What surprised the white soldiers the most when they witnessed the Indians giving up their white captives in Light in the Forest?According to Del,...

There were three things that surprised Del and the white
soldiers as they witnessed the Indians giving up their white captives. First of all, Del
was shocked that they would give them up at all. Dell knew from having lived among the
Delaware that if they did not kill white prisoners right off, they adopted them into the
tribe as their own, to replace a relative who had died. As Del
says,

"It
wasn't any mock or make-believe business either. Those Injuns actually looked on their
new white relations like full-blooded Injuns. And they'd never give them up any more
than their own people."

Del
had not believed that the Delaware would give up their white prisoners for this reason,
but he hadn't counted on the extent to which the Indians wanted the whites to leave
their land. When a treaty was negotiated requiring that white prisoners be returned in
exchange for a limitation to the advancement of white settlers into Indian territory,
the Indians agreed, and, acting with integrity, they surrendered their white
captives.

The other reasons why Del and the men
were surprised was because of the emotion the Indians showed at having to turn their
captives over, and, similarly, and perhaps most significant,
the

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"ungratefulness of the captives...(who) didn't
want to have anything to do with the whites who had risked their lives to rescue
them."

He, and the men in
general, were amazed that

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"savages, whose names were a terror on the
frontier, (were) crying like women as they gave up some white child or
wife."

The white men did not
look upon the Indians as having the same attachments and attributes as members of their
own race, and to see the love they held for their adopted relations and the deep pain
they experienced in losing them, humanized the "savages" in a way that was as revealing
as it was disturbing. The Indians' reactions to the loss of their loved ones, as well as
the obvious feeling the prisoners had for their Indian captors, forced the white men to
see the Indians as people like themselves. It was inconceivable that the captives would
have become attached to the "savages," but the fact that they obviously had made it
imperative to consider the Indians in a different, human light. This realization was
problematic because, if the Indians were seen as equals, then the whole issue of the way
they were being treated by the white men would come into question (Chapter
2).