There are various shades of meaning as regards the virtue of chastity, whether it be that of the faithful wife,
or the virginity of the maiden
it could apply to the immature or of the unmarried, or the temporary continence of warrior or medicine-man, or the more
permanent attempts (sometimes becoming perversions) of priestly subjects—in all these applications its
origin is the same, though cloaked and shrouded by varying conditions of life and culture,
the execution of thirty-eight Sioux on December 26, 1862 was maybe a reaction to the saintly being of the so called savage and the unconscious sense of loss on the part of those that lacked soul and deep down knew it
The hanging, following trials which condemned over three hundred participants in the 1862 Dakota Conflict, stands as the largest mass execution in American history. Only the unpopular intervention of Lincoln saved 265 other Dakota and mixed-bloods from the fate met by the less fortunate thirty-eight. . The mass hanging was the concluding scene in the opening chapter of a story of the American-Sioux conflict that would not end until the Seventh Cavalry completed its massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890.
The reaction to the white invasion was brutal and bloody but below is an idea of what really went down once religous mania took hold. Wounded kneewas thye final nail in the coffin of paradise, but was it in any way true?
Was America truly a paradise before the Europeans arrived? A single album of watercolours exists to show how the native Indians lived before foreign white men settled along the coast.
They were painted in the 1580s by John White, a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had permission from Elizabeth I to settle the Eastern seaboard of what is now the United States. Raleigh had named it Virginia, in honour of the Virgin Queen.
scum of the earth
The watercolours illustrate idyllic scenes of handsome, near-naked Indians living off the fat of the land.
They dwell in simple homes of bark and reed. On either side of their neat pathways grow fine crops of corn. Nearby are plots of tobacco, sunflowers and medicinal herbs.
The Indians draw water, hunt deer in the woods with dogs and spear bountiful fish from their canoes in the wide, shallow river.
In one picture they dance in and out of a circle of wooden statues, perhaps to celebrate a corn festival. In another, they make music around a bonfire in thanks for escaping from a danger.
White's full-length portraits show the prosperity of these Algonquian Indians. A priest sports a fine coat of rabbit fur.
A tattooed warrior chief wears beads, possibly pearls, and his wife and daughter appear to have trinkets of gold and silver, as well as red glass beads given to the little girl by the colonists.
The impression left is of good-tempered, sociable, unthreatening people, deft with tools. Put white men's clothes on them and they could be the kind of peasantry seen out of the window of an English country house.
During the European colonisation which followed, this utopian vision fell apart in a nightmare of starvation, disease and bloody massacre.
For these Indians were slaughtered in untold numbers by white men, and the revenge attacks they inflicted in turn on the settlers were some of the most savage in American history, involving grotesque torture and even cannibalism.
Could the supposed utopia ever have worked? That is the haunting question at the heart of a British Museum exhibition to celebrate the 400th anniversary of England's first permanent settlement in America.
Initially at least, the British had every intention of ensuring the prosperity and harmony portrayed in White's pictures was maintained.
One of the first settlers wrote: "We found the people most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age. The earth bringeth forth all things in abundance, as in the first creation, without toil or labour."
But colonial settlers already had a reputation for atrocity. After Columbus's discovery of the New World in 1492, Spanish settlers had brutally slaughtered hundreds of thousands of American Indians in the West Indies and news of this was spreading up the Eastern seaboard.
US cavalry in their early days could only contain the supierior horsemanship of the indians but this changed when repeating firearms could be used. This figure by Fixed Bayonet. we have about ten left then thats it.
In the Spaniards' search for gold and precious stones, whole villages were looted and burned. A Spanish missionary wrote that on one day, 3,000 people were dismembered, beheaded or raped right in front of him.
The Spanish cut off the legs of children who ran from them and made bets as to who could cut a person in half with "one sweep of his sword".
They loosed dogs that "devoured an Indian like a hog at first sight, in less than a moment", added the priest, and used infants for dog food. Thousands of men, women and children were shipped to Europe to serve as slaves.The spic missionary killed more innocents in latin america than the krauts in europe.Fact.
indian girl dancing for whites in a gaming club. The same expectations of the Indian woman now as then in the time of the Mayflower. When we don't respect others we have no regard for ourselves.
