Chapter 77

[207] Pizarro says (_Relacion_, 266) that "the virgins of the sun feigned to preserve virginity and to be chaste. In this they lied, as they cohabited with the servants and guards of the Sun, who were numerous." Regarding Peruvians in general Pizarro (1570) and Cieza (_Travels_, 1532-40) agree that parents did not care about the conduct of their daughters, and Cieza speaks of the promiscuity at festivals. Brinton (_M.N.W._, 149) is obliged to admit that "there is a decided indecency in the remains of ancient American art, especially in Peru, and great lubricity in many ceremonies."

[208] _Indian Rights Assoc._, Philadelphia, 1885.

[209] _Journ. Anthrop. Inst._, 1892, 427.

[210] _Indian Com. Rep_., 1854, p. 179.

[211] Bristol in _Ind. Aff. Rep. Spec. Com_., 1867, p. 357.

[212] _Rep. Com. Ind. Aff_., 1892, p. 607.

[213] Even the wives of chiefs were treated no better than slaves. Catlin himself tells us of the six wives of a Mandan chief who were "not allowed to speak, though they were in readiness to obey his orders." (_Smithson. Rep._. 1885, Pt. II., 458.)

[214] Such cruel treatment of women argues a total lack of sympathy in Indians, and without sympathy there can be no love. The systematic manner in which sympathy is crushed among Indians I have described in a previous chapter. Here let me add a few remarks by Theodore Roosevelt (I., 86) which coincide with what John Hance, the famous Arizona guide, told me:

"Anyone who has ever been in an encampment of wild Indians and has had the misfortune to witness the delight the children take in torturing little animals will admit that the Indian's love of cruelty for cruelty's sake cannot possibly be exaggerated. The young are so trained that when old they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting pain in its most appalling form. Among the most brutal white borderers a man would be instantly lynched if he practiced on any creature the fiendish torture which in the Indian camp either attracts no notice at all, or else excites merely laughter."

(See also Roosevelt's remarks--87, 831, 335 on Helen Hunt Jackson's _Century of Dishonor_.) The Indian was much wronged by unprincipled agents and others, but the border ruffians served him only as he served others of his race, the weaker being always driven out. Nor was there any real sympathy within the tribes themselves. "These people," wrote the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune (VI., 245), "are very little moved by compassion. They give a sick person food and drink, but show otherwise no concern for him; to coax him with love and tenderness is a language which they do not understand. When he refuses food they kill him, partly to relieve him from suffering, partly to relieve themselves of the trouble of taking him with them when they go to some other place."

[215] _Smithsonian Rep._, 1885, Pt. II., 108.

[216] The humor of Catlin's assertions becomes more obvious still when we read how readily Indians dissolve their marriages, through love of change, caprice, etc. See cases in Westermarck, 518.

[217] Cited by Schoolcraft, _Oneota_, 57.

[218] _Transactions of the American Philosophical Society._ Philadelphia, 1819.

[219] _Journ. Anthrop. Inst._, 1884, p. 251.

[220] Brinton's _Library of Aborig. Amer. Lit._, II, 65.

[221] The only way the women could secure any consideration was by overawing the men. Thus Southey says (III., 411) regarding the Abipones that the old women "were obdurate in retaining superstitions that rendered them objects of fear, and therefore of respect." Smith in his book on the Araucanians of Chili, notes (238), that besides the usual medicine men there was an occasional woman "who had acquired the most unbounded influence by shrewdness, joined to a hideous personal appearance and a certain mystery with which she was invested."

[222] As when he says, "The Atkha Aleuts occasionally betrothed their children to each other, but the marriage was held to be binding only after the birth of a child." What evidence of choice is there here?

[223] _U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Colorado,_ etc., 1876, p. 465.

[224] Miss Alice Fletcher gives in the _Journal of the American Folk Lore Society_ (1889, 219-26) an amusing instance of how far a present-day Omaha girl may go in resenting a man's unwelcome advances. A faint-hearted lover had sent a friend as go-between to ask for the girl's favor. As he finished his speech the girl looked at him with flashing eyes and said: "I'll have nothing to do with your friend or you either." The young man hesitated a moment, as if about to repeat his request, when a dangerous wave of her water-bucket made him leap to one side to escape a deluge.

[225] _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie,_ 1891, p. 545.

[226] How California marriages were made in the good old times we may see from the account in Hakluyt's _Collection of Early Voyages_, 1810, III., 513:

"If any man had a daughter to marry he went where the people kept, and said, I have a daughter to marry, is there any man here that would have her? And if there were any that would have her, he answered that he would have her, and so the marriage was made."

