Marriage among all Indian tribes is primarily by legal appointment, as the young woman receives a husband from some other prescribed clan or clans, and the elders of the clan, with certain exceptions, control these marriages, and personal choice has little to do with the affair.  When marriages are proposed, the virtues and industry of the candidates, and more than all, their ability to properly live as married couples and to supply the clan or tribe with a due amount of subsistence, are discussed long and earnestly, and the young man or maiden who fails in this respect may fail in securing an eligible and desirable match.  And these motives are constantly presented to the savage youth.

A simple democracy exists among these people, and they have a variety of tribal offices to fill.  In this way the men of the tribe are graded, and they pass from grade to grade by a selection practically made by the people.  And this leads to a constant discussion of the virtues and abilities of all the male members of the clan, from boyhood to old age.  He is most successful in obtaining clan and tribal promotion who is most useful to the clan and the tribe.  In this manner all of the ambitious are stimulated, and this incentive to industry is very great.

When brought into close contact with the Indian, and into intimate acquaintance with his language, customs, and religious ideas, there is a curious tendency observable in students to overlook aboriginal vices and to exaggerate aboriginal virtues.  It seems to be forgotten that after all the Indian is a savage, with the characteristics of a savage, and he is exalted even above the civilized man.  The tendency is exactly the reverse of what it is in the case of those who view the Indian at a distance and with no precise knowledge of any of his characteristics.  In the estimation of such persons the Indian’s vices greatly outweigh his virtues; his language is a gibberish, his methods of war cowardly, his ideas of religion utterly puerile.

The above tendencies are accentuated in the attempt to estimate the comparative worth and position of individual tribes.  No being is more patriotic than the Indian.  He believes himself to be the result of a special creation by a partial deity and holds that his is the one favored race.  The name by which the tribes distinguish themselves from other tribes indicates the further conviction that, as the Indian is above all created things, so in like manner each particular tribe is exalted above all others.  “Men of men” is the literal translation of one name; “the only men” of another, and so on through the whole category.  A long residence with any one tribe frequently inoculates the student with the same patriotic spirit.  Bringing to his study of a particular tribe an inadequate conception of Indian attainments and a low impression of their moral and intellectual plane, the constant recital of its virtues, the bravery and prowess of its men