‘I would do the like again’, said a labourer named Joseph Lewis who lived near Deep Creek, Norfolk County, Virginia, after shooting dead a free African American named Jack Bass in May 1822. He fired his gun after a female fortune teller named Evans of Portsmouth had confirmed Lewis’s suspicion that Bass was responsible for ‘tricking’ or bewitching him and his wife. At the consequent trial, held at the Norfolk Superior Court, Judge Parker sentenced Lewis to eighteen years imprisonment.29 ‘I had to kill her. I had to’, explained Louis De Paoli, a San Francisco florist who specialized in cultivating violets, after beating his sister-in-law Catherine to death with a chair in the autumn of 1905. He and his wife believed she had bewitched them and their three children. They had bought some pills to combat the spell, and Mrs De Paoli had tried whipping the evil out of the children, praying to St Anthony as she did so. In anguish Louis resolved to make the ultimate sacrifice. He said later, ‘I was sorry to do it, but she had a spell on the children and they were about to die. It was either I kill her or five of us die from the spell’. Fiis wife agreed. In broken English she told the authorities, ‘Better one die than five, that what he say to me. Then he kill. He right. Katy had spell on us’. Louis spent the rest of his life in an insane asylum.30
Numerous other witch murders perpetrated by European and African Americans are detailed in this book, proof that all cultures in America had their rationales for executing witches. As we have seen, some referred to the Bible for justification. Insanity explains the actions of others. Like the two cases above, such murders were usually matters of interpersonal relations between a few people. In nineteenth-century Native-American society, however, the execution of witches was very much a community concern led by chiefs. The Nations had their own traditions and laws that justified the ultimate punishment. The Cherokee considered witchcraft a greater crime than homicide, and a Seneca Council at Buffalo Creek decreed in 1801 that ‘those persons accused of Witchcraft should be threatened with Death, in case they persisted in bewitching the People’. Amongst the Choctaw, witches were not thought to be human; they were spirits inhabiting human bodies, so they were not recognized in clan laws that otherwise restrained retributive murder. Witches deserved death: it was a communal obligation to punish them. According to an 1819 missionary report, a source that always need to be treated with circumspection, the Choctaws in what is now Yalobusha County, Mississippi, had killed a dozen suspected witches, male and female, in the previous three years alone.31
In 1829 the Mississippi Choctaw Nation instituted a law that addressed white concerns regarding the execution of witches. While produced as a result of shrewd political negotiations with missionaries and white authorities, the law did not deny the reality of witchcraft and enshrined Choctaw beliefs. The result was a fascinating fusion of European and indigenous legal custom, a European conception of justice married to a Choctaw sense of customary right.
Whereas it has been an old custom of the Choctaws to punish persons said to be witches or wizzards with death, without giving them a fair trial that by any disinterested persons; and many have fallen victim under the influence of this habit.
We do hereby resolve, in general council of the North, East and Southern Districts, that in future all persons, who shall be accused of being a wizard or witch, shall be tried before the Chiefs and committees, or by any four Captains, and if they be found guilty, they shall be punished at the discretion of the courts.
Be it further resolved, that if any person or persons shall find at any place the entrails of a wizzard of witch, the said entrails going from or returning to the body, the said body shall be put to death at the place where it may be discovered, and the said body shall be cut open by a proper person, and an examination be made to see whether it has in it any entrails and a report be made of said body’.32
In 1834 Major Francis Armstrong, Choctaw reservation agent, reported that the natives had recently executed a man and a woman for witchcraft. He demanded that the killers be handed over and called a council of chiefs to try and stamp out the practice. He persuaded them to institute a new decree on the 6 November stating
That any person or persons who shall kill another for a witch or wizard shall suffer death. And any person who shall publicly state that he himself or she herself is a witch or wizard, or shall say that such a person or persons are witches or wizards, and he or she knows it to be so, shall receive sixty lashes on the bare back.33
Armstrong received official praise for his endeavours. ‘To his decision and firmness may be ascribed the termination of a superstitious custom, that triumphs in the weakness of human nature, gives a sort of legalized sanction to the most barbarous acts’, declared a Senate report.34 Still, four years later, considerable excitement surged through the Nation when the natives of the Six Towns executed a woman believed to be a witch despite the new law.35
Through a process of negotiation and their own decision-making, the Choctaws suppressed the sort of widespread witch purges that had erupted earlier under Handsome Lake and the Shawnee Prophet, but with the multiple pressures of war, European oppression, and epidemics, systematic witch hunts broke out in several other Native American tribal areas over the century. One evening in 1854 four Pueblo men reported to the governor of Nambe, New Mexico, that they had murdered two male witches. ‘They were killed by order of the pueblo and the head men of the pueblo’, testified the governor of Nambe. ‘It was the duty of the fiscal [constable] to execute the order of the pueblo. They commanded him to kill these two men’. He went on to state, ‘we have not exercised this custom of killing witches since the Americans came here, because there had not been such doings before’. The federal agent for the area reported in frustration that the killers were acquitted because of the difficulty of proving in what county the crime was committed.36 Further executions took place over the next decade or so. When, in 1883, the archaeologist and historian Adolph Bandelier investigated the practice of magic in Nambe he was told by locals that the killing of witches had greatly contributed to the depopulation of the community.37
An Indian Reservation was established along the Fresno River, California, in 1854, and four years later it was reported that seven or eight medicine men had been executed for having stopped the rains from coming and failing to cure the sick.38 In 1878 Navajo fears regarding the harmful magic practised by their medicine men came to a head with several executions and the torture of suspects. The central accusation was that the medicine men were shooting stones into the bodies of people on the reservation. It would seem an epidemic had struck the community. Chief Ganado Mucho explained to the American authorities that some medicine men had also killed some of his relatives by putting grass, hair, horse and sheep dung in his brother’s grave. The assumed guilty confessed and Mucho killed two of them. When Lt Mitchell questioned three Navajo medicine men he found tied up for shooting stones into people’s bodies, he told them, ‘The Americans no longer disbelieve in this shooting stones business and it must be stopped... I am here to make Indian doctors promise to stop’. Contemporary reports and later oral histories of the purge indicate that while the American authorities saw the persecution as a manifestation of tribal politics played out through ‘superstition’, the episode, like that at Nambe, had its roots in a deeper response to communal anxiety and instability arising from epidemics and relations with the encroaching European Americans.39
Such destabilizing purges centred on the failure of medicine men were exceptional, and it is likely that most witch executions were not part of larger hunts but the result of disputes between individuals where the punishment was ultimately sanctioned by tribal law. Those punished in this context were more often women, it would seem. In 1873 a middle-aged woman was executed for witchcraft amongst the Native Americans of Pine Nut Valley, Nevada. A grand council ordered her death by stoning. Her outraged husband initially threatened to ‘clean out the whole tribe’, but was later pacified. When, in 1888, typhoid fever struck the community of Mojave Indians in San Bernardino County, California, the medicine men instituted a ritual for detecting the witch responsible. The eighteen- year-old daughter of a sub-chief named Creso was identified and then burned to death.40