[217] Cited by Schoolcraft, Oneota, 57.
[218] Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia, 1819.
[219] Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 1884, p. 251.
[220] Brinton's Library of Aborig. Amer. Lit., II, 65.
[221] The only way the women could secure any consideration was by overawing the men. Thus Southey says (III., 411) regarding the Abipones that the old women "were obdurate in retaining superstitions that rendered them objects of fear, and therefore of respect." Smith in his book on the Araucanians of Chili, notes (238), that besides the usual medicine men there was an occasional woman "who had acquired the most unbounded influence by shrewdness, joined to a hideous personal appearance and a certain mystery with which she was invested."
[222] As when he says, "The Atkha Aleuts occasionally betrothed their children to each other, but the marriage was held to be binding only after the birth of a child." What evidence of choice is there here?
[223] U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Colorado, etc., 1876, p. 465.
[224] Miss Alice Fletcher gives in the Journal of the American Folk Lore Society (1889, 219-26) an amusing instance of how far a present-day Omaha girl may go in resenting a man's unwelcome advances. A faint-hearted lover had sent a friend as go-between to ask for the girl's favor. As he finished his speech the girl looked at him with flashing eyes and said: "I'll have nothing to do with your friend or you either." The young man hesitated a moment, as if about to repeat his request, when a dangerous wave of her water-bucket made him leap to one side to escape a deluge.
[225] Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1891, p. 545.
[226] How California marriages were made in the good old times we may see from the account in Hakluyt's Collection of Early Voyages, 1810, III., 513: