the back only, or full dress. It does not argue true modesty on the part of a Maori woman to cover those parts of her body which custom orders her to cover, any more than it argues true modesty on the part of an Oriental barbarian to cover her face only, on meeting a man, leaving the rest of her body exposed. Nor does suicide prove anything, since it is known that the lower races indulge in self-slaughter for as trivial causes as they do in the slaughter of others. True modesty, as defined above, is not a Maori characteristic. The evidence on this point is too abundant to quote in full.
Shortland (126-27) describes in detail all of the ceremonies which were in former days the pastimes of the New Zealanders, and which accompanied the singing of their _haka_ or “love-songs,” to which reference has already been made. In the front were seated three elderly ladies and behind them in rows, eight or ten in a row, and five or six ranks deep, sat “_the best born young belles of the town_” who supplied the poem and the music for the _haka_ pantomime:
“The _haka_ is not a modest exhibition, but the reverse; and, on this occasion, two of the old ladies who stood in front … accompanied the music by movements of the arms and body, their postures being often disgustingly lascivious. However, they suited the taste of the audience, who rewarded the performers at such times with the applause they desired…. It was altogether as ungodly a scene as can well be imagined.”
The same author, who lived among the natives several years, says (120) that
“before marriage the greatest license is permitted to young females. The more admirers they can attract and the greater their reputation for intrigue, the fairer is their chance of making an advantageous match.”
William Brown writes (35) that “among the Maoris chastity is not deemed one of the virtues; and a lady before marriage may be as liberal of her favors as she pleased without incurring censure.” “As a rule,” writes E. Tregear in the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_ (1889),
“the girls had great license in the way of lovers. I don’t think the young woman knew when she was a virgin, for she had love-affairs with the boys from the cradle. This does not apply, of course, to _every_ individual case–some girls are born proud, and either kept to one sweetheart or had none, but this was rare.”
After marriage a woman was expected to remain faithful to her husband, but of course not from any regard for chastity, but because she was his private property. Like so many other uncivilized races the Maori saw no impropriety in lending his wife to a friend. (Tregear, 104.)
The faces of Maori women were always wet with red ochre and oil. Both sexes anointed their hair (which was vermin-infested) with rancid shark’s oil, so that they were as disagreeable to the smell as Hottentots. (Hawkesworth, 451-53.) They were cannibals, not from necessity, but for the love of human flesh, though they did not, like the Australians, eat their own relatives. Food, says Thompson (I., 160), affected them “as it does wild beasts.” They practised infanticide, killed cripples, abandoned the sick–in a word, they displayed a coarseness, a lack of delicacy, in sexual and other matters, which makes it simply absurd to suppose they could have loved as we love, with our altruistic feeling of sympathy and affection. William Brown says (38) that mothers showed none of that doting fondness for their children common elsewhere, and that they suckled pigs and pups with “affection.” “Should a husband quarrel with his wife, she would not hesitate to kill her children, merely to annoy him” (41). “They are totally devoid of natural affection.” The men “appear to care little for their wives,” apparently from
“a want of that sympathy between the sexes which is the source of the delicate attentions paid by the male to the female in most civilized countries. In my own experience I have seen only one instance where there was any perceptible attachment between husband and wife. To all appearance they behave to each other as if they were not at all related; and it not infrequently happens that they sleep in different places before the termination of the first week of their marriage.”
Thus even in the romantic isles of the Pacific we seek in vain for true love. Let us now see whether the vast continent of North and South America will bring us any nearer to our goal.
HOW AMERICAN INDIANS LOVE
“On the subject of love no persons have been less understood than the Indians,” wrote Thomas Ashe in 1806 (271).
“It is said of them that they have no affection, and that the intercourse of the sexes is sustained by a brutal passion remote from tenderness and sensibility. This is one of the many gross errors which have been propagated to calumniate these innocent people.”
Waitz remarks (III., 102):
“How much alike human nature is everywhere is evinced by the remarkable circumstance that notwithstanding the degradation of woman, cases of romantic love are not even very rare”
among Indians. “Their languages,” writes Professor Brinton (_R.P._, 54),
“supply us with evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among them, and this is corroborated by the incidents we learn of their domestic life…. Some of the songs and stories of this race seem to reveal even a capability for romantic love such as would do credit to a modern novel. This is the more astonishing, as in the African and Mongolian races this ethereal sentiment is practically absent, the idealism of passion being something foreign to those varieties of man.”
The Indians, says Catlin (_N.A.I._, I., 121), “are not in the least behind us in conjugal, in filial, and in paternal affection.” In the preface to Mrs. Eastman’s _Life and Legend of the Sioux_, Mrs. Kirkman exclaims that
“in spite of all that renders gross and mechanical their ordinary mode of marrying and giving in marriage, instances are not rare among them of love as true, as fiery, and as fatal as that of the most exalted hero of romance.”
Let us listen to a few of the tales of Indian love, as recorded by Schoolcraft.[195]
THE RED LOVER
Many years ago there lived a Chippewa warrior on the banks of Lake Superior. His name was Wawanosh and he was renowed for his ancestry and personal bravery. He had an only daughter, eighteen years old, celebrated for her gentle virtues, her _slender_ form, her full beaming hazel eyes, and her dark and flowing hair. Her hand was sought by a young man of humble parentage, but a tall commanding form, a manly step, and an eye beaming with the tropical fires of love and youth. These were sufficient to attract the favorable notice of the daughter, but did not satisfy the father, who sternly informed the young man that before he could hope to mingle his humble blood with that of so renowned a warrior he would have to go and make a name for himself by enduring fatigue in the campaigns against enemies, by taking scalps, and proving himself a successful hunter.
The intimidated lover departed, resolved to do a deed that should render him worthy of the daughter of Wawanosh, or die in the attempt. In a few days he succeeded in getting together a band of young men all eager, like himself, to distinguish themselves in battle. Armed with bow and quiver, and ornamented with war-paint and feathers, they had their war-dance, which was continued for two days and nights. Before leaving with his companions the leader sought an interview with the daughter of Wawanosh. He disclosed to her his firm intention never to return unless he could establish his name as a warrior. He told her of the pangs he had felt at her father’s implied imputation of effeminacy and cowardice. He averred that he never could be happy, either with or without her, until he had proved to the whole tribe the strength of his heart, which is the Indian term for courage. He repeated his _protestations of inviolable attachment_, which she returned, and, _pledging vows of mutual fidelity_, they parted.
She never saw him again. A warrior brought home the tidings that he had received a fatal arrow in his breast after distinguishing himself by the most heroic bravery. From that moment the young girl never smiled again. She pined away by day and by night. Deaf to entreaty and reproach, she would seek a sequestered spot, where she would sit under a shady tree, and sing her mournful laments for hours together. A small, beautiful bird, of a kind she had never seen, sat on her tree, every day, singing until dark. Her fond imagination soon led her to suppose it was the spirit of her lover, and her visits were repeated with greater frequency. She passed her time in fasting and singing her plaintive songs. Thus she pined away, until _the death she so fervently desired_ came to her relief. After her death the bird was never more seen, and it became a popular opinion that this mysterious bird had flown away with her spirit. But bitter tears of regret fell in the lodge of Wawanosh. Too late he _regretted his false pride_ and his harsh treatment of the noble youth.
THE FOAM WOMAN
There once lived an Ottawa woman on the shores of Lake Michigan who had a daughter as beautiful as she was modest and discreet. She was so handsome that her mother feared she would be carried off, and, to prevent it, she put her in a box on the lake, which was tied by a long string to a stake on the shore. Every morning the mother pulled the box ashore, and combed her daughter’s long, shining hair, gave her food, and then put her out again on the lake.
One day a handsome young man chanced to come to the spot at the moment she was receiving her morning’s attentions from her mother. He was struck with her beauty and immediately went home and told his feelings to his uncle, who was a great chief and a powerful magician. The uncle told him to go to the mother’s lodge, sit down in a modest manner, and, without saying a word, _think_ what he wanted, and he would be understood and answered. He did so; but the mother’s answer was: “Give you my daughter? No, indeed, my daughter shall never marry _you_.” This pride and haughtiness angered the uncle and the spirits of the lake, who raised a great storm on the water. The tossing waves broke the string, and the box with the girl floated off through the straits to Lake Huron. It was there cast on shore and found by an old spirit who took the beautiful girl to his lodge and married her.
The mother, when she found her daughter gone, raised loud cries, and continued her lamentations for a long time. At last, after two or three years, the spirits had pity on her and raised another storm, greater even than the first. When the water rose and encroached on the lodge where the daughter lived, she leaped into the box, and the waves carried her back to her mother’s lodge. The mother was overjoyed, but when she opened the box she found that her daughter’s beauty had almost all departed. However, she still loved her because she was her daughter, and she now thought of the young man who had made her the offer of marriage. She sent a formal message to him, but he had changed his mind, for he knew that she had been the wife of another. “_I_ marry your daughter?” said he; “_your_ daughter! No, indeed! I shall never marry her.”
THE HUMPBACK MAGICIAN
Bokwewa and his brother lived in a secluded part of the country. They were considered as Manitoes who had assumed mortal shapes. Bokwewa was a humpback, but had the gifts of a magician, while the brother was more like the present race of beings. One day the brother said to the humpback that he was going away to visit the habitations of men, and procure a wife. He travelled alone a long time. At length he came to a deserted camp, where he saw a corpse on a scaffold. He took it down and found it was the body of a beautiful young woman. “She shall be my wife,” he exclaimed.
He took her and carried her home on his back. “Brother,” he exclaimed, “cannot you restore her life? Oh! do me that favor.”
The humpback said he would try, and, after performing various ceremonies, succeeded in restoring her to life. They lived very happily for some time. But one day when the humpback was home alone with the woman, her husband having gone out to hunt, a powerful Manito came and carried her off, though Bokwewa used all his strength to save her.
When the brother returned and heard what had happened he would not taste food for several days. Sometimes he would fall to weeping for a long time, and appear almost beside himself. At last he said he would go in search of her. His brother, finding that he could not dissuade him, cautioned him against the dangers of the road; he must pass by the large grape-vine and the frog’s eggs that he would come across. But the young husband heeded not his advice. He started out on his journey and when he found the grapes and the frog’s eggs he ate them.
At length he came to the tribe into which his wife had been stolen. Throngs of men and women, gaily dressed, came out to meet him. As he had eaten of the grapes and frog’s eggs–snares laid for him–he was soon overcome by their flatteries and pleasures, and he was not long afterward seen beating corn with their women (the strongest proof of effeminacy), although his wife, for whom he had mourned so much, was in that Indian metropolis.
