>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]   >> Good afternoon.
Can you hear me?   >> Yes.
>> Yeah? It's my great pleasure today to introduce
to you Cameron B. Strang, Library
of Congress Kislak Fellow in American Studies.
I'm Barbara Tenenbaum, Specialist in Mexican Culture
in the Hispanic Division and curator of the J.I.
Kislak collection in the rare book and special collections division.
It's a good thing that J. Kislak's father asked his son
to go south young man and opened a branch
of the family mortgage lending business in Miami, Florida.
Mr. Kislak decided he wanted to decorate his office
with maps of his new state.
But unlike many, he actually read the maps which led
to his lifelong collecting of Floridiana.
Dr. Strang's talk today reflects that aspect
of Mr. Kislak's interests.   I have long argued that we
in the United States desperately need an integrated history
of our country.
I'm truly excited by the topic of the talk today.
The only history we learned in K through 12, is the history
of whatever state we're then in and the outline of what was experienced
in the power centers, centering mostly
on the East Coast down to Georgia.
You will see today how little we know about the basic history
of Florida, certainly an important state in our nation's history
and the site of its first permanent European settlement, St. Augustine.
I have to put in a plug here where they spoke Spanish.
A city that continues to today.
Cameron Strang holds a BA from McGill University,
an MA from the University of New Hampshire
and is currently a doctoral candidate
at the University of Texas at Austin.
The title of his dissertation is Entangled Knowledge,
Expanding Nation: Local Science and the United States Empire
in the Southeast Borderlands, 1763 to 1840.
And he has received numerous grants in addition to his [inaudible].
The most important of which is the National Science Foundation grant;
Science, Technology and Society Doctoral Dissertation Research
Improvement grant, 2011.
But he has just a grand group of them.
I assure you.
He will show us how persistent violence
in 19th century Florida affected how science was conducted there
and our knowledge of the state's natural history,
antiquities and native people.
His most specific examples come from the Second Seminole War.
How many of you have ever heard of the Second Seminole War?
Okay. You're bound to learn a lot.
A conflict we barely heard of, see I was right, despite the presence
of President Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor.
In other words, it's not an insignificant skirmish.
So without any further ado, I'd like to give you Cameron Strang.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you Dr. Tenenbaum for that very kind introduction
and thank you also to Dr. Caroline Brown, Marilou Wrecker,
the staff at the Kluge Center and all of the other fellows
who have helped make my time at the Library of Congress so productive
and enriching, also many thanks to J.I.
Kislak for funding my fellowship at the library.
It's a very rare privilege to enjoy
such a refined work environment for so long.
I'm really grateful to everyone who made that possible.
In January of 1838, the Seminole leader Osceola died
in the military prison of Fort Moultrie, South Carolina.
He had been one of the most prominent opponents of U.S. efforts
to remove the Seminoles from Florida but U.S. Army officers lured him
into negotiations and under banner
of truce had him seized and imprisoned.
Shortly after his death,
the American doctor Frederick Weedon cut off his head and took it back
to its home in St. Augustine along with many of Osceola's grave goods.
Dr. Weedon embalmed Osceola's head and kept it
as a scientific curiosity and according
to Weedon's great grand daughter, he even used it as a tool
for disciplining his children, "Father used to hang the head
of Osceola on the bed stand where his three little boys slept
and leave it there all night as punishment for misbehavior."
In 1843, Weedon gave the head to his son-in-law, Dr. Daniel Whitehurst
who in turns sent it to one of New York City's premier physicians.
In the letter he sent along with the head,
Whitehurst described the context of violence
in which it had been acquired noting that,
"Florida as you are well aware is but just relieved from scenes
of a sanguinary character, too long protracted for its happiness."
He did express concern that in obtaining the head of such a man,
I am aware that the sentiments
of the ultra philanthropist would be shocked,
it would be deemed desecration of the grave, and that a child
of the forest with qualities commanding admiration should be
conveyed to the tomb, a headless corpse.
But Whitehurst assured the New York physician and perhaps himself
that with the scientific and intelligent,
such influences are of little worth.
In the preservation of the dead, we do no violence to the feelings
of humanity or even the stronger attachments of love.
Osceola's head was put on display in a New York museum until 1866
when according to most accounts, a fire destroyed the museum
and Osceola's head was lost.
