Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her aged father’s life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place (Oneota, 88).  Now Schoolcraft is not a witness on whom one can rely safely, and his case could be accepted as an illustration of an aboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in question had never been subject to missionary influences.  Nevertheless, such an act of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman.  It was in a woman’s heart that human sympathy was first born —­together with her child.  The helpless infant could not have survived without her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use for womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man, immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart and knew not tenderness.

Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow.  The practice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see in later chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, and even where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them was hardly what we call affection—­a conscious, enduring devotion—­but a sort of animal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce and cruel animals, and which endures but a short time.  In Agassiz’s book on Brazil we read (373), that the Indians “are cold in their family affections; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, they seem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up.”  As an illustration of this trait Agassiz mentions a sight he witnessed one day.  A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deck crying, “while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking and laughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy.”

WOMEN CRUELER THAN MEN

Apart from instinctive maternal love, sympathy appears to be as far to seek in the savage women as in the men.  Authorities agree that in respect of cruelty the squaws even surpass the warriors.  Thus Le Jeune attests (Jes.  Rel., VI., 245), that among the Canadians the women were crueler toward captives than the men.  In another place (V., 29), he writes that when prisoners were tortured the women and girls “blew and drove the flames over in their direction to burn them.”  In every Huron town, says Parkman (Jes. in N.A., XXXIV.), there were old squaws who “in vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men.”  The same is asserted of the Comanche women, who “delight in torturing the male prisoners.”  Concerning Chippewa war captives, Keating says (I., 173):  “The marriageable women are reduced to servitude and are treated with great cruelty by the squaws.”  Among the Creeks the women even used to pay a premium of tobacco for the privilege of whipping prisoners of war (Schoolcraft, V., 280).  These are typical instances.  In Patagonia, writes Falkner (97), the Indian women follow their husbands, armed with