(MIS)HANDLING ENEMY COMBATANTS?

Robert Ignatius Burns, The Jesuits and the Indian Wars of the Northwest (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1966) ("To kill in the heat of battle was one thing. To prosecute criminal trials against enemy warriors afterward was quite another. The Interior Indian knew nothing about law courts or capital punishment. These things were strange and frightening. He could have understood fighting on until the scales were balanced, or perhaps exacting some alternative compensation. But this White way was iniquitous. When the tribesmen reflected further that the Whites never yet won a war in the Interior, though they had blundered unhappily through protracted campaigns, and that they had just sustained the humiliating and total defeat of their professional warriors, the surrender demands could only appear perversely illogical." "Worse, the Indian war criminal or patriots had been killed in a very special way. They were hanged by the neck, convulsively leaping and pitching at the end of a heavy rope, with all the repulsive gaminess, distortions, and discolorations attending death by strangulation. It is unlikely that the Indians appreciated the difference between a sharp drop though a proper gallows, as happened amid solemn ceremonies after a court trial, and the quaky popular lacing with its shattering horrors for the spectators. After this war Colonel Wright would hang his many Indian victims in the crudest fashion, on a handy tree limb, by kicking over a keg or wheeling away a gun lumber. After the Cascades fight in 1856 the local chief was hanged in a particularly messy performance. After vainly offering the army a ransom of ten horses and two squaws, this chief was hoisted by a rope over a tree branch; the dangling, struggling figure managed a defiant comment, and in the end had to be shot." "The Whites seemed obsessed with  this form of punishment . . . . So familiar were the Indians with this White compulsion, that in April 1854 the Snohomisg had anticipated and appeased the Whites by voluntarily hanging two of their own people guilty of killing a White man. The hanging of Leschi particularly struck the dian imagination, so that by mid-1858 even friendly braves  voiced their preference for death in battle. Id. at 260-261)