At last, upon some favorable night, the Indian youth visits the door of her lodge; she comes out and sits down on the ground beside him; still no word is spoken. At last she arises from the ground; he also rises, and standing before her, throws his blanket over both of them. No sooner has he done so than she doffs her blanket, letting it fall upon the ground, which is the admission on her part that she loves him, and does him obeisance as her future lord and master.
Every Indian camp at night is full of such lovers, with wooings as sweet, lips as willing, embraces as fond, lives as romantic, hearts as true, and elopements as daring and desperate as ever graced a Spanish court. The old people come together with their friends and hold a council. "How many ponies can he pay for her?" has a good deal to do with the eligibility of the suitor. That night he brings his articles of dowry to the door of his fiancee. If they are still there next morning, he is rejected; if not, accepted.
No formal marriage ceremony is gone through as a rule. The heart is the certificate and the Great Spirit the priest. Under the tribal government of the Indians, the rights of women were respected and clearly defined. She was the head of the house, and all property, save an insignificant amount, descended at death to her. She was in many tribes personified as the principal object of worship, prayer and adoration, in the tutelary goddess of the tribe. Now all is changed. The Indian of to-day is not the Indian of fifty years ago, and cannot be studied in the same light. His manners, customs and habits are all changed, and polygamy, more and more, creeps in with all its appalling degradations.
On special occasions an entire tribe is gathered under an open space in the cottonwoods to celebrate their principal dances. Hands are wildly waved above the heads of the dancers around a central fire of logs, piled in a conical heap. Around this blazing pile runs the dark circle which was built at sunset, inclosing sacred ground, which must not be trespassed on. The old chanter stands at the gate of the corral and sings. The men built the dark circle in less than an hour. When done, the corral measures forty paces in diameter. Around it stands a fence eight feet high, with a gate in the east ten feet wide.
At night-fall many of the Navajo people move, temporarily, all their goods and property into the corral, and abandon their huts or hogans. Those who do not move in are watchers to protect their property, for there are thieves among the Navajos. At 8 o'clock a band of musicians enters, and, sitting down, begins a series of cacophonous sounds on a drum. As soon as the music begins, the great wood pile is lighted. The conflagration spreads rapidly and lights the whole landscape and the sky. A storm of red, whirling sparks fly upward, like bright golden bees from out a hive, to a height of a hundred feet. The descending ashes fall in the corral like a light shower of snow. The heat soon grows so intense that in the remotest parts of the enclosure it is necessary for a person to screen his face when he looks towards the fire.
Suddenly a warning whistle is heard in the outer darkness, and a dozen forms, lithe and lean, dressed only with the narrow white breech-clout and mocassins, and daubed with white earth until they seem a group of living marbles, come bounding through the entrance, yelping like wolves, and slowly moving round the fire. As they advance, in single file, they throw their bodies into diverse attitudes, some graceful, some strained, some difficult, some menacing, and all grotesque. Now they face the east, now the west, now the south, now the north, bearing aloft their slender wands, tipped with eagle down, holding and waving them with surprising effects. Their course around the fire is to the left, east, west, south, north, a course invariably taken by all the dancers of the night.
When they have circled the fire twice, they begin to thrust their wands toward it. Their object is to try to burn off the tip of eagle down. They dash up to the fire, crawl up to it on their faces, run up holding their heads sidewise, dart up backward and approach it in all sorts of attitudes. Suddenly, one approaching the flaming pile throws himself on his back, with his head to the fire, and swiftly thrusts his wand into the flames. Many are the unsuccessful attempts, but at length, one by one, they all succeed in burning the downy balls from the end of their wands. As each accomplishes his feat, it becomes necessary, as the next duty, to restore the ball of down, which is done by refitting the ring held in the hand with down upon it, and putting it on the head of the aromatic sumac wand.
The dance customs and ideas differ with the tribes and localities. Sometimes the dance is little more than an exhibition of powers of endurance. Men or women, or both, go through fatiguing motions for hours and even days in succession, astounding spectators by their disregard of the traditions of their race, so far as idleness is concerned. Other dances are grotesque and brutal. On special occasions weird ceremonies are indulged in, and the proceedings are sensational in the extreme.
Of the ghost dance and its serious import, readers of the daily papers are familiar. Of the war dances of the different tribes a great deal has also been written, and altogether the dance lore of the American Indian is replete with singular incongruities and picturesque anomalies. Dancing with the Indian is often a religious exercise. It involves hardship at times, and occasionally the participants even mutilate themselves in their enthusiasm. Some of the tribes of the Southwest dance, as we shall see later, with venomous snakes in their hands, allowing themselves to be bitten, and relying on the power of the priests to save them from evil consequences.
The Indians gamble as if by instinct. On one occasion the writer was visiting a frontier town just after its settlement. Indians were present in very large numbers, and in a variety of ways they got hold of a good deal of money. The newcomers from the Eastern States were absolutely unprepared for the necessary privations of frontier life. Hence they were willing to purchase necessary articles at almost any price, while they were easily deluded into buying all sorts of articles for which they had no possible need. The Indians, who are supposed to be civilized, took full advantage of the situation, and brought into town everything that was of a salable character, frequently obtaining three or four times the local cash value.