Meanwhile Bokwewa waited patiently for his brother, but when he did not return he set out in search of him. He avoided the allurements along the road and when he came among the luxurious people of the South he wept on seeing his brother beating corn with the women. He waited till the stolen wife came down to the river to draw water for her new husband, the Manito. He changed himself into a hair-snake, was scooped up in her bucket, and drunk by the Manito, who soon after was dead. Then the humpback resumed his human shape and tried to reclaim his brother; but the brother was so taken up with the pleasures and dissipations into which he had fallen that he refused to give them up. Finding he was past reclaiming, Bokwewa left him and disappeared forever.
THE BUFFALO KING
Aggodagauda was an Indian who lived in the forest. Though he had accidentally lost the use of one of his two legs he was a famous hunter. But he had a great enemy in the king of buffaloes, who frequently passed over the plain with the force of a tempest. The chief object of the wily buffalo was to carry off Aggodagauda’s daughter, who was very beautiful. To prevent this Aggodagauda had built a log cabin, and it was only on the roof of this that he permitted his daughter to take the open air and disport herself. Now her hair was so long that when she untied it the raven locks hung down to the ground.
One day, when her father was off on a hunt, she went out on top of the house and sat combing her long and beautiful hair, on the eaves of the lodge, when the buffalo king, coming suddenly by, caught her glossy hair, and winding it about his horns, tossed her onto his shoulders and carried her to his village. Here he _paid every attention to gain her affections_, but all to no purpose, for she sat pensively and disconsolate in the lodge among the other females, and scarcely ever spoke, and took no part in the domestic cares of her lover the king. He, on the contrary, _did everything he could think of to please her and win her affections_. He told the others in his lodge to give her everything she wanted, and to be _careful not to displease her_. They set before her the choicest food. They _gave her the seat of honor in the lodge_. The king himself went out hunting to obtain the most dainty bits of meat. And not content with these proofs of his attachment _he fasted himself_, and would often take his flute and sit near the lodge indulging his mind in repeating a few pensive notes:
My sweetheart,
My sweetheart,
Ah me!
When I think of you,
When I think of you,
Ah me!
How I love you,
How I love you,
Ah me!
Do not hate me,
Do not hate me,
Ah me!
In the meantime Aggodagauda had returned from his hunt, and finding his daughter gone, determined to recover her. During her flight her long hair had caught on the branches and broken them, and it was by following these broken twigs that he tracked her. When he came to the king’s lodge it was evening. He cautiously peeped in and saw his daughter sitting disconsolately. She caught his eye, and, in order to meet him, said to the king, “Give me a dipper, I will go and get you a drink of water.” Delighted with this token of submission, the king allowed her to go to the river. There she met her father and escaped with him.
THE HAUNTED GROVE
Leelinau was the favorite daughter of an Odjibwa hunter, living on the shore of Lake Superior. From her earliest youth she was observed to be pensive and timid, and to spend much of her time _in solitude and fasting_. Whenever she could leave her father’s lodge she would fly to the remote haunts and recesses of the woods, or _sit upon some high promontory of rock overhanging the lake_. But her favorite place was a forest of pines known as the Sacred Grove. It was supposed to be inhabited by a class of _fairies who love romantic scenes_. This spot Leelinau visited often, _gathering on the way strange flowers or plants_ to bring home. It was there that she fasted, supplicated, and strolled.
The effect of these visits was to make the girl melancholy and dissatisfied with the realities of life. She did not care to play with the other young people. Nor did she favor the plan of her parents to marry her to a man much her senior in years, but a reputed chief. No attention was paid to her disinclination, and the man was informed that his offer had been favorably received. The day for the marriage was fixed and the guests invited.
The girl had told her parents that she would never consent to the match. On the evening preceding the day fixed for her marriage she dressed herself in her best garments and put on all her ornaments. Then she told her parents she was going to meet her little lover, the chieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the Spirit Grove. Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they let her go. When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt; with lighted torches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girl was ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of a daughter whose inclinations they had, in the end, too violently thwarted.
THE GIRL AND THE SCALP
About the middle of the seventeenth century there lived on the shores of Lake Ontario a Wyandot girl so beautiful that she had for suitors nearly all the young men of her tribe; but while she rejected none, neither did she favor any one in particular. To prevent her from falling to someone not in their tribe the suitors held a meeting and concluded that their claims should be withdrawn and the war chief urged to woo her. He objected on account of the disparity of years, but was finally persuaded to make his advances. His practice had been confined rather to the use of stone-headed arrows than love-darts, and his dexterity in the management of hearts displayed rather in making bloody incisions than tender impressions. But after he had painted and arrayed himself as for battle and otherwise adorned his person, he paid court to her, and a few days later was accepted on condition that he would pledge his word as a warrior to do what she should ask of him. When his pledge had been given she told him to bring her the scalp of a certain Seneca chief whom she hated. He begged her to reflect that this chief was his bosom friend, whose confidence it would be an infamy to betray. But she told him either to redeem his pledge or be proclaimed for a lying dog, and then left him.
Goaded into fury, the Wyandot chief blackened his face and rushed off to the Seneca village, where he tomahawked his friend and rushed out of the lodge with his scalp. A moment later the mournful scalp-whoop of the Senecas was resounding through the village. The Wyandot camp was attacked, and after a deadly combat of three days the Senecas triumphed, avenging the murder of their chief by the death of his assailant as well as of the miserable girl who had caused the tragedy. The war thus begun lasted more than thirty years.
A CHIPPEWA LOVE-SONG
In 1759 great exertions were made by the French Indian Department under General Montcalm to bring a body of Indians into the valley of the lower St. Lawrence, and invitations for this purpose reached the utmost shores of Lake Superior. In one of the canoes from that quarter, which was left on the way down at the mouth of the Utawas, was a Chippewa girl named Paigwaineoshe, or the White Eagle. While the party awaited there the result of events at Quebec she formed an attachment for a young Algonquin belonging to a French mission. This attachment was mutual, and gave rise to a song of which the following is a prose translation:
I. Ah me! When I think of him–when I think of him–my sweetheart, my Algonquin.
II. As I embarked to return, he put the white wampum around my neck–a pledge of troth, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.
III. I shall go with you, he said, to your native country–I shall go with you, my sweetheart–my Algonquin.
IV. Alas! I replied–my native country is far, far away–my sweetheart, my Algonquin.
V. When I looked back again–where we parted, he was still looking after me, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.
VI. He was still standing on a fallen tree–that had fallen into the water, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.
VII. Alas! When I think of him–when I think of him–It is when I think of him, my Algonquin.
HOW “INDIAN STORIES” ARE WRITTEN
Here we have seven love-stories as romantic as you please and full of sentimental touches. Do they not disprove my theory that uncivilized races are incapable of feeling sentimental love? Some think they do, and Waitz is not the only anthropologist who has accepted such stories as proof that human nature, as far as love is concerned, is the same under all circumstances. The above tales are taken from the books of a man who spent much of his life among Indians and issued a number of works about them, one of which, in six volumes, was published under the auspices of the United States Government. This expert–Henry R. Schoolcraft–was member of so many learned societies that it takes twelve lines of small type to print them all. Moreover, he expressly assures us[196] that “the value of these traditionary stories appears to depend very much upon their being left, as nearly as possible, in their original forms of thought and expression,” the obvious inference being an assurance that he has so left them; and he adds that in the collection and translation of these stories he enjoyed the great advantages of seventeen years’ life as executive officer for the tribes, and a knowledge of their languages.
And now, having given the enemy’s battle-ship every possible advantage, the reader will allow me to bring on my little torpedo-boat. In the first place Schoolcraft mentions (_A.R_., I., 56) twelve persons, six of them women, who helped him collect and interpret the material of the tales united in his volumes; but he does not tell us whether all or any of these collectors acted on the principle that these stories could claim absolutely no _scientific_ value unless they were verbatim reports of aboriginal tales, _without any additions and sentimental embroideries by the compilers_. This omission alone is fatal to the whole collection, reducing it to the value of a mere fairy book for the entertainment of children, and allowing us to make no inferences from it regarding the quality and expression of an Indian’s love.
Schoolcraft stands convicted by his own action. When I read his tales for the first time I came across numerous sentences and sentiments which I knew from my own experience among Indians were utterly foreign to Indian modes of thought and feeling, and which they could no more have uttered than they could have penned Longfellow’s _Hiawatha_, or the essays of Emerson. In the stories of “The Red Lover,” “The Buffalo King,” and “The Haunted Grove,”[197] I have italicized a few of these suspicious passages. To take the last-named tale first, it is absurd to speak of Indian “fairies who love romantic scenes,” or of a girl romantically sitting on a rocky promontory,[198] or “gathering strange flowers;” for Indians have no conception of the romantic side of nature–of scenery for its own sake. To them a tree is simply a grouse perch, or a source of fire-wood; a lake, a fish-pond, a mountain, the dreaded abode of evil spirits. In the tale of the “Buffalo King” we read of the chief doing a number of things to win the affection of the refractory bride–telling the others not to displease her, giving her “the seat of honor,” and going so far as to fast himself, whereas in real life, under such circumstances, he would have curtly clubbed the stolen bride into submission. In the tale of the “Red Lover” the girl is admired for her “slender form,” whereas a real Indian values a woman in proportion to her weight and rotundity. Indians do not make “protestations of inviolable attachment,” or “pledge vows of mutual fidelity,” like the lovers of our fashionable novels. As Charles A. Leland remarks of the same race of Indians (85), “When an Indian seeks a wife, he or his mutual friend makes no great ado about it, but utters two words which tell the whole story.” But there is no need of citing other authors, for Schoolcraft, as I have just intimated, stands convicted by his own action. In the second edition of his _Algic Researches_, which appeared after an interval of seventeen years and received the title of _The Myth of Hiawatha and other Oral Legends of the North American Indians_, he seemed to remember what he wrote in the preface of the first regarding these stories, “that in the original there is no attempt at ornament,” so he removed nearly all of the romantic embroideries, like those I have italicized and commented on, and also relegated the majority of his ludicrously sentimental interspersed poems to the appendix. In the preface to _Hiawatha_, he refers in connection with some of these verses to “the poetic use of aboriginal ideas.” Now, a man has a perfect right to make such “poetic use” of “aboriginal ideas,” but not when he has led his readers to believe that he is telling these stories “as nearly as possible in their original forms of thought and expression.” It is very much as if Edward MacDowell had published the several movements of his Indian Suite as being, not only in their ideas, but in their (modern European) harmonies and orchestration, a faithful transcript of aboriginal Indian music. Schoolcraft’s procedure, in other words, amounts to a sort of Ossianic mystification; and unfortunately he has had not a few imitators, to the confusion of comparative psychologists and students of the evolution of love.
