The foundation of the gentile, as of any other family life, is, as I have shown elsewhere,51 the mutual affection between kindred. In the primitive period this is especially between the children of the same mother, not so much because of the doubt of paternity as because physiologically and obviously it is the mother in whom is formed and from whom alone proceeds the living being. Why this affection does not lead to the marriage of uterine brothers and sisters—why, on the contrary, there is almost everywhere a horror of such unions—it is not easy to explain. Darwin suggests that the chief stimulus to the sexual feelings is novelty, and that the familiarity of the same household breeds indifference; and we may accept this in default of a completer explanation. Certainly, as Moritz Wagner has forcibly shown,52 this repugnance to incest is widespread in the species, and has exerted a powerful influence on its physical history.
In America marriage was usually by purchase, and was polygamous. In a number of tribes the purchase of the eldest daughter gave the man a right to buy all the younger daughters, as they reached nubile age. The selection of a wife was often regarded as the concern of the gens rather than of the individual. Among the Hurons, for instance, the old women of the gens selected the wives for the young men, “and united them with painful uniformity to women several years their senior.”53 Some control in this direction was very usual, and was necessary to prevent consanguine unions.
The position of women in the social scheme of the American tribes has often been portrayed in darker colors than the truth admits. As in one sense a chattel, she had few rights against her husband; but some she had, and as they were those of her gens, these he was forced to respect. Where maternal descent prevailed, it was she who owned the property of the pair, and could control it as she listed. It passed at her death to her blood relatives and not to his. Her children looked upon her as their parent, but esteemed their father as no relation whatever. An unusually kind and intelligent Kolosch Indian was chided by a missionary for allowing his father to suffer for food. “Let him go to his own people,” replied the Kolosch, “they should look after him.” He did not regard a man as in any way related or bound to his paternal parent.
The women thus made good for themselves the power of property, and this could not but compel respect. Their lives were rated at equal or greater value than a man’s;54 instances are frequent where their voice was important in the council of the tribe; nor was it very rare to see them attaining the dignity of head chief. That their life was toilsome is true; but its dangers were less, and its fatigues scarce greater, than that of their husbands. Nor was it more onerous than that of the peasant women of Europe to-day.
Such domestic arrangements seem strange to us, but they did not exclude either conjugal or parental affection. On the contrary, the presence of such sentiments has impressed travelers among even the rudest tribes, as the Eskimos, the Yumas and the hordes of the Chaco;55 and Miss Alice Fletcher tells me she has constantly noted such traits in her studies of life in the wigwam. The husband and father will often undergo severe privations for his wife and children.
The error to which I have referred of classifying the natives into wild and civilized tribes has led to regarding the one as agricultural, and the other as depending exclusively on hunting and fishing. Such was not the case. The Americans were inclined to agriculture in nearly all regions where it was profitable. Maize was cultivated both north and south to the geographical extent of its productive culture; beans, squashes, pumpkins, and potatoes were assiduously planted in suitable latitudes; the banana was rapidly accepted after its introduction, even by tribes who had never seen a white man; cotton for clothing and tobacco as a luxury were staple crops among very diverse stocks. The Iroquois, Algonkins and Muskokis of the Atlantic coast tilled large fields, and depended upon their harvests for the winter supplies. The difference between them and the sedentary Mexicans or Mayas in this respect was not so wide as has been represented.
It was a serious misfortune for the Americans that the fauna of the continent did not offer any animal which could be domesticated for a beast of draft or burden. There is no doubt but that the horse existed on the continent contemporaneously with post-glacial man; and some palæontologists are of opinion that the European and Asian horses were descendants of the American species;56 but for some mysterious reason the genus became extinct in the New World many generations before its discovery. The dog, domesticated from various species of the wolf, was a poor substitute. He aided somewhat in hunting, and in the north as an animal of draft; but was of little general utility. The lama in the Cordilleras in South America was prized principally for his hair, and was also utilized for burdens, but not for draft.57 Nor were there any animals which could be domesticated for food or milk. The buffalo is hopelessly wild, and the peccary, or American hog, is irreclaimable in its love of freedom.
We may say that America everywhere at the time of the discovery was in the polished stone age. It had progressed beyond the rough stone stage, but had not reached that of metals. True that copper, bronze and the precious ores were widely employed for a variety of purposes; but flaked and polished stone remained in all parts the principal material selected to produce a cutting edge. Probably three-fourths of the tribes were acquainted with the art of tempering and moulding clay into utensils or figures; but the potter’s wheel and the process of glazing had not been invented. Towns and buildings were laid out with a correct eye, and stone structures of symmetry were erected; but the square, the compass, the plumb line, and the scales and weight had not been devised.58 Commodious boats of hollowed logs or of bark, or of skins stretched on frames, were in use on most of the waters; but the inventive faculties of their makers had not reached to either oars or sails to propel them,59 the paddle alone being relied upon, and the rudder to guide them was unknown. The love of music is strong in the race, and wind instruments and those sounded by percussion had been devised in considerable variety; but the highest type, the string instruments, were beyond their capacity of invention.
The religious sentiment was awake in all the tribes of the continent, and even the lowest had myths and propitiatory rites by which to explain to themselves and cajole to their own interests the unknown powers which order the destiny of human life. There is a singular similarity in these myths. The leading cycle of them usually describes the exploits of a divine man, the national hero-god, who was the first instructor, often the ancestor of the tribe, and the creator of the visible universe. His later history is related with singular parallelism by tribes in Canada and Mexico, in Yucatan and Uruguay. After teaching his people the arts of life and the sacred rites, the forms of their social organizations and the medicinal powers of plants, he left in some mysterious way, not by the event of death, but for a journey, or by rising to the sky; leaving with them, however, his promise to return at some future day, when they should need him, and he should again become their guide and protector.
The interpretation of this fundamental American myth, which I have shown to be the typical religious legend of the race,60 offers an interesting problem. Comparing it with others of similar form in Egyptian and Aryac antiquity, I have explained it as based on the natural phenomenon of the returning and departing day, as, if not a solar, at least a light myth, developed through personification and etymologic processes. Often the hero-god is identified with some animal, as the raven, the rabbit, the wolf or coyote, the jaguar, the toucan, etc. Possibly in these we may recognize the “totemic animal” after which the gens was named; but in most cases the identification cannot be made.
The hero-god is usually connected with tales of a creation and a flood, or other destruction of the world. These cosmogonical and cataclysmal myths belong together, and arise from the same