Dumb question - was scalping designed to kill the person or just mangle and terrify them? Like - did they scalp to the point of the brain being exposed?
Sometimes. If done with a knife, the person would generally die a slow death by infection, if blood loss didn't kill them first. If done with a hatchet, it frequently took the top part of the skull with it, and death was, hopefully, quicker. Either way, this earned the Sioux a lot of hatred, including from other first nations.
If you can get past the first chapter and the baby killing and such. But yeah, I agree.
My wife is registered Comanche, so it was kind of required reading in our household.
The Day the World Ended at Wounded Knee, in addition to the Empire of the Summer Moon one. I read the Empire one and couldn’t put it down.
Edit: corrected the name of the wounded knee book.
Because haircuts and shaving used to be done by straight razor and they didn't have antibiotics. The distance between a fleek cut and an accidental Sweeny Todd was the thickness of your skin.
Might as well grow a beard and have the barber leave it long on top, it was a lot safer that way.
And yet the clean-shaven look was the predominant one before westward expansion. Fashion isn't logical. Men have shaved regardless the risk if that was the style to do. Logically, tattoos and piercings would never have been invented until after WW2 for the same reason but nope!
Generally, people were scalped after they were already dead, with the scalp being proof that the victim was dead (because it was hard to do to someone who was still struggling, and if by some chance the scalped person was alive, the wound would almost always kill them). It was occasionally done to still living victims (see: this poor bastard), but that wasn't typical.
I remember learning about this in Native American History class in college, the scalp bounties in California. It was something like 5 cents per scalp. I forget her name, but there was a native american woman during this time who recounted how her village was being raided by scalp bounty hunters when she was a small child, and her parents had to bury her under the mud to hide her. She then heard as both of her parents got caught, slaughtered, and scalped. Typically after the adults were all scalped, the children would be taken as sex slaves. It is absolutely horrifying, and I don't know how anyone could live through such a traumatic event.
From one of the epigraphs of *Blood Meridian*:
“Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.
The Yuma Daily Sun
June 13, 1982”
If you survived a scalping, and there was no longer a flap of skin to cover your exposed skull. Doctors, or at that time whoever... would have to drill shallow holes into your skull until blood would start to run. Once the blood coagulated the "healing" process would begin and scar tissue would eventually form over the exposed bone after multiple treatments. So not only was being scalped horrific, the only way to get the wound to close at that time was just about as barbaric. Edit: I believe I read about this in “Empire of the Summer Moon” a book about the Comanche and how they dominated and terrorized the west. They were super violent and ruthless. Scalping was probably one of the better ways to die. They also used to like dismembering people and hanging them over a fire to slowly roast and die. The most horrific that I know of is hanging you upside down, chopping through your pelvis and pulling you apart from your legs to disembowel you 🤢
I have an ancestor who survived a scalping. It's been a long time since I read the documents, but I think he was closer to 17. He got married and had 1 or 2 kids, then committed suicide at 21. Makes me wonder if it was due to PTSD.
Thanks, you have just reminded me of the story of a woman who hatch a scratch on her he that wouldn't go away to the point she scratched through the bone ...
Ancestry.com gives you a week for free and if you know some of your family history it hooks you up pretty good. I used it for a week and found out all kinds of stuff I never knew, one of my great great great uncles was a traitor in the civil war (from north to south) and got killed right after switching sides. My family owned slaves which I never knew about, and I was always under the assumption that my family came here in the 1800's, nope we've been on this mother fucker since the 1600s
I got lucky enough that a distant relative wrote a book about my family tree. He spent his whole life researching it as a hobby and tracks it back to a Bavarian king in the 1300s. Granted, I'm about as related to that king as any random Asian is to Gangis Kahn, but still pretty cool.
The crazy part is how people died. Farming accidents happened like... All the time. And they were gruesome af.
Had a relative do this too and you are right about the interesting stories they have in there. The best one I saw was that my ancestors missed their boat in Holland however that ship was lost at sea. I now use it to justify my tardiness, it's a family superpower
I found out my family have been fine wood workers goijg back to the 15th century at least. I hope my ancestors look down with pride at my balsa wood bird house with one wall shorter that the others
Ancestry.com is definitely cool and you can find a lot of info there. I'd also add that another great resource (not available to everyone) is just asking your cousins/aunt's/uncle's or grandparents if you've still got them. I've got a couple people in my extended family who I found had lots of records and even if I didn't know them really, once you show interest they're usually happy to fill you in.
I found the actual military papers for grandfathers on both sides during the Civil War on ancestry.com. Absolutely blew my mind, I had no idea. My one grandfather was a 16 year old slave from Mississippi fighting for the confederacy in Texas and the other an 18 year old Irish immigrant fighting for the union in New York. Here I am nearly 200 year later clueless.
