aniards tested their strength and their blades against them, ripping chests open with one blow and exposing entrails, and there were those who did worse. Then straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive. One man caught two children about two years old, pierced their throats with a dagger, then hurled them down a precipice. (Stannard pp. 72) A group of Dominican friars on the treatment of infants recorded when: "Some Christians encounter an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they tore the child from the mothers arms and flung it still living to the dog, who proceeded to devour it before the mothers eyes. . . . When there were among the prisoners some women who had recently given birth, if the newborn babes happened to cry, they seized them by the legs and hurled them against the rocks, or flung them into the jungle so that they would be certain to die there." (Stannard pp. 72)To give the reader some background detailing the stereotype many whites had/have for the Native American, I have taken quotations from John Frosts book entitled, "Pictorial History of Indian Wars and Captivities." Frosts book was published in 1873, nine years after the massacre at Sand Creek, and seventeen years before the Wounded Knee Massacre (both will be discussed later). Inside the front cover the title page bears the word Captivities in gory fashion. Frost's account of de Soto paints him more as a benevolent hero than a murdering-Hitler. The title also screams pictorially with bloody weapons that are no doubt those of the Native American; the most savage weapons, the white man's many different rifles and cannon, are conveniently missing. Frost's book loses its historical credibility by constantly slanting the adjectives in the white man's favor, and by using the noun "savage" hundreds of times. As a sidenote; the word savage, I am told, was used so commonly to d...
