Primitive Love and Love-Stories Part 59

Then she told her parents she was going to meet her little lover, the chieftain of the green plume, who was waiting for her at the Spirit Grove. Supposing she was going to act some harmless freak, they let her go. When she did not return at sunset alarm was felt; with lighted torches the gloomy pine forest was searched, but no trace of the girl was ever found, and the parents mourned the loss of a daughter whose inclinations they had, in the end, too violently thwarted.

THE GIRL AND THE SCALP

About the middle of the seventeenth century there lived on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Ontario a Wyandot girl so beautiful that she had for suitors nearly all the young men of her tribe; but while she rejected none, neither did she favor any one in particular. To prevent her from falling to someone not in their tribe the suitors held a meeting and concluded that their claims should be withdrawn and the war chief urged to woo her. He objected on account of the disparity of years, but was finally persuaded to make his advances. His practice had been confined rather to the use of stone-headed arrows than love-darts, and his dexterity in the management of hearts displayed rather in making b.l.o.o.d.y incisions than tender impressions. But after he had painted and arrayed himself as for battle and otherwise adorned his person, he paid court to her, and a few days later was accepted on condition that he would pledge his word as a warrior to do what she should ask of him. When his pledge had been given she told him to bring her the scalp of a certain Seneca chief whom she hated. He begged her to reflect that this chief was his bosom friend, whose confidence it would be an infamy to betray. But she told him either to redeem his pledge or be proclaimed for a lying dog, and then left him.

Goaded into fury, the Wyandot chief blackened his face and rushed off to the Seneca village, where he tomahawked his friend and rushed out of the lodge with his scalp. A moment later the mournful scalp-whoop of the Senecas was resounding through the village. The Wyandot camp was attacked, and after a deadly combat of three days the Senecas triumphed, avenging the murder of their chief by the death of his a.s.sailant as well as of the miserable girl who had caused the tragedy.

The war thus begun lasted more than thirty years.

A CHIPPEWA LOVE-SONG

In 1759 great exertions were made by the French Indian Department under General Montcalm to bring a body of Indians into the valley of the lower St. Lawrence, and invitations for this purpose reached the utmost sh.o.r.es of Lake Superior. In one of the canoes from that quarter, which was left on the way down at the mouth of the Utawas, was a Chippewa girl named Paigwaineoshe, or the White Eagle. While the party awaited there the result of events at Quebec she formed an attachment for a young Algonquin belonging to a French mission. This attachment was mutual, and gave rise to a song of which the following is a prose translation:

I. Ah me! When I think of him--when I think of him--my sweetheart, my Algonquin.

II. As I embarked to return, he put the white wampum around my neck--a pledge of troth, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.

III. I shall go with you, he said, to your native country--I shall go with you, my sweetheart--my Algonquin.

IV. Alas! I replied--my native country is far, far away--my sweetheart, my Algonquin.

V. When I looked back again--where we parted, he was still looking after me, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.

VI. He was still standing on a fallen tree--that had fallen into the water, my sweetheart, my Algonquin.

VII. Alas! When I think of him--when I think of him--It is when I think of him, my Algonquin.

HOW "INDIAN STORIES" ARE WRITTEN

Here we have seven love-stories as romantic as you please and full of sentimental touches. Do they not disprove my theory that uncivilized races are incapable of feeling sentimental love? Some think they do, and Waitz is not the only anthropologist who has accepted such stories as proof that human nature, as far as love is concerned, is the same under all circ.u.mstances. The above tales are taken from the books of a man who spent much of his life among Indians and issued a number of works about them, one of which, in six volumes, was published under the auspices of the United States Government. This expert--Henry R.

Schoolcraft--was member of so many learned societies that it takes twelve lines of small type to print them all. Moreover, he expressly a.s.sures us[196] that "the value of these traditionary stories appears to depend very much upon their being left, as nearly as possible, in their original forms of thought and expression," the obvious inference being an a.s.surance that he has so left them; and he adds that in the collection and translation of these stories he enjoyed the great advantages of seventeen years' life as executive officer for the tribes, and a knowledge of their languages.

And now, having given the enemy's battle-ship every possible advantage, the reader will allow me to bring on my little torpedo-boat. In the first place Schoolcraft mentions (_A.R_., I., 56) twelve persons, six of them women, who helped him collect and interpret the material of the tales united in his volumes; but he does not tell us whether all or any of these collectors acted on the principle that these stories could claim absolutely no _scientific_ value unless they were verbatim reports of aboriginal tales, _without any additions and sentimental embroideries by the compilers_. This omission alone is fatal to the whole collection, reducing it to the value of a mere fairy book for the entertainment of children, and allowing us to make no inferences from it regarding the quality and expression of an Indian's love.