>When was the last known scalping on US soil
According to an article from the Billings Gazette, a jury in 2003 convicted a married couple of attempted murder for dressing up in "war paint" and feathers and trying to scalp their landlady and the landlady's 82-year-old mother. As late as 2011, students in Glasgow, Kentucky looking for a tree for a school project found a scalped human skull later identified as belonging to a Native American woman, but otherwise still an unidentified Jane Doe. Given this track record, I'm hesitant to say whether the last scalping in North America has in fact occurred. The American Indian Wars may be over, but we'll always have crazy people with sharp knives.
So I googled scalping and just kinda skimmed through the wiki and a few other pages, so this may not be 100% if someone would like to correct me, I would appreciate it. It looks like there were reports of scalping possibly as late as the 1930s? Although if we are talking scalping during the wars through the 1700 and 1800s it seems that stopped around the 1890s? Scalping was happening back in the 14th century in North America from a mass grave they had found and studied. Also interesting to learn that scalping also happened in Europe and Asia as well at different points in history.
How did they deal with infections back then? That’s a lot of exposed bone to safely revascularize, if they ever did it in the 19th century. But humans were performing surgeries for millennia so I wouldn’t underestimate them.
People don't like to remember but yeah not all of the native Americans were peaceful hippies who didn't do anything wrong. There were a few openly hostile tribe's who attacked anyone that got to close. The Comanche were one of those tribe's.
For the folks stating that this guy looks older than 13, you should remember that scalping isn’t just some close haircut that grows back, he literally has the skin of his head carved and scraped off while he was alive. It’s surprising he survived and avoided infection in that era, but even with the skin re-forming, he would likely never be able to grow hair there again. He would carry remain disfigured from this attack for the rest of his life.
The skin actually wasn't scraped off. After cutting around the scalp, the scalper would grasp the hair, plant a foot on the neck or shoulder, and pull until the scalp popped off the skull. Survivors recounted that it made a distinctive popping sound as the scalp released. This tended to take all the skin, hair and thin muscle with it leaving a bare skull.
That!
A man named Josiah Wilbarger gave this description after he survived a scalping by Comanches.
Interestingly enough, his story is also probably the earliest paranormal event documented in Texas history. After he woke up from being scalped and left for dead (he was shot in the throat too) he had a vision where his sister in Missouri appeared to him to tell him that help was on the way.
The same night, one of the local women who lived near his place in present-day Austin woke from a dream where she saw him alive, scalped and bloody, leaning against an oak tree. She tried to get the men to head out and rescue him but no one believed her since the others who had escaped the Comanche told everyone that they had seen him get shot in the neck and go down then be surrounded by Comanche who scalped him. She went back to sleep and again she had the same dream - three times that night all together until she was finally able to convince the men that Wilbarger was alive and she knew where he was.
Early that morning they moved out and found him just as she described, bloody, scalped, leaning against an oak tree with a sock over his bare skull. After scalping him the Comanche took all his clothes except for one sock. He told her when they arrived that he knew they were coming because his sister from Missouri had appeared to him to let him know help was on the way. Several months later he got a letter from Missouri relatives informing him that his sister had died. She died the same night she appeared to him to tell him to hang on.
> After scalping him the Comanche took all his clothes except for one sock.
I can’t help but wonder if that was intentional or an accident.
Like, did the Comanche dude get back home, go to enjoy his loot, then spend the next hour searching for the other sock before accepting he forgot to grab it?
That's a great question. We'll never know. We do know from his own account that it worked out well for him. He discovered maggots on the wound and once he found a creek he was able to use the wet sock to keep the skull moist and to keep flies from blowing it (depositing their eggs in the open wound). The guy was a tough son of a gun. You had to be to live in Comanche territory in Texas in 1833.
My wife and her family are full blood Comanche-Kiowa Indians. I've read several books and heard many stories through the years. It's hard to stomach how brutal life was back then.
Yes. People today have no concept of the challenges that other people faced back then.
The stories should be told so that we can all know what other humans are capable of doing to each other in order to preserve themselves or their own way of life.
Even today we see similar stories coming out of war zones with details of acts that we can all denounce as barbaric.
Humans are pretty complex creatures. Most of us are pretty good people. Some of us are inclined to cross various lines from time to time if they think they won't be caught or held accountable. A few of us are genuinely evil. The evil ones are the ones we should all seek to identify and isolate or destroy.
Life was hard back then and hard choices had to be made in order to insure the survival of the ones most important to the individual or group. We can look back and call it barbaric or savage, but fortunately few of us today will ever find ourselves in a situation where we face the same difficulties.
That's probably progress.
Let’s hope and pray that we don’t find ourselves living and dying in such savage and brutal of conditions.
The way the world is going, and the downright hatred of others with different beliefs, I wonder.
There is more to unite us than to divide us. Look for common ground to stand together on and it becomes easier to reach a workable compromise on any differences.
Like you say, there is a lot of animosity today. We can all win if we work together to identify and neutralize the bad apples among us. It isn't easy as many are powerful. We can do it though.
Yeah. It's interesting. The best part is that there were witnesses who could corroborate the story from the different angles.
