“the people ran to and fro without their clothes, appearing and acting more like demons than human beings; every vice was practised and almost every species of crime perpetrated.”

J.T.  Irving tells a characteristic story (226-27) of an Indian girl whom he found one day lying on a grave singing a song “so despairing that it seemed to well out from a broken heart.”  A half-breed friend, who thoroughly understood the native customs, marred his illusion by informing him that he had heard the girl say to her mother that as she had nothing else to do, she believed she would go and take a bawl over her brother’s grave.  The brother had been dead five years!

The whole question of aboriginal mourning is patly summed up in a witty remark made by James Adair more than a century ago (1775).  He has seen Choctaw mourners, he declares (187), “pour out tears like fountains of water; but after thus tiring themselves they might with perfect propriety have asked themselves, ‘_ And who is dead?_’”

THE TRUTH ABOUT WIDOW-BURNING

Instructive, from several points of view, is an incident related by McLean (I., 254-55):  A carrier Indian having been killed, his widow threw herself on the body, shrieking and tearing her hair.  The other females “evinced all the external symptoms of extreme grief, chanting the death-song in a most lugubrious tone, the tears streaming down their cheeks, and beating their breasts;” yet as soon as the rites were ended, these women “were seen as gay and cheerful as if they had returned from a wedding.”  The widow alone remained, being “obliged by custom” to mourn day and night.

“The bodies were formerly burned; the relatives of the deceased, as well as those of the widow, being present, all armed; a funeral pile was erected, and the body placed upon it.  The widow then set fire to the pile, and was compelled to stand by it, anointing her breast with the fat that oozed from the body, until the heat became insupportable; when the wretched creature, however, attempted to draw back, she was thrust forward by her husband’s relatives at the point of their spears, and forced to endure the dreadful torture until either the body was reduced to ashes, or she herself almost scorched to death.  Her relatives were present merely to preserve her life; when no longer able to stand they dragged her away, and this intervention often led to bloody quarrels.”

Obviously the compulsory mourning enforced in McLean’s day was simply a mild survival of this former torture, which, in turn, was a survival of the still earlier practice of actually burning the widows alive, or otherwise killing them, which used to prevail in various parts of the world, as in India, among some Chinese aboriginal tribes, the old Germans, the Thracians and Scythians, some of the Greeks, the Lithuanians, the Basutos, the natives of Congo and other African countries, the inhabitants of New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides, Fiji Islands, the Crees, Comanches, Caribs, and various other Indian tribes in California, Darien, Peru, etc.[126]