uttural tones of
the men and the shrill voices of the squaws were intermingled. Around
the fires there were endless gossiping, story-telling, and jesting.
Jokes, by no means delicate and decidedly personal, provoked uproarious
laughter, in which the victim commonly joined.

A village, composed of a cluster of such abodes standing without any
order and enclosed by a stockade, was, at times, the scene of almost
{40} endless merry-making. Now it was a big feast; now a game of
chance played by two large parties matched against each other, while
the lodge was crowded almost to suffocation by eager spectators; now a
dance, of the peculiar Indian kind; now some solemn ceremony to
propitiate the spirits who were supposed to rule the weather, the
crops, the hunting, and all the interests of barbarian life.

At all times there was endless visiting from lodge to lodge.
Hospitality was universal. Let a visitor come in, and it would have
been the height of rudeness not to set food before him. To refuse it
would have been equally an offence against good manners. Only an
Indian stomach was equal to the constant round of eating. White men
often found themselves seriously embarrassed between their desire not
to offend their hosts and their own repugnance to viands which could
not tempt a civilized man who was not famished.

It seems strange to think of the women as both the drudges and the
rulers of the lodge. Yet such they were. This fact arose from the
circumstance already mentioned, that descent was counted, not through
the fathers, but through the mothers. The home and the children were
{41} the wife's, not the husband's. There she lived, surrounded by her
female relatives, whereas he had come from another clan. If he proved
lazy or incompetent to do his full share of providing, let the women
unite against him, and out he must go, while the wife remained.

The community idea, which we have seen to be the key to Indian social
life, showed itself in universal helpfulness. Ferocious and pitiless
as these people were toward their enemies, the women even more
ingeniously cruel than the men, nothing could exceed the cheerful
spirit with which, in their own rough way, they bore one another's
burdens. It filled the French missionaries with admiration, and they
frequently tell us how, if a lodge was accidentally burned, the whole
village turned out to help rebuild it; or how, if children were left
orphans, they were quickly