I wonder if they insulted each other’s mamas

I mentioned that I was reading David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream. I found this passage interesting. It describes the scene in the hours before a battle in 1609 between Champlain’s Indian allies and the Mohawk. They were on the shores of the lake Champlain had named for himself just days before.

“We were on the water,” he wrote, “within bow-shot of their barricades.” Songs and cries pierced the night. The Mohawk shouted insults at their enemies. “Our side was not lacking in repartee,” Champlain recalled, “telling them that they would see feats of weaponry that they had never known before, and a great deal of other talk as is usual at the siege of a city.”

In other words, trash talking has been around for a while.

[It’s interesting to learn from Fischer that according to Champlain’s reports, woodland Indians at that time entered battle pretty much as Europeans did — mass, coordinated movements, armored warriors (albeit wooden armor). It was, he says, firearms that caused the Eastern Indians to adopt the type of warfare historians (and novelists) associate with them, the hit-and-run, hiding in the woods, kind of warfare.]