In his _Early Travels and Adventures_ (41-43), he
pokes fun at the romantic ideas that poets and novelists have given
about Indian maidens and their loves, and then tells in unadorned
terms what he saw with his own eyes--Indian girls with "coarse black
hair, low foreheads, blazing coal-black eyes, faces of a dirty, greasy
color"--and the Indian young man whose romance of wooing is comprised
in the question, "How much is she worth?'"
One of the keenest and most careful observers of Indian life, the
naturalist Bates, after living several years among the natives of
Brazil, wrote concerning them (293):
"Their phlegmatic, apathetic temperament; coldness of desire
and deadness of feeling; want of curiosity and slowness of
intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninteresting
companions anywhere. Their imagination is of a dull-gloomy
quality, and they seemed never to be stirred by the
emotions--love, pity, admiration, fear, wonder, joy,
enthusiasm. These are characteristics of the whole race,"
In Schoolcraft (V., 272) we read regarding the Creeks that "the
refined passion of love is unknown to any of them, although they apply
the word _love_ to rum or anything else they wish to be possessed of."
A capital definition of Indian love! I have already quoted the opinion
of the eminent expert George Gibbs that the attachment existing among
the Indians of Oregon and Washington, though it is sometimes so strong
as to lead to suicide, is too sensual to deserve the name of love.
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