stories, artfully
sentimentalized at one end and expurgated at the other, are advanced
as proofs that a savage Indian's love is just as refined as that of a
civilized Christian! What Indian stories really are, the reader, if he
can stomach such things, may find out for himself by consulting the
marvellously copious and almost phonographically accurate collection
of native tales which another of our most eminent anthropologists, Dr.
Franz Boas, has printed.[200] And it must be borne in mind that these
stories are not the secret gossip of vulgar men alone by themselves,
but are national tales with which children of both sexes become
familiar from their earliest years. As Colonel Dodge remarks (213): it
is customary for as many as a dozen persons of both sexes to live in
one room, hence there is an entire lack of privacy, either in word or
act. "It is a wonder," says Powers (271), "that children grow up with
any virtue whatever, for the conversation of their elders in their
presence is often of the filthiest description." "One thing seems to
me more than intolerable," wrote the French missionary Le Jeune in
1632 (_Jesuit Relations_, V., 169).

"It is their living together promiscuously, girls,
women, men, and boys, in a smoky hole. And the more
progress one makes in the knowledge of the language,
the more vile things one hears.... I did not think that
the mouth of the savage was so foul as I notice it is
every day."

Elsewhere (VI., 263) the same missionary says:

"Their lips are constantly foul with these obscenities;
and it is the same with the little children.... The
older women go almost naked, the girls and young women
are _very modestly clad_; but, among themselves, their
language has the foul odor of the sewers."

Of the Pennsylvania Indians Colonel James Smith (who had lived among
them as a captive) wrote (140): "The squaws are generally very
immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men
to the blush."

DECEPTIVE MODESTY

The late Dr. Brinton shot wide off the mark when he wrote (_R. and
P._, 59) that even among the lower races the sentiment of modesty "is
never absent." With some American Indians, as in the races of other
parts of the world, there is often not even the appearance of modesty.
Many of the Southern Indians in North America and others in Central
and South America wear no clothes at all, and their actions are as