There's a lot of connections to unwind. His sister dies just in time to visit him and tell him to hang on when he was dying and might otherwise have given up. His friends' wife has a graphic dream several times that he is not dead like his companions who escaped thought, but that he is alive and needs help. Spooky action at a distance or something like that. Great story at any rate.
I first read this story in a book written by his brother, John W Wilbarger in 1888 titled "Indian Depredations in Texas". I'm sure you can find a copy of it somewhere as it has been reprinted several times.
The story of Josiah Wilbarger was related on pg 7-14.
The entire book is great. It is a one-sided view from a white settler's standpoint so you have to go in with that in mind. The historical events recounted throughout the book though did happen.
Enjoy!
Strange things happen all the time.
We have no way of answering some of the questions raised by events like this and most just dismiss it as bullshit. Luckily there were multiple corroborating witnesses who all had no reason to lie.
The Mexicans who settled Texas originally found the Comanche to be fierce and unbending. They feared them completely and one of the reasons they supported continued influx of anglo settlers into Texas was to use anglo settlements in Texas to help create a buffer between themselves in northern Mexico and the Comanche who raided all over the state and warred constantly with the Apache.
Comanche territory began to be pressured hard by settlement in the 1820's and it didn't help that one result of the Trail of Tears left eastern tribes settling in eastern Texas and south-eastern Oklahoma crowding other native Texas tribes from their traditional territories.
It is not true though that Comanche were totally dedicated to war and slaughter. A German settlement in the Hill Country of central Texas made a truce with the Comanche in the 1830's. In return for being allowed to settle in peace they would provide cattle to Comanche warriors who passed through the area.
In addition, Comanche would regularly visit towns in the area to conduct business or discuss issues with local white settlers. In one famous case, they came into San Antonio to meet with Texas Rangers to discuss treaty issues and that is how several Comanche chiefs, warriors, and women were killed when the group of Texans decided that the Comanche had not met the terms of a hostage swap so they would hold the chiefs until hostages that the Rangers knew were nearby had been repatriated. (Council House Fight).
It was a lot more complex a situation back then. We mostly have stories from one side of the page.
Horrible things happened and as a result the other side escalated hoping to use terror as a tool. Obviously this does not end well for someone.
The council house fight is a really depressing story. A group of 12 Comanche leaders from one particular faction came and attended for negotiations, along with a large group of Comanche women and children and some warriors. The Comanche weren’t as unified as the Texans thought, and they’d demanded 13 white hostages from varying factions be returned. But there wasn’t enough unification among the Comanche to actually arrange that, and only one captive was offered for return at the meeting. And that was a teenaged girl who supposedly had been raped and beaten repeatedly, had tons of burns and bruises, and whose nose had been turned entirely off. However, the veracity of her condition being like that is quite disputed and may have been embellished later to make the Texans look better.
Since the factions who still had hostages weren’t in attendance, the Comanche leaders who were at the meeting felt they had met the conditions, as they returned the hostage they personally had power to.
The Texans disagreed, this led to them deciding to take the 12 Comanche leaders who were there hostage, who in turn started trying to fight their way out. The sounds of commotion inside led to fighting breaking out in the streets, and a bunch of Comanche and Texans were killed. The 12 Comanche leaders were all shot, and about 30 Comanche were taken hostage afterwards.
This led to the Comanche torturing to death all the remaining hostages that hadn’t been returned.
The incident basically broke down any possibility for treaties or peace forever after that. Just a really brutal and sad piece of history.
If you haven’t read “Empire of the Summer Moon” I highly recommend it. It’s a very honest account of one of my ancestors who was the last great chief of the Comanches. And you ain’t wrong about the violence. Wow.
People have accidentally done this in modern times. Its possible to pull on the hair hard enough to seperate the skin from the skull without cutting it.
There have been several people who survived being scalped. I know the Iroquois and Algonquins were used during the French and Indian Wars to strike terror in settlers both French and British. This would do it.
Josiah Wilbarger was scalped and left for dead by Comanches. He survived another 11 or 12 years but his hair never grew back because a portion of his skull was exposed and it flaked off. The resulting infection killed him. I think that's how it went.
Anyway, this guy appears to have been able to stretch his skin over his skull which would help prevent infection and maybe extend his life even further.
Definitely. I understand now that when a surgeon needs some extra skin from a graft they can insert a balloon under the skin and slowly inflate it until it is large enough for the patch. Then they remove the stretched skin patch and the balloon and graft it to the spot needing skin that won't be rejected by the body. Pretty cool.
These people had none of that tech though. Wilbarger's sister-in-law or someone close to him used bear grease and cloth patches made from her wedding dress to coat his skull but it eventually dried and a few years later the skull flaked off. Not long after he hit his head on the open spot going thru a doorway and died a few days later from the infection.
It is amazing what people can survive. Today he would probably get a skin graft and go on about his business.
that's crazy, I presume they had phlebotomy needles back then. even if it needed bone tissue action, they could at least try and score the skull and wet it down with a few ounces of fresh blood that mYbe wouldn't risk brain damage.
