The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America

How colonial conquest was driven by state-sponsored, profit-driven campaigns to murder and mutilate Indian peoples in North America

From the mid-1600s through the late 1800s, states sponsored scalp bounties and volunteer campaigns to murder and mutilate thousands of Indians throughout North America. Since central governments in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Mexico City, and Washington, DC, failed to provide adequate military support and financial resources for colonial frontier defense, administrators in regional capitals such as New York, Québec City, New Orleans, Boston, Ciudad Chihuahua, Austin, and Sacramento took matters into their own hands. At different times and in almost every part of the continent, they paid citizens for killing Indians, taking Indians captive, scalping or beheading Indians, and undertaking other forms of performative violence.

As militant operatives and civilians alike struggled to prevail over Indigenous forces they considered barbaric and savage, they engaged in not just plundering, slaving, and killing but also dismembering corpses for symbolic purposes and for profit. Although these tactics mostly failed in their intent to exterminate populations, state sponsorship of indiscriminate violence took a significant demographic toll by flooding frontier zones with murderous units whose campaigns diminished Indigenous power, reduced tribal populations, and forced weakened survivors away from traditional homelands. High wages for volunteer campaigning, along with cash bounties for Indian body parts and the ability to take captives and keep valuable plunder, promoted a state-sponsored profit opportunity for civilians.

William S. Kiser is professor of history and chair of the history department at Texas A&M University-San Antonio.