[227] _Smithsonian Rep._, 1885, Pt. II., p. 71.

[228] Schoolcraft, IV., 224; Powers, 221; Waitz, IV., 132; Azara (_Voyages_), II., 94; von Martius, I.,412, 509.

[229] A table relating to sixty-five North American Indian girls given in Ploss, I., 476, shows that all but eight of them had their first child before the end of the fifteenth year; the largest number (eighteen), having it in the fourteenth.

[230] See John Fiske's _Discovery of America_, I., 21, and E.J. Payne's _History of the New World_.

[231] Giacomo Bove, _Patagonia. Cf._ Ploss, I., 476; _Globus_, 1883, 158. Hyades's _Mission Scientifique du Cap Horn_, VII., 377.

[232] Equally inconclusive is Westermarck's reference (216) to what Azara says regarding the Guanas. Azara expressly informs us that, as summed up by Darwin (_D.M._, Chap. XIX.) among the Guanas "the men rarely marry till twenty years old or more, as before that age they cannot conquer their rivals." Where girls are literally wrestled for, they have, of course, no choice.

[233] Keating says (II., 153) that among the Chippewas "where the antipathy is great, one or the other elopes from the lodge."

[234] _Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropologists_, 1894, 153-57.

[235] Laurence Oliphant realized the absurdity of attributing such tales to Indians, assigning to them feelings and motives like our own. He kindly supplies some further details, insisting that the girl was told to "return and all would be forgiven;" that the "fast young Sioux hunter" whom Winona wanted to marry ("her heart could never be another's"), had "no means of his own." He is believed to have been "utterly disconsolate at the time," and "subsequently to have married an heiress." See the amusing satire in his _Minnesota_, 287-89.

[236] S.R. Riggs in _U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Soc._, IX., 206.

[237] _Trans. Amer. Ethnol. Soc._, Vol. III, Pt. I.

[238] _Denkschriften der Kaiserl. Akad. d. Wissensch. in Wien_, Bd. XXXIX., S. 214.

[239] _Report of Bureau of Ethnol., Wash._, 1892.

[240] Ibid., 1896, Pt. 1, p. 154.

[241] _American Anthropologist_, IV., 276.

[242] The Chippewas have bridal canoes which they fill with stores to last a betrothed pair for a month's excursion, this being the only marriage ceremony. (Kane, 20.)

[243] Army bugle calls, telling the soldiers what to do, are "leading motives." See my article on "The Utility of Music," _Forum_, May, 1898; or Wallaschek's _Primitive Music_.

[244] _A Study of Omaha Indian Music_ (14, 15, 44, 52). Cambridge, 1893; _Journal Amer. Folklore_, 1889 (219-26); _Memoirs Intern. Congr. Anthrop.,_ 1894 (153-57).

[245] Dr. Brinton published in 1886 an interesting pamphlet entitled _The Conception of Love in Some American Languages_, which was afterward reprinted in his _Essays of an Americanist_. It forms the philological basis for his assertion, already quoted, that the languages of the Algonquins of North America, the Nahuas of Mexico, the Mayas of Yucatan, the Quichas of Peru, and the Tupis and Guaranis of Brazil "supply us with evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among them." I have read this learned paper half a dozen times, and have come to the conclusion that it proves exactly the contrary.

I. In the Algonkin, as I gather from the professor's explanations, there is one form of the word "love" from which are derived the expressions "to tie," "to fasten," "and also some of the coarsest words to express the sexual relation." For the feebler "sentiment" of merely liking a person there is a word meaning "he or it _seems good to me_." Expressions relating to the highest form of love, "that which embraces all men and all beings" are derived from a root indicative of "_what gives joy_." The italics are mine. I can find here no indication of altruistic sentiment, but quite the reverse.

II. It was among the Mexicans that Dr. Brinton found the "delicate" poems. Yet he informs us that they had "only one word...to express every variety of love, human and divine, carnal and chaste, between men and between the sexes." This being the case, how are we ever to know which kind of love a Mexican poem refers to? Dr. Brinton himself feels that one must not credit the Aztecs "with finer feelings than they deserve;" and with reference to a certain mythic conception he adds, "I gravely doubt that they felt the shafts of the tender passion, with any such susceptibility as to employ this metaphor." Moreover, as he informs us, the Mexican root of the word is not derived from the primary meaning of the root, but from a secondary and later signification. "This hints ominously," he says,

"at the probability that the ancient tongue had for a long time no word at all to express this, the highest and noblest emotion of the human heart, and that consequently this emotion itself had not risen to consciousness in the national mind."

