[247] It is of the Modocs of this region that Joaquin Miller wrote that "Indians have their loves, and as they have but little else, these fill up most of their lives." The above poems indicate the quality of this Indian love. In Joaquin Miller's narrative of his experience with the Modocs, the account of his own marriage is of special interest. At a Modoc marriage a feast is given by the girl's father, "to which all are invited, but the bride and bridegroom do not partake of food. … Late in the fall, the old chief made the marriage feast, and at that feast neither I nor his daughter took meat, or any part." It is a pity that the rest of this writer's story is, by his own confession, part romance, part reality. A lifelike description of his Modoc experience would have done more to ensure immortality for his book than any amount of romancing.
[248] Journal of Amer. Folklore, 1888, 220-26.
[249] Internat. Archiv. fur Ethnogr., Supplement zu Bd. IX. 1896, pp. 1-6.
[250] These lines by their fervid eroticism quite suggest the existence of a masculine Indian Sappho. See the comments on Sappho in the chapter on Greek love.
[251] Such a procedure does well enough if the object is to amuse idle readers; and when a writer confesses, as Cornelius Mathews did in the Indian Fairy Book, that he bestowed on the stories "such changes as similar legends most in vogue in other countries have received to adapt them to the comprehension and sympathy of general readers," no harm is done. But for scientific purposes it is necessary to sift down all alleged Indian stories and poems to the solid bed-rock of facts. It is significant that in the stories collected by men of science and recorded literally in anthropological journals all romantic and sentimental features are conspicuously absent, being often replaced by the Indian's abounding obscenity. Rand's Legends of the Micmacs and Grinnell's Blackfoot Lodge Tales are on the whole free from the errors of Schoolcraft and his followers. It ought to be obvious to every collector of aboriginal folk-lore that Indian tales, like the Indians themselves, are infinitely more interesting in war paint and buffalo robes than in "boiled shirts" and "store-clothes."
[252] U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Rocky Mt. Region, IX., 90.
[253] Related in G. White's Historical Collection of Georgia, 571.
[254] See Brinton's The American Race, 59-67, for an excellent summary of our present knowledge of the Eskimos (on the favorable side).
[255] Journal Ethnol. Soc., I., 299.
[256] Cranz, I., 155, 134; Hall, II., 87, I., 187; Hearne, 161.