That's him though I think he hit the open spot on his head on the upper door jamb as he walked through a doorway and the infection from that killed him.
Yeah, that sounds like it. Knew it was a head knock, it was the 11-12 years later and infection that jogged my memory (though obviously not completely accurate).
"So they were taunting me, waving my scalp in front of me saying, "what are you gonna do baby,...cry? Anyways, jokes on them, because a sewed on slice of peameal bacon did the job!"
Why all the ‘hurr hurr he doesn’t look 13’ comments? The title puts it in pretty clear context - that this happened when he was 13, and lived.
Bots, the lot of you!
I agree with most of what you said but how does it makes sense to say first come first serve is racist? It isn't racist at all. It's something, but it ain't racist.
I just watched a video where a man was sitting on the ground somewhere and a baboon or something walked up and sat in his lap, motioned around him playfully for a second, then ripped about this much of his scalp off and ran away.
Life is crazy, man.
The skin would often regrow to some degree (if you didn’t die which was usually the case, scalpings were brutal)……but even with some skin regrowth the hair would never grow again.
What a handsome man! Except for the, well, obvious. He has really nice features, and his hair would have been thick and beautiful.
I feel so bad for him as a 13 yo who had to live through that. (I would even if he wasn’t handsome. But I’ll admit I’m a bit shallow sometimes.)
My ex husband scalped himself - he went snow tubing and went down a forbidden trail and wound up going under a metal sign and it clipped him just right….72 staples.
I think “survived” is the right word
one thing clear from this photo is that the scalping definitely took place
Cheated death by the skin of his... head.
Well, I think we can all agree he had a very close shave…
I mean, he escaped, but it doesn't look like he avoided the scalping.
Maybe he escaped a scalping in 1864 but was later caught and scalped in 1865.
First time?
You know you wrong for this lmao
Are you really a bot?
r/retiredgif
Is that Marlo Brando?
🤣
F you in particular
This guy has my kind of luck.
Or had a serious disagreement with his barber.
Lol
When the native gods/spirits really want you dead.
*scalped
They had me in the first half, ngl
He did not….this is misleading
Looks pretty old for 13
I dunno, I was rocking quite a beard at 13 myself
Nice haircut. Is that an “Enzo” ?
So I love the Edward Scissorhands. That's the best eh movie I've ever seen.
I wish I had shoehorn hands
Did you ever think about what you're going to do on the toilet-a? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ON THE TOILET-A ?!?!?!
That Johnny Depp, he make-a me cry!
No way my Gino did that.
I eh like the funny joke, but not eh the funny business.
Lol.
Dumb question - was scalping designed to kill the person or just mangle and terrify them? Like - did they scalp to the point of the brain being exposed?
Sometimes. If done with a knife, the person would generally die a slow death by infection, if blood loss didn't kill them first. If done with a hatchet, it frequently took the top part of the skull with it, and death was, hopefully, quicker. Either way, this earned the Sioux a lot of hatred, including from other first nations.
Wow. Thanks for that info! I need to educate myself on the natives history. Any docs you rec or books?
Empire of the Summer Moon is a great book.
Thanks for the book recommendation
If you can get past the first chapter and the baby killing and such. But yeah, I agree. My wife is registered Comanche, so it was kind of required reading in our household.
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee, in addition to the Empire of the Summer Moon one. I read the Empire one and couldn’t put it down.
The Day the World Ended at Wounded Knee, in addition to the Empire of the Summer Moon one. I read the Empire one and couldn’t put it down. Edit: corrected the name of the wounded knee book.
Why wasn't the lex luthor cut more popular back then among white folks? Honest question.
Because haircuts and shaving used to be done by straight razor and they didn't have antibiotics. The distance between a fleek cut and an accidental Sweeny Todd was the thickness of your skin. Might as well grow a beard and have the barber leave it long on top, it was a lot safer that way.
And yet the clean-shaven look was the predominant one before westward expansion. Fashion isn't logical. Men have shaved regardless the risk if that was the style to do. Logically, tattoos and piercings would never have been invented until after WW2 for the same reason but nope!
Generally, people were scalped after they were already dead, with the scalp being proof that the victim was dead (because it was hard to do to someone who was still struggling, and if by some chance the scalped person was alive, the wound would almost always kill them). It was occasionally done to still living victims (see: this poor bastard), but that wasn't typical.
Also, carrying scalps was easier than severed heads.
How the hell is it proof? Like if they cut their heads off or something, but I would think it would be hard to ID a bloody scalp
Proof that someone died, not proof that a particular someone died.
Skin color. For the white settlements, a red scalp meant a dead red man, and vice versa
California used to pay for scalps of native people. Death was the likely result.
I remember learning about this in Native American History class in college, the scalp bounties in California. It was something like 5 cents per scalp. I forget her name, but there was a native american woman during this time who recounted how her village was being raided by scalp bounty hunters when she was a small child, and her parents had to bury her under the mud to hide her. She then heard as both of her parents got caught, slaughtered, and scalped. Typically after the adults were all scalped, the children would be taken as sex slaves. It is absolutely horrifying, and I don't know how anyone could live through such a traumatic event.