It is a great pity that Schoolcraft, with his valuable opportunities for ethnological research, should not have added a critical attitude and a habit of accuracy to his great industry. The historian Parkman, a model observer and scholar, described Schoolcraft’s volumes on the Indian Tribes of the United States as
“a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page of a striking unfitness for historical or scientific inquiry.”[199]
REALITY VERSUS ROMANCE
A few of the tales I have cited are not marred by superadded sentimental adornments, but all of them are open to suspicion from still another point of view. They are invariably so proper and pure that they might be read to Sunday-school classes. Since one-half of Schoolcraft’s assistants in the compilation of this material were women, this might have been expected, and if the collection had been issued as a Fairy Book it would have been a matter of course. But they were issued as accurate “oral legends” of wild Indians, and from the point of view of the student of the history of love the most important question to ask was, “Are Indian stories in reality as pure and refined in tone as these specimens would lead us to suspect?” I will answer that question by citing the words of one of the warmest champions of the Indians, the eminent American anthropologist, Professor D.G. Brinton _(M.N.W., 160):
“Anyone who has listened to Indian tales, not as they are recorded in books, but as they are told by the camp-fire, will bear witness to the abounding obscenity they deal in. That the same vulgarity shows itself in their arts and life, no genuine observer need doubt.”
And in a footnote he gives this extremely interesting information:
“The late George Gibbs will be acknowledged as an authority here. He was at the time of his death preparing a Latin translation of the tales he had collected, as they were too erotic to print in English. He wrote me, ‘Schoolcraft’s legends are emasculated to a degree that they become no longer Indian.'”
No longer Indian, indeed! And these doctored stories, artfully sentimentalized at one end and expurgated at the other, are advanced as proofs that a savage Indian’s love is just as refined as that of a civilized Christian! What Indian stories really are, the reader, if he can stomach such things, may find out for himself by consulting the marvellously copious and almost phonographically accurate collection of native tales which another of our most eminent anthropologists, Dr. Franz Boas, has printed.[200] And it must be borne in mind that these stories are not the secret gossip of vulgar men alone by themselves, but are national tales with which children of both sexes become familiar from their earliest years. As Colonel Dodge remarks (213): it is customary for as many as a dozen persons of both sexes to live in one room, hence there is an entire lack of privacy, either in word or act. “It is a wonder,” says Powers (271), “that children grow up with any virtue whatever, for the conversation of their elders in their presence is often of the filthiest description.” “One thing seems to me more than intolerable,” wrote the French missionary Le Jeune in 1632 (_Jesuit Relations_, V., 169).
“It is their living together promiscuously, girls, women, men, and boys, in a smoky hole. And the more progress one makes in the knowledge of the language, the more vile things one hears…. I did not think that the mouth of the savage was so foul as I notice it is every day.”
Elsewhere (VI., 263) the same missionary says:
“Their lips are constantly foul with these obscenities; and it is the same with the little children…. The older women go almost naked, the girls and young women are _very modestly clad_; but, among themselves, their language has the foul odor of the sewers.”
Of the Pennsylvania Indians Colonel James Smith (who had lived among them as a captive) wrote (140): “The squaws are generally very immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men to the blush.”
DECEPTIVE MODESTY
The late Dr. Brinton shot wide off the mark when he wrote (_R. and P._, 59) that even among the lower races the sentiment of modesty “is never absent.” With some American Indians, as in the races of other parts of the world, there is often not even the appearance of modesty. Many of the Southern Indians in North America and others in Central and South America wear no clothes at all, and their actions are as unrestrained as those of animals.[201] The tribes that do wear clothes sometimes present to shallow or biassed observers the appearance of modesty. To the Mandan women Catlin (I., 93, 96) attributes “excessive modesty of demeanor.”
“It was customary for hundreds of girls and women to go bathing and swimming in the Missouri every morning, while a quarter of a mile back on a terrace stood several sentinels with bows and arrows in hand to protect the bathing-place from men or boys, who had their own swimming-place elsewhere.”
This, however, tells us more about the immorality of the men and their anxiety to guard their property than about the character of the women. On that point we are enlightened by Maximilian Prinz zu Wied, who found that these women were anything but prudes, having often two or three lovers at a time, while infidelity was seldom punished (I., 531). According to Gatschet (183) Creek women also “were assigned a bathing-place in the river currents at some distance below the men;” but that this, too, was a mere curiosity of pseudo-modesty becomes obvious when we read in Schoolcraft (V., 272) that among these Indians “the sexes indulge their propensities with each other promiscuously, unrestrained by law or custom, and without secrecy or shame.” Powers, too, relates (55) that among the Californian Yurok “the sexes bathe apart, and the women do not go into the sea without some garment on.” But Powers was not a man to be misled by specious appearances. He fully understood the philosophy of the matter, as the following shows (412):
“Notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary by false friends and weak maundering philanthropists, the California Indians are a grossly licentious race. None more so, perhaps. There is no word in all their language that I have examined which has the meaning of ‘mercenary prostitute,’ because such a creature is unknown to them; but among the unmarried of both sexes there is very little or no restraint; and this freedom is so much a matter of course that there is no reproach attaching to it; so that _their young women are notable for their modest and innocent demeanor_. This very modesty of outward deportment has deceived the hasty glance of many travellers. But what their conduct really is is shown by the Argus-eyed surveillance to which women are subjected. If a married woman is seen even walking in the forest with another man than her husband she is chastised by him. A repetition of the offence is generally punished with speedy death. Brothers and sisters scrupulously avoid living alone together. A mother-in-law is never allowed to live with her son-in-law. To the Indian’s mind the opportunity of evil implies the commission of it.”
WERE INDIANS CORRUPTED BY WHITES?
Having disposed of the modesty fallacy, let us examine once more, and for the last time, the doctrine that savages owe their degradation to the whites.
In the admirable preface to his book on the Jesuit missionaries in Canada, Parkman writes concerning the Hurons (XXXIV.):
“Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, says that the nation was corrupt in his time, but that this was a degeneracy from their ancient manners. La Potherie and Charlevoix make a similar statement. Megapolensis, however, in 1644 says that they were then exceedingly debauched; and Greenhalgh, in 1677, gives ample evidence of a shameless license. One of their most earnest advocates of the present day admits that the passion of love among them had no other than an animal existence (Morgan, _League of the Iroquois_, 322). There is clear proof that the tribes of the South were equally corrupt. (See Lawson’s _Carolina_, 34, and other early writers.)”
Another most earnest advocate of the Indians, Dr. Brinton, writes (_M.N.W._, 159) that promiscuous licentiousness was frequently connected with the religious ceremonies of the Indians:
“Miscellaneous congress very often terminated their dances and festivals. Such orgies were of common occurrence among the Algonkins and Iroquois at a very early date, and are often mentioned in the _Jesuit Relations_; Venagas describes them as frequent among the tribes of Lower California, and Oviedo refers to certain festivals of the Nicaraguans, during which the women of all ranks extended to whosoever wished just such privileges as the matrons of ancient Babylon, that mother of harlots and all abominations, used to grant even to slaves and strangers in the temple of Melitta as one of the duties of religion.”
In Part I. (140-42) of the _Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States_,[202] A.F. Bandelier, the leading authority on the Indians of the Southwest, writes regarding the Pueblos (one of the most advanced, of all American tribes):
“Chastity was an act of penitence; to be chaste signified to do penance. Still, after a woman had once become linked to a man by the performance of certain simple rites it was unsafe for her to be caught trespassing, and her accomplice also suffered a penalty. But there was the utmost liberty, even license, as toward girls. Intercourse was almost promiscuous with members of the tribe. Toward outsiders the strictest abstinence was observed, and this fact, which has long been overlooked or misunderstood, explains the prevailing idea that before the coming of the white man the Indians were both chaste and moral, while the contrary is the truth.”
Lewis and Clarke travelled a century ago among Indians that had never been visited by whites. Their observations regarding immoral practices and the means used to obviate the consequences bear out the above testimony. M’Lean (II., 59, 120) also ridicules the idea that Indians were corrupted by the whites. But the most conclusive proof of aboriginal depravity is that supplied by the discoverers of America, including Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. Columbus on his fourth voyage touched the mainland going down near Brazil. In Cariay, he writes,[203] the enchanters
“sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed. The elder could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty that more could not be expected from public women.”
On another page (30) he writes: “The habits of these Caribbees are brutal,” adding that in their attacks on neighboring islands they carry off as many women as they can, using them as concubines. “These women also say that the Caribbees use them with such cruelty as would scarcely be believed; and that they eat the children which they bear to them.”
Brazil was visited in 1501 by Amerigo Vespucci. The account he gives of the dissolute practices of the natives, who certainly had never set eye on a white man, is so plain spoken that it cannot be quoted here in full. “They are not very jealous,” he says, “and are immoderately libidinous, and the women much more so than the men, so that for decency I omit to tell you the … They are so void of affection and cruel that if they be angry with their husbands they … and they slay an infinite number of creatures by that means…. The greatest sign of friendship which they can show you is that they give you their wives and their daughters” and feel “highly honored” if they are accepted. “They eat all their enemies whom they kill or capture, as well females as males.” “Their other barbarous customs are such that expression is too weak for the reality.”
The ineradicable perverseness of some minds is amusingly illustrated by Southey, in his _History of Brazil_. After referring to Amerigo Vespucci’s statements regarding the lascivious practices of the aboriginals, he exclaims, in a footnote: “This is false! Man has never yet been discovered in such a state of depravity!” What the navigators wrote regarding the cannibalism and cruelty of these savages he accepts as a matter of course; but to doubt their immaculate purity is high treason! The attitude of the sentimentalists in this matter is not only silly and ridiculous, but positively pathological. As their number is great, and seems to be growing (under the influence of such writers as Catlin, Helen Hunt Jackson, Brinton, Westermarck, etc.), it is necessary, in the interest of the truth, to paint the Indian as he really was until contact with the whites (missionaries and others) improved him somewhat.[204]
THE NOBLE RED MAN
Beginning with the Californians, their utter lack of moral sense has already been described. They were no worse than the other Pacific coast tribes in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. George Gibbs, the leading authority on the Indians of Western Oregon and Washington, says regarding them (I., 197-200):
“Prostitution is almost universal. An Indian, perhaps, will not let his favorite wife, but he looks upon his others, his sisters, daughters, female relatives, and slaves, as a legitimate source of profit…. Cohabitation of unmarried females among their own people brings no disgrace if unaccompanied with child-birth, which they take care to prevent. This commences at a very early age, perhaps ten or twelve years.”
