, Jean-­François Bertet de, 58 Lafitau, Joseph-­François, 48–50, 51, 138n20 Lalemant, Jérôme, 51 land acquisition, by Euro-­A mericans, 11, 70, 90–91, 111, 151n82 Lawson, John, 106 Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 108 Le Clerq, Chrestien, 58 legislature, colonial, 77–81, 148n34, 148n42; House of Representatives, 84, 85–86 Lenape (Delaware) ­peoples, 6, 65–67 Leonardson, Samuel, 91 le Page du Pratz, Antoine, 48, 51 Linnaeus, Carolus, 104 literacies, 16–17, 20, 22–23, 40–43, 129n20, 129n23, 130nn26–27, 134n67, 135n80, 136n84 Lithgow, William, 23–24, 25, 38, 131n33 Long, John, 1–2, 93, 94, 123n2, 139n33 Loskiel, George, 66 Louis XIV, 53 Lovewell, John, 87–91, 100, 150n67, 150n74, 151n77, 151n82; Lovewell’s War, (1722– 1725), 85 Madjeckewiss (Matchekewis), 1–2, 123n5 Maisonville, Francis, 116, 152n21 Manteo (Algonquian interpreter), 39, 126n1, 135n75 mapping, of p ­ eople, 16–20, 28, 30, 33, 35–39, 133n48 Maquas (Mohawk) p ­ eoples, 87

“Marckes of Sundrye of the Chief Mene of ­Virginia” (de Bry), 36–40, 41, 132n46, 135n70, 135n75 Markham, Moses, 82, 149n52 Martyr, Peter, 34 Mascarene, Paul, 86 masculinity, 39, 44–47, 51, 54, 57, 63, 67, 70, 105 Massachusett ­peoples, 6 Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay, colonial government of, 72, 74, 77, 82–83, 87–91, 150n63, 150n74, 151n82; House of Representatives, 84, 85–86 Mather, Cotton, 69, 90, 143nn2–3 McCrea, Jane, 102–4, 109 McCullough, John, 104–5 memory, embodied, 11, 95, 102, 108, 129n17, 153n28 men, 36–38, 74, 79–80, 82, 85, 102, 133n48, 135n71; masculinity, 39, 44–47, 51, 54, 57, 63, 67, 70, 105 men, fighting. See scalping, bounties for; tattooing, reading and rewriting across cultures meritography, 53, 55, 61 Metacom (chief sachem of the Wampanoag), 75–77, 145n15, 147n30 métis individuals, 57 Miami ­peoples, 104 Michael (Lenape man), 65–67, 142n66 Mi’kmaq ­peoples, 58, 59–61, 83, 86 missionaries, 47–48, 51, 58, 60, 64–67, 85–86 mixed-­race ­peoples, 57, 86–87 Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains (Lafitau), 48–50, 138n20 Mohave ­peoples, 119–20 Mohawk ­peoples, 1, 45, 87, 137n8 Mohegan ­peoples, 6, 72 Mohican p ­ eoples, 82 moral critique, 47, 58, 60, 98–99, 118 Moravians, 64–67, 123n5 Morton, Thomas, 74, 90 Moryson, Fynes, 24 Moss, Keturah, 105 Mrs. Wright Modeling a Head in Wax (Wright), 113, 115 Munsee Delaware p ­ eoples, 96–98 The Murder of Jane McCrea (Vanderlyn), 102–3



Index 161

Narragansett ­peoples, 6, 72, 73, 76, 147n30 narratives, 4, 6, 7–8, 11–12, 67, 113–22; of captivity, 107–8, 119–20, 154n47; of pain, 5–6, 11, 121–22; as propaganda during Revolutionary War, 113–17; of scalp bounties, as supporting evidence, 10, 71, 78–79, 83–85, 89–91, 149n49. See also scalping, narratives by survivors of; settler logics Natchez p ­ eoples, 51, 56, 57 Nativeness. See “Indianness”; Indigeneity Neff, Joseph, 91 Neff, Mary, 91 Neilson, Samuel, 92, 96 Nero (Iroquois man), 51 Newberry Library, 120 Nick of the Woods, or, The Jibbenainosay (Bird), 108–10 noncombatants, 80, 102, 149n48, 149n51 Nouveaux voyages aux Indes Occidentales (Bossu), 54–56, 139n33 Nozell, Marc, 69 Oatman, Olive, 119–20 Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians (Bartram), 64–65 Odawa (Ottawa) p ­ eoples, 6, 62–63 Ohio villages, 64–67 Ojibwe ­peoples, 1–2, 6, 139n33 “One of the wyves of Wyngyno” (White), 13–14, 30, 133n50, 134n60 Osage ­peoples, 54, 121 Ossomocomuck (Outer Banks, North Carolina), 9, 15, 19–20. See also Algonquian ­peoples Otherness, 5, 19, 61 pain, 7–8, 52, 55, 59–61; narratives of, 5–6, 121–22; pornography of, 11 paint, body, 30, 33, 45, 64, 133n51 paintings, watercolor, 56. See also White, John passing, as “Indian,” 1–2, 44, 63, 86–87, 123n2, 142n56 Pell, John, 41 Penhallow, Samuel, 88 Pequot p ­ eoples, 6, 73–74, 75; Pequot War (1636–1638), 72, 73 Percy, George, 32 Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal (journal), 107, 109, 154n43

