[224] Miss Alice Fletcher gives in the Journal of the American Folk Lore Society (1889, 219-26) an amusing instance of how far a present-day Omaha girl may go in resenting a man’s unwelcome advances.  A faint-hearted lover had sent a friend as go-between to ask for the girl’s favor.  As he finished his speech the girl looked at him with flashing eyes and said:  “I’ll have nothing to do with your friend or you either.”  The young man hesitated a moment, as if about to repeat his request, when a dangerous wave of her water-bucket made him leap to one side to escape a deluge.

[225] Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1891, p. 545.

[226] How California marriages were made in the good old times we may see from the account in Hakluyt’s Collection of Early Voyages, 1810, III., 513: 

“If any man had a daughter to marry he went where the people kept, and said, I have a daughter to marry, is there any man here that would have her?  And if there were any that would have her, he answered that he would have her, and so the marriage was made.”

[227] Smithsonian Rep., 1885, Pt.  II., p. 71.

[228] Schoolcraft, IV., 224; Powers, 221; Waitz, IV., 132; Azara (Voyages), II., 94; von Martius, I.,412, 509.

[229] A table relating to sixty-five North American Indian girls given in Ploss, I., 476, shows that all but eight of them had their first child before the end of the fifteenth year; the largest number (eighteen), having it in the fourteenth.

[230] See John Fiske’s Discovery of America, I., 21, and E.J.  Payne’s History of the New World.

[231] Giacomo Bove, Patagonia.  Cf. Ploss, I., 476; Globus, 1883, 158.  Hyades’s Mission Scientifique du Cap Horn, VII., 377.

[232] Equally inconclusive is Westermarck’s reference (216) to what Azara says regarding the Guanas.  Azara expressly informs us that, as summed up by Darwin (D.M., Chap.  XIX.) among the Guanas “the men rarely marry till twenty years old or more, as before that age they cannot conquer their rivals.”  Where girls are literally wrestled for, they have, of course, no choice.

[233] Keating says (II., 153) that among the Chippewas “where the antipathy is great, one or the other elopes from the lodge.”

[234] Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropologists, 1894, 153-57.

[235] Laurence Oliphant realized the absurdity of attributing such tales to Indians, assigning to them feelings and motives like our own.  He kindly supplies some further details, insisting that the girl was told to “return and all would be forgiven;” that the “fast young Sioux hunter” whom Winona wanted to marry ("her heart could never be another’s"), had “no means of his own.”  He is believed to have been “utterly disconsolate at the time,” and “subsequently to have married an heiress.”  See the amusing satire in his Minnesota, 287-89.