“Chastity is not considered a virtue by the Chinook women,” says Ross (92),
“and their amorous propensities know no bounds. All classes, from the highest to the lowest, indulge in coarse sensuality and shameless profligacy. Even the chief would boast of obtaining a paltry toy or trifle in return for the prostitution of his virgin daughter.”
Lewis and Clarke (1814) found that among the Chinooks, “_as, indeed, among all Indians_” they became acquainted with on their perilous pioneer trips through the Western wilds, prostitution of females was not considered criminal or improper (439).
Such revelations, illustrating not individual cases of depravity, but a whole people’s attitude, show how utterly hopeless it is to expect refined and pure love of these Indians. Gibbs did not give himself up to any illusions on this subject. “A strong _sensual_ attachment often undoubtedly exists,” he wrote (198),
“which leads to marriage, and instances are not rare of young women destroying themselves on the death of a lover; but where the idea of chastity is so entirely wanting in both sexes, _this cannot deserve the name of love_, or it is at best of a temporary duration.” The italics are mine.
In common with several other high authorities who lived many years among the Indians (as we shall see at the end of this chapter) Gibbs clearly realized the difference between red love and white love–between sensual and sentimental attachments, and failed to find the latter among the American savages.
British Columbian capacity for sexual delicacy and refined love is sufficiently indicated by the reference on a preceding page (556) to the stories collected by Dr. Boas. Turning northeastward we find M’Lean, who spent twenty-five years among the Hudson’s Bay natives, declaring of the Beaver Indians (Chippewayans) that “the unmarried youth, of both sexes, are generally under no restraint whatever,” and that “the lewdness of the Carrier [Taculli] Indians cannot possibly be carried to a greater excess.” M’Lean, too, after observing these northern Indians for a quarter of a century, came to the conclusion that “the tender passion seems unknown to the savage breast.”
“The Hurons are lascivious,” wrote Le Jeune (whom I have already quoted), in 1632; and Parkman says (_J.N.A._, XXXIV.):
“A practice also prevailed of temporary or experimental marriage, lasting a day, a week, or more…. An attractive and enterprising damsel might, and often did, make twenty such marriages before her final establishing.”
Regarding the Sioux, that shrewd observer, Burton, wrote (_C. of S._, 116): “If the mother takes any care of her daughter’s virtue, it is only out of regard to its market value.” The Sioux, or Dakotas, are indeed, sometimes lower than animals, for, as S.R. Riggs pointed out, in a government publication (_U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Soc._, Vol. IX.), “Girls are sometimes taken very young, before they are of marriageable age, which generally happens with a man who has a wife already.” “The marriageable age,” he adds, “is from fourteen years old and upward.” Even the Mandans, so highly lauded by Catlin, sometimes brutally dispose of girls at the age of eleven, as do other tribes (Comanches, etc.).
Of the Chippewas, Ottawas, and Winnebagoes we read in H. Trumbull’s _History of the Indian Wars_ (168):
“It appears to have been a very prevalent custom with the Indians of this country, before they became acquainted with the Europeans, to compliment strangers with their wives;”
and “the Indian women in general are amorous, and before marriage not less esteemed for gratifying their passions.”
Of the New York Indians J. Buchanan wrote (II., 104):
“that it is no offence for their married women to associate with another man, provided she acquaint her husband or some near relation therewith, but if not, it is sometimes punishable with death.”
Of the Comanches it is said (Schoolcraft, V., 683) that while “the men are grossly licentious, treating female captives in a most cruel and barbarous manner,” upon their women “they enforce rigid chastity;” but this is, as usual, a mere question of masculine property, for on the next page we read that they lend their wives; and Fossey (_Mexique_, 462) says: “Les Comanches obligent le prisonnier blanc, dont ils ont admire le valeur dans le combat, a s’unir a leurs femmes pour perpetuer sa race.” Concerning the Kickapoo, Kansas, and Osage Indians we are informed by Hunter (203), who lived among them, that
“a female may become a parent out of wedlock without loss of reputation, or diminishing her chances for a subsequent matrimonial alliance, so that her paramour is of respectable standing.”
Maximilian Prinz zu Weid found that the Blackfeet, though they horribly mutilated wives for secret intrigues [violation of property right], offered these wives as well as their daughters for a bottle of whiskey. “Some very young girls are offered” (I., 531). “The Navajo women are very loose, and do not look upon fornication as a crime.”
“The most unfortunate thing which can befall a captive woman is to be claimed by two persons. In this case she is either shot or delivered up for indiscriminate violence” (Bancroft, I., 514).
Colonel R.I. Dodge writes of the Indians of the plains (204):
“For an unmarried Indian girl to be found away from her lodge alone is to invite outrage, consequently she is never sent out to cut and bring wood, nor to take care of the stock.”
He speaks of the “Indian men who, animal-like, approach a female only to make love to her,” and to whom the idea of continence is unknown (210). Among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes
“no unmarried woman considers herself dressed to meet her beau at night, to go to a dance or other gathering, unless she has tied her lower limbs with a rope…. Custom has made this an almost perfect protection against the brutality of the men. Without it she would not be safe for an instant, and even with it, an unmarried girl is not safe if found alone away from the immediate protection of the lodge” (213).
A brother does not protect his sister from insult, nor avenge outrage (220).
“Nature has no nobler specimen of man than the Indian,” wrote Catlin, the sentimentalist, who is often cited as an authority. To proceed: “Prostitution is the rule among the (Yuma) women, not the exception.” The Colorado River Indians “barter and sell their women into prostitution, with hardly an exception.” (Bancroft, I., 514.) In his _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, C.C. Jones says of the Creeks, Cherokees, Muscogulges, etc. (69):
“Comparatively little virtue existed among the unmarried women. Their chances of marriage were not diminished, but rather augmented, by the fact that they had been great favorites, provided they had avoided conception during their years of general pleasure.”
The wife “was deterred, by fear of public punishment, from the commission of indiscretions.” “The unmarried women among the Natchez were unusually unchaste,” says McCulloh (165).
This damning list might be continued for the Central and South American Indians. We should find that the Mosquito Indians often did not wait for puberty (Bancroft, I., 729); that, according to Martius, Oviedo, and Navarette,
“in Cuba, Nicaragua,[205] and among the Caribs and Tupis, the bride yielded herself first to another, lest her husband should come to some ill-luck by exercising a priority of possession…. This _jus primae noctis_ was exercised by the priests” (Brinton, _M.N.W._, 155);
that the Waraus give girls to medicine men in return for professional services (Brett, 320); that the Guaranis lend their wives and daughters for a drink (Reich, 435); that among Brazilian tribes the _jus primae noctis_ is often enjoyed by the chief (_Journ. Roy. G.S._, II., 198); that in Guiana “chastity is not considered an indispensable virtue among the unmarried women” (Dalton, I., 80); that the Patagonians often pawned and sold their wives and daughters for brandy (Falkner, 97); that their licentiousness is equal to their cruelty (Bourne, 56-57), etc., etc.
APPARENT EXCEPTIONS
A critical student will not be able, I think, to find any exceptions to this rule of Indian depravity among tribes untouched by missionary influences. Westermarck, indeed, refers (65) with satisfaction to Hearne’s assertion (311) that the northern Indians he visited carefully guarded the young people. Had he consulted page 129 of the same writer he would have seen that this does not indicate a regard for chastity as a virtue, but is merely a result of their habit of regarding women as property, to which Franklin, speaking of these same Indians, refers (287); for as Hearne remarks in the place alluded to, “it is a very common custom among the men of this country to exchange a night’s lodging with each other’s wives.” An equal lack of insight is shown by Westermarck, when he professes to find female chastity among the Apaches. For this assertion he relies on Bancroft, who does indeed say (I., 514) that “all authorities agree that the Apache women, both before and after marriage, are remarkably pure.” Yet he himself adds that the Apaches will lend their wives to each other.[206] If the women are otherwise chaste, it is not from a regard for purity, but from fear of their cruel husbands and masters. United States Boundary Commissioner, Bartlett, has enlightened us on this point. “The atrocities inflicted upon an Apache woman taken in adultery baffle all description,” he writes, “and the females whom they capture from their enemies are invariably doomed to the most infamous treatment.” Thus they are like other Indians–the Comanches, for instance, concerning whom we read in Schoolcraft (V., 683) that “the men are grossly licentious, treating female captives in a most cruel and barbarous manner; but they enforce rigid chastity upon their women.”
Among the Modocs a wife who violated her husband’s property rights in her “chastity,” was disembowelled in public, as Bancroft informs us (I., 350). No wonder, that, as he adds, “adultery, being attended with so much danger, is comparatively rare, but among the unmarried, who have nothing to fear, a gross licentiousness prevails.”
The Peruvian sun virgins are often supposed to indicate a regard for purity; but in reality the temples in which these girls were reared and guarded were nothing but nurseries for providing a choice assortment of concubines for the licentious Incas and their friends. (Torquemada, IX., 16.)[207]
“In the earlier times of Peru the union of the sexes was voluntary, unregulated, and accompanied by barbarous usages: many of which even at the present day exist among the uncivilized nations of South America.” (Tschudi’s _Antiquities_, 184; McCulloh, 379.)
Of the Mexicans, too, it has been erroneously said that they valued purity; but Bandelier has collected facts from the old Spanish writers, in summing which up he says: “This almost establishes promiscuity among the ancient Mexicans, as a preliminary to formal marriage.” Oddly enough, the crime of adultery with a married woman was considered one against a cluster of kindred, and not against the husband; for if he caught the culprits _in flagrante delictu_ and killed the wife, he lost his own life!
Another source of error regarding exceptional virtue in an Indian tribe lies in the fact that in some few cases female captives were spared. This was due, however, not to a chivalrous regard for female virtue, but to superstition. James Adair relates of the Choktah (164) that even a certain chief noted for his cruelty
“did not attempt the virtue of his female captives lest (as he told one of them) ‘it should offend the Indian’s god;’ though at the same time his pleasures were heightened in proportion to the shrieks and groans from prisoners of both sexes while they were under his torture. Although the Choktah are libidinous, yet I have known them to take several female prisoners without offering the least violence to their virtue, till the time of purgation was expired; then some of them forced their captives, notwithstanding their pressing entreaties and tears.”