This image is cast made from the death mask that Dr. Weedon
and a colleague made of Osceola's head shortly after he died.
The story of Osceola's head is well-known among historians
of Florida but this episode is usually presented
as a bizarre anecdote, not a representative example
of larger trends in Florida and the United States at this time.
Far from being exceptional, doctors Weedon
and Whitehurst were reenacting a common activity among men of science
in Florida during the Second Seminole War.
Like many other surgeons and amateur naturalists,
they collected Indian heads in the name of science and sent them off
to leading doctors and craniologists throughout the U.S. Both Native
Americans and Whites commit a numerous acts of violence
against the dead bodies of their enemies during this war,
a conflict that lasted from 1835 to 1842.
Historians of Florida have emphasized the prominence
of Seminole scalping during the war but it paid less attention
to how educated Whites, amassed
of substantial collections of Indian skulls.
On the other hand, there has been much scholarship on skull collecting
and craniology in 19th century America.
But almost all of this work has concentrated
on a few leading experts in Philadelphia, New York
and other centers of science to analyze skulls that were sent
to them in their safe and comfortable museums.
This talk aims to reorient our perspective top the local level,
focusing on the practices of amateur naturalists working amidst the
diseases, deaths, swamps and war of Florida.
I will start with a survey of science in Florida
from around 1800 to the 1830s.
But most of the talk will concentrate
on Native American scalping
and white skull collecting during the Second Seminole War.
I argue that Seminoles and Whites were engaged in a cycle
of violence against the enemy dead.
That led to an increase in the scope and significance
of both scalp taking and skull collecting.
These entangled practices contributed to the Seminole sense
of their own ethnic identity while also shaping how White naturalists
and craniologist characterized the Seminoles as a people.
While the main emphasis of this lecture is on violence
and scientific practices in Florida, skull collecting
in this territory was interconnected with the collection and analysis
of human remains in the country on a whole.
Historians of early American science usually approached the south and not
to mention Florida as a region apart.
Yet the practices and ideas of amateur skull collectors
in Florida did have a lasting impact on how White men
of science throughout the country understood the Seminoles
as an ethnicity and the collection of Native American skulls
as a scientific practice.
This lecture today is based on rare books and manuscripts in the J.I.
Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress as well as archival work
at the American Philosophical Society,
the Academy of Natural Sciences and the P.K. Young Library
at the University of Florida.
I pay special attention to the writings of amateur naturalists
and surgeons in the U.S. Army, a group of men who carried
out the bulk of scientific work
in Florida during the Second Seminole War and high connections
with leading men of science throughout the country.
[ Pause ]
>> I'd like to start with my 32nd version of Florida history
to make sure that no one here is completely lost.
Spain first explored and colonized Florida in the 16th century,
setting up a series of missions and forts with which they hoped
to secure their hold on the province and convert its natives.
Old World diseases devastated the native population
and by the early 1700s, British colonists and their allies had all
but wiped out the provinces of remaining Native American groups
through extensive raids in search of Indian slaves.
Britain took control of Florida in 1763 and held it for two decades,
a period in which scientific explorers
like William Bertram helped introduce Anglo-Americans
to the region's natural history and Native American peoples.
Britain returned Florida to Spain after the Revolutionary War
and the Spanish maintained a tenuous control over Florida until ceding it
The Seminoles that Bertram described were not the same Indians
that the Spanish had encountered in Florida 200 years earlier.
The Seminoles were a branch of the Creek Indians who migrated
into the Florida peninsula
in the early 1700s filling the territory left vacant
by the destruction of earlier Native American groups.
Yet the Seminoles were not at this time an ethnically exclusive group,
other Indians who migrated into Florida as well as many African
and Creole Blacks would affiliate with them as part
of their gradual ethnogenesis that is they're coming to have a sense
of their own ethnic identity as a distinct group.
All of these groups fought alongside each other during the wars
During the last decade of Spanish rule, that is the 1810s,
Florida became a borderland of violence, largely as a result
of encroachments by filibusters, patriots and soldiers
from the United States, US Whites
and Florida Indians fought each other during the Patriot War
of 1812, the Creek War of 1813 to 1814 and the First Seminole War
of 1817 to 1818, nearly a continuous decade of warfare.
As part of their resistance,
Seminole scalped fallen American fighters.
Indeed, at least during the Patriot War,
they did so with the encouragement of the Spanish government
which offered a bounty to the Seminoles for American scalps.
