ish. Also she drinks
only out of a special vessel, because any person who should afterwards
drink out of the same vessel would infallibly pine away and die.[223]

[Dread and seclusion of menstruous women among the Indians of North
America.]

Among most tribes of North American Indians the custom was that women in
their courses retired from the camp or the village and lived during the
time of their uncleanness in special huts or shelters which were
appropriated to their use. There they dwelt apart, eating and sleeping
by themselves, warming themselves at their own fires, and strictly
abstaining from all communications with men, who shunned them just as if
they were stricken with the plague. No article of furniture used in
these menstrual huts might be used in any other, not even the flint and
steel with which in the old days the fires were kindled. No one would
borrow a light from a woman in her seclusion. If a white man in his
ignorance asked to light his pipe at her fire, she would refuse to grant
the request, telling him that it would make his nose bleed and his head
ache, and that he would fall sick in consequence. If an Indian's wooden
pipe cracked, his friends would think that he had either lit it at one
of these polluted fires or had held some converse with a woman during
her retirement, which was esteemed a most disgraceful and wicked thing
to do. Decent men would not approach within a certain distance of a
woman at such times, and if they had to convey anything to her they
would stand some forty or fifty paces off and throw it to her.
Everything which was touched by her hands during this period was deemed
ceremonially unclean. Indeed her touch was thought to convey such
pollution that if she chanced to lay a finger on a chief's lodge or his
gun or anything else belonging to him, it would be instantly destroyed.
If she crossed the path of a hunter or a warrior, his luck for that day
at least would be gone. Were she not thus secluded, it was supposed that
the men would be attacked by diseases of various kinds, which would
prove mortal. In some tribes a woman who infringed the rules of
separation might have to answer with her life for any misfortunes that
might happen to individuals or to the tribe in consequence, as it was
supposed, of her criminal negligence. When she quitted her tent or hut
to go into retirement, the fire in it was extinguished and the ashes
thrown away outside of the village, and a new fire wa