How It Feels To Be Scalped: what follows is a December 20, 1883 article from the San Antonio Light newspaper. It’s the actual words of a soldier who had been scalped:
Quote…“I
magine someone who hates you grabbing a handful of your hair and giving it a sudden jerk upward, and a not particularly sharp blade of a knife being run quickly in a circle around your scalp in a saw like motion. Also imagine what effect that a strong, quick jerk on your hair to release the scalp would have on your nervous and physical systems, and you will have some idea how it feels to be scalped.
“When that Indian sawed his knife around the top of my head, first a sense of cold numbness pervaded my whole body. A flash of pain that started at my feet and ran like an electric shock to my brain quickly followed this. When the Indian tore my scalp from my head it seemed as if it must have been connected with cords to every part of my body.”…Unquote
Following the attack, a friend of the scalped man killed the Indian who had done the scalping, but, according to the soldier, his scalp wasn’t returned.
After recovery he chose to muster out of the service…but his commanding officer called him into his office, and suggested that the soldier was making a mistake by leaving the army. “Thank,” said his commanding officer, “how surprised and disgusted some red devil of an Indian might be if you should stay with us and happen to fall into his hands. When he went to raise your hair he would find that someone had been there before him.”
Incidentally, his commanding officer was General George Armstrong Custer whose command was wiped out shortly afterward at Little Big Horn.
Here’s is a video of the Phantom of the Black Hills reciting this classic tale:
