and fixed the day for her wedding to the man of their choice.  While all were busy with the preparations, she climbed the rock overhanging the river.  Having reached the summit, she made a speech full of reproaches to her family, and then sang her dirge.  The wind wafted her words and song to her family, who had rushed to the foot of the rock.  They implored her to come down, promising at last that she should not be forced to marry.  Some tried to climb the rock, but before they could reach her she threw herself down the precipice and fell a corpse at the feet of her friends.

Mrs. Eastman also relates the story of Winona’s leap (65-70).  “The incident is well known,” she writes.  “Almost everyone has read it a dozen times, and always differently told.”  It is needless to say that a story told in a dozen different ways and embellished by half-breed guides and white collectors of legends has no value as scientific evidence.[235] But even if we grant that the incidents happened just as related, there is nothing to indicate the presence of exalted sentiments.  The girl preferred the hunter because he would be more frequently with her than the warrior (one of the versions says she wanted to wed “the successful hunter")[236]—­which leaves us in doubt as to the utilitarian or sentimental quality of her attachment.  Apparently she was not very eager to marry the hunter, for had she been, why did she refuse to live when they told her she would not be forced to marry the warrior?  But the most important consideration is that she did not commit suicide for love at all, but from aversion—­to escape being married to a man she disliked.  Aversion is usually the motive which leads Indian women to what are called “suicides for love.”  As Griggs remarks (l.c.): 

“Sometimes it happens that a young man wants a girl, and her friends are also quite willing, while she alone is unwilling.  The purchase-bundle is desired by her friends, and hence compulsion is resorted to.  The girl yields and goes to be his slave, or she holds out stoutly, sometimes taking her own life as the alternative.  Several cases of the kind have come to the personal knowledge of the writer.”

Not long ago I read in the Paris Figaro a learned article on suicide in which the assertion was made that, as is well known, savages never take their own lives.  W.W.  Westcott, in his otherwise excellent book on suicide, which is based on over a hundred works relating to his subject, makes the same astounding assertion.  I have shown in preceding pages that many Africans and Polynesians commit suicide, and I may now add that Indians seem still more addicted to this idiotic practice.  Sometimes, indeed, they have cause for it.  I have already cited the words of Belden that suicide is very common among Indian women, and that “considering the treatment they receive, it is a wonder there is not more of it.”  Keating says (II., 172) that “among the women suicide is far more frequent [than among men], and is the result of jealousy, or of disappointments in love; sometimes extreme grief at the loss of a child will lead to it.”  “Not a season passes away,” writes Mrs. Eastman (169),