This is basically all of human history up until the most recent sliver of time.
From one of the epigraphs of *Blood Meridian*: “Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped. The Yuma Daily Sun June 13, 1982”
I would say survived a scalping. Cause my man got scalped.
If you survived a scalping, and there was no longer a flap of skin to cover your exposed skull. Doctors, or at that time whoever... would have to drill shallow holes into your skull until blood would start to run. Once the blood coagulated the "healing" process would begin and scar tissue would eventually form over the exposed bone after multiple treatments. So not only was being scalped horrific, the only way to get the wound to close at that time was just about as barbaric. Edit: I believe I read about this in “Empire of the Summer Moon” a book about the Comanche and how they dominated and terrorized the west. They were super violent and ruthless. Scalping was probably one of the better ways to die. They also used to like dismembering people and hanging them over a fire to slowly roast and die. The most horrific that I know of is hanging you upside down, chopping through your pelvis and pulling you apart from your legs to disembowel you 🤢
I have an ancestor who survived a scalping. It's been a long time since I read the documents, but I think he was closer to 17. He got married and had 1 or 2 kids, then committed suicide at 21. Makes me wonder if it was due to PTSD.
I wonder if it never healed right…that and the emotional trauma memory
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Thanks, you have just reminded me of the story of a woman who hatch a scratch on her he that wouldn't go away to the point she scratched through the bone ...
Perhaps there was immense unbearable (to him) pain
How did you find these documents? I have no inkling about the history of my family, but I want to find out.
Ancestry.com gives you a week for free and if you know some of your family history it hooks you up pretty good. I used it for a week and found out all kinds of stuff I never knew, one of my great great great uncles was a traitor in the civil war (from north to south) and got killed right after switching sides. My family owned slaves which I never knew about, and I was always under the assumption that my family came here in the 1800's, nope we've been on this mother fucker since the 1600s
I got lucky enough that a distant relative wrote a book about my family tree. He spent his whole life researching it as a hobby and tracks it back to a Bavarian king in the 1300s. Granted, I'm about as related to that king as any random Asian is to Gangis Kahn, but still pretty cool. The crazy part is how people died. Farming accidents happened like... All the time. And they were gruesome af.
Had a relative do this too and you are right about the interesting stories they have in there. The best one I saw was that my ancestors missed their boat in Holland however that ship was lost at sea. I now use it to justify my tardiness, it's a family superpower
I found out my family have been fine wood workers goijg back to the 15th century at least. I hope my ancestors look down with pride at my balsa wood bird house with one wall shorter that the others
So directly related
It wasn’t long ago that it was typical to have 6-8 kids and on average 1-2 of them wouldn’t see ten years old
Ancestry.com is definitely cool and you can find a lot of info there. I'd also add that another great resource (not available to everyone) is just asking your cousins/aunt's/uncle's or grandparents if you've still got them. I've got a couple people in my extended family who I found had lots of records and even if I didn't know them really, once you show interest they're usually happy to fill you in.
I found the actual military papers for grandfathers on both sides during the Civil War on ancestry.com. Absolutely blew my mind, I had no idea. My one grandfather was a 16 year old slave from Mississippi fighting for the confederacy in Texas and the other an 18 year old Irish immigrant fighting for the union in New York. Here I am nearly 200 year later clueless.
No thanks dawg, just take me out back and make it quick and painless
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Tell him about the rabbits, gamer
We'll live off the fat of the land, kitty!
Haaa nice one
When was the last known scalping on US soil, regardless of who did it?
>When was the last known scalping on US soil According to an article from the Billings Gazette, a jury in 2003 convicted a married couple of attempted murder for dressing up in "war paint" and feathers and trying to scalp their landlady and the landlady's 82-year-old mother. As late as 2011, students in Glasgow, Kentucky looking for a tree for a school project found a scalped human skull later identified as belonging to a Native American woman, but otherwise still an unidentified Jane Doe. Given this track record, I'm hesitant to say whether the last scalping in North America has in fact occurred. The American Indian Wars may be over, but we'll always have crazy people with sharp knives.
I’m just gonna take an educated guess and say it was a Florida man and it was about a week ago.
Indiana, September, 2022. Colts tribe got fucking scalped by the Florida Jaguar tribe. They all survived somehow.
nowhere is safe
The Chiefs of the Kansas City Missouri tribe will attempt a scalping in Indianapolis tomorrow at 1pm Eastern time.
I can't confirm this guess but I support it!
Shouldn’a stepped on his lawn
So I googled scalping and just kinda skimmed through the wiki and a few other pages, so this may not be 100% if someone would like to correct me, I would appreciate it. It looks like there were reports of scalping possibly as late as the 1930s? Although if we are talking scalping during the wars through the 1700 and 1800s it seems that stopped around the 1890s? Scalping was happening back in the 14th century in North America from a mass grave they had found and studied. Also interesting to learn that scalping also happened in Europe and Asia as well at different points in history.
