"designed to cause all possible suffering without
touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and
cudgels, gashing their limbs with knives, cutting off
their fingers with clamshells, scorching them with
firebrands, and other indescribable tortures."
They cut off the breasts of one of the women and compelled her to eat
them. Then all the women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to
the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of
the crowd.
If anyone in this hostile crowd had shown the slightest sympathy with
the victims of this satanic cruelty, he would have been laughed at and
insulted; for to the American Indians ferocity was a virtue, while
"pity was a cowardly weakness at which their pride revolted." They
were deliberately trained to cruelty from infancy, children being
taught to break the legs of animals and otherwise to torture them. Nor
were the women less ferocious than the men; indeed, when it came to
torturing prisoners, the squaws often led the men. In the face of such
facts, it seems almost like mockery to ask if these Indians were
capable of falling in love. Could a Huron to whom cruelty was a
virtue, a duty, and whose chief delight was the torture of men and
women or animals, have harbored in his mind such a delicate,
altruistic sentiment as romantic love, based on sympathy with
another's joys and sorrows? You might as well expect a tiger to make
romantic love to the Bengal maiden he has carried into the jungle for
his supper. Cruelty is not incompatible with appetite, but it is a
fatal obstacle to love based on affection. Facts prove this natural
inference. The Iroquois girls were coarse wantons who indulged in free
lust before marriage, and for whom the men felt such passion as is
possible under the circumstances.
The absurdity of the claim that these cruel Indians felt love is made
more glaringly obvious if we take a case nearer home; imagining a
neighbor guilty of torturing harmless captive women with the obscene
cruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity for
refined love! The Indians would honor such a man as a colleague and
hero; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or the
madhouse.