Philip, King. See Metacom phonetic writing system, 9–10, 40–43, 135n80. See also literacies Picts, 23, 24–28, 29, 48, 116–17, 132n38, 132nn41–42 pilgrimage sites, tattooing at, 23–24, 25, 131n33 Pomeiooc (village), 33, 134n60 Potawatomi ­peoples, 6 Quakers, 97, 108–10 Quapaw ­peoples, 54 Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), 80 race, 78, 86, 104, 105, 118–20, 122, 124n10, 124n14; mixed-­race ­peoples, 57, 86–87; passing, as “Indian,” 1–2, 44, 63, 86–87, 123n2, 142n56; tattooing, as marker of racial difference, 104–5; whiteness, 17–18, 105, 109, 118–20, 121–22, 124n7, 124n14 Râle, Sébastien, 85–86, 87, 150n63 Raleigh, Walter, 15, 17, 39 Read, Charles, 97 reading, the ­human body, 7, 9–10, 19, 22–23, 40, 66, 70. See also tattooing, reading and rewriting across cultures “Remarks on the Management of the Scalped-­Head” (Robertson), 107 Revolutionary War, 98–101, 102–4, 113–17, 152n21 Richardson, Robbie, 61, 142n56 Roanoke (village), 13–14, 33, 126n1, 127n3, 128n14, 134n60, 135n75 Robbins, Jonathan, 87, 89 Robertson, Felix, 107, 108–9, 154n43 Robertson, James, 107, 154n44 Rosenthal, Angela, 94 Rowlandson, Mary, 75 Saltonstall, Nathaniel, 76, 80, 147nn29–30 savagery, depictions of, 1, 22, 26, 28, 40, 44, 48, 58, 93, 100, 108–10, 116–19 Sayre, Gordon, 28, 53, 138n20, 140n37, 140n40, 141n44 scalping, 1–2, 4, 8, 52, 118; history of, 72–73, 144n11, 145nn12–14, 147n29, 147n32; as hybrid practice, 68–70, 77, 88, 113–17; identification of individual scalps, 10, 70–71, 104–5, 110

162 Index scalping, bounties for, 10, 68–91, 144n10; among French colonists (New France), 85–86, 88, 115–16, 148n34; heads, ­whole, 71–73, 76–77, 144n9, 145n12, 145n14, 147nn31–32; King Philip’s War, evolution during, 75–77, 78; legislative acts and standardized prices, 77–81, 148n34, 148n42; narratives, as evidence, 10, 71, 78–79, 83–85, 89–91, 149n49; petitions, from bounty seekers, 72, 83–85, 87–91, 150n57; use against other colonial powers, 85–87, 148n34; volunteer ranger groups, 79, 81–83, 85–86, 87–90, 147n33, 148n38, 150n57, 150n63; wolf bounties, as pre­ce­dent, 73–75, 146n24 scalping, narratives by survivors of, 11, 92–111, 121; agency in, 105–6, 154n40; as collective trauma, 153n28; as embodied memory, 11, 95, 102, 108, 153n28; fame of, 101–2, 105; Indigenous survivors, 96–98, 152n11; lit­er­a­ture, influence on early American, 107–10; medical interest in, 98–101, 106–7, 154nn43–44; settler w ­ omen in, 102–5; use to justify settler colonialism, 92–96, 102–4, 107, 110–11, 119, 151n7 Scarry, Elaine, 7, 95 Secotan (village), 33, 34, 134n60 A Se­lection of Some of the Most In­ter­est­ing Narratives of the Outrages Committed by the Indians (Loudon), 97–98 semasiographic systems, 22, 135n80 settler logics, 4–5, 34, 74, 117–20, 124n11; of Indigenous elimination, 90–91, 110, 118–19, 151nn77–78, 154n47; of settler victimhood, 5–6, 119, 121–22 Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), 45–46, 59–61, 82, 92, 149n51 Sewall, Samuel, 80 Shawnee ­peoples, 6, 52–53, 104, 108–10, 137n8 Shipley, John, 83–84 Shirley, William, 83 Shoemaker, Nancy, 6–7, 124n11, 124n14 Sion College library, 41 slavery. See captivity Smith, John, 32 sovereignty, denial of Indigenous, 43, 117–18 Speed, John, 26, 27 Stewart, John, 106 Stoddard, Solomon, 75

