A few Indian tribes have got as far as the second stage, but most of them belong to the first.  Provided a warrior coveted a girl, and provided her parents were satisfied with the payment he offered, matters were settled without regard to the girl’s wishes.  To avoid needless friction it was sometimes deemed wise to first gain the girl’s good-will; but this was a matter of secondary importance.  “It is true,” says Smith in his book on the Indians of Chili (214),

“that the Araucanian girl is not regularly put up for sale and bartered for, like the Oriental houris; but she is none the less an article of merchandise, to be paid for by him who would aspire to her hand.  She has no more freedom in the choice of her husband than has the Circassian slave.”

“Marriage with the North Californians,” says Bancroft (I., 349),

“is essentially a matter of business.  The young brave must not hope to win his bride by feats of arms or softer wooing, but must buy her of her father like any other chattel, and pay the price at once, or resign in favor of a richer man.  The inclinations of the girl are in nowise consulted; no matter where her affections are placed, she goes to the highest bidder.  The purchase effected, the successful suitor leads his blushing property to his hut and she becomes his wife without further ceremony.  Wherever this system of wife-purchase obtains the rich old men almost absorb the youth and beauty of the tribe, while the younger and poorer men must content themselves with old and ugly wives.  Hence their eagerness for that wealth which will enable them to throw away their old wives and buy new ones."[226]

A favorable soil for the growth of romantic and conjugal love!  The Omahas have a proverb that an old man cannot win a girl, he can only win her parents; nevertheless if the old man has the ponies he gets the girl.  The Indians insist on their rights, too.  Powers tells (318) of a California (Nishinam) girl who loathed the man that had a claim on her.  She took refuge with a kind old widow, who deceived the pursuers.  When the deception was discovered, the noble warriors drew their arrows and shot the widow to death in the middle of the village amid general approval.  I myself once saw a poor Arizona girl who had taken refuge with a white family.  When I saw the man to whom she had been sold—­a dirty old tramp whom a decent person would not want in the same tribe, much less in the same wigwam—­I did not wonder she hated him; but he had paid for her and she was ultimately obliged to live with him.

Of the Mandans, Catlin says (I., 119) that wives “are mostly treated for with the father, as in all instances they are regularly bought and sold.”  Belden relates (32) how he married a Sioux girl.  One evening his Indian friend Frombe came to his lodge and said he would take him to see his sweetheart.

“I followed him and we went out of the village to where some girls were watching the Indian boys play at ball.  Pointing to a good-looking Indian girl, Frombe said:  ‘That is Washtella,’