In its later development the capacity of the language for emotional expression was greatly enlarged. Was this before the European missionaries appeared on the scene? Missionaries, it is important to remember, had a good deal to do with the development of the language, as well as the birth of the nobler conceptions and emotions among the lower races. Many fatal blunders in comparative psychology and sociology can be traced to the ignoring of this fact.

III. Dr. Otto Stoll, in his work _Zur Ethnographie der Rep. Guatemala,_ declares that the Cakchiquel Indians of that country "are strangers to the mere conception of that kind of love which is expressed by the Latin verb _amare_." _Logoh_, the Guatemalan word for love, also means "to buy," and according to Stoll the only other word in the pure original tongue for the passion of love is _ah_, to want, to desire. Dr. Brinton finds it used also in the sense of "to like," "to love" [in what way?]. But the best he can do is to "think that 'to buy' and 'to love' may be construed as developments of the same idea of _prizing highly_" which tells us nothing regarding altruism. All that we know about the customs of Guatemalans points to the conclusion that Dr. Stoll was right in declaring that they had no notion of true love.

IV. Of the Peruvian expressions relating to love in the comprehensive sense of the word, Dr. Brinton specifies five. Of one of them, _munay_, there were, according to Dr. Anchorena, nearly six hundred combinations. It meant originally "merely a sense of want, an appetite, and the accompanying desire to satisfy it." In songs composed in the nineteenth century _cenyay_, which originally meant pity, is preferred to _munay_ as the most appropriate term for the love between the sexes. The blind, unreasoning, absorbing passion is expressed by _huaylluni_, which is nearly always confined to sexual love, and "conveys the idea of the sentiment showing itself in action by those sweet signs and marks of devotion which are so highly prized by the loving heart." The verb _lluyllny_ (literally to be soft or tender, as fruit) means to

"love with tenderness, to have as a darling, to caress lovingly. It has less of sexuality in it than the word last mentioned, and is applied by girls to each other and as a term of family fondness."

There was also a term, _mayhuay_, referring to words of tenderness or acts of endearment which may be merely simulated signs of emotion. I cannot find in any of these definitions evidence of altruistic affection, unless it be in the "marks of devotion," which expression, however, I suspect, is Philadelphian rather than Peruvian.

V. The Tupi-Guarani have one word only to express all the varieties of love known to them--_aihu_. Dr. Brinton thinks he "cannot be far wrong" in deriving this from _ai_, self, or the same, and _hu_ to find or be present; and from this he infers that "to love," in Guarani, means "to find oneself in another," or "to discover in another a likeness to oneself." I submit that this is altogether too airy a fabric of fanciful conjecture to allow the inference that the sentiment of love was known to these Brazilian Indians, whose morals and customs were, moreover, as we have seen, fatal obstacles to the growth of refined sexual feeling. Both the Tupis and Guaranis were cannibals, and they had no regard for chastity. One of their "sentimental" customs was for a captor to make his prisoner, before he was eaten, cohabit with his (the captor's) sister or daughter, the offspring of this union being allowed to grow up and then was devoured too, the first mouthful being given to the mother. (Southey, I., 218.) I mention this because Dr. Brinton says that the evidence that the sentiment of love was awake among these tribes "is corroborated by the incidents we learn of their domestic life."

[246] _U.S. Geogr. and Geol Survey Rocky Mt. Region_, Pt. I., 181-89.

[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.

[257] Hall, _Narrat. of Second Arctic Exp._, 102; Cranz, I, 207-12 (German ed.); Letourneau, _E.d.M._, 72.

[258] Among the Nagas, we read in Dalton (43), "maidens are prized for their physical strength more than for their beauty and family;" and the reason is not far to seek. "The women have to work incessantly, while the men bask in the sun."

[259] Shortt in _Trans. Ethnol. Soc_., _N.S._, VII., 464.

[260] For our purposes it is needless to continue this list; but I may add that of the very few tribes Westermarck ventured to claim specifically for his side, three at any rate--the Miris, Todas, and Kols (Mundas) do not belong there. The state of mind prevalent among the Miris is indicated by Dalton's observation (33) that "two brothers will unite and from the proceeds of their joint labor buy a wife between them." In regard to the Todas, Westermarck apparently forgot what he himself had written about them on a previous page (53), after Shortt:

"When a man marries a girl, she becomes the wife of his brothers as they successively reach manhood, and they become the husbands of all her sisters, when they are old enough to marry."

