“It is considered a reproach to have only one wife, a sign of poverty and insignificance.  There was on one occasion a heated discussion at Kamdesh concerning the best plans to be adopted to prepare for an expected attack.  A man sitting on the outskirts of the assembly controverted something the priest said.  Later on the priest turned round fiercely and demanded to be told how a man with ‘only one wife’ presumed to offer an opinion at all.”

His religion allowed a Mohammedan to take four legitimate wives, while their prophet himself had a larger number.  A Hindoo was permitted by the laws of Manu to marry four women if he belonged to the highest caste, but if he was of the lowest caste he was condemned to monogamy.

King Solomon was held in honor though he had unnumbered wives, concubines, and virgins at his disposal.

How far the sentiment of monogamy—­one of the essential ingredients of Romantic Love—­had penetrated the skulls of American Indians may be inferred from the amusing and typical details related by the historian Parkman (O.T., chap. xi.) of the Dakota or Sioux Indians, among whom he sojourned.  The man most likely to become the next chief was a fellow named Mahto-Tatonka, whose father had left a family of thirty, which number the young man was evidently anxious to beat: 

“Though he appeared not more than twenty-one years old, he had oftener struck the enemy, and stolen more horses and more squaws than any young man in the village.  We of the civilized world are not apt to attach much credit to the latter species of exploits; but horse-stealing is well-known as an avenue to distinction on the prairies, and the other kind of depredation is esteemed equally meritorious.  Not that the act can confer fame from its own intrinsic merits.  Any one can steal a squaw, and if he chooses afterward to make an adequate present to her rightful proprietor, the easy husband for the most part rests content; his vengeance falls asleep, and all danger from that quarter is averted.  Yet this is esteemed but a pitiful and mean-spirited transaction.  The danger is averted, but the glory of the achievement also is lost.  Mahto-Tatonka proceeded after a more gallant and dashing fashion.  Out of several dozen squaws whom he had stolen, he could boast that he had never paid for one, but snapping his fingers in the face of the injured husband, had defied the extremity of his indignation, and no one had yet dared to lay the hand of violence upon him.  He was following close in the footsteps of his father.  The young men and the young squaws, each in their way, admired him.  The one would always follow him to war, and he was esteemed to have an unrivalled charm in the eyes of the other.”

Thus the admiration of the men, the love (Indian style) of the women, and the certainty of the chieftainship—­the highest honor accessible to an Indian—­were the rewards of actions which in a civilized community