Parkman, too, was convinced (_Jes. in Can._, XXXIV.) that the remarkable forbearance observed by some tribes was the result of superstition; and he adds: “To make the Indian a hero of romance is mere nonsense.”
INTIMIDATING CALIFORNIA SQUAWS
Besides the atrocious punishments inflicted on women who forgot their role as private property, some of the Indians had other ways of intimidating them, while reserving for themselves the right to do as they pleased. Powers relates (156-61) that, among the California Indians in general,
“there is scarcely such an attribute known as virtue or chastity in either sex before marriage. Up to the time when they enter matrimony most of the young women are a kind of _femmes incomprises_, the common property of the tribe; and after they have once taken on themselves the marriage covenant, simple as it is, they are guarded with a Turkish jealousy, for even the married women are not such models as Mrs. Ford…. The one great burden of the harangues delivered by the venerable peace-chief on solemn occasions is the necessity and excellence of _female_ virtue; all the terrors of superstitious sanction and the direst threats of the great prophet are levelled at unchastity, and all the most dreadful calamities and pains of a future state are hung suspended over the heads of those who are persistently lascivious. All the devices that savage cunning can invent, all the mysterious masquerading horrors of devil-raising, all the secret sorceries, the frightful apparitions and bugbears, which can be supposed effectual in terrifying women into virtue and preventing smock treason, are resorted to by the Pomo leaders.”
Among these Pomo Indians, and Californian tribes almost universally (406), there existed secret societies whose simple purpose was to conjure up infernal terrors and render each other assistance in keeping their women in subjection. A special meeting-house was constructed for this purpose, in which these secret women-tamers held a grand devil-dance once in seven years, twenty or thirty men daubing themselves with barbaric paint and putting vessels of pitch on their heads. At night they rushed down from the mountains with these vessels of pitch flaming on their heads, and making a terrible noise. The squaws fled for dear life; hundreds of them clung screaming and fainting to their valorous protectors. Then the chief took a rattlesnake from which the fangs had been extracted, brandished it into the faces of the shuddering women, and threatened them with dire things if they did not live lives of chastity, industry, and obedience, until some of the terrified squaws shrieked aloud and fell swooning upon the ground.
GOING A-CALUMETING
We are now in a position to appreciate the unintentional humor of Ashe’s indignant outcry, cited at the beginning of this chapter, against those who calumniate these innocent people “by denying that there is anything but ‘brutal passion’ in their love-affairs.” He admits, indeed, that “no expressions of endearment or tenderness ever escape the Indian sexes toward each other,” as all observers have remarked, but claims that this reserve is merely a compliance with a political and religious law which “stigmatizes youth wasting their time in female dalliance, except when covered with the veil of night and beyond the prying eye of man.” Were a man to speak to a squaw of love in the daytime, he adds, she would run away from him or disdain him. He then proceeds, with astounding naivete, to describe the nocturnal love-making of “these innocent people.” The Indians leave their doors open day and night, and the lovers take advantage of this when they go a-courting, or “a-calumeting,” as it is called.
“A young man lights his calumet, enters the cabin of his mistress, and gently presents it to her. If she extinguishes it she admits him to her arms; but if she suffer it to burn unnoticed he softly retires with a disappointed and throbbing heart, knowing that while there was light she never could consent to his wishes. This spirit of nocturnal amour and intrigue is attended by one dreadful practice: the girls drink the juice of a certain herb which prevents conception and often renders them barren through life. They have recourse to this to avoid the shame of having a child–a circumstance _in which alone_ the disgrace of their conduct consists, and which would be thought a thing so heinous as to deprive them forever of respect and religious marriage rites. _The crime is in the discovery_.” “I never saw gallantry conducted with more _refinement_ than I did during my stay with the Shawnee nation.”
In brief, Ashe’s idea of “refined” love consists in promiscuous immorality carefully concealed! “On the subject of love,” he sums up with an injured air, “no persons have been less understood than the Indians.” Yet this writer is cited seriously as a witness by Westermarck and others!
In view of the foregoing facts every candid reader must admit that to an Indian an expression like “Love hath weaned my heart from low desires,” or Werther’s “She is sacred to me; all desire is silent in her presence,” would be as incomprehensible as Hegel’s metaphysics; that, in other words, mental purity, one of the most essential and characteristic ingredients of romantic love, is always absent in the Indian’s infatuation. The late Professor Brinton tried to come to the rescue by declaring (_E.A._, 297) that
“delicacy of sentiment bears no sort of constant relation to culture. Every man … can name among his acquaintances men of unusual culture who are coarse voluptuaries and others of the humblest education who have the delicacy of a refined woman. So it is with families, and so it is with tribes.”
Is it? That is the point to be proved. I myself have pointed out that among nations, as among individuals, intellectual culture alone does not insure a capacity for true love, because that also implies emotional and esthetic culture. Now in our civilized communities there are all sorts of individuals, many coarse, a few refined, while some civilized races, too, are more refined than others. To prove his point Dr. Brinton would have had to show that among the Indians, too, there are tribes and individuals who are morally and esthetically refined; and this he failed to do; wherefore his argument is futile. Diligent and patient search has not revealed to me a single exception to the rule of depravity above described, though I admit the possibility that among the Indians who have been for generations under missionary control such exceptions might be found. But we are here considering the wild Indian and not the missionary’s garden plant.
SQUAWS AND PERSONAL BEAUTY
An excellent test of the Indian’s capacity for refined amorous feeling may be found in his attitude toward personal beauty. Does he admire real beauty, and does it decide his choice of a mate? That there are good-looking girls among some Indian tribes cannot be denied, though they are exceptional. Among the thousands of squaws I have seen on the Pacific Slope, from Mexico to Alaska, I can recall only one whom I could call really beautiful. She was a pupil at a Sitka Indian school, spoke English well, and I suspect had some white blood in her. Joaquin Miller, who married a Modoc girl and is given to romancing and idealizing, relates (227) how “the brown-eyed girls danced, gay and beautiful, half-nude, in their rich black hair and flowing robes.” Herbert Walsh,[208] speaking of the girls at a Navajo Indian school, writes that
“among them was one little girl of striking beauty, with fine, dark eyes, regularly and delicately modelled features, and a most winning expression. Nothing could be more attractive than the unconscious grace of this child of nature.”
I can find no indication, however, that the Indians ever admire such exceptional beauty, and plenty of evidence that what they admire is not beautiful. “These Indians are far from being connoisseurs in beauty,” wrote Mrs. Eastman (105) of the Dakotas. Dobrizhoffer says of the Abipones (II., 139) what we read in Schoolcraft concerning the Creeks: “Beauty is of no estimation in either sex;” and I have also previously quoted Belden’s testimony (302), that the men select the squaws not for their personal beauty but “their strength and ability to work;” to which he should have added, their weight; for bulk is the savage’s synonym for beauty. Burton (_C.S._, 128) admired the pretty doll-like faces of the Sioux girls, but only up to the age of six. “When full grown the figure becomes dumpy and _trapu_;” and that is what attracts the Indian. The examples given in the chapter on Personal Beauty of the Indians’ indifference to geological layers of dirt on their faces and bodies would alone prove beyond all possibility of dispute that they can have no esthetic appreciation of personal charms. The very highest type of Indian beauty is that described by Powers in the case of a California girl
“just gliding out of the uncomfortable obesity of youth, her complexion a soft, creamy hazel, her wide eyes dreamy and idle … a not unattractive type of vacuous, facile, and voluptuous beauty”
–a beauty, I need not add, which may attract, but would not inspire love of the sentimental kind, even if the Indian were capable of it.
ARE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS GALLANT?
Having failed to find mental purity and admiration of personal beauty in the Indian’s love-affairs, let us now see how he stands in regard to the altruistic impulses which differentiate love from self-love. Do Indians behave gallantly toward their women? Do they habitually sacrifice their comfort and, in case of need, their lives for their wives?
Dr. Brinton declares (_Am. R._, 48) that “the position of women in the social scheme of the American tribes has often been portrayed in darker colors than the truth admits.” Another eminent American anthropologist, Horatio Hale, wrote[209] that women among the Indians and other savages are not treated with harshness or regarded as inferiors except under special circumstances. “It is entirely a question of physical comfort, and mainly of the abundance or lack of food,” he maintains. For instance, among the sub-arctic Tinneh, women are “slaves,” while among the Tinneh (Navajos) of sunny Arizona they are “queens.” Heckewelder declares (_T.A.P.S._, 142) that the labors of the squaws “are no more than their fair share, under every consideration and due allowance, of the hardships attendant on savage life.” This benevolent and oft-cited old writer shows indeed such an eager desire to whitewash the Indian warrior that an ignorant reader of his book might find some difficulty in restraining his indignation at the horrid, lazy squaws for not also relieving the poor, unprotected men of the only two duties which they have retained for themselves–murdering men or animals. But the most “fearless” champion of the noble red man is a woman–Rose Yawger–who writes (in _The Indian and the Pioneer_, 42) that “the position of the Indian woman in her nation was not greatly inferior to that enjoyed by the American woman of to-day.” … “They were treated with great respect.” Let us confront these assertions with facts.
Beginning with the Pacific Coast, we are told by Powers (405) that, on the whole, California Indians did not make such slaves of women as the Indians of the Atlantic side of the continent. This, however, is merely comparative, and does not mean that they treat them kindly, for, as he himself says (23), “while on a journey the man lays far the greatest burdens on his wife.” On another page (406) he remarks that while a California boy is not “taught to pierce his mother’s flesh with an arrow to show him his superiority over her, as among the Apaches and Iroquois,” he nevertheless afterward “slays his wife or mother-in-law, if angry, with very little compunction.” Colonel McKee, in describing an expedition among California Indians (Schoolcraft, III., 127), writes:
“One of the whites here, in breaking in his squaw to her household duties, had occasion to beat her several times. She complained of this to her tribe and they informed him that he must not do so; if he was dissatisfied, _let him kill her and take another_!” “The men,” he adds, “allow themselves the privilege of shooting any woman they are tired of.”