News of this bloody colonial massacre might well have reached the Algonquian Indians on Roanoke Island - one of a string of islands known as the Outer Banks off the coast of North Carolina - by the time John White arrived as governor there in July 1587, with 117 men, women and children.roanoke
The Algonquian Indians were already hostile - the British commander of an earlier expedition to Roanoke had held their chief's son hostage and so enraged them that the settlers had to be taken off by ship and brought home.
But White still hoped to establish the first permanent English settlement in the New World at Roanoke, by planting wheat and making the colony selfsufficient.
He believed in peaceful coexistence - but the Algonquians, angry and suspicious, rejected his overtures.
He had better luck with another, more friendly Indian tribe nearby and soon became confident of success. Propitiously, White's wife was delivered of a daughter, the first English child to be born in the New World.
Then things began to go wrong. A colonist set off to hunt for crabs in the shallows. Native Indians shot 16 arrows through his body.
According to the chronicler of the expedition: "After they had slain him with their wooden swords, they beat his head in pieces."
White's retributive expedition went badly wrong, wounding friendly Indians. As tensions mounted, the colonists, alarmed by the lack of food, demanded that White go back to England for supplies and assistance, leaving behind his wife and daughter.
He agreed. It was to be the last time he saw his family. He had expected to be away just a few months, but as he arrived back in England, Queen Elizabeth ordered all seaworthy vessels into service against the gathering Spanish armada. Not until 1590 could White return to Roanoke.
He found all the colonists, more than 100, had vanished. The houses were in disrepair, or had been carefully dismantled; his daughter's house was a ruin. The only clue to what had happened was the word CROATOAN - an Outer Bank island south of Roanoke - written on a tree in the central square.
White tried to sail to Croatoan, but a great storm blew up and forced him back across the Atlantic.
A second attempt was also defeated by bad weather. He never tried again and eventually died in obscurity in his native Ireland.
But the mystery continued to intrigue mariners. Despite the reference to Croatoan, no sign of the colonists was found there either.
Rumours spread that they were still alive, deep in the forest. When settlers arrived at a nearby spot on the coast in 1607 and created Jamestown, efforts were made to locate them.
But Jamestown had its own problems. The local Powhatan Indians easily outnumbered the British newcomers, although it was in their interest to trade with them.
In return for beaver skins and food, the settlers could give them highly-prized metal objects such as knives and cooking pots and even guns, which transformed Indian hunting methods and gave them power over other local tribes.
When the settlers ran out of gifts, the colonists put a crown on the head of the Indian chief, dubbed him King and convinced him that he should put his people to work in the fields to supply the settlers with food.
At first this ruse succeeded, especially after his youngest daughter Pocahontas married John Rolfe, who turned tobacco into Jamestown's most successful cash crop. But after the chief died, his successor turned against the settlers.
In March 1622 he launched attacks on 31 British settlements along the James River, in what became known as the Jamestown Massacre. About 400 colonists, a third of the settler population, were cut to pieces and 20 women seized as slaves.
The massacre destroyed the romantic belief that American Indians were the children of a golden age. Instead, it reinforced the presumption that the Indians were savages who needed to be crushed.
The settlers' retaliatory raids were so successful that the Indian chief called for a peace parlay, at which the colonists poisoned the Indians' drinks at the toast of friendship, killing 250 of them; another 50 were killed by hand.
By the time Virginia had become a colony, of the 8,000 Powhatan Indians who had welcomed the first settlers fewer than 1,000 remained.
Warring settlers were not entirely to blame. In the early 17th century, smallpox, probably transmitted by British and French fishermen, killed more than 90 per cent of the native inhabitants of coastal New England, and almost as many further south.
'The ground was strewn with the skulls and the bones of thousands of Indians,' wrote one of the Mayflower pilgrims, the religious puritans who famously sailed in 1620 from Plymouth in England to found the colony of Plymouth in New England.
Many Indians killed themselves or surrendered to alcohol in the belief that their God had indeed abandoned them to disease.
If America had ever been a Garden of Eden, the garden was now overrun by snakes. As for the Puritan settlers, the plagues were as much a triumph of light over darkness, civilisation over savagery, as were its wars over native tribes.
In New England a breakdown of relations with the Indians led the English colonists to surround a tribal village called Mystic and attack it at dawn.
They set the village on fire and shot all those who attempted to escape. One Puritan wrote: "It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God."