Stoler, Ann Laura, 118 Strachey, William, 104 Symmes, Thomas, 89–90 Systemae naturae (Linnaeus), 104 tattooing, 2, 4, 8, 128n17; body paint, temporary, 30, 33, 45, 64, 133n51; con­temporary, 121, 156n15, 156n17; as marker of racial difference, 104; material practice of, 2, 57–58, 132n47, 141n43; Polynesian, 32, 128n17, 129n21, 136n1; settler appropriation of, 10–11, 57–59, 66–67, 88, 121, 124n13, 156n17; Tattoo Re­nais­sance, 118; terms for, 19, 33–34, 40, 129n21, 134n64 tattooing, colonial interpretations of: among French colonists (New France), 44–51, 53–58, 62–63, 134n64 tattooing, colonial observations of, 9–10, 13–43; archaeological evidence of, 18–19; British history, influence of, 23, 24–28, 29, 48, 116–17, 132n38, 132nn41–42; as communication system, 9–10, 15, 19–20, 22–23, 36–39, 40–43, 136n84; as cultural emblems, 18, 129n18; as profound surfaces, 34–35; social order, as signs of, 36–38, 39–40, 135n71; translation, of Indigenous tattoos, 18, 22–23, 28, 36, 38–43, 46, 128n16. See also engravings; paintings, watercolor tattooing, reading and rewriting across cultures, 10, 44–67, 121; among French colonists (New France), 136n3, 137nn10– 11, 140n37, 140n39, 141n44, 142n60; as coats of arms or signatures, 47–50, 137n14; as hieroglyphics, 48–50, 65, 67, 138n17; as honorifics, 50–57; hybridity of, 10–11, 57–59, 66–67; involuntary markings, 59–63, 119–20, 141n51; Native American tattooed bodies, changing symbolism of, 64–67 Tennessee, settlers in. See scalping, narratives by survivors of Terry, Edward, 24 Thacher, James, 98–101, 106 Timberlake, Henry, 57 torture: scalping as, 116, 154n40; tattooing, link to, 52–53, 59–63, 139n27 Traditional Cultural Advisors Committee of the Osage Nation, 121



Index 163

Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 86 Tuck, Eve, 5–6 Two Feathers (Algonquian man), 48–50, 51 Tyger (ship), 15 Underhill, John, 75 University of Pennsylvania, 108, 154n43 Vance, Doctor, 107, 154n44 Vanderlyn, John, 102–3 vigilante personas, 108–10, 113–15, 119 “­Virginia: A Vocabulary with severall Phrases of Speech in V ­ irginia” (Harriot), 41 ­Virginia Council, 115 Voyages and Travels (Long), 1–2 Wabanaki Confederacy, 6, 77 Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 103 Wampanoag p ­ eoples, 6, 75–77, 145n15, 147n30 Wanchese (Algonquian interpreter), 39, 126n1, 135n75 warfare: ­Father Râle’s War, 85–86; Kieft’s War, 147n31; King Philip’s War, 75–77, 78; King William’s War, 78–79; multigenerational, 150n67; noncombatants, 80, 102, 149n48, 149n51; Pequot War, 72, 73; Queen Anne’s War, 80; Revolutionary War, 98–101, 102–4, 113–17, 152n21; Seven Years’ War, 45–46, 59–61, 82, 92, 149n51; tattooing, link to, 52–53; trophies of, 71–73; vigilante personas, 108–10, 113–15, 119. See also scalping; tattooing, reading and rewriting across cultures Wellcome Collection, 25 werowances (chiefs), 30, 36–37