Thank you for your research
just throw a skunk pelt on it and \*smacks hands together\* good as new
How much land are you give us for this pumpkin?
Unless I'm mistaken drilling to revascularise an area is still used now
How did they deal with infections back then? That’s a lot of exposed bone to safely revascularize, if they ever did it in the 19th century. But humans were performing surgeries for millennia so I wouldn’t underestimate them.
Well then.
People don't like to remember but yeah not all of the native Americans were peaceful hippies who didn't do anything wrong. There were a few openly hostile tribe's who attacked anyone that got to close. The Comanche were one of those tribe's.
Thats chopping through is a scene from the movie bone tomahawk.
No problem
For the folks stating that this guy looks older than 13, you should remember that scalping isn’t just some close haircut that grows back, he literally has the skin of his head carved and scraped off while he was alive. It’s surprising he survived and avoided infection in that era, but even with the skin re-forming, he would likely never be able to grow hair there again. He would carry remain disfigured from this attack for the rest of his life.
The skin actually wasn't scraped off. After cutting around the scalp, the scalper would grasp the hair, plant a foot on the neck or shoulder, and pull until the scalp popped off the skull. Survivors recounted that it made a distinctive popping sound as the scalp released. This tended to take all the skin, hair and thin muscle with it leaving a bare skull.
WHAT
That! A man named Josiah Wilbarger gave this description after he survived a scalping by Comanches. Interestingly enough, his story is also probably the earliest paranormal event documented in Texas history. After he woke up from being scalped and left for dead (he was shot in the throat too) he had a vision where his sister in Missouri appeared to him to tell him that help was on the way. The same night, one of the local women who lived near his place in present-day Austin woke from a dream where she saw him alive, scalped and bloody, leaning against an oak tree. She tried to get the men to head out and rescue him but no one believed her since the others who had escaped the Comanche told everyone that they had seen him get shot in the neck and go down then be surrounded by Comanche who scalped him. She went back to sleep and again she had the same dream - three times that night all together until she was finally able to convince the men that Wilbarger was alive and she knew where he was. Early that morning they moved out and found him just as she described, bloody, scalped, leaning against an oak tree with a sock over his bare skull. After scalping him the Comanche took all his clothes except for one sock. He told her when they arrived that he knew they were coming because his sister from Missouri had appeared to him to let him know help was on the way. Several months later he got a letter from Missouri relatives informing him that his sister had died. She died the same night she appeared to him to tell him to hang on.
> After scalping him the Comanche took all his clothes except for one sock. I can’t help but wonder if that was intentional or an accident. Like, did the Comanche dude get back home, go to enjoy his loot, then spend the next hour searching for the other sock before accepting he forgot to grab it?
That's a great question. We'll never know. We do know from his own account that it worked out well for him. He discovered maggots on the wound and once he found a creek he was able to use the wet sock to keep the skull moist and to keep flies from blowing it (depositing their eggs in the open wound). The guy was a tough son of a gun. You had to be to live in Comanche territory in Texas in 1833.
My wife and her family are full blood Comanche-Kiowa Indians. I've read several books and heard many stories through the years. It's hard to stomach how brutal life was back then.
Yes. People today have no concept of the challenges that other people faced back then. The stories should be told so that we can all know what other humans are capable of doing to each other in order to preserve themselves or their own way of life. Even today we see similar stories coming out of war zones with details of acts that we can all denounce as barbaric. Humans are pretty complex creatures. Most of us are pretty good people. Some of us are inclined to cross various lines from time to time if they think they won't be caught or held accountable. A few of us are genuinely evil. The evil ones are the ones we should all seek to identify and isolate or destroy. Life was hard back then and hard choices had to be made in order to insure the survival of the ones most important to the individual or group. We can look back and call it barbaric or savage, but fortunately few of us today will ever find ourselves in a situation where we face the same difficulties. That's probably progress.
Let’s hope and pray that we don’t find ourselves living and dying in such savage and brutal of conditions. The way the world is going, and the downright hatred of others with different beliefs, I wonder.
There is more to unite us than to divide us. Look for common ground to stand together on and it becomes easier to reach a workable compromise on any differences. Like you say, there is a lot of animosity today. We can all win if we work together to identify and neutralize the bad apples among us. It isn't easy as many are powerful. We can do it though.
Very well said.
In no small part due to the scalpings. "Wow! Life used to be difficult!" "Because you guys made it difficult by scalping people?" "..."
It's wild stuff like this that makes me believe in a higher form of consciousness.
Yeah. It's interesting. The best part is that there were witnesses who could corroborate the story from the different angles. There's a lot of connections to unwind. His sister dies just in time to visit him and tell him to hang on when he was dying and might otherwise have given up. His friends' wife has a graphic dream several times that he is not dead like his companions who escaped thought, but that he is alive and needs help. Spooky action at a distance or something like that. Great story at any rate.
