Page:Cathlamet On the Columbia.djvu/91

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE SWEAT HOUSE
71

When she was fifteen or sixteen years old, after the fashion of the young girls of her race, she fled from the house with her lover, a most unworthy scamp, and so began the life which ended a few years later in all that was left of poor Lucy, a mangled, battered body, being gathered up from the floor of the madhouse and buried. The "madhouse" of the Lower Columbia and of Puget Sound was not in pioneer days a lunatic asylum or a female seminary, only a judicious combination of the two with unlimited whisky thrown in.

The Indian woman of the Northwest Pacific Coast was not a flower-garlanded maiden or a frivolous French soubrette or Light o' Love, as so many Indian romances depict her. There was in her from childhood up a certain gravity and sober earnestness which was the natural result

71