CHAPTER XVI
THE INDIAN AND HER BABY
I have elsewhere spoken of the Indian woman’s reception of her child. It is welcomed with joy, and yet in its first hour’s treatment most white women would think its life would terminate. After seeing that it breathes properly—that is, through the nose—the mother carries her little one to the nearest creek or water-hole and gives it a good bath. Cold water has no terrors for her, and she does not fear its use for the child. With this cold bath the child may be said to enter its earthly existence. Henceforth life is to be a succession of hardening processes. Indian babies get no foolish and weakening coddling. They are loved dearly and petted often, but are made to lie down on flat boards or basket cradles, with arms and legs strapped down, and are thus early accustomed to physical restraint. They sleep out of doors from the day of their birth, and become accustomed to all kinds of weather. For an Indian child who has taken cold we shall look in vain. The name, the thought of such an ill is unknown.
If the parents have to move from canyon up to plateau, or go off to far away forests for the winter’s supply of pinion nuts, the child is put into its carrying basket, swung on the back of the mother, dependent from her forehead, and carried either on horseback or on foot to the new stopping place. Simplicity and naturalness accompany every stage of the little one’s life until the age of puberty, when the child-life is supposed to end, and the man or woman life begins.
A HEALTHY AND HAPPY INDIAN BABY.
Now, while of very necessity our method of treating white children must be different from this, we can learn many lessons from the Indian that will materially benefit our race. The key-stone of the whole idea is found in the words: “No coddling.” Not long ago I went to the home of an artist friend. His wife had just presented him with a fine, healthy son. The wife’s mother was present, and had taken charge of the young mother and her baby. The room was stifling hot, so that I could scarcely breathe, and when I went to see the baby it was wrapped up in a cradle with a sheet and three blankets over its head. At once I opened the doors and windows, taking good precaution to see that the mother did not take cold. I gave both grandmother and new mother a lecture upon the monstrous folly and cruelty of thus depriving the new-born child of needed air for its expanding lungs. The lesson was accepted in the proper spirit, for the father fully agreed with me, and on the grandmother’s departure, a few days later, the coddling, smothering process ceased, and a cold bath, sleeping out of doors, and a generally healthy treatment of the child substituted. I know this is an exaggerated case, but it serves as an illustration of the wrongful and excessive “coddling” we give our children, from which follow such evils as weak lungs, weak throats, readiness to take cold, etc.
As the exaggerated opposite of this, let me relate the treatment I accorded to my own children.
When my first son was born, we were so located that I was compelled to be both physician and nurse. His first experience—after a good hot bath—was a cold bath, and within half an hour of his birth he was sleeping out of doors. At five weeks of age he and his mother accompanied me on an eight-hundred-mile drive over the plains and deserts of Nevada. We camped out, slept on the ground, and gave him, whenever possible, an open air bath in the cold mountain brooks that occasionally were met with.
A year or so after the second boy was born I was stationed in the little town of Cedarville, Cal., and one of the happiest remembrances of my life there was in winter when the snow was deep upon the ground. I would place a canvas upon the floor of my small study, where a good fire blazed in the stove, fetch in a couple of washtubs full of snow, then undress the youngsters, and watch them as they sat in the snow, rubbed it on their naked bodies and laughed and shouted and crowed with delight when I gently snowballed them.
While they were little tots, every morning before being dressed they stood outside while I threw—not poured, but threw,—a bucketful of cold water over them. Then, after a vigorous and hearty rub down, they went with me for a walk where they were allowed to run and jump and romp to their heart’s content.