INTIMIDATING CALIFORNIA SQUAWS

Besides the atrocious punishments inflicted on women who forgot their role as private property, some of the Indians had other ways of intimidating them, while reserving for themselves the right to do as they pleased.  Powers relates (156-61) that, among the California Indians in general,

“there is scarcely such an attribute known as virtue or chastity in either sex before marriage.  Up to the time when they enter matrimony most of the young women are a kind of femmes incomprises, the common property of the tribe; and after they have once taken on themselves the marriage covenant, simple as it is, they are guarded with a Turkish jealousy, for even the married women are not such models as Mrs. Ford....  The one great burden of the harangues delivered by the venerable peace-chief on solemn occasions is the necessity and excellence of female virtue; all the terrors of superstitious sanction and the direst threats of the great prophet are levelled at unchastity, and all the most dreadful calamities and pains of a future state are hung suspended over the heads of those who are persistently lascivious.  All the devices that savage cunning can invent, all the mysterious masquerading horrors of devil-raising, all the secret sorceries, the frightful apparitions and bugbears, which can be supposed effectual in terrifying women into virtue and preventing smock treason, are resorted to by the Pomo leaders.”

Among these Pomo Indians, and Californian tribes almost universally (406), there existed secret societies whose simple purpose was to conjure up infernal terrors and render each other assistance in keeping their women in subjection.  A special meeting-house was constructed for this purpose, in which these secret women-tamers held a grand devil-dance once in seven years, twenty or thirty men daubing themselves with barbaric paint and putting vessels of pitch on their heads.  At night they rushed down from the mountains with these vessels of pitch flaming on their heads, and making a terrible noise.  The squaws fled for dear life; hundreds of them clung screaming and fainting to their valorous protectors.  Then the chief took a rattlesnake from which the fangs had been extracted, brandished it into the faces of the shuddering women, and threatened them with dire things if they did not live lives of chastity, industry, and obedience, until some of the terrified squaws shrieked aloud and fell swooning upon the ground.

GOING A-CALUMETING