We are now prepared to take a view of the status of woman among the tribes of primitive America. It is the general belief that she was a mere chattel, having no rights whatever, existing merely upon the sufferance of her husband, and in all ways a slave, a creature without rights or privileges. Such a picture is far from the truth, even though it contain many aspects of partial truth. As a matter of fact, the matriarchal system prevailed in the majority of the American tribes; and this alone is sufficient to show that woman had some rights. These were not precisely personal, but rather gentile; yet they acted in many ways as personal. For example, where the matriarchal system was in force, all property rights, as between husband and wife, vested in the latter; she alone could dispose of property,--and that at her discretion--, and it was to her relatives and not to his that the property passed on the death of the pair. Moreover, in the tribes wherein prevailed the theory of maternal descent, the children did not look upon the father as a relative; he was not of their gens, and they owed him no duties whatever. So far was this theory carried in many cases that the children would not provide for their fathers when these became disabled by sickness, accident, or age, but sent their unfortunate sires for assistance to the gentes from which they came. Again, the life of a woman was in many cases rated as of higher value than that of a man. We have Father Ragueneau's authority for the statement that among the Hurons thirty gifts was considered sufficient compensation for the death of a man, but the blood-money exacted for the killing of a woman was forty gifts. Such a condition of affairs as that mentioned by the old Jesuit is strong argument for the theory that woman was held by the primitive Americans in higher esteem than has been generally thought, while her control of the property must have won for her--judging from modern civilized instances--at least some consideration from her husband.
Undoubtedly there was an obverse side to the picture. Marriage by purchase was a feature of American primitive existence; and, though this also has its modern counterpart, the methods pursued among the Amerinds were not so pleasing to the vanity of the bride as are those of our own day and civilization. The woman herself rarely had anything to say in the matter; sometimes the selection of a wife for a warrior was undertaken by the whole gens, or at least a committee thereof. Among the Hurons, for instance, this selection was made by the old women, and we are told by J. W. Sanborn that these old ladies, in their search for fitting brides for the young men of the tribe, "united them with painful uniformity to women several years their senior." This may have been wiser in tribal polity than agreeable to the warriors; as for the prospective brides, their preferences were not taken into account at all. In view of these facts, it is no wonder that every lake in our country can boast its "Lovers' Leap," where the young Indian pair, fleeing from their cruel parents, cast themselves headlong down--to be afterward "enshrined in song and story."
"Song and story" have indeed lent their potent aid to confuse and blur our view of the primitive American woman. Longfellow's story of Hiawatha is famous for many reasons, but the chief among them is not its fidelity to truth of conditions. Yet so truly has the name of Minnehaha, "The Laughing Water," become even as a household word to many of our readers of poetry that this sketch would seem incomplete were no reference made to it here. All know the poetic story: how the demi-god Hiawatha, miraculous of birth, tutelary genius of the Indians of North America, wise, benign, powerful, teacher of all good, protector against all ills, marries the lovely Minnehaha, the daughter of the old Dakota arrow-maker. Here would seem to be a union blessed of the gods; yet it is foredoomed to bring but sorrow. Not even the power of Hiawatha can save his beloved Minnehaha from the impending and foretold fate which is to be hers. At last "Famine" and "Fever," two unbidden and unwelcome guests, force entrance into her wigwam; she cannot withstand the baleful glare of Death, and, uttering the cry of "Hiawatha! Hiawatha!" she passes alone into "the Kingdom of Ponemah, the land of the Hereafter." It is all very beautiful in its fancy and imagination, but nowhere in the poem do we find the American primitive woman as we have learned to see her through the calmer eyes of those who have sought her story in lower strata than those of poesy.
Polygamy generally prevailed among the Amerinds, and modern civilization is accustomed to regard this as an evil from the standpoint of the woman. It may, however, be questioned whether in this instance, as in so many others, our pity has not been misplaced. The work of the fields was universally performed by women, their lords and masters confining their contribution to the household work to furnishing the table with fish and game. Had monogamy prevailed, the lot of the wife would necessarily have been hard; the work which she would have found to her hand would have been more than she could accomplish, and she must have sunk under it. But the custom of polygamy obviated such necessity, for it brought into the household other servants who should perform the requisite tasks. It is at least probable, though it is not an established fact, that each household had a chief wife, to whom the rest were subservient; in fact, there is reason to believe that the constitution of the Indian household was not unlike that of the Israelites, wherein the added "wives" were little else than concubines, having a legal status but not full rights of wifeship. Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that polygamy, apart from its moral aspect, was an institution for which the Indian wife had cause to be profoundly grateful. It ameliorated her lot in such wise that she was really subject to no more hardships than is the European peasant woman of the present day.
On the other hand, it would seem that at least in some instances the husband had absolute rights of life and death over his wife. In the not very edifying--and probably even less authentic--autobiography of James Beckwourth, the white man who was long chief of the Crow tribe, there is related an incident where, his Blackfoot wife having shown disregard to his commands, he coolly took up his war club and struck her on the head, stunning her, and, as was thought at the time, killing her. The blow turned out not to be fatal; but this does not obscure the point of the incident, which lies in the fact that the father of the woman, who was present, told Beckwourth that he had done perfectly right and acted entirely as befitted a great warrior. Beckwourth rather plumed himself upon his conduct,--though it is difficult to see wherein the incident called for the display of any very heroic qualities,--and in his narration almost apologizes for the fact that he did not strike quite so hard a blow as he had intended; but, while the story has its amusing features, our concern in the matter lies in the fact that such conduct seems to have been entirely conventional. This incident occurred in the beginning of the last century; but it is evident that it must have been a survival of custom, and not a novelty introduced by a fresh civilization.
