THE INDIAN OF THE NORTHWEST 33
went up and down these wild places with the same agility as sailors do on board a ship."
Lastly, let us consider the most intimate of all, the Indian family relationship. Polygamy was permitted, but was not the usual state, and was unknown among a few tribes such as the Red Fish Dinees 171 and the Yakimas. Thompson gives us a most enlightening account of polygamy more so than any of the other journalists. He ascribes the cause of it to the wife rather than to the husband ; unless she or her husband have widowed relatives who live with them in the same tent, the wife is unable to do the work when the family comes. A second wife is necessary because of the great amount of work. Then, too, friends when dying often bequeath wives to certain bosom friends who they know will take care of them in the sense of providing a living for them. Sometimes an Indian man would thus have four or five wives, willy nilly except the first ; often the burden of supporting so many was very great, and the work necessary to ward off starvation was done in a quiet spirit of heroism.
Indian children in a family were few, from two to four, due to hardships endured by mothers. Mackenzie 172 says that Indians considered the state of women in labor as among the most trifling occurrences of physical pain, and were justified in this apparent insensibility. All other testimony was to the same effect. Marriages occurred while the parties were com- paratively young. The betrothal was usually arranged and presents given by parents years before. Sometimes these betrothals were broken, and much misery and strife resulted. Most tribes of the interior esteemed chastity a virtue, viola- tion of which was punished with death. Thompson cills the Saleesh a fine race of moral Indians, the finest he had ever seen, and he was a strict judge. Alexander Henry, Junior, 178 said the same thing of the Saleesh, and he was undeniably a degenerate. Chastity was not always a virtue among some of the coast tribes, especially among the lower and slave classes.
171 Mackenzie, Voyage*: Ch. VIII. 1 73 Voyages: Vol. IL, p. 16. i?3Nw Ljht: Vol. II., p. 710.
