And if you happen to come upon Indian fishermen on your way—­they are all peaceful hereabouts—­you may get the noble red man’s opinion of the great Woman Question.  As I stood at the road-side one day I saw an Indian emerging from the woods, carrying his rifle and his pipe.  Him followed, at a respectful distance, his squaw, a little woman not bigger than a twelve-year-old boy; and she carried, first, a baby; second, three salmon, each of which weighed not less than twenty pounds; third, a wild goose, weighing six or eight pounds; finally, a huge bundle of some kind of greens.  This cumbrous and heavy load the Indian had lashed together with strong thongs, and the squaw carried it on her back, suspended by a strap which passed across her forehead.

When an Indian kills a deer he loads it on the back of his squaw to carry home.  Arrived there, he lights his pipe, and she skins and cleans the animal, cuts off a piece sufficient for dinner, lights a fire, and cooks the meat.  This done, the noble red man, who has calmly or impatiently contemplated these labors of the wife of his bosom, lays down his pipe and eats his dinner.  When he is done, the woman, who has waited at one side, sits down to hers and eats what he has left.

“Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.”  Miss Anthony and Mrs. Cady Stanton have good missionary ground among these Indians.  One wonders in what language an Indian brave courts the young squaw whom he wishes to marry; what promises he makes her; what hopes he holds out; with what enticing views of wedded bliss he lures the Indian maiden to the altar or whatever may be the Digger substitute for that piece of church furniture.  One wonders that the squaws have not long ago combined and struck for at least moderately decent treatment; that marriages have not ceased among them; that there has not arisen among the Diggers, the Pit River Indians, and all the Indian tribes, some woman capable of leading her sex in a rebellion.

But, to tell the truth, the Indian women are homely to the last degree.  “Ugly,” said an Oregonian to me, as we contemplated a company of squaws—­“ugly is too mild a word to apply to such faces;” and he was right.  Broad-faced, flat-nosed, small-eyed, unkempt, frowzy, undersized, thickset, clumsy, they have not a trace of beauty about them, either young or old.  They are just useful, nothing more; and as you look at them and at the burdens they bear, you wonder whether, when the Woman’s Rights movement has succeeded, and when women, dressed like frights in such Bloomer costume as may then be prescribed, go out to their daily toil like men, and on an equality with men—­when they have cast off the beauty which is so scornfully spoken of in the conventions, and have secured their rights—­whether they will be any better off than these squaws.  When you have thoughtfully regarded the Indian woman perhaps you will agree with Gail Hamilton that it is woman’s first duty to be useless; for it is plain that here, as in a higher civilization, when women consent to work as men, they are sure to have the hardest work and the poorest pay.