The Pomo Indians make it a special point to slaughter the women of their enemies during or after battle. “They do this because, as they argue with the greatest sincerity, one woman destroyed is tantamount to five men killed” (Bancroft, I., 160), for without women the tribe cannot multiply. A Modoc explained why he needed several wives–one to take care of his house, a second to hunt for him, a third to dig roots (259). Bancroft cites half a dozen authorities for the assertion that among the Indians of Northern California “boys are disgraced by work” and “women work while men gamble or sleep” (I., 351). John Muir, in his recent work on _The Mountains of California_ (80), says it is truly astonishing to see what immense loads the haggard old Pah Ute squaws make out to carry bare-footed over the rugged passes. The men, who are always with them, stride on erect and unburdened, but when they come to a difficult place they “kindly” pile stepping-stones for their patient pack-animal wives, “just as they would prepare the way for their ponies.”
Among some of the Klamath and other California tribes certain women are allowed to attain the rank of priestesses. To be “supposed to have communication with the devil” and be alone “potent over cases of witchcraft and witch poisoning” (67) is, however, an honor which women elsewhere would hardly covet. Among the Yurok, Powers relates (56), when a young man cannot afford to pay the amount of shell-money without which marriage is not considered legal, he is sometimes allowed to pay half the sum and become what is termed “half-married.” “Instead of bringing her to his cabin and making her his slave, he goes to live in her cabin and becomes her slave.” This, however, “occurs only in case of soft uxorious fellows.” Sometimes, too, a squaw will take the law in her own hands, as in a case mentioned by the same writer (199). A Wappo Indian abandoned his wife and went down the river to a ranch where he took another woman. But the lawful spouse soon discovered his whereabouts, followed him up, confronted him before his paramour, upbraided him fiercely, and then seized him by the hair and led him away triumphantly to her bed and basket. It is to check such unseemly “new-womanish” tendencies in their squaws that the Californians resorted to the bugaboo performances already referred to. The Central Californian women, says Bancroft (391), are more apt than the others to rebel against the tyranny of their masters; but the men usually manage to keep them in subjection. The Tatu and Pomo tribes intimidate them in this way:
“A man is stripped naked, painted with red and black stripes, and then at night takes a sprig of poison oak, dips it in water, and sprinkles it on the squaws, who, from its effects on their skins, are convinced of the man’s satanic power, so that his object is attained.” (Powers, 141.)
The pages of Bancroft contain many references besides those already quoted, showing how far the Indians of California were from treating their women with chivalrous, self-sacrificing devotion. “The principal labor falls to the lot of the women” (I., 351). Among the Gallinomeros,
“_as usual_, the women are treated with great contempt by the men, and forced to do all the hard and menial work; they are not even allowed to sit at the same fire or eat at the same repast with their lords” (390).
Among the Shoshones “the weaker sex _of course_ do the hardest labor” (437), etc. With the Hupa a girl will bring in the market $15 to $50–“about half the valuation of a man.” (Powers, 85.)
Nor do matters mend if we proceed northward on the Pacific coast. Thus, Gibbs says (198) of the Indians of Western Oregon and Washington, “the condition of the woman is that of slavery under any circumstances;” and similar testimony might be adduced regarding the Indians of British Columbia and Alaska.
Among the eastern neighbors of the Californians there is one Indian people–the Navajos of Arizona and New Mexico–that calls for special attention, as its women, according to Horatio Hale, are not slaves but “queens.” The Navajos have lived for centuries in a rich and fertile country; their name is said to mean “large cornfields” and the Spaniards found, about the middle of the sixteenth century, that they practised irrigation. A more recent writer, E.A. Graves,[210] says that the Navajos “possess more wealth than all the wild tribes in New Mexico combined. They are rich in horses, mules, asses, goats, and sheep.” Bancroft cites evidence (I., 513) that the women were the owners of the sheep; that they were allowed to take their meals with the men, and admitted to their councils; and that they were relieved of the drudgery of menial work. Major E. Backus also noted (Schoolcraft, IV., 214) that Navajo women “are treated more kindly than the squaws of the northern tribes, and perform far less of laborious work than the Sioux or Chippewa women.” But when we examine the facts more closely we find that this comparative “emancipation” of the Navajo women was not a chivalrous concession on the part of the men, but proceeded simply from the lack of occasion for the exercise of their selfish propensities. No one would be so foolish as to say that even the most savage Indian would put his squaw into the treadmill merely for the fun of seeing her toil. He makes a drudge of her in order to save himself the trouble of working. Now the Navajos were rich enough to employ slaves; their labor, says Major Backus, was “mostly performed by the poor dependants, both male and female.” Hence there was no reason for making slaves of their wives. Backus gives another reason why these women were treated more kindly than other squaws. After marriage they became free, for sufficient cause, to leave their husbands, who were thus put on their good behavior. Before marriage, however, they had no free choice, but were the property of their fathers. “The consent of the father is absolute, and the one so purchased assents or is taken away by force.”[211]
A total disregard of these women’s feelings was also shown in the “very extensive prevalence of polygamy,” and in the custom that the wife last chosen was always mistress of her predecessors. (Bancroft, I., 512.) But the utter incapacity of Navajo men for sympathetic, gallant, chivalrous sentiment is most glaringly revealed by the barbarous treatment of their female captives, who, as before stated, were often shot or delivered up for indiscriminate violence. Where such a custom prevails as a national institution it would be useless to search for refined feeling toward any woman. Indeed, the Navajo women themselves rendered the growth of refined sexual feeling impossible by their conduct. They were notorious, even among Indians, for their immodesty and lewd conduct, and were consequently incapable of either feeling or inspiring any but the coarsest sensual passion. They were not queens, as the astonishing Hale would have it, but they certainly were queans.
Concerning other Indians of the Southwest–Yumas, Mojaves, Pueblos, etc.–M.A. Dorchester writes:[212]
“The native Indian is naturally polite, but until touched by civilization, it never occurred to him to be polite to his wife.” “If there is one drawback to Indian civilization more difficult to overcome than any other, it is to convince the Indian that he ought not to put the hardest work upon the Indian women.”
The ferocious Apaches make slaves of their women. (Bancroft, I., 512.) Among the Comanches “the women do all the menial work.” The husband has the pleasant excitement of killing the game, while the women do the hard work even here: “they butcher and transport the meat, dress the skins, etc.” “The females are abused and often beaten unmercifully.” (Schoolcraft, I., 236, V., 684.) The Moquis squaws were exempt from field labor not from chivalrous feelings but because the men feared amorous intrigues. (Waitz, IV., 209.) A Snake, Lewis and Clarke found (308),
“would consider himself degraded by being compelled to walk any distance; and were he so poor as to possess only two horses, he would ride the best of them, and leave the other for his wives and children and their baggage; and if he has too many wives or too much baggage for the horse, the wives have no alternative but to follow him on foot.”
Turning to the great Dakota or Sioux stock, we run against one of the most naive of the sentimentalists, Catlin, who perpetrated several books on the Indians and made many “fearless” assertions about the red men in general and the Mandans in particular. G.E. Ellis, in his book, _The Red Man and the While Man_ (101), justly observes of Catlin that “he writes more like a child than a well-balanced man,” and Mitchell (in Schoolcraft, III., 254) declares that much of what Catlin wrote regarding the Mandans existed “entirely in the fertile imagination of that gentleman,” Yet this does not prevent eminent anthropologists like Westermarck (359) from soberly quoting Catlin’s declaration that “it would be untrue and doing injustice to the Indians, to say that they were in the least behind us in conjugal, in filial, and in paternal affection” (_L.N.N.A.I._, I., 121). There is only one way of gauging a man’s affection, and that is by his actions. Now how, according to Catlin himself, does an Indian act toward his wife? Even among the Mandans, so superior to the other Indians he visited, he found that the women, however attractive or hungry they might be,
“are not allowed to sit in the same group with the men while at their meals. So far as I have yet travelled in the Indian country I have never seen an Indian woman eating with her husband. Men form the first group at the banquet, and _women and children and dogs_ all come together at the next.”
Men first, women and dogs next–yet they are “not in the least behind us in conjugal affection!” With his childish disregard of logic and lack of a sense of humor Catlin goes on to tell us that Mandan women lose their beauty soon because of their early marriages and “the slavish life they lead.” In many cases, he adds, the inclinations of the girl are not considered in marriage, _the father selling her to the highest bidder_.
Mandan conjugal affection, “just like ours,” is further manifested by the custom, previously referred to, which obliges mourning women to crop off all their hair, while of a man’s locks, which “are of much greater importance,” only one or two can be spared. (Catlin, _l.c._, I., 95, 119, 121; II., 123.) An amusing illustration of the Mandan’s supercilious contempt for women, also by Catlin, will be given later.[213]
The Sioux tribes in general have always been notorious for the brutal treatment of their women. Mrs. Eastman, who wrote a book on their customs, once received an offer of marriage from a chief who had a habit of expending all his surplus bad temper upon his wives. He had three of them, but was willing to give them all up if she would live with him. She refused, as she “did not fancy having her head split open every few days with a stick of wood.” G.P. Belden, who also knew the Sioux thoroughly, having lived among them twelve years, wrote (270, 303-5) that “the days of her childhood are the only happy or pleasant days the Indian girl ever knows.” “From the day of her marriage [in which she has no choice] until her death she leads a most wretched life.” The women are “the servants of servants.” “On a winter day the Sioux mother is often obliged to travel eight or ten miles and carry her lodge, camp-kettle, ax, child, and several small dogs on her back and head.” She has to build the camp, cook, take care of the children, and even of the pony on which her lazy and selfish husband has ridden while she tramped along with all those burdens. “So severe is their treatment of women, a happy female face is hardly ever seen in the Sioux nation.” Many become callous, and take a beating much as a horse or ox does. “Suicide is very common among Indian women, and, considering the treatment they receive, it is a wonder there is not more of it.”[214]
Burton attests (_C.S._, 125, 130, 60) that “the squaw is a mere slave, living a life of utter drudgery.” The husbands “care little for their wives.” “The drudgery of the tent and field renders the squaw cold and unimpassioned.” “The son is taught to make his mother toil for him.” “One can hardly expect a smiling countenance from the human biped trudging ten or twenty miles under a load fit for a mule.” “Dacotah females,” writes Neill (82, 85),
“deserve the sympathy of every tender heart. From early childhood they lead worse than a dog’s life. Uncultivated and treated like brutes, they are prone to suicide, and, when desperate, they act more like infuriated beasts than creatures of reason.”
Of the Crow branch of the Dakotas, Catlin wrote:[215] “They are, _like all other Indian women, the slaves of their husbands_ … and not allowed to join in their religious rites and ceremonies, nor in the dance or other amusements.” All of which is delightfully consistent with this writer’s assertion that the Indians are “not in the least behind us in conjugal affection.”[216]
In his _Travels Through the Northwest Regions of the United States_ Schoolcraft thus sums up (231) his observations:
“Of the state of female society among the Northern Indians I shall say little, because on a review of it I find very little to admire, either in their collective morality, or personal endowments…. Doomed to drudgery and hardships from infancy … without either mental resources or personal beauty–what can be said in favor of the Indian women?”
