At one time among the Indians, as among all heathen people, the girls were counted of little value. If they grew up they were to become the burden-bearers of their masters of the other sex. An Indian mother has been known to take her little baby girl out into the woods and stuff its mouth with grass and leaves and leave it to die. And when asked why she did so, she would say, “I did not want her to grow up and suffer as I have suffered.”
But heathenism crushes out a mother’s love and turns the heart to stone and changes a father into a foul, indifferent fiend. And so when the miners came the natives willingly sold their daughters, ranging from ten to eighteen years of age, for a few blankets or a little gold, into a slavery which was worse than death.
For years these wretched, deluded people have visited our towns, our mining and lumbering and fishing camps, bringing their bright-eyed, happy little girls with them, and after having made a lot of money in this foul method, have returned to make a great potlatch and ostentatiously give away hundreds of dollars of their ill-gotten gains.
One child that we knew of refused to go with her parents for this purpose. When they tried to compel her, she said, “You can go. I will not go if you kill me,” and then she ran to the woods. After they had left she made her way to the missionary and sought protection.
Another child of about twelve years of age, who refused at first to follow a life of sin, was visited by a great rough fellow who, with his hand full of money and with promises of fine clothes and trinkets and sweets, coaxed her and finally prevailed upon her to come and live with him.
A large number of girls were sold in this way from one of our mission schools by their cruel heathen parents and friends, at prices ranging from fifty to one hundred dollars each. Some of these poor children came to the mission-house at midnight, almost broken-hearted, and said to the missionary, “Please will you not take me in. They are going to sell me as a slave, and I don’t want to go.”
We reasoned with their parents and heathen relatives, but our efforts were vain. We went to the cabins of the white men and expostulated with them, and were driven out with fiendish curses and told that it was none of our business.
“Poor Little Quee-lawt!”
On one occasion I found three poor women by the roadside near the sawmill at Nanaimo, all helplessly drunk. It seemed of daily occurrence in those days to see women drunk. With these poor creatures was a little girl, Quee-lawt by name. She was one of the brightest and most attractive of our little scholars. When she first came to school, like some others of the children, she was very scantily clad, but by the kindness of some good ladies this little maid was neatly clothed, and because her forehead had not been flattened as much as some others, she was pleasing in appearance. She learned to read nicely and could sing very sweetly, and we had great hopes of a bright future for her.
But alas! poor Quee-lawt had been led astray by these sinful women, and by some low, degraded white men had been robbed of her purity, made drunken and defiled. And here we saw her, all besmeared with dirt and filth—drunk, drunk.