Scalped! As a boy growing up in rural West Tennessee, I occasionally heard stories from my older relatives that someone in my family had at one time been scalped. Just who this person was I really had no idea and I wasn’t sure if it was someone in my direct ancestry or someone related to someone who was. All I really knew is that it was someone on my paternal grandmother’s side of the family. Some of my uncles and aunts seemed to think it was “grandma,” and they told how she wore silk kerchiefs on her head ever afterwards which made me think it was someone they had known personally. There was also a story that the unfortunate girl – in the stories I heard she was a teenager – had been out picking blackberries when a band of Indians came upon them. One of the girls was supposed to have been killed and one, the one with some connection to my family, was scalped. After she was scalped, she was supposed to have crawled into a hollow log and heard the Indian’s footsteps as they ran across the top of it.
Sam,
That is a very interesting story. I am 1% Choctaw, Cherokee or Chickasaw. Through my maternal ancestry. Happy Easter,
Rick Lentz