Perhaps surprisingly, men of science from the United States attempted
to carry out scientific work
in Spanish East Florida during the height of these conflicts,
including an 1818 expedition of naturalists
from Philadelphia's academy of natural sciences.
The members of this expedition we're well aware
that they were entering a war zone.
Yet, they were initially [inaudible].
While en route to Florida, the entomologist Thomas Say,
this dashing fellow coolly wrote to our friend
that we entertain no fears from the hostility of the Indians.
We could even repel the attack of a few of them as there are eight souls
of us armed with guns and pistols.
Say would not let the ongoing wars diminish his excitement
at the chance to collect bugs in Florida which he described
as a promise land, not flowing with milk and honey it's true,
but abounding in insects.
The expedition members began to panic however when a man
with a fresh bullet scar on his face told them
that warring Seminoles had been seen on a road nearby.
Say thus wrote that, "We departed from that place in good time
as it seems probable if they went in quest of us."
The Philadelphia naturalist soon left Florida
and blamed their overall failure
to study its natural history on the provinces' wars.
Thomas Say was all the more frustrated
because like many other Americans, he believed that the war
in Florida was a result of America's aggressive
and unjust policies towards the region's Indians.
He wrote that, in consequence of this most cruel and inhuman war
that our government is unrighteously and unconstitutionally waging
against these poor wretches whom we call savages.
Our voyage was soon aborted and we therefore obtained
but very few insects and these are but little consequences.
The devastating wars in 1810s Florida even shaped how the
expedition members wrote about the few species they were able to study.
It shaped the knowledge they reproduced about the expedition.
Soon after returning to Philadelphia,
Ornithologist George Ord published his observations on the Florida jay
in the academy's journal.
He confirmed William Bertram's earlier opinion that the jay was
in fact a distinct species but added that, "This beautiful
and sprightly bird we observed daily around the rude habitations
of the disheartened inhabitants as if willing
to console them amidst those privations
which the frequent Indian wars
and the various revolutions have compelled them to bear."
Although Ord did provide the usual taxonomic information on this bird,
his brief article told the scientifically minded readers more
about violence in Florida than it did its natural history.
The decade following the transfer of Florida
to the United States was one of relative peace.
Men of science form the U.S. and Florida collaborated to study
for this natural history and agricultural potential.
Optimists described the region as fertile ground
for natural history work or as one local put it,
the very paradise of botanists.
Other naturalists including the famous ornithologist John J. Audubon
were less impressed.
He visited the Saint John's region in 1832 and wrote to his wife that,
"I have been deceived most shamefully about the Floridas.
They're scarcely a bird to be seen."
And although Audubon did not have any conflict
with Florida's Indians during this trip, his wife had heard reports
that the Seminoles were furious over Andrew Jackson's 1830 announcement
of the Indian Removal Act.
And she feared for her husband's safety.
The 1820s and 1830s was also a period
of extensive ethnographic research into the language,
cultural practices, and antiquity of Florida's Native Americans.
Some of his writing was quite derogatory
and depicted the Seminoles as savages that were incapable
of achieving what most Whites would have deemed a civilized way of life.
Yet, this wasn't by no means a universal opinion.
Many writers during this period portrayed the Seminoles
as intelligent and noble and claimed that the disparity
between the achievements of Whites and Indians was a matter
of preference and education, not the result of inherent differences.
The Florida [inaudible] man of science George Clark
for example wrote that, "The only difference in men,
laying aside his color is the difference of opinion
and that difference of opinion rises from difference in education."
Like many of his learning contemporaries, Clark excavated
and studied Florida's Indian mound as part of his interest
in antiquity and ethnography.
And for those of you who don't know, there is a series of hundreds
of Indian mounds throughout the eastern United States
and to the west as well.   There is a large debate at this time
about what they meant and who built them.
In a letter to the renowned United States geographer Samuel F.B. Morse,
Clark claimed that the Coastal Indians
who had built the mound had been a numerous and thriving people based
on the uniformity of what he called a very remarkable deposit
of their dead which appears
to have been set apart as sacred to the dead.
Furthermore, he told Morse that the mode of preparing the dead
for burial is very remarkable.
For the skeletons he found had their arms wrapped around their knees
and were placed in a sitting position.