Westminster School, Governing Body of, 42 White, John, 9, 13–17, 19–22, 28–33, 39, 126n1, 127n2, 132n47, 133nn49–51, 134n55; “Arnaq and Nutaaq,” 20–21, 23; “A chiefe Herowans [werowance’s] wyfe of [Pomeiooc] and her ­daughter,” 30–32, 133n51; “One of the wyves of Wyngyno,” 13–14, 30, 133n50, 134n60; works based on White’s watercolor paintings, 28–30, 36, 127n4, 132n41, 134n59, 135n70 whiteness, 17–18, 105, 109, 118–20, 121–22, 124n7, 124n14 Williams, Roger, 73–74 Wingina (werowance of Roanoke), 13, 30, 36–40, 41, 132n46, 135n70, 135n75 Winthrop, John, 73–74 Wolfe, James, 86–87 wolf eradication proj­ects, 73–75 ­women, 51, 62, 79–80, 137n8; Duston, Hannah, 68–69, 90–91, 100, 143nn1–3; femininity, 68, 104, 105; feminism, 125n16; pain narratives of, 121–22; scalping, of settler ­women, 102–5, 106; tattooing, of Indigenous w ­ omen, 13–14, 20–21, 30–32, 34, 38–39, 121, 133nn49–50, 156n15; white womanhood, 109, 119–20, 121–22 Wonno, Isaac, 82, 149n52 Wright, Joseph, 113–15, 116 Wright, Patience, 113, 115 writing: definitions of, 35; inscribed objects, 34–35, 48, 138n19; literacies, 16–17, 20, 22–23, 40–43, 129n20, 129n23, 130nn26– 27, 134n67, 135n80, 136n84; phonetic writing system, 10, 40–43, 135n80 Yang, K. Wayne, 5–6 “Yankee-­Doodle, or the American Satan” (Wright), 113–15, 116

ACKNOWL ­E DGMENTS

The amount of collective wisdom and kindness that goes into producing a book never fails to stagger me. A single author’s name on the cover d ­ oesn’t at all encompass the pro­cess of writing, and I am profoundly grateful for the support I’ve received from so many ­people and institutions. Karen Kupperman has been a mentor for this proj­ect from its earliest stages, and I cannot thank her enough for her generosity with resources, ideas, and questions—­her wide-­ranging curiosity and her willingness to entertain imaginative, interdisciplinary approaches to early Amer­i­ca continue to be an inspiration. I’m also deeply indebted to Nicole Eustace, Jennifer Morgan, Becky Goetz, Martha Hodes, and Andrew Needham for their encouragement as well as their incisive, insightful critiques. Bruce Dorsey helped set me on this path. This proj­ect received financial and material support from many institutions. I thank the Gradu­ate School of the University of Alabama, the Department of American Studies at UA, the New York University Gradu­ate School of Arts and Sciences, the NYU History Department, and the Harvard International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World for travel and research funding. The National Humanities Center, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Folger Institute, Newberry Library, John Car­ter Brown Library, American Antiquarian Society, Library Com­pany of Philadelphia, and Historical Society of Pennsylvania all provided fellowships that made extended periods of research and writing pos­si­ble. I feel very fortunate to have benefited from the expertise of the many wonderful librarians and archivists at ­t hese institutions, as well as ­t hose at the Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society, the British Library, NYU’s Bobst Library, and UA’s Gorgas Library. Thank you all. This book is particularly indebted to a year-­long fellowship at the McNeil Center. Th ­ ere I had the good fortune to participate in the Sawyer Seminar