Colonists found it easier to kill "Red Indians" if they demonised them.One of the most overrated men in history who was actually not very much George Washington, falsely revered as the father of his country, wrote that "the gradual extension of our settlements will as certainly cause the savage, as the wolf, to retire - both being beasts of prey, though they differ in shape".
Andrew Jackson, another US President, earned the name Sharp Knife from Creek Indians for his habit of skinning victims and using the cured and braided tissue as pony reins.
European settlers seized upon scalping as the characteristic of the savage Indian. Many tribes practised scalping, believing that a warrior's scalp symbolised his life force.
A Frenchman who witnessed a scalping wrote: 'As soon as the man is felled they run up to him, thrust their knee between his shoulder blades, seize a tuft of hair in one hand and, with their knife in another, cut around the skin of the head and pull the whole piece away. Then showing the scalp they utter a cry they call the death cry.'
Once the warrior was alone, he would stop and scrape the skin to remove the blood and fibres from it.
Stretching the skin over a hoop of green wood, like a tambourine, he would dry it in the sun. The scalp was then painted red and its hair combed.
Sometimes as many as 15 scalps could be fastened on the same stick, often dressed with feathers.
A British officer came to a village in the 18th century where he found "about 600 scalps, mostly English, hanging on poles over their doors etc." Being scalped alive was not necessarily fatal, but infection usually set in.
One night in October 1754, Peter Williamson, a tough young Scotsman from Aberdeen, survived a horrendous ordeal: a party of Indians attacked his house while his wife was away and took him captive.
After walking all night, laden with their plunder, he was bound to a tree and tortured.
His fingers were tied with cord so tightly that blood ran out of his finger ends; then, whooping and hollering "as it is their custom", they took burning sticks and coals and held them against his eyes, face and hands.
These were the same Algonquian Indians who, from White's pictures, seem to have lived so peacefully 170 years before.
While Williamson remained with them, kept as a beast of burden, he witnessed terrible acts of revenge on British settlers - entire families burned alive in their own homes, a wife and her four children scalped before her husband's eyes.
Atrader who fell into their clutches was roasted before he was dead; they ate his body and made of his head what they called an 'Indian pudding'.
Worse was to follow. Three British prisoners were tortured with redhot irons. Two of them had their bellies ripped open and their entrails burned before their eyes.
The third was placed in a deep hole and earth rammed in around him up to his neck.
They then scalped him and let him remain there for three or four hours in agony, after which, Williamson continues, "they made a small fire near his head, causing him to suffer the most excruciating torments imaginable, whilst the poor creature could only cry for mercy in killing him immediately, for his brains were boiling in his head."
Even after his eyes burst and gushed out of his sockets, it took him another hour or two to die.
These stories, true or exaggerated, became part of the folk history which labelled native Americans savages, in the eyes of settlers whose own behaviour against the tribespeople was hardly less ruthless over the years.
Williamson, who eventually escaped, detailed both their savage punishments and their codes of honour which made them strictly truthful and almost incapable of fraud.
He believed that the savagery of Indians at this time was directly attributable to the demoralising effects of alcohol, to which the Indians had an addiction but almost no resistance.
When drunk they were capable of killing their wives and children; "but when sober, they are very tenacious of decorum, never allowing more than one to speak at a time".
In the light of all that happened afterwards, John White's watercolours take on a tragic air. They were designed, of course, to sell the romance of the New World of America to the Old of England, but they are honest and natural in their simplicity, revealing an age before gunfire, liquor or the plague.
As for Roanoke, a tribal chief told a settler in 1608 that White's original colonists had survived for 20 years on the islands off Virginia, and that his Algonquians had slaughtered most of them two years earlier. Most, but not all.
A hundred years later, a surveyor stepped ashore on Croatoan Island, where he was astonished to be greeted by Indians with pale skin and light hair
the incredibly strange worlds of people involved with toy soldiers more than often forget the bloody climax of uniform as regards deed.
Recently in the toy soldier magazine one bloke got hot under his skirt because he was pissed as regards a kid not being able to take toy soldiers to school,
what school allows a kid to take toy soldiers to school?. THE magazine itself under mr hennessy seems to assume that all and sundry are on the "our troops in Iraq are great " trip just because we collect toy soldiers, well my trip is much more a Wellesian trip. H.G collected soldiers and who at the same time was a million miles away from the "my country right or wrong bullshit"And that bullshit is about who are the right people to hate.Get my drift...no? Well ok get back to the play mobil pirate ship.