Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Scalping



 On 20 February 1725 New Hampshire militiamen took part in the first recorded scalping of Indians by whites in North America, according to one of the inaccurate websites I use for daily history.

Actually it was the whites, I believe, British or French, who taught the Indians to scalp by paying bounties for the scalps of their enemies. Massachusetts offered a scalp bounty during King William's War in 1689, and again in 1703 and 1722. Mercifully, the practice has largely disappeared at private hands and has today been taken over wholly by the Federal Reserve. The yankee government scalps anyone the Fed might miss. Professionalism -- it's the cure for every ill.

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