“Anyone who has ever been in an encampment of wild Indians and has had the misfortune to witness the delight the children take in torturing little animals will admit that the Indian’s love of cruelty for cruelty’s sake cannot possibly be exaggerated.  The young are so trained that when old they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting pain in its most appalling form.  Among the most brutal white borderers a man would be instantly lynched if he practiced on any creature the fiendish torture which in the Indian camp either attracts no notice at all, or else excites merely laughter.”

(See also Roosevelt’s remarks—­87, 831, 335 on Helen Hunt Jackson’s Century of Dishonor.) The Indian was much wronged by unprincipled agents and others, but the border ruffians served him only as he served others of his race, the weaker being always driven out.  Nor was there any real sympathy within the tribes themselves.  “These people,” wrote the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune (VI., 245), “are very little moved by compassion.  They give a sick person food and drink, but show otherwise no concern for him; to coax him with love and tenderness is a language which they do not understand.  When he refuses food they kill him, partly to relieve him from suffering, partly to relieve themselves of the trouble of taking him with them when they go to some other place.”

[215] Smithsonian Rep., 1885, Pt.  II., 108.

[216] The humor of Catlin’s assertions becomes more obvious still when we read how readily Indians dissolve their marriages, through love of change, caprice, etc.  See cases in Westermarck, 518.

[217] Cited by Schoolcraft, Oneota, 57.

[218] Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Philadelphia, 1819.

[219] Journ.  Anthrop.  Inst., 1884, p. 251.

[220] Brinton’s Library of Aborig.  Amer.  Lit., II, 65.

[221] The only way the women could secure any consideration was by overawing the men.  Thus Southey says (III., 411) regarding the Abipones that the old women “were obdurate in retaining superstitions that rendered them objects of fear, and therefore of respect.”  Smith in his book on the Araucanians of Chili, notes (238), that besides the usual medicine men there was an occasional woman “who had acquired the most unbounded influence by shrewdness, joined to a hideous personal appearance and a certain mystery with which she was invested.”

[222] As when he says, “The Atkha Aleuts occasionally betrothed their children to each other, but the marriage was held to be binding only after the birth of a child.”  What evidence of choice is there here?

[223] U.S.  Geogr. and Geol.  Survey of Colorado, etc., 1876, p. 465.