… the moment we get into how courage (and showing courage) was understood in these cultures, both the idea of a universal battle experience and also a universal notion of “warrior courage” break down. To take just a few examples …
Among Great Plains Native Americans, the sign of great courage was the individual act (on this, see A.R. McGinnis, Counting Coup and Cutting Horses (2010), which is replete with examples), particularly touching an enemy combatant (“counting coup“) or stealing enemy horses from their camp, typically by night and by stealth. It is sometimes asserted that counting coup means touching an enemy without killing them, but McGinnis fairly handily debunks this – not only could the enemy be killed, he could be already dead, killed by someone else and in some cases up to four warriors might count coup on the same fallen foe, none of whom need be the person who did the killing (McGinnis, 44, 63). These acts were fundamentally individual and the honor that resulted from them was entirely from the daring, rather than, necessarily, their direct efficacy. As McGinnis notes at multiple points, it was not the killing of an enemy, but the actual act of rushing forward to touch the body that was rewarded with honor.
Of course in many cases, counting coup in this way was followed by swift retreat, since the body in question was likely to be amongst the still living and dangerous enemy, which was the point since the purpose of the act was to show supreme daring and skill to rush forward among the enemy and get back out after touching one. The same of course was true of “cutting horses”, a task which could generally only be done by sneaking into an enemy camp, literally surrounded by (hopefully unaware) enemy warriors, before grabbing their horses and riding off (there is a first person account of such a raid in Black Elk Speaks (1932) which has always stuck with me, but McGinnis provides several other examples).
(I should note that the last Great Plains Native American to achieve the complete set of military honors and be made a war chief was Joe Medicine Crow who quite famously managed to lead a war party, take an enemy’s weapon, count coup (on a live opponent!) and steal some fifty horses from the Nazi SS during the Second World War)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
September 16, 2022
QotD: Counting coup
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