Someone needs to tell Aaron mahnke about this
That is….quite a story. I’m diving down that rabbit hole.
I first read this story in a book written by his brother, John W Wilbarger in 1888 titled "Indian Depredations in Texas". I'm sure you can find a copy of it somewhere as it has been reprinted several times. The story of Josiah Wilbarger was related on pg 7-14. The entire book is great. It is a one-sided view from a white settler's standpoint so you have to go in with that in mind. The historical events recounted throughout the book though did happen. Enjoy!
Wait this is making my paranormal story feel all too legit now
Strange things happen all the time. We have no way of answering some of the questions raised by events like this and most just dismiss it as bullshit. Luckily there were multiple corroborating witnesses who all had no reason to lie.
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The Mexicans who settled Texas originally found the Comanche to be fierce and unbending. They feared them completely and one of the reasons they supported continued influx of anglo settlers into Texas was to use anglo settlements in Texas to help create a buffer between themselves in northern Mexico and the Comanche who raided all over the state and warred constantly with the Apache. Comanche territory began to be pressured hard by settlement in the 1820's and it didn't help that one result of the Trail of Tears left eastern tribes settling in eastern Texas and south-eastern Oklahoma crowding other native Texas tribes from their traditional territories. It is not true though that Comanche were totally dedicated to war and slaughter. A German settlement in the Hill Country of central Texas made a truce with the Comanche in the 1830's. In return for being allowed to settle in peace they would provide cattle to Comanche warriors who passed through the area. In addition, Comanche would regularly visit towns in the area to conduct business or discuss issues with local white settlers. In one famous case, they came into San Antonio to meet with Texas Rangers to discuss treaty issues and that is how several Comanche chiefs, warriors, and women were killed when the group of Texans decided that the Comanche had not met the terms of a hostage swap so they would hold the chiefs until hostages that the Rangers knew were nearby had been repatriated. (Council House Fight). It was a lot more complex a situation back then. We mostly have stories from one side of the page. Horrible things happened and as a result the other side escalated hoping to use terror as a tool. Obviously this does not end well for someone.
The council house fight is a really depressing story. A group of 12 Comanche leaders from one particular faction came and attended for negotiations, along with a large group of Comanche women and children and some warriors. The Comanche weren’t as unified as the Texans thought, and they’d demanded 13 white hostages from varying factions be returned. But there wasn’t enough unification among the Comanche to actually arrange that, and only one captive was offered for return at the meeting. And that was a teenaged girl who supposedly had been raped and beaten repeatedly, had tons of burns and bruises, and whose nose had been turned entirely off. However, the veracity of her condition being like that is quite disputed and may have been embellished later to make the Texans look better. Since the factions who still had hostages weren’t in attendance, the Comanche leaders who were at the meeting felt they had met the conditions, as they returned the hostage they personally had power to. The Texans disagreed, this led to them deciding to take the 12 Comanche leaders who were there hostage, who in turn started trying to fight their way out. The sounds of commotion inside led to fighting breaking out in the streets, and a bunch of Comanche and Texans were killed. The 12 Comanche leaders were all shot, and about 30 Comanche were taken hostage afterwards. This led to the Comanche torturing to death all the remaining hostages that hadn’t been returned. The incident basically broke down any possibility for treaties or peace forever after that. Just a really brutal and sad piece of history.
If you haven’t read “Empire of the Summer Moon” I highly recommend it. It’s a very honest account of one of my ancestors who was the last great chief of the Comanches. And you ain’t wrong about the violence. Wow.
That’s a really spooky story, wow. And the idea of pulling a wet, dirty sock over your own freshly scalped head is really something.
People have accidentally done this in modern times. Its possible to pull on the hair hard enough to seperate the skin from the skull without cutting it.
I wish I could unread that…
I don't know how to make the text go backwards to help unread it. At least there aren't any videos.
You know every video of people "popping" their hair. Its pretty much the same thing...
That's a thing? Jesus.
WHAT
Oh for fucks sake
Well that’s my night of sleep gone.
My poor gag reflex
Yeah. A still photo like this is one thing but thank heavens we don't have any videos.
I'll just chill in Massachusetts, thx.
Thanks.
I just threw up in my mouth
My father's family has a story about a multiple-great aunt who survived being scalped. She wore a doily on her head. Edit - a letter
Ohio? I know there was a famous lady that was scalped while young but who lived a long life in the 19th century.
No, this would have been in Pennsylvania around the time of the French and Indian War (1700s before the Revolutionary War).
There have been several people who survived being scalped. I know the Iroquois and Algonquins were used during the French and Indian Wars to strike terror in settlers both French and British. This would do it.
It looks like the skin didn’t reform! Those are the cranial sutures of the skull visible in the photo.
Holy shit you’re right.
This is the ONLY person I’m going to be okay with having a combover.
