Women of America / Woman: In all ages and in all countries Vol. 10 (of 10)

by John Ruse Larus

While before the coming of the whites there was doubtless frequent warfare among the red men, and while the men were preeminently warriors, yet warfare was not their normal state. Tribal feuds there were in plenty, and these ever and again broke out into strife; but, as a rule, the tribes lived in general amity, and not infrequently, as in the case of the Iroquois, or Five Nations, there were treaties of alliance and support. With the evolution and progress of the new conditions, however, the Indian found himself an Ishmael indeed. Not only were tribal jealousies and feuds augmented, but the red men became again and again involved in the wars of the whites, so that strife became their constant condition of existence. Battling for very life,--and, in their bewilderment and lack of racial organization, often turning their weapons against each other instead of the common foe,--the Indians were soon reduced to the condition of mere wandering and militant tribes, their culture forgotten and indeed inapplicable to the changed conditions. In this state of affairs all that was not strictly military became worthless; and so woman, save as leader or Amazon, lost her rightful position in Indian society. She now became, indeed, a mere chattel, a slave, even a detriment, however necessarily tolerated. She was useful in producing warriors and in ministering to their physical needs; but there her functions ceased. Though in rare instances, as in the case of Catherine Montour, a woman might be heard at the council fire, this was regarded as a survival of a custom decidedly "more honored in the breach than the observance"; from a state of at least partial equality with the men, she was soon, by the altered circumstances of her race, reduced to a condition of abject slavery and degradation.

The changed conditions were powerful over the nature as well as the status of the Indian woman. The colonists always insisted most strenuously upon the natural cruelty of the Indians; but we must remember that this was not a quality confined to barbarism, since even in the days of the first colonists the Inquisition was an established institution, while the tortures practised in England during the reign of "Good Queen Bess" might have seemed to the most enthusiastic Indian warrior too cruel to be used by him on his worst enemy. There can, however, be no question that the Indians, like so many other primitive peoples, delighted in torture of their foes--though they did not emulate their white fellows by torturing a man because he happened to differ from them in a matter of theory. Now it has been seen in the case of Pocahontas that it was a custom of the women to interfere to save the lives of prisoners; and the existence of such a well-defined custom argues a certain tender-heartedness among the women. Under the new conditions of constant strife, however, this "quality of mercy" became a thing of the past. It is the nature of woman to be enthusiastic in evil as in good; and it soon came about that it was the women of the Indians who were the most bloodthirsty and cruel of their race. It was they who heaped the foulest insults upon a captive enemy, who most delighted in the most terrible torture of that foe, who were best pleased if his agony extorted from him the tribute of a groan.

This indulgence in the most depraved instincts of the animal nature of course reacted. The women of the Amerinds lost all the distinctively feminine characteristics that they had ever possessed, and with them even their slight influence upon the men of their race. These saw in their women the evidences of a lower nature than their own, instead of one higher, and so they calmly and justly relegated those who were developing toward animalism to the level of an animal. The rule was not invariable; but it was general. There still remained a few "mothers in Israel," women who by force of character maintained some influence in their tribes; but, as a rule, the squaw was a mere beast of burden, a mere "breeder of sinners." The facility in adaptation to conditions which has always been one of woman's prominent traits had proved fatal to the status and nature of the Amerind woman.

There were some notable exceptions. In the long Seminole war the Indians were led by a remarkable man named Osceola. He was a half-breed, the son of an Indian woman by a white named Powell; but Osceola, though reared amid the environment of Caucasian civilization, never acknowledged any relationship to the whites. The Seminoles preserved the gentile system, in which the child followed the fortunes of its mother, and Osceola acknowledged none but Indian racial laws. Of his mother but little is known; but it is certain that she was a woman of stern and decided character, that she accepted the benefits of white civilization without admitting any gratitude therefor, and that she instilled into her great son the principles which had come down to her from her ancestors. She possessed great influence with her race, as much for her powers of intellect as for her education--for she was excellently taught--and culture; and it is probable that her influence was paramount in the selection of her son as one of the chiefs of his nation. After his rise to fame, we hear no more of her; but that she was a power in her day and way cannot be doubted.

