Dr. William S. Kiser is a Las
Cruces native and currently a professor of history and department chair
at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. He spoke about
his latest book, “The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and
the Violent Conquest of North America” on April 23 at NMSU’s Branson
Library. Scott Brocato recently spoke with Dr. Kiser about the talk and
his book.
Scott Brocato:
First, give us an overview of what your book covers.
Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
The
book itself covers about 250 years of North American history, and it
spans geographically everywhere from French Canada in the 16 and 1700s
to Mexico in the 1800s to Gold Rush California, mid-nineteenth century
Texas, the British colonies. So it's actually very expansive in scope
with respect to what I call “scalp warfare” or Indian scalp hunting. It
was a practice that I'm sure we'll get into more here in a few minutes,
but a practice that was very prominent across the continent as a form of
colonial conquest. My talk itself at NMSU (April 23) is going
to focus exclusively on scalp warfare in the southwest borderlands, so
it will not be nearly as broad as the book.
Scott Brocato:
Well, let's go ahead and talk about scalp warfare. Explain what it was and when and where it began.
Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
So
“scalp warfare” is, it's a term that I coined myself in writing this
book to describe a specific type of violence and conflict that commonly
occurred across North America between various Indian tribes and various
colonial groups. And of course, there are many forms of conflict between
natives and newcomers. Many of those fall within more traditional
frameworks of, you know, whether it's the British Army, the French Army,
the Mexican Army, the U.S. Army, and members of various tribes.
But
scalp warfare was different in that it involved not professional
armies, but it involved usually paramilitary operatives and even
civilians who temporarily kind of set aside their normal daily
activities or businesses and took up arms in small groups to track down,
fight, and kill Indians who were viewed as enemies at the time. And
there was an economic incentive behind this because they would take the
scalps and oftentimes they could redeem those scalps for cash payments
with the local governments that sponsored these types of actions. So
it's a form of conflict and violence that proliferates over a
three-century period, not in isolation, but alongside other more
traditional conflicts between Indians and settlers.
Scott Brocato:
Focusing
on the mid-19th century, the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora
implementing their bounty systems to monetize the killing and scalping
of Apache people as a strategy for conquest, why was this system
implemented about the Apaches? Why were they so hated?
Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
In
the case of the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora and the Apache
tribe, there was a long-standing hatred between the two groups that went
back into the 1700s, and it revolved a lot around reciprocal raiding
and captive taking. For multiple generations, Apaches had raided
rancherias, haciendas in northern Mexico; and killed, plundered, and
taken women and children as captives, and then assimilated those
captives into their Apache tribe. At the same time, Mexican settlers
were doing the same thing to Apaches. So this was really a reciprocal
type of violence that bred a deep, deep animosity and hatred between the
two sides over many decades.
And by the time you get to the
1830s, the local Mexican governments in Chihuahua and Sonora--and again,
this was done at the local level, not the national level in Mexico
City--as a new strategy for their warfare against Apaches, they began
passing laws that allowed for the payment of scout bounties to try to
encourage civilians, in addition to the Mexican army and soldiers, to
encourage civilians to go out and try to hunt and kill Apaches for
profit. And the scout bounties that they implemented in Chihuahua and
Sonora offered the equivalent of, in a lot of cases, an entire year of
wages for the average Mexican worker at the time.
So there were
windfall profits to be, you know, potentially to be gained by killing
Apaches, and the scalps were used as the evidence scalp hunters actually
called scalps receipts. They use this, I call the book The Business of
Killing Indians, because a lot of the scalp hunters actually used
business language and they treated it as a business to make money, the
profit incentive. They would redeem the scalps, or what they called the
receipts, in the state capital for the bounty money.
Scott Brocato:
There were even public celebrations about the slain victims, their scalps on display, for example, at a church.
Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
Yeah,
and that's a very common characteristic of scalp warfare across time
and place. In the case of northern Mexico specifically, in addition to
the economic incentives for taking scalps, there was also a performative
aspect, kind of like a martial masculinity, and it was also performing
racial hatred.
So the scalps were taken and then redeemed for the
cash rewards, and then afterwards, the scalps would oftentimes be
displayed publicly in these towns, sometimes on the plaza, sometimes in
front of the church, sometimes across the front of the courthouse.
Sometimes the scalp hunters themselves would, after receiving the cash
payout, they would keep the scalps and they would decorate their houses
with them. There are actual eyewitness accounts of scalp hunters who had
scalps nailed to their front doors.
And this was a performative
aspect, because these men were treated as celebrities and heroes in
their local societies, and so displaying playing the scalps and
celebrating it, was a way of sort of celebrating their victories over
their native enemies. And it was a way of demonstrating their celebrity
status in these frontier communities in really a very gruesome, macabre
kind of way.
Scott Brocato:
When did scalp warfare begin to wane, in particular the warfare we're discussing between Mexico and Texas?
Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
With
respect to the Southwest borderlands, the scalp warfare begins really
in the 1830s. The first codified scalp bounty in Mexico is 1837, and it
continues to occur...there are certain time periods where it's more
prominent than others. It was very common in the 1840s and ‘50s. less so
in the 1870s and ‘80s, but the last known Apache scalp that was
redeemed for a bounty in Mexico was in 1886, and actually it was
September of 1886. And that's significant, because September of 1886 is
the same month that Geronimo surrendered to the U.S. Army, and the
Apache War is officially ended. So scalp warfare, in an official kind of
a sense, with respect to the Apache tribe, literally ended the same
month that the broader wars between the Apaches and the American and
Mexican militaries ended.
Scott Brocato:
What lessons
can be gleaned from learning about scalp warfare of the past? Do you see
any modern parallels--minus actual scalping--in terms of similar racial
animosity today?
Dr. Willam S. Kiser:
Certainly, the
racial animosities are there in different areas. In the book, I don't
really try to draw specific parallels or comparisons to current events
or examples of racial violence. But what I do try to do in the book is I
try to highlight the legacies of scalp warfare, because it was so
violent, so brutal, and rooted in such deep hatred, and the legacies in
particular for the victims with respect to indigenous oral traditions.
and oral histories.
So, for example, in the case of the Chiricahua
Apaches, there's the oral traditions of the tribe, which hold that an
Apache person who is killed will enter the afterlife in the same
physical condition that they leave their earthly life. So what this
means is that if an Apache is killed and then scalped, they are
essentially doomed to an eternity in the afterlife in that defiled,
humiliated condition. So scalp warfare--and that's the Apache example,
but many tribes have variations of those oral traditions about an
afterlife and the mutilation of the corpses--so scalp warfare has a sort
of a spiritual, a traumatic impact, not just on the victims, but on
their survivors as well. And that is passed down through oral histories
and oral traditions in ways that I try to highlight, you know, sort of
the continuity of that trauma.
And there are also other examples
of, you know, the modern legacies of scalp warfare in terms of
memorialization. For example, in Nova Scotia and Canada in the last
decade or so, they've taken down several public monuments to former
British governors who implemented scalp bounties back in the 1700s. So
you start to see it's less prominent and certainly less common, but
there are memorials and monuments across Canada, the United States.
celebrating perpetrators of scalp warfare, that there's kind of been a
reckoning with that in modern times, similar, I guess, in some ways to
Confederate monuments, but on a much, much smaller scale.
If you want to read my book ATROCITY: ALMOST DEAD INDIANS, I shared what I could find about scalp bounties - and it was shocking...
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