Parents are treated in the same manner when helpless
and infirm. [Note 77 at end of para.] In 1839 I found an aged man
left to die, without fire or food, upon a high bare hill beyond the
Broughton. In 1843 I found two old women, who had been abandoned in
the same way, at the Murray, and although they were taken every care
of when discovered, they both died in about a week afterwards. No age
is prescribed for matrimony, but young men under twenty-five years
of age do not often obtain wives, there are exceptions, however,
to this: I have seen occasionally young men of seventeen or eighteen
possessing them. When wives are from thirty-five to forty years of age,
they are frequently cast off by the husbands, or are given to the
younger men in exchange for their sisters or near relatives, if such are
at their disposal.
[Note 77: "Practised by the American Indians." - Catlin, vol. i. p. 216.
"The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally
one continued series of captivity to different masters, of ghastly wounds,
of wanderings in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from
other females amongst whom she is brought a stranger by her captor; and
rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance, but it is marked
and scarred by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus wanders
several hundred miles from the home of her infancy, being carried off
successively to distant and more distant points."]
Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands or friends, in
addition to the dreadful life of drudgery, and privation, and hardship
they always have to undergo; they are frequently beaten about the head,
with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for
the most trivial offences. No one takes the part of the weak or the
injured, or ever attempts to interfere with the infliction of such severe
punishments.
Few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful
scars upon the head, or the marks of spear-wounds about the body. I have
seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have
been almost riddled with spear wounds. Upon this point Captain Grey
remarks, vol. ii. p. 249.
The menses commence to flow among the native females at an earlier age
than among Europeans, frequently beginning at about twelve; they are also
subject to many irregularities in their periodical return, arising
probably from the kind of life they lead and the nature of the diet upon
which they live. I have known cases where this irregularity has extended
to three months.