This was at a comparatively late date, and the instance is the last that we find of an Indian woman exerting decided influence within her tribe. Long before the dawn of the last century, the aboriginal woman had lost all little power that had once been hers. That this loss was largely due to her own failure to advance, and her consequent retrogression, we have already seen, but circumstances were also largely responsible for the lapse of feminine prestige.

It may be that one of the causes for the lost influence of women among the Indian tribes was the lowering of the standard of morality. This is a matter upon which it is difficult to pronounce, since morality, always comparative in its standards and to be judged only by the racial creeds which govern it in local applications, was peculiarly variant among the Indian tribes of North America. Judged by the rules of modern civilization, it might be broadly stated that morality was always at a very low ebb among the Amerinds; but such a statement would be entirely unwarranted by the true laws of morality. Polygamy, for example, is by modern white races held to be immoral; but it was a very common custom among the Amerinds, and that which is sanctioned by custom is assuredly not immoral, though it may be counted un-moral. Again, as already noted, there were tribes among which the exchange of wives, temporarily or permanently, was held to be entirely legitimate; and, while such a custom is very far from being in accord with Caucasian standards, it is the custom only, and not the practisers thereof, which is to be blamed by the just moralist. On the other hand, it may be set down as a rule of Indian social life that adultery was severely punished. Even here the point of view was not invariable, some tribes holding the man the more guilty, while others visited punishment chiefly or entirely upon the woman; but the sentiment concerning the crime in the abstract was almost universal. It is very probable--though no authority can be found for the statement--that it was among those tribes where the descent was in the male line that the woman was held chiefly criminal in adultery, since thus the purity of descent was contaminated and diverted, while among those nations where descent was in the female line, the woman was held less guilty than he who shared her crime. However this may be, and there is too much confusion of statement, as well as too many diverse laws, for us safely to generalize in the matter, certain it is that adultery was in general looked upon as a heinous crime, usually to be visited with death as its penalty. Yet, with all this strictness regarding the sanctity of the marriage tie, where not abrogated by consent, there was among many of the tribes of the West a singular lack of respect for female purity in general. In more than one tribe, the unmarried women were practically held in common by the unmarried men, though immediately upon marriage the former became strangers to all but their husbands. Here are contradictions in theory as well as practice, but such contradictions are invariably to be found among primitive peoples, nor can the highest civilization yet known boast entire freedom from them.

While upon the subject of morality, it may be well to glance at the aboriginal customs concerning divorce. As always, any inclusive statement must be prefaced by the warning that generalization is impossible of application to all the nations of North America; only a few very broad rules can be laid down, and these are tried by many exceptions. It may be stated as one of these rules that divorce was general among the Amerinds. As is usually the case where polygamy prevails, divorce was almost invariably at the discretion of the husband; but this rule knew some remarkable exceptions, as among the Pueblo Indians, where, because of the status of the husband as the perpetual guest of his wife, divorce was chiefly in the discretion of the women. It is, however, safe to lay down the general rule that divorce was at the discretion of the husband and rarely needed more than the expression of his wish to become effective and legal. This facility of divorce, of course, made for immorality as at present understood, since it created of marriage little more than a state of concubinage, where the concubine could be cast off at will and made over to another master, so that the marriage relation lacked the continuity which is its most essential feature; but, as a matter of fact, the practice of divorce was uncommon among most of the Amerind tribes. Whether this was because of public sentiment overriding the customary law, as is so often the case among people where law is entirely of custom and not of legislation, or whether the very lack of romantic affection in most marriages among the Indians acted as a safeguard against satiety and disgust, or whether there were other effective but unconjecturable reasons, cannot be known; but the fact remains that divorce, though easy of accomplishment, was of rare practice among the American Indians as a race.