Although Clark made no deeper analysis of this burial technique,
it is apparent that Florida's ancient Native Americans did treat
the physical remains of their dead with great respect.
By the 1800s, Florida Indians no longer built mounds.
The Seminoles buried their dead in graves, set them atop scaffolds
or occasionally placed them in hollow trees.
They also buried various artifacts, food, and tobacco along
with the body of the deceased.
An archeological evidence indicates that the Seminoles took special care
to stock the graves of children with such goods.
At around 1830, the year that Andrew Jackson announced
that all the eastern Indians had to be removed west of the Mississippi;
the way that men of science approached Native American remains
was changing.
Although curious individuals like Clark continued to exhume
and analyze the ancient dead.
Doctors and naturalists became increasingly interested
in the skulls of contemporary Indian groups.
Philadelphia physician Samuel George Martin was
at the forefront of this shift.
The leading member of the academy of natural sciences,
Martin turned to skull collecting around 1830.
And by the time he died in 1851, he had a massive collection of well
over 1,000 skulls including several hundred Native American ones.
In brief, Martin is credited with shifting the emphasis
in skull analysis away from phrenology,
the study of human character through prominences
on the head towards craniology which Martin
and his colleagues considered more scientific and objective.
For Martin, skulls indicated the size of one's brain and the size
of one's brain indicated one's intelligence.
So, he measured the internal capacity of skulls
and averaged out the results by race.
Yet despite his efforts to present himself as an objective man
of science, Martin's analysis did reflect his own racial prejudices.
He believed that each race of humans was a distinct species
and the ways he conducted skull measurements
of course supported his theory
that on average White men were the most intelligent of all people.
Just as the ways that skulls were studied was beginning to change,
so too were the ways that those remains were gathered for analysis.
They're in the early 1830s.
Indian groups in the southeast had been able
to protect the remains of their dead.
In 1833 for example, one year before the removal of the Creek Indians,
a naturalist working in Alabama apologized to Martin that,
"It would scarcely be possible to get Indian skulls
as the Indians do not allow their burial places to be ransacked."
But the enforcement of Indian removal policies would soon benefit
Martin and his colleagues.
Despite efforts by many Eastern Indian groups
to actually exhume their dead and bring them west,
removal led to a huge increase
in naturalist access to contemporary skulls.
Not only were many eastern graves now left unguarded,
but the thousands of Indians who died of disease
and starvation during their migration, often fell victim
to doctors and other naturalists who were eager
In Florida however, many Native Americans refused
to leave their land and their people's remains behind,
a situation that led to the Second Seminole War.
To explain the war in brief, several Seminole chiefs refused
to sign a treaty of removal and when the U.S. attempted
to bolster its power in the region, the Seminoles attacked.
The most notable early event of the war was the annihilation
of Major Dade's company which had 110 men in December of 1835.
The war would continue for the next 7 years as the Seminoles retreated
into the everglades of Southern Florida
and eventually the United States decided the war had caused enough
lives and money and decided to leave the remaining Seminoles alone.
Among the many people killed
in Florida during the Second Seminole War were some
of the territory's leading scientific experts.
One of this was Dr. Frederick Leitner, a German immigrant
who had made several natural history expeditions into Southern Florida.
He was killed while serving as guide and surgeon for US soldiers
in the Everglades, a region he may have known better
than any other White naturalist at the time.
The danger the men of science had becomes so great
that one Charleston naturalist wrote to John J. Audubon in 1836
that with regard to Florida nothing will be done for about two years.
He warned Audubon that even after the main force
of Seminoles was eventually defeated,
"There will undoubtedly remain many small predatory bands.
They will make no bones of scalping an ornithologist."
Yet despite the danger and the deaths of some prominent men
of science there were actually who did a great deal
to augment America's scientific knowledge of Florida.
In an article published in the American Journal of Science in 1838,
one army major claimed that the war which has lately been carried
on with the Florida Indians has opened the country generally
to observation and its character will hereafter be better
if not well understood.
And although the topographical engineers and amateur naturalist
in the Army made many contributions to America's knowledge of Florida,
their fear of Seminole attack
and more specifically scalping 'caused many of this men
to forego a recreational natural history.
One amateur botanist noted that he was tempted to wander away from camp
to examine the flora, "But the pleasure
of such excursions was very much damped by the thought
that while I was stooping to pick a flower,
one of the sneaking villains might pick off my scalp."