To speak of "liberty of choice" in such cases, or of the marriage being only "ostensibly" arranged by the parents, is nonsense. As for the Kols, what Dalton says about the Mundas (194) not only indicates that parental interference is more than "ostensible," but makes clear that what these girls enjoy is not free choice but what is euphemistically called "free love," before marriage:

"Among Mundas having any pretensions to respectability the young people are not allowed to arrange these affairs [matrimonial] for themselves. Their parents settle it all for them, French fashion, and after the liberty they have enjoyed, and the liaisons they are sure to have made, this interference on the part of the old folk must be very aggravating to the young ones."

If the dissolute or imbecile advocates of "free love" had their way, we should sink to the level of these wild tribes of India; but there is no danger of our losing again the large "tracts of mind, and thought, and feeling" we have acquired since our ancestors, who came from India, were in such a degraded state as these neighbors of theirs.

[261] Statistics have shown that twenty-eight per cent of the females were married before their fourth year. The ancient _Sutras_ ordained the age of six to seven the best for girls to marry, and declared that a father who waits till his daughter is twelve years old must go to hell. The evils are aggravated by the fact noted by Dr. Ryder (who gives many pathetic details) that a Hindoo girl of ten often appears like an European child of six, owing to the weak physique inherited from these girl mothers. Yet Mrs. Mansell relates:

"Many pitiable child-wives have said to me, 'Oh, Doctor mem Sahib, I implore you, do give me medicine that I may become a mother.' I have looked at their innocent faces and tender bodies, and asked, 'Why?' The reply has invariably been, 'My husband will discard me if I do not bear a child.'"

[262] _Journal of Nat. Indian Assoc._, 1881, 543-49.

[263] The roots of this superstition, which has created such unspeakable misery in India, go back to the oldest times of which there are records. The Vedas say, "Endless are the worlds for those men who have sons; but there is no place for those who have no male offspring."

[264] Dr. S. Armstrong-Hopkins writes in her recent volume _Within the Purdah_ (51-52): "A few years ago the English Government passed a law to the effect that no bride should go to the house of her mother-in-law before she arrived at the age of twelve years. I am witness, however, as is every practising physician in India, that this law is utterly ignored.... Often and often have I treated little women patients of five, six, seven, eight, nine years, who were at that time living with their husbands."

[265] If Darwin had dwelt on such facts in his _Descent of Man_, and contrasted man's vileness with the devotion, sympathy, and self-sacrifice shown by birds and other animals, he would have aroused less indignation among his ignorant contemporaries. In these respects it was the animals who had cause to resent his theory.

[266] Dr. Ryder says in her pathetic book, _Little Wives of India_: "A man may be a vile and loathsome creature; he may be blind, a lunatic, an idiot, a leper, or diseased in any form; he may be fifty, sixty, or seventy years old, and may be married to a child of five or ten, who positively loathes his presence; but if he claims her she must go. There is no other form of slavery equal to it on the face of the earth."

[267] The London _Times_ of November 11, 1889, had the following in its column about India:

"Two shocking cases of wife killing lately came before the courts, in both cases the result of child marriage. In one a child aged ten was strangled by her husband. In the second case a child of tender years was ripped open with a wooden peg. Brutal sexual exasperation was the sole apparent reason in both instances. Compared with the terrible evils of child marriage, widow cremation is of infinitely inferior magnitude."

[268] Manu's remark that "where women are honored there the gods are pleased" is one of those expressions of unconscious humor which naturally escaped him, but should not have escaped European sociologists. What he understands by "honoring women" may be gathered from many maxims in his volume like the following (the references being to the pages of Burnell and Hopkins's version):

"This is the nature of women, to seduce men here" (40);

"One should not be seated in a secluded place with a mother, sister, or daughter; the powerful host of the senses compels even a wise man" (41).

"No act is to be done according to (her) own will by a young girl, a young woman, or even by an old woman, though in (their own) houses."

"In her childhood (a girl) should be under the will of her father; in (her) youth, of (her) husband; her husband being dead, of her sons; a woman should never enjoy her own will" (130).

"Though of bad conduct or debauched, or even devoid of good qualities, a husband must always be worshipped like a god by a good wife."

"For women there is no separate sacrifice, nor vow, nor even fast; if a woman obeys her husband, by that she is exalted in heaven" (131).

"Day and night should women be kept by the male members of the family in a state of dependence" (245)....

"Women being weak creatures, and having no share in the _mantras_, are falsehood itself" (247).