John Vanderlyn depicted it in his 1804 painting The Death of Jane McCrea. This painting, below, is, I think, the sort of image that comes to mind when Americans like me think of scalping.
But here's a reversal of (my) expectations: Hannah Duston Killing the Indians.
Painted in 1847, by Junius Brutus Stearns, this shows colonial American Hannah Duston and her companions (actually just one other woman and a fourteen year old boy) tomahawking their Abenaki Indian captors--a family of two men, three women, and six children.
Duston had been captured and her six-day-old baby killed during a raid on their settlement, Haverhill, Mass., in 1697, during the first round of the French and Indian Wars.
The captives scalped ten of the Abenaki (two escaped) and brought their scalps back to Massachusetts for bounty money.
Hannah became a hero, with a statue and everything, her story written up by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, of Salem Witch Trial fame.
There's a ton of cultural baggage to all this, but there is no doubt in my mind, studying history, that we are a savage species.
And those Puritans... I wouldn't want to meet them in the dark.
More here: Hannah Dustin: The Judgement of History, by Kathryn Whitford)