He added that "I saw little therefore
of the surrounding country."   [ Pause ]
>> Acts of violence against the bodies of the enemy dead
of both sides characterized the war from its beginning.
The Seminoles for their part often mutilated the bodies
of White civilians and soldiers.
After wiping out Dade's company in the first battle of the war,
the Seminoles and their Black allies removed the heart and lungs of some
of the White officers and according to an Army surgeon,
left one soldier, "In a truly revolting condition for a part
of his body had been cut off and crammed in his mouth".
The surgeon may have had a dark sense of humor, however,
as he simply referred to this soldier as a private.
Although Seminoles mutilated the White dead in a variety
of ways scalping was their preferred method of commemorating a kill,
intimidating Whites and garnering prestige and status.
Just as skull collecting was a justifiable practice in the eyes
of White men of science scalping had its place in Seminole cosmology
and perhaps surprisingly some contemporary White observers
in Florida seemed to recognize this.   According to one army captain,
"The Seminoles mode of warfare is rational.
The scalps of the White men are
to them the banners of victory and glory."
The captain even provided us with a glimpse
of how these scalps were incorporated into Seminole rituals.
He wrote that the scalps were given up to a great medicine chief
who arranged them upon a pole, 10 feet in height,
around which they exultingly dance until daylight,
accompanying their frantic mirth with songs ridiculing
and defining the White men.
That the Seminoles combined songs defining the White men
with scalp rituals convince us how central scalp taking was
to their sense of resistance.   But it's important to emphasize
that such rituals were not stagnant or timeless.
Some 20th century ethnographer actually date the beginning
of certain Seminole rituals associated with violence
such as the scalp dance with the Second Seminole War or at the time
Furthermore, there are interesting parallels
between how Seminoles presented scalps to medicine chiefs
and how Whites sent Native American skulls
to their own prominent medicine men, men like Samuel George Morton.
Enemy remains may have had very different meanings to the two groups
but the ways that scalps and skulls circulated from fighters
in the field to intellectual elites and centers of ritual
and knowledge was actually quite similar.
Indeed, the circulation of scalps during the Second Seminole War
contributed to the very ethnogenesis of the Seminoles as a people.
Anthropologist Brent Richard Weisman has argued that the networks
of exchange that developed
between various Seminole bands during the war accelerated the
formation of a distinct Seminole identity.
In other words disparic [phonetic] bands that had been classified
as Seminoles either by Europeans or Americans actually began
to see themselves as a unified group.
This process was even more pronounced with the circulation
of scalps, human remains that spoke volumes about Seminole pride
and the rejection of White people and culture.
It was not then just White craniologist who drew on the remains
of the enemy dead to emphasize ethnic differences
between themselves and other peoples.
[ Pause ]
>> Scalping was not the only way that Seminole violence
against the bodies of dead Whites paralleled skull collecting,
like White skull collectors,
Seminoles disinterred the bones of their dead enemies.
One army sergeant describes "burying some of the dead
who had been disinterred and abused by the savages," and an army surgeon
in the Everglades wrote how his men had to "bury again our killed
which had been disburied whose remains we found scattered
and bleaching in the sun."
Defilements of White graves were so common that soldiers actually began
to alter traditional burial practices.
A soldier from Vermont told his wife how he had to carry the bodies
of his comrades 15 miles from where they died because,
"Had they been buried within five miles
of the battleground it is probable they would have been exhumed."
This problem was even more pronounced in the swampy Everglades
where at least one company of troops had to,
were forced to place their dead in deep pools and actually stake them
to the bottom, "To keep the bodies down so
in case the Indians did come back they can not find them
Whites of course were not the only ones who feared for the remains
of their fallen friends and took measures
to prevent their bodies from being desecrated.
According to one soldier, the Seminoles' determination
that neither the killed nor the wounded shall fall into the hands
of the Whites overrules all other considerations even the chances
of victory and plunder.
The Seminoles went to such length to protect their dead
from White skull collectors and then scalpers because the integrity
of a person's physical remains was vital
to Seminole conceptions of the afterlife.
According to the militia officer and amateur naturalist Meyer M. Cohen,
"The practice of the Indians not
to abandon their slain is founded solely on superstition,
for they believed that the scalped can not enter the hereafter hunting
grounds which constitute their notion of heaven."
