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 will be giving a talk about his latest book, “The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America” Thursday at 3pm 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 (Thursday, 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.