Yet we hear at times of women taking part in the most important councils of their nations, of their even leading warriors to battle, of their exercise of all the functions of a ruler. Women have been made head chiefs; a very notable instance of a woman ruler was the "Queen of Pamunkey," who was the widow of Totapotamoi, a great Indian chief in the Virginias. She came to one of the councils of the Virginia Burgesses in the time of Berkeley, and was the recipient of much attention. She was described as a woman of majestic presence, who entered the council chamber "with a comportment graceful to admiration, grave court-like gestures, and a majestic air on her face"; and through the quaint old verbiage we can descry a woman of carriage and powers of intellect remarkable in her race. Her dress was picturesque; she wore a sort of crown of black and white wampum plaited together, and her fine figure was covered by a robe of buckskin, dressed with the hair outward and decorated with fringes--not impossibly scalplocks--from the shoulders to the hem. She had been summoned to the council to give a promise of help; but she had her own grievances to relate in the fact that her husband had been slain while fighting for the English, and yet she had never received any compensation or acknowledgment of his services. The incident holds for us its chief interest as a proof of the high standing of individual women among the tribes of the Atlantic slope. This female rule was not a passing custom; it was evidently of long establishment at the time of the coming of the colonists, and it continued into later colonial and even into Revolutionary times. Of the later instances of women chiefs, Queen Esther furnishes a noted example. This abominable woman, who played such a prominent part in the massacre of Wyoming in 1778, was a half-breed, probably the daughter of Catherine Montour, also a half-breed and a fiend incarnate. In the attack upon Wyoming Valley, led by Major John Butler, son of that Walter Butler whose name was so execrated by the colonists,--the Senecas took part, led by a noted chief named Gi-on-gwah-tuh and by Queen Esther, who was probably, though this is not certain, in supreme command of the Indians. However this may be, we know that she led the attack, fighting like a fiend, and that after the action sixteen prisoners were placed in a circle around a large stone, known to this day as Queen Esther's Rock. Striking up a chant, she passed around the circle, at each step dashing out the brains of a victim. Two of the prisoners, however, managed to make a dash for liberty and succeeded in effecting their escape, and it is to them that we owe our account of the massacre.
As is so often the case in matters of colonial record, there is a confusion between Queen Esther and her mother, and most writers allege that the "queen" was herself the Catherine Montour whom others claim to have been the mother of the chieftainess. The latter theory is probably correct. When in 1744 Catherine Montour, who, in her youth, had been captured and adopted by the Senecas, appeared at a council of the Indian commissioners and delegates from the Six Nations, the council being held at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we are told by Stone, in his life of Sir William Johnson, that "Although so young when made a prisoner, she had nevertheless preserved her language; and being in youth and middle age very handsome and of good address, she had been greatly caressed by the gentlewomen of Philadelphia during her occasional visits to that city with her people on business. Indeed, she was always held in great esteem by the white people, invited to their houses, and entertained with marked civility."
It would seem, then, that in 1744 Catherine Montour had already passed middle age, and indeed we know from the account of Lord Cornbury that she was born some time before the close of the seventeenth century. It would therefore seem most probable that Queen Esther was the daughter of the Catherine Montour who was a Huron by birth and a Seneca by adoption; but this matters little in the search for the deductions to be made from the story of Queen Esther and the unfortunate Wyoming Valley. Accepting as accurate only that part of her history which deals with the massacre, we know that Esther was a war chief of the Senecas and that she had absolute control over them. We also find that the Catherine Montour of Stone's account, whether or not she was identical with Queen Esther, was of such influence with her tribe that she was selected by them as a delegate to an important convention. This, then, furnishes us with a specific instance of the power of women among the Indians.
An incident in this same massacre of Wyoming is illustrative of a somewhat curious fact with regard to Indian life, the adaptability of their captives to the life of the woods. There was captured by the Indians a little girl named Frances Slocum, about five years old. For long all trace of her was lost; but in 1835, more than fifty years after the massacre, an old woman known as Maconaqua, living in a Miami village in Indiana, was by accident identified as the lost Frances Slocum. To all appearance she was an Indian; and she was really so in costume, habits, and even in manner of thought. When the events of her childhood were recalled to her memory, she herself was able to give evidence which rendered her identification unquestionably complete. But when pressed to return to civilization and her relatives, she absolutely declined. "I cannot go," she said; "I have always lived with the Indians; I am used to them; I wish to live and die with them. My husband and my boys are buried here, and I cannot leave them. I have a house and land, two daughters, a son-in-law, and grandchildren. I was a sapling when they took me. It is all gone past. I should not be happy with my white relatives. I am glad to see them; but I cannot go."
So she was left with her red brothers by adoption; but when, some ten years later, the Miami Indians were moved West; a bill was introduced into Congress by a Mr. Bidlack, securing to Maconaqua and her heirs a tract of land a mile square, embracing the home in which she had so long lived. But she pined after her red kindred, and in 1847 died from sheer weariness of the new conditions of her existence, and was buried near the confluence of the Wabash and the Missisinewa Rivers.