In Columbia what was most prized was the aptitude of the woman for labour, and her qualities as a beast of burden were worth to her parents a greater or less number of horses.[1]
Among the Redskins of northern California the girls were bought and sold like any other articles, and there was no thought of consulting them in the matter. The price was paid to the father, and the girl was led off simply as if it were a horse-sale. Poor suitors naturally had to give way to rich ones, and hence all the opulent old men obtained all the beautiful young women.[2] There was no nuptial ceremony. However, with the Modocs, the conclusion of the business is marked by a feast, but the newly-married couple take no part in it.
The Redskin parents do not always entirely abandon their married daughter, and if she is too ill-treated by her owner, they have the right to take her back, and then of course to sell her to some one else.[3] Socialist customs sometimes co-exist with these gross conjugal ones. The nuptial abode is often prepared by the tribe, or, as in Columbia, the friends join in paying to the father the price of the daughter.[4] The Californian suitors sometimes obtain a wife on credit; but then the man is called "half-married," and is forced to live as a slave with the parents of the girl until he has concluded the payment, for there is no essential difference between marriage by servitude and marriage by purchase. In America, as elsewhere, morality is simply the expression of habits and needs, and thus the purchase of the wife has ended by becoming an honourable thing; and among the Californian Redskins the children of a wife who has cost nothing to her husband are looked down on.[5]
The Papayos of New Mexico are not content with selling their daughters by private contract; they put them up to auction.[6] As for the inhabitants of those curious Neo-Mexican phalansteries called pueblos, as they are much more advanced than the greater part of their American
