Post by Moltke on Jun 9, 2018 23:50:24 GMT -6
Have been reading/looking through Will Hutchison's Artifacts of the battle LGH and was about to post some questions on relics from the battle but a question and answer from the NPS website forced me to post a quick threat. The NPS lists
38. Why do you have only an estimate? (of Indian dead numbers)
ANSWER: No Indian dead were left behind. All were carried away for burial elsewhere, so an accurate count is difficult to know.
This caught my eye because I was thinking they did find dead left in the village and even near/on the battlefield. For instance the diary of Thomas W. Coleman mentions a "funeral tent" of dead Indians. Later when he states companies went to destroy most of the village they found "150 dead indians" in a ravine. This of course was not him seeing it but what he was told by soldiers that were there. That number has to be inaccurate probably, but in the same work describing Coleman's accounts it mentions that Gibbon makes a reference to a location where "the Indians had buried a number of their dead" without details. I though Godfrey mentioned finding scaffolds of Indian dead as well. Conversely in Hardorff's Hokahey book the conclusion lent that perhaps as few as 30 or so Indian casualties which I still find too low to fathom in my own likely biases ignorance.
So my main question is why the NPS claim that none were left behind?
38. Why do you have only an estimate? (of Indian dead numbers)
ANSWER: No Indian dead were left behind. All were carried away for burial elsewhere, so an accurate count is difficult to know.
This caught my eye because I was thinking they did find dead left in the village and even near/on the battlefield. For instance the diary of Thomas W. Coleman mentions a "funeral tent" of dead Indians. Later when he states companies went to destroy most of the village they found "150 dead indians" in a ravine. This of course was not him seeing it but what he was told by soldiers that were there. That number has to be inaccurate probably, but in the same work describing Coleman's accounts it mentions that Gibbon makes a reference to a location where "the Indians had buried a number of their dead" without details. I though Godfrey mentioned finding scaffolds of Indian dead as well. Conversely in Hardorff's Hokahey book the conclusion lent that perhaps as few as 30 or so Indian casualties which I still find too low to fathom in my own likely biases ignorance.
So my main question is why the NPS claim that none were left behind?
