The Piutes of the Pacific slope, like some eastern Indians, appear to have indulged in a form of nocturnal courtship strikingly resembling that of the Dyaks of Borneo.  The Indian woman (Sarah W. Hopkins) who wrote Life Among the Piutes declares that the lover never speaks to his chosen one,

“but endeavors to attract her attention by showing his horsemanship, etc.  As he knows that she sleeps next to her grandmother in the lodge, he enters in full dress after the family has retired for the night, and seats himself at her feet.  If she is not awake, her grandmother wakes her.  He does not even speak to the young woman or grandmother, but when the young woman wishes him to go away, she rises and goes and lies down by the side of her mother.  He then leaves as silently as he came in.  This goes on sometimes for a year or longer if the young woman has not made up her mind.  She is never forced by her parents to marry against her wishes.”

Courtship among the Nishinam Indians of California is thus described by Powers (317): 

“The Nishinam may be said to set up and dissolve the conjugal estate almost as easily as do the brute beasts.  No stipulated payment is made for the wife.  A man seeking to become a son-in-law is bound to cater (ye-lin) or make presents to the family, which is to say, he will come along some day with a deer on his shoulder, perhaps fling it off on the ground before the wigwam, and go his way without a single word being spoken.  Some days later he may bring along a brace of hare or a ham of grizzly-bear meat, or some fish, or a string of ha-wok [shell money].  He continues to make these presents for awhile, and if he is not acceptable to the girl and her parents they return him an equivalent for each present (to return his gift would be grossly insulting); but if he finds favor in her eyes they are quietly appropriated, and in due course of time he comes and leads her away, or comes to live at her house.”

Belden remarks (301) that a Sioux seldom gets the girl he wants to marry to love him.  He simply buys her of her parents, and as for the girl, after being informed that she has been sold

“she immediately packs up her little keepsakes and trinkets, and without exhibiting any emotion, such as is common to white girls, leaves her home, and goes to the lodge of her master,”

where she is henceforth his wife and “willing slave.”  Among the Blackfoot Indians, too, there was apparently no form of courtship, and young men seldom spoke to girls unless they were relatives. (Grinnell, 216.) It was a common thing among these Indians for a youth and a girl not to know about each other until they were informed of their impending marriage.