Although his language and perspective are obviously biased,
Cohen did recognize how important the body was
within Seminole cosmology, however,
as we shall see this recognition did not prevent Cohen
from collecting Seminole skulls.
The Seminoles desired to protect the bones of their friends
and ancestors was even a significant reason why many of them chose
to fight and die rather than be forced out of Florida,
writing near the end of the war one army captain noted that,
"The most zealous and intelligent of the Seminoles believe
in the sacredness of the soil as an inheritance from their forefathers
and reverencing with an idolatrous fanaticism the graves of their men,
women, and children whose spirits they believe hovered around them
in their festivals, pertinaciously refused all intercourse
with the Whites.
They would therefore agree to no treaty of removal.
Whites too mutilated and scalped Seminoles they killed in battle.
White scalpers were usually common soldiers.
Yet the educated Whites who preferred skulls
over scalps also grew desensitized to this practice.
One army colonel even expressed surprise at his own lack
of sentiment writing to his wife
that he had watched his men scalp eight Seminoles,
"without a mingled feeling what is this my wife?"
Among educated Whites, however,
skull collecting was a far more justifiable practice than scalping
because they saw it as a contribution to modern science.
Like before the war, the most common way that collectors
in Florida obtained Native American remains continue to be digging
Jacob Mott [phonetic], one of many surgeons who spent the idle hours
at camp excavating mounds bragged that he had, "Pocketed the parts
of a skull perhaps one owned by some warrior or the remnant
of a royal head that whosever knowledge box it once formed a part,
they must have done him service under hard knocks
Mott has hoped that he had found the knowledge box
of a social elite was common
to many Whites skull collectors of the 19th Century.
According to anthropologist named Samuel J. Harrison [phonetic],
British soldiers in South Africa another imperial frontier,
saw skull collecting especially in the context of war as a form
of trophy hunting and just as the head
of a priced buck would bring more acclaim than that
of a smaller animal so too did the identification of a skull
with a king or a great warrior add to its value.
Mott and other mound excavators could only speculate about the rank
of the men and women whose skulls they exhumed, yet the Whites
who collected the heads of recently dead Seminoles or those just killed
in battle could cite the status or prowess of their victims
to add prestige to their collections.
The case of Osceola's head that I mentioned at the beginning
of this talk is probably the most extreme example of this.
White surgeons and other amateur naturalist began to cut off
and collect the heads of recently killed Seminoles almost
as soon as the War began.
In 1836, one soldier wrote that his company of volunteers found,
"A large fierce looking Seminole imprisoned at the fort
when they first arrived," as if to assure to his readers
that this man no longer posed a threat to them.
He noted that the man's head, "has been secured and submitted
to skillful craniologists."
But the most celebrated skulls that White army surgeons collected
in early 1836 belonged
to two prominent leaders a war captain believed
to be a man named Uchee Billy and the Seminole Chief Yaha-Hajo.
An amateur naturalist
from Charleston named Meyer M. Cohen pointed
out that Yaha-Hajo had been killed in the possession of,
"40 or 50 scalps," and he noted his own,
"complex emotions upon registering that some
of these scalps had belonged to White women.
Cohen and the company surgeon then cut off Yaha-Hajo's head
and analyzed his skull leaving the body
to what Cohen called the awful fate he has merited
to have his flesh gnawed by wolves and his bones crunched by the bears.
The mutilation and decapitation of the man erroneously identified
as Uchee Billy was even more horrific
but it does [inaudible] some of the ways that craniologists
and skull collectors in Florida process the interracial violence
that enabled and partially justified their own work.
Lieutenant William W. Smith explained
that Uchee Billy was scalped, his body stretch naked upon a pole
and brought into camp for the curious to look at.
Smith who was on a philosophical bent mused that the soldiers' thirst
for revenge against what they perceived
as Indian atrocities had gone beyond "the sentiment of civilization
that teaches us respect for the dead, "Why he asked should I indulge
in the vulgar curiosity to gaze at the sad remains of a human being,
a mutilated and dishonored corpse."
Yet despite such misgivings Smith's, "Sterner feelings, got the better,"
and he went to examine Billy's remains "with a real curiosity."
Smith was one of many curios Whites who analyzed Billy's head
which he noted was preserved in the doctor's cabinet
and afforded a fine subject for the speculation of the phrenologists
of whom there were not a few in camp.
