Editorial note — FOOTNOTES

Honorable Wm. Jones, Secretary of the Navy, Washington.

It may be here added that the practice of scalping is by no means confined to the aborigines of North America. Among white Americans, it has never been too uncommon to excite remark, still less reprobation; and though it may not have been a regularly recognized and practiced incident of our warfare with Indians of late years, one has only to read any of the chronicles of our earlier warrings with Indian, English, or French foes, to perceive the entire reciprocity of the custom. It fell into desuetude, on our part, less from any disrepute than from sheer indifference. Instances are not lacking during the last century, of our skinning whole Indians, tanning their hides, and manufacturing the leather into various articles of use or joy; and when we ceased to scalp as a rule, it was simply because scalps were no longer worth the trouble of taking. I am myself no stranger to reeking Apache scalps, taken both by citizens and soldiery. I knew a young officer of our army who, in a spirit of bravado, fastened an Apache scalp to each of his spurs, and wore them with the long black hair trailing at his heels during one of his hunts for Indians in Arizona. The legislature of one of our Territories passed a bill offering a reward of a certain sum of money for every "buck" Indian's scalp which should be produced, and a certain other sum for the scalp of "anything in the shape of an Indian," i. e., woman or child. The British general, Henry Hamilton, while lieutenant-governor at Detroit, had a regular tariff of prices both for prisoners and for scalps which he purchased from Indians and from white renegades, thus acquiring the soubriquet of "the hair-buying general," applied to him by George Rogers Clark. Honors are so easy on this score that they do not count in the game of war which the British played with their American cousins.