"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):