Schoolcraft stands convicted by his own action. When I read his tales for the first time I came across numerous sentences and sentiments which I knew from my own experience among Indians were utterly foreign to Indian modes of thought and feeling, and which they could no more have uttered than they could have penned Longfellow's _Hiawatha_, or the essays of Emerson. In the stories of "The Red Lover," "The Buffalo King," and "The Haunted Grove,"[197] I have italicized a few of these suspicious pa.s.sages. To take the last-named tale first, it is absurd to speak of Indian "fairies who love romantic scenes," or of a girl romantically sitting on a rocky promontory,[198] or "gathering strange flowers;" for Indians have no conception of the romantic side of nature--of scenery for its own sake. To them a tree is simply a grouse perch, or a source of fire-wood; a lake, a fish-pond, a mountain, the dreaded abode of evil spirits. In the tale of the "Buffalo King" we read of the chief doing a number of things to win the affection of the refractory bride--telling the others not to displease her, giving her "the seat of honor," and going so far as to fast himself, whereas in real life, under such circ.u.mstances, he would have curtly clubbed the stolen bride into submission. In the tale of the "Red Lover" the girl is admired for her "slender form," whereas a real Indian values a woman in proportion to her weight and rotundity. Indians do not make "protestations of inviolable attachment," or "pledge vows of mutual fidelity," like the lovers of our fashionable novels. As Charles A.

Leland remarks of the same race of Indians (85), "When an Indian seeks a wife, he or his mutual friend makes no great ado about it, but utters two words which tell the whole story." But there is no need of citing other authors, for Schoolcraft, as I have just intimated, stands convicted by his own action. In the second edition of his _Algic Researches_, which appeared after an interval of seventeen years and received the t.i.tle of _The Myth of Hiawatha and other Oral Legends of the North American Indians_, he seemed to remember what he wrote in the preface of the first regarding these stories, "that in the original there is no attempt at ornament," so he removed nearly all of the romantic embroideries, like those I have italicized and commented on, and also relegated the majority of his ludicrously sentimental interspersed poems to the appendix. In the preface to _Hiawatha_, he refers in connection with some of these verses to "the poetic use of aboriginal ideas." Now, a man has a perfect right to make such "poetic use" of "aboriginal ideas," but not when he has led his readers to believe that he is telling these stories "as nearly as possible in their original forms of thought and expression." It is very much as if Edward MacDowell had published the several movements of his Indian Suite as being, not only in their ideas, but in their (modern European) harmonies and orchestration, a faithful transcript of aboriginal Indian music. Schoolcraft's procedure, in other words, amounts to a sort of Ossianic mystification; and unfortunately he has had not a few imitators, to the confusion of comparative psychologists and students of the evolution of love.

It is a great pity that Schoolcraft, with his valuable opportunities for ethnological research, should not have added a critical att.i.tude and a habit of accuracy to his great industry. The historian Parkman, a model observer and scholar, described Schoolcraft's volumes on the Indian Tribes of the United States as

"a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page of a striking unfitness for historical or scientific inquiry."[199]

REALITY VERSUS ROMANCE

A few of the tales I have cited are not marred by superadded sentimental adornments, but all of them are open to suspicion from still another point of view. They are invariably so proper and pure that they might be read to Sunday-school cla.s.ses. Since one-half of Schoolcraft's a.s.sistants in the compilation of this material were women, this might have been expected, and if the collection had been issued as a Fairy Book it would have been a matter of course. But they were issued as accurate "oral legends" of wild Indians, and from the point of view of the student of the history of love the most important question to ask was, "Are Indian stories in reality as pure and refined in tone as these specimens would lead us to suspect?" I will answer that question by citing the words of one of the warmest champions of the Indians, the eminent American anthropologist, Professor D.G. Brinton _(M.N.W., 160):

"Anyone who has listened to Indian tales, not as they are recorded in books, but as they are told by the camp-fire, will bear witness to the abounding obscenity they deal in. That the same vulgarity shows itself in their arts and life, no genuine observer need doubt."

And in a footnote he gives this extremely interesting information:

"The late George Gibbs will be acknowledged as an authority here. He was at the time of his death preparing a Latin translation of the tales he had collected, as they were too erotic to print in English.

He wrote me, 'Schoolcraft's legends are emasculated to a degree that they become no longer Indian.'"

No longer Indian, indeed! And these doctored stories, artfully sentimentalized at one end and expurgated at the other, are advanced as proofs that a savage Indian's love is just as refined as that of a civilized Christian! What Indian stories really are, the reader, if he can stomach such things, may find out for himself by consulting the marvellously copious and almost phonographically accurate collection of native tales which another of our most eminent anthropologists, Dr.

Franz Boas, has printed.[200] And it must be borne in mind that these stories are not the secret gossip of vulgar men alone by themselves, but are national tales with which children of both s.e.xes become familiar from their earliest years. As Colonel Dodge remarks (213): it is customary for as many as a dozen persons of both s.e.xes to live in one room, hence there is an entire lack of privacy, either in word or act. "It is a wonder," says Powers (271), "that children grow up with any virtue whatever, for the conversation of their elders in their presence is often of the filthiest description." "One thing seems to me more than intolerable," wrote the French missionary Le Jeune in 1632 (_Jesuit Relations_, V., 169).