166

Acknowl­edgments

“Race, Across Time and Space” led by the inimitable David Kazanjian, while also experiencing the tremendous intellectual community built at the McNeil by Daniel Richter. Dan’s thoughtful advice and gracious mentoring remain deeply felt, and the friends made during my McNeil year continue to inspire me with their brilliance and their camaraderie: I wish I still shared a hallway and a lunch ­table with Noelani Arista, Michael Blaakman, Ben Breen, Sara Damiano, Claire Gherini, Don Johnson, Pippa Koch, Peter Kotowski, Sarah Rodriguez, Sean Trainor, and Lynne Feeley. As a participant in the 2016 Scholars’ Workshop at the Omohundro Institute, I experienced the careful, rigorous editing and constructive feedback for which the Omohundro is renowned. My thanks to Josh Piker, Brett Rushforth, Karin Wulf, Paul Mapp, and Nadine Zimmerli, as well as fellow workshop participant Bryan Rindfleisch, for their careful readings and good advice. My thanks too to the members of the “Re­nais­sance Skin” proj­ect of King’s College London and the Wellcome Institute—in par­tic­u­lar, proj­ect director Evelyn Welch—­for inviting me to participate in several of their wonderfully generative workshops and symposia. ­There are many other scholars who have left their marks on this book through conversations at conferences, talks, and archives, including Zara Anishanslin, Céline Carayon, Katherine Dauge-­Roth, Liz Ellis, Hannah Farber, Christopher Heaney, Craig Koslofsky, John Kuhn, Jean-­François Lozier, Marcy Norton, Ben Reed, and Coll Thrush. Jessie Kindig provided astute comments on a very early draft of Chapter 3. A number of crucial conversations with Joy A. J. Howard not only improved my writing but improved my life. The NYU Atlantic Workshop was the first intellectual home for this proj­ect, and the group’s sheer scale and energy make it hard to rightly credit all of its participants as they deserve. I’m especially grateful for the detailed suggestions and encouraging pep talks from Jerusha Westbury, Anelise Shrout, Kate Mulry, Samantha Seeley, Katy Walker, Gabriel Rocha, Max Mishler, Ebony Jones, Alex Manevitz, and Hayley Negrin. At the University of Alabama, my colleagues in the Department of American Studies have been a plea­sure to work with and to learn from—my par­tic­u­lar thanks to department chair Edward Tang for his mentorship and good humor. The ju­nior faculty writing group at UA has been a g­ reat source of cross-­ disciplinary insights. I appreciate Utz McKnight for inviting me to join the group and for his well-­honed blend of kindness and tough questions. My current and former students, both undergraduate and gradu­ate, continue to



Acknowl­edgments 167

be a source of motivation: thank you for your questions, ideas, and enthusiasm (and you can stop asking me if the book is done now). A very heartfelt thank you to my editor at Penn Press, Bob Lockhart, who took an interest in this proj­ect from an early stage and whose patience and support have made all the difference. His careful, incisive reading of drafts improved the final product on ­every level, from line edits to chapter reor­ga­ ni­za­tion. The editorial and production staff at Penn Press, particularly Lily Palladino and the copyediting team, have saved me from my worst writing habits a hundred times over. Any remaining errors or infelicities of prose are, of course, my own. I am grateful as well to series editor Kathy Brown and the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript: it is a tremendous gift to have such thoughtful and generous readers. ­There are a g­ reat many friends and f­amily members who had exactly nothing to do with this book, and I love them for that. But a few friends who particularly helped sustain me through the last stages of writing this book (and the first stages of a pandemic) need mentioning. Madalyn Baldanzi, Meredith Leich, and Alyssa Work are some of the sharpest, funniest, and all-­ round best ­people I know: our text threads are no substitute for wandering around New York together, but I trea­sure them nonetheless. Pippa Koch regularly air-­drops ­little moments of joy into my life. Jill and Jason Clements, Jessica Hines, and Andy Baer—­t hanks for all the porch conversations. And the figs. Laura Helton and Sam Seeley have for many years now been the most excellent of colleague-­friends: thanks for being ­t here ­every step of the way, and I hope you ­don’t mind how dear you and your families are to me. ­You’re stuck with me now. Thank you to my ­father, Mark Odle, for his unconditional support. Thank you to my m ­ other, Anna Smith Odle, for her unstinting encouragement (and all of the driving, gosh). Sometimes the greatest debts get the shortest acknowl­edgments: if I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. Both of my grand­mothers passed away while I was completing this book; I wish I had gotten to pre­sent them with the finished work. My grand­ mother Mary Louise Smith was an educator who inspired me with her creativity and craft. Stories of her childhood introduced me to the ways that the past remains pre­sent in all we do. My grand­mother Betty Odle gleefully trounced me at Scrabble and expressed boundless faith and enthusiasm in all my undertakings: something a child takes for granted and an adult knows is priceless.

168

Acknowl­edgments

Ansel Payne is my toughest reader and my best champion. It is my wish, e­ very day and always, to be the same for him. This morning we si­mul­ta­ neously reached for the last pastry, and—­equally si­mul­ta­neously—­made the “small venomous dinosaur” gesture. If anyone asks how I know, dearest, that’s how I know. Non mihi, non tibi, sed nobis.