n6 The Winning of the West 



suffered the fate of the strong men, and instead of 

 enthusiasm for his country's flag and a general na- 

 tional animosity toward his enemies, he was actu- 

 ated by a furious flame of hot anger, and was goaded 

 on by memories of which merely to think was mad- 

 ness. His friends had been treacherously slain while 

 on messages of peace; his house had been burned, 

 his cattle driven off, and all he had in the world de- 

 stroyed before he knew that war existed and when 

 he felt quite guiltless of all offence; his sweetheart 

 or wife had been carried off, ravished, and was at 

 the moment the slave and concubine of some dirty 

 and brutal Indian warrior; his son, the stay of his 

 house, had been burned at the stake with torments 

 too horrible to mention 24 ; his sister, when ransomed 

 and returned to him, had told of the weary journey 

 through the woods, when she carried around her 

 neck as a horrible necklace the bloody scalps of her 

 husband and children 25 ; seared into his eyeballs, 

 into his very brain, he bore ever with him, waking 



24 The expression "too horrible to mention" is to be taken 

 literally, not figuratively. It applies equally to the fate that 

 has befallen every white man or woman who has fallen into 

 the power of hostile plains Indians during the last ten or fif- 

 teen years. The nature of the wild Indian has not changed. 

 Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes 

 torments which a civilized man can not look another in the 

 face and so much as speak of. Impalement on charred 

 stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger- joints chewed 

 off, eyes burned out these tortures can be mentioned, but 

 there are others equally normal and customary which can not 

 even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims. 



25 For the particular incident see M'Ferrin's "History of 

 Methodism in Tennessee," p. 145. 



