disappointment or
quarrel between men and women are not the result of
grief, but of savage and unbounded revenge."

(Schoolcraft, V., 272.) Krauss (222) found that suicide was frequent
among the Alaskan Thlinket Indians. Men sometimes resorted to it when
they saw no other way of securing revenge, for a person who causes a
suicide is fined and punished as if he were a murderer. One woman cut
her throat because a shahman accused her of having by sorcery caused
another one's illness. A favorite mode of committing suicide is to go
out into the sea, cast away oar and rudder, and deliver themselves to
wind and waves. Sometimes they change their mind. A man, whose face
had been all scratched up by his angry wife, left home to end his
life; but after spending the night with a trader he concluded to go
home and make up the quarrel. Mrs. Eastman (48) tells of an old squaw
who wanted to hang herself because she was angry with her son; but
when, "after having doubled the strap four times to prevent its
breaking, she found herself choking, her courage gave way--she yelled
frightfully." They cut her down and in an hour or two she was quite
well again. Another squaw, aged ninety, attempted to hang herself
because the men would not allow her to go with a war-party. Her object
in wanting to go was to have the pleasure of mutilating the corpses of
enemies! Keating says that Sank men sometimes kill themselves because
they are envious of the power of others. Neill (85) records the cases
of a Dakota wife who hanged herself because her husband had flogged
her for hiding his whiskey; of a woman who hanged herself because her
son-in-law refused to give her whiskey; of an old woman who flew into
a passion and committed suicide because her pet granddaughter had been
whipped by her father.

If a storm in a tea-kettle is accepted as a true storm, then we may
infer from these suicides the existence of deep feeling and profound
despair. As a matter of fact, a savage's feelings are no deeper than a
tea-kettle, and for that very reason they boil up and overflow more
readily than if they were deeper. Loskiel tells us (74-75), that
Delaware Indians, both men and women, have committed suicide on
discovering that their spouse was unfaithful; these are the same
Indians among whom husbands used to abandon their wives when they had
babes, and wives their husbands when there were no more presents to
receive. Yet even if we admitted such feelings t