to coax him with love and tenderness is
a language which they do not understand. When he refuses food they
kill him, partly to relieve him from suffering, partly to relieve
themselves of the trouble of taking him with them when they go to some
other place."

[215] _Smithsonian Rep._, 1885, Pt. II., 108.

[216] The humor of Catlin's assertions becomes more obvious still when
we read how readily Indians dissolve their marriages, through love of
change, caprice, etc. See cases in Westermarck, 518.

[217] Cited by Schoolcraft, _Oneota_, 57.

[218] _Transactions of the American Philosophical Society._
Philadelphia, 1819.

[219] _Journ. Anthrop. Inst._, 1884, p. 251.

[220] Brinton's _Library of Aborig. Amer. Lit._, II, 65.

[221] The only way the women could secure any consideration was by
overawing the men. Thus Southey says (III., 411) regarding the
Abipones that the old women "were obdurate in retaining superstitions
that rendered them objects of fear, and therefore of respect." Smith
in his book on the Araucanians of Chili, notes (238), that besides the
usual medicine men there was an occasional woman "who had acquired the
most unbounded influence by shrewdness, joined to a hideous personal
appearance and a certain mystery with which she was invested."

[222] As when he says, "The Atkha Aleuts occasionally betrothed their
children to each other, but the marriage was held to be binding only
after the birth of a child." What evidence of choice is there here?

[223] _U.S. Geogr. and Geol. Survey of Colorado,_ etc., 1876, p. 465.

[224] Miss Alice Fletcher gives in the _Journal of the American Folk
Lore Society_ (1889, 219-26) an amusing instance of how far a
present-day Omaha girl may go in resenting a man's unwelcome advances.
A faint-hearted lover had sent a friend as go-between to ask for the
girl's favor. As he finished his speech the girl looked at him with
flashing eyes and said: "I'll have nothing to do with your friend or
you either." The young man hesitated a moment, as if about to repeat
his request, when a dangerous wave of her water-bucket made him leap
to one side to escape a deluge.

[225] _Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie,_ 1891, p. 545.

[226] How California marriages were made in the good old times we may
see from the account in Hakluyt's _Collection of Early Voyages_, 1810,
III., 513:

"If any man had a daughter to marry he went where the people
kept, and said, I have a daughter to mar