According to Smith's phrenological analysis, Billy was prone
to destructiveness and his "moral
and intellectual organs were too insignificant to merit attention."
While Smith's analysis of Billy's head was based solely on phrenology
and his own biases, Meyer M. Cohen incorporated perspectives
from the then emerging science of craniology.
He does measure the size, facial and angle, and cheekbones
of the two priced skulls and made an effort to use this measurements
to rank these Native Americans, intellectual potential
against the other peoples or as he put it to assign
to the race their station.
And though Cohen claimed that the heads of Uchee Billy
and Yaha Hajo were actually smaller than those
of most Europeans he admitted
that his measurements did not actually provide conclusive evidence
Cohen does supplemented his craniological work
with phrenological analysis seen in this chart.
In short he experimented with analytical methods
until he could produced results
that reinforced what he already thought he knew
about Native Americans in Florida that they were bold, courageous,
eloquent, and cunning but also cruel, greedy, and lacking the kind
of reflective intelligence,
that Cohen believed was reserved for White men alone.
While, Cohen and many other amateur naturalists worked
on their own initiative, the army surgeon E.H Abadie collected skulls
at the request of Samuel George Morton,
America's foremost craniologist.
The skulls that Abadie and a few other war time collectors sent
to Morton, became the basis of how Morton
and therefore many other craniologist throughout the country
analyzed the characteristic,
the ethnic characteristics of the Seminoles.
In 1849, 11 of the 13th Seminole skulls
to which Morton had access had been gathered during the war
and the measurements that Morton conducted
on this skulls set a statistical precedent for what constituted
at least in his eyes a typical Seminole.
Just as White scalps were then contributing to the Seminoles sense
of ethnic identity, so to were White craniologists using skulls gathered
during the war to draw their own conclusions
about what made the Seminoles a distinct people.
E.H Abadie sent Morton eight of these 13 Seminole skulls himself,
he collected most of these at grave sites
that the Seminoles had been forced to abandon during their retreats
and migrations but Abadie also sent Morton the skulls
of Seminoles killed in battle.
Perhaps the most interested of this was simply listed
as Seminole warrior of Florida, woman.
In his 1849 catalogue of skulls, Morton credited Abadie
with this specimen and assigned it the number of 708.
He noted that the warrior woman was about 30 years old,
had a cranial capacity of 91 cubic inches and a facial angle
of 73 degrees thus the life
of a no doubt remarkable woman was reduced to a few statistics.
Morton's brief analysis of this woman is typical
of his statistical approach to craniology,
a method that he made famous in his 1839 book, Crania Americana.
This book provided detailed illustrations and measurements
on individual skulls from several Native American groups
in both North and South America.
Skulls such as this one which Abadie had taken off a Seminole warrior
of whose history nothing is known represent how Morton was able
to make his analyses seem objective and factual or replacing reports
in phrenological speculation with precise measurements.
Yet one other remarkable aspects of the skull collections that Abadie
and other Whites sent to Morton was
that in many cases they circulated stories along with the remains.
Morton was very interested in stories
about the individuals whose skulls he possessed
because they could confirm the characterization supposed
by craniological measurements.
Yet, the stories that accompanied individual skulls reflected
of course the perspectives of the Whites who recorded them.
During the Second Seminole War, therefore, the stories often focused
on Seminole violence and ironically their supposedly barbarous efforts
to take scalps from the White dead.
One of the best examples of how skulls and stories
of Seminole violence travel together appeared
in Morton's Crania Americana.   Morton published in full the account
of how a particular Seminole had been killed,
a story that emphasized the heroism of one Captain Dimmick
who after having his horse shot up from underneath him,
succeeded in dispatching this Seminole and another.
The physician who recorded the story was careful to note
that the Seminole's were rushing at Dimmick
to take his scalp before they captain was able to recover
and as the picture shows shoot this one in the head.
This was the only episode from the Seminole's life
that Morton described in any detail in both the text
and image reinforced the message that Florida was a land of violence
and the Seminoles were a violent people.
Part of what made the stories in Crania Americana come to life
for Morton's readers was the striking lithographs of skulls
and mummified heads from throughout the Americas.
These images probably did far more to capture the imagination
of Morton's readers than the statistics
that made up the bulk of his work.
This is an illustration of the unnamed Seminole
that Captain Dimmick shot in the head.