Thus, even though it be contrary to the general judgment, it appears that we should be justified in pronouncing the morality of the Indian race, judged by their standards and not by those of our civilization, to have been of at least average excellence. With the coming of the white men, however, this state of affairs altered rapidly for the worse. Stern moralists as the Puritans may have been in theory, they were not always so in practice; and Antinomianism, at one time so prevalent among them, may have had much for which to answer. If the cold Puritans were not guiltless in this wise, what could be expected from the Cavaliers or the warm-blooded sons of France? The theory of King James and his councillors, that marriages with Indian maidens would be desirable, was put into at least semi-practice in many of the colonies, and the relations thus established were not continued strictly "under the rose." The consequence of this immorality on the part of the Caucasians, who were held at first by the Indians as a superior race in all ways, reacted upon the aboriginal thought, and the standard of morality became lowered among the redskins, particularly among their women. Here also we find a cause of the retrogression of the Indian woman in all ways.

It is, however, a curious fact that in one instance white immorality was the cause of great and lasting benefit to a white nation. After the occupation of North America by the English and French had become a settled fact, and while there was yet dispute between the two nations for dominance on the continent, there arose among the Indians a man of wonderful ability and wide influence over his race. He was an Ottawa, Pontiac by name; and though by right chief of only his own tribe, he had before long brought many other tribes to acknowledge him as their head. Soon after the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham, the English took possession of Detroit, until then held by the French, and the Indians in the vicinity soon found cause to complain most bitterly of the change in the masters of the region. Pontiac assembled the neighboring tribes and proposed to drive the English from the country. He believed, and not impossibly with reason, that if the British were dealt a severe blow by the Indians, the French, notwithstanding their recent discomfiture and the treaty of peace, would finish the work; and as a preliminary step he proposed to capture Detroit, which from its position was of the first importance to the holding of the region of the Northwest. It must be remembered that at that time Detroit was a fort and not a city; and Pontiac saw that his best chance to capture it was by stratagem. The Indians were nominally at peace with the English; but several of the tribes--among them the Ojibwas and Wyandots--assented to the scheme proposed by Pontiac, and assembled before Detroit. It was Pontiac's plan to propose to Major Gladwyn, in command at Detroit, a meeting inside the fort, where a belt of wampum--the sign of amity--should be presented by the chief and everything done that might promote friendly relations. Suspecting nothing, Gladwyn assented, and Pontiac's scheme seemed sure of fruition.

It chanced, however, that among the Ojibwas was a beautiful girl, named Catherine, and that she came under the notice of Gladwyn. He was enamored of her beauty and proposed to her to become his mistress; and she, honored by the notice of the handsome Englishman, yielded to his desire. It would seem that at first the girl did not know that evil threatened the British; but one evening, when she came to the fort to visit her lover, she was noticed by him to be absent and sad. At first she would not tell him the reason of her grief; but at last, urged by her love to treachery to her own people, she told him that the Indians had been engaged in filing off the barrels of their rifles so that they could conceal these weapons beneath their cloaks, and that the next day, when the peace conference was to be held, the presentation by Pontiac of the belt of wampum was to be the signal for the armed warriors to rise upon the unsuspecting and weaponless officers in a massacre which should become general when the gates of the fort had been seized by those deputed for the purpose. Gladwyn was not the man to neglect such a warning; and the next day, when Pontiac, surrounded by his apparently peaceful but really armed warriors, was about to hand the wampum belt to Gladwyn, a drum beat, the doors of the council chamber were thrown open, and there appeared at every entrance a file of soldiers with levelled muskets, while in the streets was heard the tramp of marching men hurriedly assembling at the point of danger. Pontiac saw that he was betrayed, and, with quick presence of mind, concluded his speech with some words of friendship, and sat down without having made the intended signal; but Gladwyn, less tactful than the Indian, boldly accused the latter of treachery and dared him to do his worst. He did not, however, take the obvious course of securing the person of Pontiac, who was allowed to depart and who at once began a siege which for vigor and ability is hardly surpassed in the annals even of civilized warfare.