Iroquois Torture and Decapitation of White Captives Described

History of Orange County, New York 1888     

     There has been no more intellectual nation among the aborigines of 
America than the Senecas of Western New York — the most original 
and determined of the confederated Iroquois — but its warriors were 
cruel like the others, and their squaws often assisted the men in torturing 
their captives. When Boyd and Parker were captured in the Genesee 
Valley in the Sullivan campaign of 1779, Brant, the famous half-breed 
chief, assured them that they would not be injured, yet left them in the 
hands of Little Beard, another chief, to do with as he would, and the 
prolonged tortures to which he and his savage companions subjected 
them were horrible. After they had been stripped and tied to trees, and 
tomahawks were thrown so as to just graze their heads, Parker was un- 
intenlionally hit so that his head was severed from his body, but Boyd was 
made to suffer lingering miseries. His ears were cut off, his mouth 
enlarged with knives and his severed nose thrust into it, pieces of flesh 
were cut from his shoulders and other parts of his body, an incision was 
made in his abdomen and an intestine fastened to the tree, when he was 
scourged to make him move around it, and finally as he neared death, was 
decapitated, and his head raised on a pole. 

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