The Sioux tribes in general have always been notorious for the brutal treatment of their women.  Mrs. Eastman, who wrote a book on their customs, once received an offer of marriage from a chief who had a habit of expending all his surplus bad temper upon his wives.  He had three of them, but was willing to give them all up if she would live with him.  She refused, as she “did not fancy having her head split open every few days with a stick of wood.”  G.P.  Belden, who also knew the Sioux thoroughly, having lived among them twelve years, wrote (270, 303-5) that “the days of her childhood are the only happy or pleasant days the Indian girl ever knows.”  “From the day of her marriage [in which she has no choice] until her death she leads a most wretched life.”  The women are “the servants of servants.”  “On a winter day the Sioux mother is often obliged to travel eight or ten miles and carry her lodge, camp-kettle, ax, child, and several small dogs on her back and head.”  She has to build the camp, cook, take care of the children, and even of the pony on which her lazy and selfish husband has ridden while she tramped along with all those burdens.  “So severe is their treatment of women, a happy female face is hardly ever seen in the Sioux nation.”  Many become callous, and take a beating much as a horse or ox does.  “Suicide is very common among Indian women, and, considering the treatment they receive, it is a wonder there is not more of it."[214]

Burton attests (C.S., 125, 130, 60) that “the squaw is a mere slave, living a life of utter drudgery.”  The husbands “care little for their wives.”  “The drudgery of the tent and field renders the squaw cold and unimpassioned.”  “The son is taught to make his mother toil for him.”  “One can hardly expect a smiling countenance from the human biped trudging ten or twenty miles under a load fit for a mule.”  “Dacotah females,” writes Neill (82, 85),

“deserve the sympathy of every tender heart.  From early childhood they lead worse than a dog’s life.  Uncultivated and treated like brutes, they are prone to suicide, and, when desperate, they act more like infuriated beasts than creatures of reason.”

Of the Crow branch of the Dakotas, Catlin wrote:[215] “They are, like all other Indian women, the slaves of their husbands ... and not allowed to join in their religious rites and ceremonies, nor in the dance or other amusements.”  All of which is delightfully consistent with this writer’s assertion that the Indians are “not in the least behind us in conjugal affection."[216]

In his Travels Through the Northwest Regions of the United States Schoolcraft thus sums up (231) his observations: