Lifting Hair — The Scalp Hunting Business

Well, damn. I am quite annoyed with William S. Kiser.

I’ve been disciplined in my reading, focused on my deep dive into irregular warfare during the American Civil War. Now Dr. Kiser, professor of history and chair of the history department at Texas A&M University–San Antonio, has dropped a tome that any self-respecting Frontier Partisans scholar and teller-of-tales simply must pick up.

From the mid-1600s through the late 1800s, states sponsored scalp bounties and volunteer campaigns to murder and mutilate thousands of Indians throughout North America. Since central governments in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Mexico City, and Washington, DC, failed to provide adequate military support and financial resources for colonial frontier defense, administrators in regional capitals such as New York, Québec City, New Orleans, Boston, Ciudad Chihuahua, Austin, and Sacramento took matters into their own hands. At different times and in almost every part of the continent, they paid citizens for killing Indians, taking Indians captive, scalping or beheading Indians, and undertaking other forms of performative violence.

“Receipts.”

As militant operatives and civilians alike struggled to prevail over Indigenous forces they considered barbaric and savage, they engaged in not just plundering, slaving, and killing but also dismembering corpses for symbolic purposes and for profit. Although these tactics mostly failed in their intent to exterminate populations, state sponsorship of indiscriminate violence took a significant demographic toll by flooding frontier zones with murderous units whose campaigns diminished Indigenous power, reduced tribal populations, and forced weakened survivors away from traditional homelands. High wages for volunteer campaigning, along with cash bounties for Indian body parts and the ability to take captives and keep valuable plunder, promoted a state-sponsored profit opportunity for civilians.

There is no clear picture of Frontier Partisan warfare if you leave out the importance of scalp bounties — the economic incentive to wage a particularly nasty and brutal type of exterminationist warfare. The New England colonial rangers who got caught in an an ambush in Maine in 1725 that became known as Lovewell’s Fight were on a scalp-hunting mission. That tale is recounted in a Frontier Partisans Podcast episode.

Cormac McCarthy famously (notoriously?) delved into the metaphysics of scalp hunting in Blood Meridian: or The Evening Redness in the West. John Joel Glanton’s scalp hunters were just one of the outfits active in a peculiar kind of mercenary warfare in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico in the mid-19th Century, conducted by units of what Kiser calls “civilian paramilitary operatives.”

It was warfare as business, and the lexicon of business was deployed starkly in its enactment. Scalp hunters often referred to scalps as “receipts.” It must be noted that the business of scalp hunting was not a simple proposition of white men killing Indians for bounties. Indians were active participants. James Kirker’s operational commander was Shawnee Spybuck, a Trans-Mississippi Shawnee who showed absolutely no compunction about hunting Apaches — or adding in a stray Mexican scalp or two.

And, ironically, the cover image for Kiser’s book is a political cartoon from the War of 1812, complaining of the British practice of buying American scalps from their Indian allies, a practice they also engaged in during the brutal American Revolutionary War campaign in the Ohio River Valley.

That, too, was state-sponsored scalp warfare. In the preview I have seen, Kiser does acknowledge that.

I won’t let this interrupt my guerrilla war momentum, but I ordered The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America, and already have it in hand.

Hell, it’s all of a piece anyway. Just ask Bloody Bill Anderson…

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Kiser offers an interesting article on an incident I was unaware of. I hate it when I miss these things…

In May 2022, federal law-enforcement agents executed a search warrant at a Maine auction business that specializes in historical memorabilia. According to a tipster, the auctioneer’s website had recently listed a nineteenth-century Indian scalp for bid. If the scalp were confirmed as an actual body part, the sale would constitute trafficking of human remains, a violation of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). FBI agents seized the item and departed without incident.

News of the raid did not break until six months later, when several media outlets carried the story. FBI Special Agent Timothy Theriault described the confiscated item as “a leather-like substance with long strands of black hair follicles coming out of it.” Accompanying the artifact was a faded paper tag with a matter-of-fact inscription: “Mescallaro [sic] Apache, Scalp. Killed at Johnson’s Run Texas Sent to Frank Owens by Lance Brewington Former Maysville Man Above Told Me By Lance B. At Joplin Mo. 1899 W. W. Gibson.”

The Long Shadow of Indian Scalp Bounties

Crom!

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Kiser has lectured on the subject several times. Here’s the keynote address from a February 2024 University of Texas conference on Borders/Borderlands and the Holocaust: