“would consider himself degraded by being compelled to walk any distance; and were he so poor as to possess only two horses, he would ride the best of them, and leave the other for his wives and children and their baggage; and if he has too many wives or too much baggage for the horse, the wives have no alternative but to follow him on foot.”

Turning to the great Dakota or Sioux stock, we run against one of the most naive of the sentimentalists, Catlin, who perpetrated several books on the Indians and made many “fearless” assertions about the red men in general and the Mandans in particular.  G.E.  Ellis, in his book, The Red Man and the While Man (101), justly observes of Catlin that “he writes more like a child than a well-balanced man,” and Mitchell (in Schoolcraft, III., 254) declares that much of what Catlin wrote regarding the Mandans existed “entirely in the fertile imagination of that gentleman,” Yet this does not prevent eminent anthropologists like Westermarck (359) from soberly quoting Catlin’s declaration that “it would be untrue and doing injustice to the Indians, to say that they were in the least behind us in conjugal, in filial, and in paternal affection” (L.N.N.A.I., I., 121).  There is only one way of gauging a man’s affection, and that is by his actions.  Now how, according to Catlin himself, does an Indian act toward his wife?  Even among the Mandans, so superior to the other Indians he visited, he found that the women, however attractive or hungry they might be,

“are not allowed to sit in the same group with the men while at their meals.  So far as I have yet travelled in the Indian country I have never seen an Indian woman eating with her husband.  Men form the first group at the banquet, and women and children and dogs all come together at the next.”

Men first, women and dogs next—­yet they are “not in the least behind us in conjugal affection!” With his childish disregard of logic and lack of a sense of humor Catlin goes on to tell us that Mandan women lose their beauty soon because of their early marriages and “the slavish life they lead.”  In many cases, he adds, the inclinations of the girl are not considered in marriage, the father selling her to the highest bidder.

Mandan conjugal affection, “just like ours,” is further manifested by the custom, previously referred to, which obliges mourning women to crop off all their hair, while of a man’s locks, which “are of much greater importance,” only one or two can be spared. (Catlin, l.c., I., 95, 119, 121; II., 123.) An amusing illustration of the Mandan’s supercilious contempt for women, also by Catlin, will be given later.[213]