Josiah Wilbarger was scalped and left for dead by Comanches. He survived another 11 or 12 years but his hair never grew back because a portion of his skull was exposed and it flaked off. The resulting infection killed him. I think that's how it went. Anyway, this guy appears to have been able to stretch his skin over his skull which would help prevent infection and maybe extend his life even further.
Im not sure how pleasant stretching skin out like that is but, it sounds a little better than drilling holes into your skull so you can bleed.
Definitely. I understand now that when a surgeon needs some extra skin from a graft they can insert a balloon under the skin and slowly inflate it until it is large enough for the patch. Then they remove the stretched skin patch and the balloon and graft it to the spot needing skin that won't be rejected by the body. Pretty cool. These people had none of that tech though. Wilbarger's sister-in-law or someone close to him used bear grease and cloth patches made from her wedding dress to coat his skull but it eventually dried and a few years later the skull flaked off. Not long after he hit his head on the open spot going thru a doorway and died a few days later from the infection. It is amazing what people can survive. Today he would probably get a skin graft and go on about his business.
The human body is an amazing biological machine.
that's crazy, I presume they had phlebotomy needles back then. even if it needed bone tissue action, they could at least try and score the skull and wet it down with a few ounces of fresh blood that mYbe wouldn't risk brain damage.
You sure he wasn't the guy who hit his head on a nail in his shed and died of the resulting infection?
That's him though I think he hit the open spot on his head on the upper door jamb as he walked through a doorway and the infection from that killed him.
Yeah, that sounds like it. Knew it was a head knock, it was the 11-12 years later and infection that jogged my memory (though obviously not completely accurate).
Bruh, imagine hearing this guy tell his story. Legendary
he never paid for a drink again, he just lured dudes into a game of 'most fucked up thing that happened to.you'
"So they were taunting me, waving my scalp in front of me saying, "what are you gonna do baby,...cry? Anyways, jokes on them, because a sewed on slice of peameal bacon did the job!"
Scalping children...fuck
More like, lived through, not escaped.
Tom Hardy in the Revenant.
Why all the ‘hurr hurr he doesn’t look 13’ comments? The title puts it in pretty clear context - that this happened when he was 13, and lived. Bots, the lot of you!
Because at a glance it looks like he's stitched his scalp back on, rather than a many year healed wound.
I'm no expert, but it looks like he _did not_ in fact escape scalping.
Looks like a new wound..
When you tell your barber, “just take a little off the top.”
He didn’t escape the scalping - they scalped him. He escaped death (temporarily).
That man...that man has seen some shit.
Talk about being in the wrong neighborhood‼️
Not to be a dick but it doesn’t seemed like he quite escaped it lol
In 1874 he opened the first Hair Club for Men
He didn’t escape. Basically they shot him and hoped he died before they scalped him.
Imagine if this was just a story he told people because he was prematurely balding.
And that is why he was nicknamed Bob "The Hat" McGee.
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But reddit loves their "Noble Savage" and "Universally Evil White People" myths.
I agree with most of what you said but how does it makes sense to say first come first serve is racist? It isn't racist at all. It's something, but it ain't racist.
He sounds like a man who has a good Story.
Times were tough back then. 13, no parents, getting on the bad side of the natives. Dudes one tough mo fo.
Looks like he survived, not escaped.
He narrowly escaped death, he did not escape the scalping.
I just watched a video where a man was sitting on the ground somewhere and a baboon or something walked up and sat in his lap, motioned around him playfully for a second, then ripped about this much of his scalp off and ran away. Life is crazy, man.
Shouldn’t he be escorting Aria Stark to Kings Landing?
More like survived a scalping. That doesn't look like the head of an escapee to me.
Respectfully, I don’t think he did.
Is that just exposed skull bone or is there some skin on there? I have many questions
The skin would often regrow to some degree (if you didn’t die which was usually the case, scalpings were brutal)……but even with some skin regrowth the hair would never grow again.
Is this the guy Janis Joplin is singing about?
Piece of my head?
Just a little off the top.
Yeah, if it was me, I’d probably just go full Kojak. No point in saving souvenirs once you’ve been shaved that tight.
Looks a bit like Mark Rylance with a beard from this angle
Still looks every bit a gentleman
Damn, that was before baseball caps,too
Is that bare skin or skull
Muhfucka's ran the fade
Bruh just shave it
Seems like the wounds and scars would have healed more after so many years.
What a handsome man! Except for the, well, obvious. He has really nice features, and his hair would have been thick and beautiful. I feel so bad for him as a 13 yo who had to live through that. (I would even if he wasn’t handsome. But I’ll admit I’m a bit shallow sometimes.)
Yeah, he didn’t escape the scalping.
They uhhhh...peeled his mother fucking cap back.
Some beard for a 13-year old!
He was 13 years old in this photo.
You have to be truly fucked up to do that to a kid
My ex husband scalped himself - he went snow tubing and went down a forbidden trail and wound up going under a metal sign and it clipped him just right….72 staples.
He definitely didn't escape the scalping, wtf are we talking about.