OCR Text |
Show I; 350 THE MANDANS----DOMESTIC HABITS. privileges among these Indians. All the horses which a young man steals, or captures in war, belong to them. If an Indian returns from an expedition on horseback, and meets his sister, he will immediately alight, and give her the horse ; on the other hand, if he wishes to possess some object of value belonging to his sister, for instance, a dress, he goes and abruptly demands it, and immediately receives it; even should it be the very dress she is wearing, she will take it off at once, and give it to her brother. Prudery is not a virtue of the Indian women; they have often two, three, or more lovers : infidelity is not often punished. There was only one woman among the Mandans, a piece of whose nose was cut off, a circumstance which is very common among the Blackfeet. If an Indian elopes with a married woman, the husband whom she has abandoned avenges himself by seizing the seducer's property, his horses and other things of value, to which the latter must quietly submit. Such a woman is never taken back. If a man has the eldest daughter of a family for his wife, he has a right to all her sisters. A chief business of the young men among these Indian tribes is to try their fortune with the young maidens and the women, and this, together with their toilet, fills up the greater part of their time. They do not meet with many coy beauties. In the evening, and generally till late at night, they roam about the villages, or in the vicinity, or from one village to the other. They have a singular mode of displaying their achievements in this field, especially when they visit the women in their best dresses. On these occasions they endeavour to gain credit by the variety of their triumphs, and mark the number of conquered beauties by bundles of peeled osier twigs, painted red at the tips. These sticks are of two kinds. Most of them are from two to three feet in length, others five or six feet. The latter, being carried singly, are painted with white and red rings alternately, which indicates the number of conquests. The shorter sticks are only painted red at the tips, and every stick indicates an exploit, the number of which is often bound up into a pretty large bundle. Thick fasces of this kind are carried about by the dandies in their gallant excursions. Among the Mandans these sticks are generally quite plain ; among the Manitaries, on the contrary, there is, usually, in the middle of the bundle, one larger stick, at the end of which there is a tuft of black feathers. These feathers indicate the favourite, and the dandies tell everybody that she is the person for whom this honour is intended. (See Plate XXI. Fig. 6.) If these people have had familiar intercourse with a person who wore the white buffalo robe, a piece of skin of that colour is fastened to the stick; if she wore a red blanket, or buffalo robe, a piece of red cloth is fastened to the stick. This custom, which is well known among the Mandans and Manitaries, has not, to my knowledge, been mentioned by any traveller. They have distinct names for the several degrees of relationship. The father's brother is called father, and the mother's sister, mother; cousins are called brothers and sisters. The |