The French were not necessarily above such tactics — while there is no evidence to suggest that the French ever intentionally infected their enemies with disease, they enthusiastically supported scalping. But in general, they took a subtler, more Gallic approach to the issue.
Part of the reason may have been that the French had an entirely different vision about the role North America played in their empire than the British had.
The British, it has been said, had come to North America to subdue it, to tame it, to turn the entire continent into one massive and perfect English garden.
The French, on the other hand, had no desire whatsoever to tame the continent. For them, it was a wild place, filled with wild men, and its primary purpose was to provide furs and pelts and other raw materials then demanded by the devotees of haute couture in Paris. Those things could only be obtained in a wild land, and so by and large, the French strove to keep America as pristine as possible, within reason, of course.
That attitude gave the French a certain natural advantage in terms of developing alliances with the native populations in their North American possessions. But the French further honed that advantage by playing on the increasing resentment the Indians felt toward the English settlers — and the Germans and Irish and Dutch who joined them — who were, by now, pouring into their country, felling trees, spoiling the rivers and extirpating game.
 |
| Men shooting indian |
The French adroitly exploited the Indians' simmering rage over a series of very real insults and deceptions they had suffered at the hands of the British, and in eastern Pennsylvania, at least, that was exemplified by the ignominy of the "Walking Purchase."
Politics is a game between nations. Real life is what happens between men.
On an afternoon in 1756, the two collided.
The details of the story remain murky. According to one version, Tom Quick and his father had ventured to the creek bank to cut some saplings that they planned to use for hoops. Indians attacked them. The young man escaped. His father was not so lucky. Tom Quick Sr. was shot and as he lay on the mossy ground, dying or dead, his killers scalped him. That fact is not at all in dispute, according to Streleicki of the Pike County Historical Society.
Until the day he died, 40 years later, the legend goes, Tom Quick would swear that one of the Lenape in the war party was his childhood friend, Muskwink.
email
print
default
increase
decrease
