Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations | Page 3

fields with blood?
It is said the Indian was cruel to the captives, and inflicted unspeakable
torture upon his enemy taken in battle. But from what we know of them,
it is not to be inferred that Indian Chiefs were ever guilty of filling
dungeons with innocent victims, or slaughtering hundreds and
thousands of their own people, whose only sin was a quiet dissent from
some religious dogma. Towards their enemies they were often
relentless, and they had good reason to look upon the white man as
their enemy. They slew them in battle, plotted against them secretly,
and in a few instances comparatively, subjected individuals to torture,
burned them at the stake, and, perhaps, flayed them alive. But who
knows anything of the precepts and practices of the Roman Catholic
Christendom, and quote these things as proofs of unmitigated barbarity.
At the very time that the Indians were using the tomahawk and
scalping- knife to avenge their wrongs, peaceful citizens in every
country of Europe, where the Pope was the man of authority, were
incarcerated for no crime whatever, and such refinement of torture
invented and practiced, as never entered in the heart of the fiercest
Indian warrior that roamed the wilderness to inflict upon man or beast.
We know very little of the secrets of the inquisition, and this little chills
our blood with horror. Yet these things were done in the name of Christ,
the Savior of the World, the Prince of Peace, and not savage, but
civilized. Christian men looked on, not coldly, but rejoicingly, while
women and children writhed in flames and weltered in blood. Were the
atrocities committed in the vale of Wyoming and Cherry Valley
unprecedented among the Waldensian fastnesses and the mountains of
Aurvergne? Who has read Fox's book of Martyrs, and found anything
to parallel it in all the records of Indian warfare? The slaughter of St.
Bartholomew's days, the destruction of the Jews in Spain, and the
Scotch Covenanters, were in obedience to the mandates of Christian
princes,-- aye, and some of them devised by Christian women who
professed to be serving God, and to make the Bible the man of their
counsel.
It is said also that the Indians were treacherous, and more, no
compliance with the conditions of any treaty, was ever to be trusted.

But the Puritan fathers cannot be wholly exonerated from the charge of
faithlessness; and who does not blush to talk of Indian traitors when he
remembers the Spanish invasion and the fall of the princely and
magnanimous Montezuma?
Indians believed in witches, and burned them, too. And did not the
sainted Baxter, with the Bible in his hand, pronounce it right, and was
not the Indian permitted to be present, when the quiet unoffending
woman was cast into the fire, by the decree of a Puritan council?
To come down to the more decidedly Christian times, it is not so very
long since, in Protestant England, hanging was the punishment of a
petty thief, long and hopeless imprisonment of a slight misdemeanor,
when men were set up to be stoned and spit upon by those who claimed
the exclusive right to be called humane and merciful.
Again, it is said, the Indian mode of warfare is, without exception, the
most inhuman and revolting. But I do not know that those who die by
the barbed and poisoned arrow linger in any more unendurable torment
than those who are mangled with powder and lead balls, and the
custom of scalping among Christian murderers would save thousands
from groaning days, and perhaps weeks, among heaps that cover
victorious fields and fill hospitals with the wounded and dying. But
scalping is not an invention exclusively Indian. "It claims," says
Prescott, "high authority, or, at least, antiquity." And, further history,
Herodotus, gives an account of it among the Scythians, showing that
they performed the operation, and wore the scalp of their enemies taken
in battle, as trophies, in the same manner as the North American Indian.
Traces of the custom are also found in the laws of the Visigaths, among
the Franks, and even the Anglo Saxons. The Northern Indians did not
scalp, but they had a system of slavery, of which there are no traces to
be found among the customs, laws, or legends of the Iroquois.
Again, it is said, "They carried away women and children captive, and
in their long journey through the wilderness, they were subjected to
heartrending trials."
The wars of Christian men throw hundreds and thousands of women
and children helpless upon the cold world, to toil, to beg, and to starve.
This is not so bright a picture as is usually given of people who have
written laws and have stores of learning, but people cannot see in any
place that