“were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had each a child of a few weeks or months old.  At the first halt, their captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter.”

Later on all the prisoners were subjected to further tortures

“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.

INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING