To scalp someone is to remove the skin from the top of the skull and the hair with it. The end product is a flap of skin with a hair piece attached. The size of the scalp taken can vary from a square inch to the entire scalp. Scalping can be done in a variety of ways, but is usually done from behind the victim, pulling the head up, and slicing along the hairline of the forehead. Scalping may be done to a living person or a dead person. When done to a living person, scalping does not necessarily result in death.
Much like religion, written language, and agriculture, scalping seems to have arisen independently among different human populations on different continents. The first recorded mention of scalping in history comes from ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Natives along the East Coast claim they learned it from the English. Between Natives and whites, it’s not clear who took more scalps from who, but both scored in the thousands.
For Natives, scalps were a trophy. For Europeans, with a long history of employing mercenaries, they served as proof for payment.
Today, ten scalps, including those of women and children, can be seen in the hands of the statue of Hannah Duston. She was a frontier mother who was kidnapped by the Abenaki. One night in 1697, she and two fellow captives killed their presumed captors, two men, two women, and six children. About to escape, she was cognizant of the bounty: “fifty pounds per head for every Indian man, and twenty five pound [four to eight months of a soldier’s salary] per head for any Indian woman or Child… the Scalps… to be produced and delivered to the Commissioner.”
In New England, the colonists began with bounties for wolves, evidenced by producing a head or scalp. In the 1630s, they offered cloth in exchange for Pequot body parts. They killed that which they could not domesticate, and they paid someone to do it.
The bounty had actually expired by the time Duston returned with her scalps, but she petitioned, successfully, for the reward. It was a key moment in the history of European colonial scalp bounties. In the words of Ball (2013), “In a single generation, accelerated by the colonial wars, bounties had moved from a tool born of exigency to a demand by the populace.”
By 1700, most New England colonies were offering scalp bounties.
Like Pocahontas, her story was forgotten but revived in the 1800s. It was repeated by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. She appeared in history books and children’s books. They left out the part about the women and children, or the possibility that the people she killed were not her original captors, but were bringing her back to her settlement to ransom her.
In the words of Ball, “Demand for territory in this ’empire of land’ was ‘inherently eliminatory,’ presuming the removal of indigenous peoples in favor of English settlers. Colonial rewards for Indian scalps fused the ‘logic of elimination’ with targeted violence. Scalp bounties simultaneously constructed racialized enemies and produced whiteness as the unifying principle for people of the British (and later American) empire.”
Between 1861 and 1910, six monuments were dedicated to her. It was a story the white people wanted to memorialize at that time. Her granite likeness, the one that stands today holding the scalps, was the first statue funded by the state of New Hampshire. In her other hand is a hatchet.
Memories of the People 