It was one of three skulls given a lithograph in Crania Americana
and is no doubt one of the most memorable images in the whole book.
This lithograph made the violent circumstances that both surrounded
and enabled skull collecting during the war abundantly clear.
Throughout the rest of the 19th century, US Army soldiers
and surgeons would increase their collection
of Native American's skulls dramatically.
Although there were several factors involved in this,
it seems that the Second Seminole War did much to set a precedent
for how skull collecting could and should overlap with military action.
Prior to the war in Florida,
army surgeons had not collected the skulls of Native Americans killed
in combat, at least not in such a widespread and systematic way.
After this war however, skull collecting became all too common.
Also, many of the Whites that served in the Second Seminole War would go
on to fight Indian wars in the west.
The lessons they had learned about acceptable treatment
of the Indian dead probably informed how they gathered heads
in the aftermath of western battles.
As for the Native Americans of Florida, the number of their skulls
that ended up in US museums also continued to increase.
By 1871, scientific institutions in Philadelphia and Washington had
over 300 skulls from Florida's Native American peoples,
some but by no means all of these have been repatriated as part
of the Native American Graves Protection
and Repatriation Act of 1990.
To conclude, I hope that this talk encourages historians
to pay closer attention to the local circumstances had shaped how men
of science in the field conducted their work.
This is especially important in scientific practices
like skull collecting a violent act against the Indian dead
that at least in Florida took place within a context of scalpings,
mutilations and disinterments by both sides.
The Seminole skulls collected during the war did have an influential
place in the development of American Racial Science,
yet onsite skull collecting had a far more immediate impact
on the Seminoles than it did on any craniological theory.
Furthermore, the scientific characterizations of Seminole skulls
and the Seminoles as a people may not have been the most important
legacy of the human remains collected during this conflict.
Seminole scalp taking was probably more extensive
than White skull collecting during the war and neglecting
to emphasize the scope and significance
of scalping can make the Seminoles seem like hapless victims in a war
that they did not actually lose.   The collection and circulation
of scalps strengthened the Seminole sense of identity
and perhaps encouraged them
to continue resisting American imperialism
to the 19th century and beyond.
Although, historians have studies scalping and skull collecting
in separate context, it's important to recognize
that these were entangled practices.
Both scalping and skull collecting fed off the general context
of violence against the enemy dead and both practices contributed
to the Seminoles' and Whites' sense of ethic difference.
Once removed from the dead, scalps and skulls generated fresh emotions,
knowledge and associations.
Unfortunately most of the lessons that both sides drew
from each other remains did more to perpetuate interracial violence
than reconcile differences.   Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]   >> You'll take questions?
>> Do we have a time?
I can take a few questions if anyone has any.
>> Yes.   [ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> During the war?   >> No [inaudible] war--
>> Well, It means throughout the beginning
around this time the collection of non White skulls sort
of became ubiquitous, not only increasingly in the US West but also
in imperial frontiers like Australia and Africa and Asia.
And also among Whites in the sense that criminals and such
where their bodies were considered forfeit.
In terms of White bodies, it didn't really take off
until after the civil war in the United States when there was
such an abandon of the White dead that they're seen as ripe
for the picking in some ways.   [ Pause ]
>> My question was why is that [inaudible] try
to understand the larger context of [inaudible].
I guess that conflict would be [inaudible] how you treat the body,
whose body [inaudible]
>> At this time, I think it was such an assumption that women
and men were very different among, you know this elitist men of science
that that figured less into equation then issues of race
where you know there had been an ongoing debate about the nature
of racial difference for already for 100 of years at this point
and Morton was-- he was part of this new group that started to try
to find a scientific basis
for actually considering them separate species and--
but on a larger context level the collection of remains in terms
of identifying race really started to take off around the same period
and it's usually in the historiography studied later
and once it had actually been very well established
by the late 19th century and of course in the early 20th century
with the Nazis and, yes--   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Yes, there is actually pretty,
I mean technologically advanced preservation methods
in how they were-- I don't wanna get too gory but like
after being removed, they were stretched out on hoops and dried
at which point they would be painted and decorated in specific ways,
and you know, it sounds a little coarse but at which point,
they sort of became a piece leather and would last a very long time
and became important ritual objects.   [ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> I'm not sure.
That's a good question and I don't know.
Anyone else?
Anyway, thank you all for coming and have a great day.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.