Native American Usage
A number of Native American tribes of the Eastern Woodlands culture area forced prisoners to run the gantlet. (See Captives in American Indian Wars.) The Jesuit Isaac Jogues was subject to this treatment while a prisoner of the Iroquois in 1641. He described the ordeal in a letter that appears in the book The Jesuit Martyrs of North America : "Before arriving (at the Iroquois Village) we met the young men of the country, in a line armed with sticks...", and he and his fellow Frenchmen were made to walk slowly past them "for the sake of giving time to anyone who struck us."
Other European-Americans captured by Indians and made to run the gantlet included John Stark, Daniel Boone, James Smith, Col. William Crawford, Simon Kenton, Lieutenant-Colonel John B. McClelland, and Susanna Willard Johnson.
Read more about this topic: Gauntlet (punishment)
Famous quotes containing the words native, american and/or usage:
“To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came of age I embarked.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Do not be discouraged, if in a thousand instances you find your kindness rejected and wronged, your good evil-spoken of, and the hand you extend for the relief of others, cast insultingly away; the benevolence which cannot outlive these trials of its purity and strength, is not like the self-sacrifice of him, who went about doing good.”
—C., U.S. women’s magazine contributor. American Ladies Magazine, pp. 331-4 (July 1828)
“Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates—but pages
Might be filled up, as vainly as before,
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore!
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)