(213):  it is customary for as many as a dozen persons of both sexes 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 biassed 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 assigned 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