"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 naïve 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."