"It is their living together promiscuously, girls, women, men, and boys, in a smoky hole. And the more progress one makes in the knowledge of the language, the more vile things one hears.... I did not think that the mouth of the savage was so foul as I notice it is every day."

Elsewhere (VI., 263) the same missionary says:

"Their lips are constantly foul with these obscenities; and it is the same with the little children.... The older women go almost naked, the girls and young women are _very modestly clad_; but, among themselves, their language has the foul odor of the sewers."

Of the Pennsylvania Indians Colonel James Smith (who had lived among them as a captive) wrote (140): "The squaws are generally very immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men to the blush."

DECEPTIVE MODESTY

The late Dr. Brinton shot wide off the mark when he wrote (_R. and P._, 59) that even among the lower races the sentiment of modesty "is never absent." With some American Indians, as in the races of other parts of the world, there is often not even the appearance of modesty.

Many of the Southern Indians in North America and others in Central and South America wear no clothes at all, and their actions are as unrestrained as those of animals.[201] The tribes that do wear clothes sometimes present to shallow or bia.s.sed observers the appearance of modesty. To the Mandan women Catlin (I., 93, 96) attributes "excessive modesty of demeanor."

"It was customary for hundreds of girls and women to go bathing and swimming in the Missouri every morning, while a quarter of a mile back on a terrace stood several sentinels with bows and arrows in hand to protect the bathing-place from men or boys, who had their own swimming-place elsewhere."

This, however, tells us more about the immorality of the men and their anxiety to guard their property than about the character of the women.

On that point we are enlightened by Maximilian Prinz zu Wied, who found that these women were anything but prudes, having often two or three lovers at a time, while infidelity was seldom punished (I., 531). According to Gatschet (183) Creek women also "were a.s.signed a bathing-place in the river currents at some distance below the men;"

but that this, too, was a mere curiosity of pseudo-modesty becomes obvious when we read in Schoolcraft (V., 272) that among these Indians "the s.e.xes indulge their propensities with each other promiscuously, unrestrained by law or custom, and without secrecy or shame." Powers, too, relates (55) that among the Californian Yurok "the s.e.xes bathe apart, and the women do not go into the sea without some garment on."

But Powers was not a man to be misled by specious appearances. He fully understood the philosophy of the matter, as the following shows (412):

"Notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary by false friends and weak maundering philanthropists, the California Indians are a grossly licentious race.

None more so, perhaps. There is no word in all their language that I have examined which has the meaning of 'mercenary prost.i.tute,' because such a creature is unknown to them; but among the unmarried of both s.e.xes there is very little or no restraint; and this freedom is so much a matter of course that there is no reproach attaching to it; so that _their young women are notable for their modest and innocent demeanor_. This very modesty of outward deportment has deceived the hasty glance of many travellers. But what their conduct really is is shown by the Argus-eyed surveillance to which women are subjected. If a married woman is seen even walking in the forest with another man than her husband she is chastised by him. A repet.i.tion of the offence is generally punished with speedy death.

Brothers and sisters scrupulously avoid living alone together. A mother-in-law is never allowed to live with her son-in-law. To the Indian's mind the opportunity of evil implies the commission of it."

WERE INDIANS CORRUPTED BY WHITES?

Having disposed of the modesty fallacy, let us examine once more, and for the last time, the doctrine that savages owe their degradation to the whites.

In the admirable preface to his book on the Jesuit missionaries in Canada, Parkman writes concerning the Hurons (x.x.xIV.):

"Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, says that the nation was corrupt in his time, but that this was a degeneracy from their ancient manners. La Potherie and Charlevoix make a similar statement. Megapolensis, however, in 1644 says that they were then exceedingly debauched; and Greenhalgh, in 1677, gives ample evidence of a shameless license. One of their most earnest advocates of the present day admits that the pa.s.sion of love among them had no other than an animal existence (Morgan, _League of the Iroquois_, 322).

There is clear proof that the tribes of the South were equally corrupt. (See Lawson's _Carolina_, 34, and other early writers.)"

Another most earnest advocate of the Indians, Dr. Brinton, writes (_M.N.W._, 159) that promiscuous licentiousness was frequently connected with the religious ceremonies of the Indians:

"Miscellaneous congress very often terminated their dances and festivals. Such orgies were of common occurrence among the Algonkins and Iroquois at a very early date, and are often mentioned in the _Jesuit Relations_; Venagas describes them as frequent among the tribes of Lower California, and Oviedo refers to certain festivals of the Nicaraguans, during which the women of all ranks extended to whosoever wished just such privileges as the matrons of ancient Babylon, that mother of harlots and all abominations, used to grant even to slaves and strangers in the temple of Melitta as one of the duties of religion."

In Part I. (140-42) of the _Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the Southwestern United States_,[202] A.F. Bandelier, the leading authority on the Indians of the Southwest, writes regarding the Pueblos (one of the most advanced, of all American tribes):