A French author, Eugene A. Vail, writes an interesting summary (207-14) of the realistic descriptions given by older writers of the brutal treatment to which the women of the Northern Indians were subjected. He refers, among other things, to the efforts made by Governor Cass, of Michigan, to induce the Indians to treat their women more humanely; but all persuasion was in vain, and the governor finally had to resort to punishment. He also refers to the selfish ingenuity with which the men succeeded in persuading the foolish squaws that it would be a disgrace for their lords and masters to do any work, and that polygamy was a desirable thing. The men took as many wives as they pleased, and if one of them remonstrated against a new rival, she received a sound thrashing.
In Franklin’s _Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea_ we are informed (160) that the women are obliged to drag the heavily laden sledges:
“Nothing can more shock the feelings of a person accustomed to civilized life than to witness the state of their degradation. When a party is on a march the women have to drag the tent, the meat, and whatever the hunter possesses, whilst he only carries his gun and medicine case.”
When the men have killed any large beast, says Hearne (90), the women are always sent to carry it to the tent. They have to prepare and cook it,
“and when it is done the wives and daughters of the greatest captains in the country are never served till all the males, even those who are in the capacity of servants, have eaten what they think proper.”
Of the Chippewas, Keating says (II., 153), that “frequently … their brutal conduct to their wives produces abortions.”
A friend of the Blackfoot Indians, G.B. Grinnell, relates (184, 216) that, while boys play and do as they please, a girl’s duties begin at an early age, and she soon does all a woman’s “and so menial” work. Their fathers select husbands for them and, if they disobey, have a right to beat or even kill them. “As a consequence of this severity, suicide was quite common among the Blackfoot girls.”
A passage in William Wood’s _New England Prospect_, published in 1634,[217] throws light on the aboriginal condition of Indian women in that region. Wood refers to “the customarie churlishnesse and salvage inhumanitie” of the men. The Indian women, he says, are
“more loving, pittiful and modest, milde, provident, and laborious than their lazie husbands…. Since the _English_ arrivall comparison hath made them miserable, for seeing the kind usage of the _English_ to their wives, they doe as much condemne their husbands for unkindnesse and commend the _English_ for love, as their husbands, commending themselves for their wit in keeping their wives industrious, doe condemn the _English_ for their folly in spoiling good working creatures.”
Concerning the intelligent, widely scattered, and numerous Iroquois, Morgan, who knew them more intimately than anyone else, wrote (322), that “the Indian regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man, and, from nature and habit, she actually considered herself to be so.” “Adultery was punished by whipping; but the punishment was inflicted on the woman alone, who was supposed to be the only offender” (331). “Female life among the Hurons had no bright side,” wrote Parkman (_J.C._, XXXIII.). After marriage,
“the Huron woman from a wanton became a drudge … in the words of Champlain, ‘their women were their mules.’ The natural result followed. In every Huron town were shrivelled hags, hideous and despised, who, in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men.”
The _Jesuit Relations_ contain many references to the merciless treatment of their women by the Canadian Indians. “These poor women are real pack-mules, enduring all hardships.” “In the winter, when they break camp, the women drag the heaviest loads over the snow; in short, the men seem to have as their share only hunting, war, and trading” (IV., 205). “The women here are mistresses and servants” (Hurons, XV.). In volume III. of the _Jesuit Relations_ (101), Biard writes under date of 1616:
“These poor creatures endure all the misfortunes and hardships of life; they prepare and erect the houses, or cabins, furnishing them with fire, wood, and water; prepare the food, preserve the meat and other provisions, that is, dry them in the smoke to preserve them; go to bring the game from the place where it has been killed; sew and repair the canoes, mend and stitch the skins, curry them and make clothes and shoes of them for the whole family; they go fishing and do the rowing; in short, undertake all the work except that alone of the grand chase, besides having the care and so weakening nourishment of the children….
“Now these women, although they have so much trouble, as I have said, yet are not cherished any more for it. The husbands beat them unmercifully, and often for a very slight cause. One day a certain Frenchman undertook to rebuke a savage for this; the savage answered, angrily: ‘How now, have you nothing to do but to see into my house, every time I strike my dog?'”
Surely Dr. Brinton erred grievously when he wrote, in his otherwise admirable book, _The American Race_ (49), that the fatigues of the Indian women were scarce greater than those of their husbands, nor their life more onerous than that of the peasant women of Europe to-day. Peasants in Europe work quite as hard as their wives, whereas the Indian–except during the delightful hunting period, or in war-time, which, though frequent, was after all merely episodic–did nothing at all, and considered labor a disgrace to a man, fit only for women. The difference between the European peasant and the American red man can be inferred by anyone from what observers reported of the Creek Indians of our Southern States (Schoolcraft, V., 272-77):
“The summer season, with the men, is devoted to war, or their domestic amusements of riding, horse-hunting, ball-plays, and dancing, and by the women to their customary hard labor.”
“The women perform all the labor, both in the house and field, and are, in fact, but slaves to the men, without any will of their own, except in the management of the children.”
“A stranger going into the country must feel distressed when he sees naked women bringing in huge burdens of wood on their shoulders, or, bent under the scorching sun, at hard labor in the field, while the indolent, robust young men are riding about, or stretched at ease on some scaffold, amusing themselves with a pipe or a whistle.”
The excesses to which bias and unintelligent philanthropy can lead a man are lamentably illustrated in the writings of the Moravian missionary, Heckewelder, regarding the Delaware Indians.[218] He argues that
“as women are not obliged to live with their husbands any longer than suits their pleasure or convenience, it cannot be supposed that they would submit to be loaded with unjust or unequal burdens” (!) “Were a man to take upon himself a part of his wife’s duty, in addition to his own [hunting (!), for the Delawares were then a peaceful tribe], he must necessarily sink under the load, and of course his family must suffer with him.”
The heartless sophistry of this reasoning–heartless because of its pitiless disregard of the burdens and sufferings of the poor women–is exposed in part by his own admissions regarding the selfish actions of the men. He does not deny that after the women have harvested their corn or maple sugar the men arrogate the right to dispose of it as they please. He relates that in case of a domestic quarrel the husband shoulders his gun and goes away a week or so. The neighbors naturally say that his wife is quarrelsome. All the odium consequently falls on her, and when he gets back she is only too willing to drudge for him more than ever. Heckewelder naively gives the Indian’s recipe for getting a useful wife:
“Indian, when he see industrious squaw, which he like, he go to _him_ [her], place his two forefingers close aside each other, make two look like one–see _him_ [her] smile–which is all _he_ [she] say, _yes!_ so he take _him_ [her] home. Squaw know too well what Indian do if _he_ [she] cross! Throw _him_ [her] away and take another! Squaw love to eat meat! no husband! no meat! Squaw do everything to please husband! he do same to please squaw [??]! live happy.”
When that Indian said “he do the same to please the squaw,” he must have chuckled at his own sarcasm. Heckewelder does, indeed, mention a few instances of kindness to a wife _(e.g._, going a great distance to get some berries which she, in a pregnant state, eagerly desired;) but these were obviously exceptional, as I have found nothing like them in other records of Indian life. It must be remembered that, as Roosevelt remarks (97) these Indians, under the influence of the Moravian missionaries, had been
“transformed in one generation from a restless, idle, blood-thirsty people of hunters arid fishers into an orderly, thrifty, industrious folk; believing with all their hearts the Christian religion.”
It was impossible, however, to drive out the devil entirely, as the facts cited show, and as we may infer from what, according to Loskiel, was true a century ago of the Delawares as well as the Iroquois: “Often it happens that an Indian deserts his wife because she has a child to suckle, and marries another whom he presently abandons for the same reason.” In this respect, however, the women are not much better than the men, for, as he adds, they often desert a husband who has no more presents to give them, and go with another who has. Truly Catlin was right when he said that the Indians (and these were the best of them) were “not in the least behind us in conjugal affection!”
Thus do even the apparent exceptions to Indian maltreatment of women–which exceptions are constantly cited as illustrations of the rule–melt away like mists when sunlight is brought to bear upon them. One more of these exceptions, of which sly sentimentalists have made improper use, must be referred to here. It is maintained, on the authority of Charlevoix, that the women of the Natchez Indians asserted their rights and privileges even above those of the men, for they were allowed to put unfaithful husbands to death while they themselves could have as many paramours as they pleased. Moreover, the husband had to stand in a respectful posture in the presence of his wife, was not allowed to eat with her, and had to salute her in the same way as the servants. This, truly, would be a remarkable sociological fact–if it were a fact. But upon referring to the pages of Charlevoix (264) we find that these statements, while perfectly true, do not refer to the Natchez women in general, but only to the princesses, or “female suns.” These were allowed to marry none but private men; but by way of compensation they had the right to discard their husbands whenever they pleased and take another. The other women had no more privileges than the squaws of other tribes; whenever a chief saw a girl he liked he simply informed the relatives of the fact and enrolled her among the number of his wives. Charlevoix adds that he knew of no nation in America where the women were more unchaste. The privileges conferred on the princesses thus appear like a coarse, topsy-turvy joke, while affording one more instance of the lowest degradation of woman.
Summing up the most ancient and trustworthy evidence regarding Mexico, Bandelier writes (627):
“The position of women was so inferior, they were regarded as so far beneath the male, that the most degrading epithet that could be applied to any Mexican, aside from calling him a dog, was that of woman.”
If a woman presumed to don a man’s dress her death alone could wipe out the dishonor.
SOUTH AMERICAN GALLANTRY
So much for the Indians of North America. The tribes of the southern half of the continent would furnish quite as long and harrowing a tale of masculine selfishness and brutality, but considerations of space compel us to content ourselves with a few striking samples.
In the northern regions of South America historians say that “when a tribe was preparing poison in time of war, its efficacy was tried upon the old women of the tribe.”[219]
“When we saw the Chaymas return in the evening from their gardens,” writes Humboldt (I., 309),
“the man carried nothing but the knife or hatchet (machete) with which he clears his way among the underwood; whilst the woman, bending under a great load of plantains, carried one child in her arms, and, sometimes, two other children placed upon the load.”
Schomburgk (II., 428) found that Caribbean women generally bore marks of the brutal treatment to which they were subjected by the men. Brett noted (27, 31) that among the Guiana tribes women had to do all the work in field and home as well as on the march, while the men made baskets, or lay indolently in hammocks until necessity compelled them to go hunting or fishing. The men had succeeded so thoroughly in creating a sentiment among the women that it was their duty to do all the work, that when Brett once induced an Indian to take a heavy bunch of plantains off his wife’s head and carry it himself, the wife (slave to the backbone) seemed hurt at what she deemed a degradation of her husband. One of the most advanced races of South America were the Abipones of Paraguay. While addicted to infanticide they, contrary to the rule, were more apt to spare the female children; but their reason for this was purely commercial. A son, they said, would be obliged to purchase a wife, whereas daughters may be sold to a bridegroom (Dobrizhoffer, II., 97). The same missionary relates (214) that boys are laughed at, praised and rewarded for throwing bones, horns, etc., at their mothers.
“If their wives displease them, it is sufficient; they are ordered to decamp…. Should the husband cast his eyes upon any handsome woman the old wife must move merely on this account, her fading form and advancing age being her only accusers, though she may be universally commended for conjugal fidelity, regularity of conduct, diligent obedience, and the children she has borne.”
In Chili, among the Mapuches (Araucanians) the females, says Smith (214), “do all the labor, from ploughing and cooking to the saddling and unsaddling of a horse; for the ‘lord and master’ does nothing but eat, sleep, and ride about.” Of the Peruvian Indians the Jesuit Pater W. Bayer (cited Reich, 444) wrote about the middle of the eighteenth century that wives are treated as slaves and are so accustomed to being regularly whipped that when the husband leaves them alone they fear he is paying attention to another woman and beg him to resume his beating. In Brazil, we are informed by Spix and Martins (I., 381),
“the women in general are slaves of the men, being compelled when on the march to carry everything needed, like beasts of burden; nay, they are even obliged to bring home from the forest the game killed by the men.”
Tschndi (_R.d.S.A._, 284, 274) saw the marks of violence on many of the Botocudo women, and he says the men reserved for themselves the beautiful plumes of birds, leaving to the women such ornaments as pig’s claws, berries, and monkey’s teeth. A peculiar refinement of selfishness is alluded to by Burton (_H.B._, II., 49):
“The Brazilian natives, to warm their naked bodies, even in the wigwam, and to defend themselves against wild beasts, used to make their women keep wood burning all night.”
Of the Patagonians Falkner says (125) that the women “are obliged to submit to every species of drudgery.” He gives a long list of their duties (including even hunting) and adds:
“No excuse of sickness, or being big with child, will relieve them from their appointed labor; and so rigidly are they obliged to perform their duty, that their husbands cannot help them on any occasion, or in the greatest distress, without incurring the highest ignominy.”
Even the wives of the chiefs were obliged to drudge unless they had slaves. At their marriages there is little ceremony, the bride being simply handed over to the man as his property. The Fuegians, according to Fitzroy, when reduced to a state of famine, became cannibals, eating their old women first, before they kill their dogs. A boy being asked why they did this, answered: “Doggie catch otters, old women no.” (Darwin, _V B._, 214.)
Thus, from the extreme north to the extreme south of the American continent we find the “noble red man” consistent in at least one thing–his maltreatment of women. How, in the face of these facts, which might be multiplied indefinitely, a specialist like Horatio Hale could write that there was among the Indians “complete equality of the sexes in social estimation and influence,” and that
“casual observers have been misled by the absence of those artificial expressions of courtesy which have descended to us from the time of chivalry, and which, however gracious and pleasing to witness, are, after all, merely signs of condescension and protection from the strong to the weak”[220]
–surpasses all understanding. It is a shameful perversion of the truth, as all the intelligent and unbiassed evidence of observers from the earliest time proves.
HOW INDIANS ADORE SQUAWS
Not content with maltreating their squaws, the Indians literally add insult to injury by the low estimation in which they hold them. A few sample illustrations must suffice to show how far that adoration which a modern lover feels for women and for his sweetheart in particular is beyond their mental horizon.
“The Indians,” says Hunter (250), “regarding themselves as the lords of the earth, look down upon the squaws as an inferior order of beings,” created to rear families and do all the drudgery; “and the squaws, accustomed to such usage, cheerfully acquiesce in it as a duty.” The squaw is not esteemed for her own sake, but “in proportion to the number of children she raises, particularly if they are males, and prove brave warriors.” Franklin says (287) that the Copper Indians “hold women in the same low estimation as the Chippewayans do, looking upon them as a kind of property which the stronger may take from the weaker.” He also speaks (157) “of the office of nurse, so degrading in the eyes of a Chippewayan, as partaking of the duties of a woman.” “The manner of the Indian boy toward his mother,” writes Willoughby (274), “is almost uniformly disrespectful;” while the adults consider it a disgrace to do a woman’s work–that is, practically any work at all; for hunting is not regarded as work, but is indulged in for the sport and excitement. In the preface to Mrs. Eastman’s book on the Dakotas we read:
“The peculiar sorrows of the Sioux woman commence at her birth. Even as a child she is despised, in comparison with her brother beside her, who is one day to be a great warrior.”
“Almost everything that a man owns is sacred,” says Neill (86), “but nothing that the woman possesses is so esteemed.” The most insulting epithets that can be bestowed on a Sioux are coward, dog, woman. Among the Creeks, “old woman” is the greatest term of reproach which can be used to those not distinguished by war names. You may call an Indian a liar without arousing his anger, but to call him a woman is to bring on a quarrel at once. (Schoolcraft, V., 280.) If the Natchez have a prisoner who winces under torture he is turned over to the women as being unworthy to die by the hands of men. (Charlevoix, 207.) In many cases boys are deliberately taught to despise their mothers as their inferiors. Blackfeet men mourn for the loss of a man by scarifying their legs; but if the deceased is only a woman, this is never done. (Grinnell, 194.) Among all the tribes the men look on manual work as a degradation, fit only for women. The Abipones think it beneath a man to take any part in female quarrels, and this too is a general trait. (Dobrizhoffer, II., 155.)[221] Mrs. Eastman relates (XVII.) that
“among the Dakotas the men think it undignified for them to steal, so they send their wives thus unlawfully to procure what they want–and woe be to them if they are found out.”
Horse-stealing alone is considered worthy of superior man. But the most eloquent testimony to the Indian’s utter contempt for woman is contributed in an unguarded moment by his most ardent champion. Catlin relates (_N.A.I._, I., 226) how he at one time undertook to paint the portraits of the chiefs and such of the warriors as the chiefs deemed worthy of such an honor. All was well until, after doing the men, he proposed also to paint the pictures of some of the squaws:
“I at once got myself into a serious perplexity, being heartily laughed at by the whole tribe, both by men and by women, for my exceeding and (to them) unaccountable condescension in seriously proposing to paint a woman, conferring on her the same honor that I had done the chiefs and braves. Those whom I had honored were laughed at by the hundreds of the jealous, who had been decided unworthy the distinction, and were now amusing themselves with the _very enviable honor_ which the _great white medicine man_ had conferred _especially_ on them, and was now to confer equally upon the _squaws!_”
CHOOSING A HUSBAND
It might be inferred _a priori_ that savages who despise and abuse their women as the Indians do would not allow girls to choose their own husbands except in cases where no selfish reason existed to force them to marry the choice of their parents. This inference is borne out by the facts. Westermarck, indeed, remarks (215) that “among the Indians of North America, numberless instances are given of woman’s liberty to choose her husband.” But of the dozen or so cases he cites, several rest on unreliable evidence, some have nothing to do with the question at issue,[222] and others prove exactly the contrary of what he asserts; while, _more suo_, he placidly ignores the mass of facts which disprove his assertion that “women are not, as a rule, married without having any voice of their own in the matter.” There are, no doubt, some tribes who allow their women more or less freedom. Apache courtship appears to be carried on in two ways, in each of which the girl has the power to refuse. In both cases the proposal is made by pantomime, without a word being spoken. According to Cremony (245). the lover stakes his horse in front of the girl’s “roost.” Should she favor his suit, she takes his horse, gives it food and water, and secures it in front of his lodge. Four days comprise the term allowed for an answer. Dr. J.W. Hoffman relates[223] that a Coyotero Apache, having selected the girl he wants, watches to find out the trail she is apt to frequent when she goes to pick berries or grass seed. Having discovered it, he places a row of stones on both sides of it for a distance of ten or fifteen paces:
“He then allows himself to be seen by the maiden before she leaves camp, and running ahead, hides himself in the immediate vicinity of the row of stones. If she avoids them by passing to the outside, it is a refusal, but should she continue on her trail, and pass between the two rows, he immediately rushes out, catches her and … carries her triumphantly to camp.”
Lewis and Clarke relate (441) that among the Chinooks the women “have a rank and influence very rarely found among Indians.” They are allowed to speak freely before the men, their advice is asked, and the men do not make drudges of them. The reason for this may be found in a sentence from Ross’s book on Oregon (90): “Slaves do all the laborious work.” Among such Indians one might expect that girls would have their inclinations consulted when it came to choosing a husband. In the twelfth chapter of his _Wa-Kee-Nah_, James C. Strong gives a graphic description of a bridal chase which he once witnessed among the Mountain Chinooks. A chief had an attractive daughter who was desired by four braves. The parents, having no special choice in the matter, decided that there should be a race on horseback, the girl being the winner’s prize. But if the parents had no preference, the girl had; she indulged in various ingenious manoeuvres to make it possible for the Indian on the bay horse to overtake her first. He succeeded, put his arm round her waist, lifted her from her horse to his own, and married her the next day.
Here the girl had her way, and yet it was only by accident, for while she had a preference, she had no liberty of choice. It was the parents who ordered the bridal race, and, had another won it, she would have been his. It is indeed difficult to find real instances of liberty of choice where the daughter’s desire conflicted with the wishes of the parents or other relatives. Westermarck claims that the Creeks endeavored to gain the girl’s consent, but no such fact can be gathered from the passage he refers to (Schoolcraft, V., 269). Moreover, among the Creeks, unrestrained license prevailed before marriage, and marriage was considered only as a temporary convenience, not binding on the party more than a year; and finally, Creeks who wanted to marry had to gain the consent of the young woman’s uncles, aunts, and brothers. Westermarck also says that among the Thlinkets the suitor had to consult the wishes of the “young lady;” yet on page 511 he tells us that among these Indians, “when a husband dies, his sister’s son _must_ marry the widow.” It does not seem likely that where even widows are treated so unceremoniously, any deference is