Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/289

KROEBER] GAMES OF THE CALIFORNIA INDIANS 277 guessed at. This procedure is suggestive of a Chinese form of gambling, but the geographical compactness of the area over which this sub-type of guessing game is found suggests its distribution from a native origin.

The "four-stick game" is another local variety, which has been found only among the Lutuami, Achomawi, Northern Paiute, and Washo—all at least partly Californian—and possibly the Chinook of Oregon. Among most or all of these tribes it does not replace but occurs by the side of the usual guessing game. Two of the sticks are heavy, two short and thin. The guessing is for the order in which they are grouped under a basket or mat.

When one reflects that in reality chance is no greater factor in the standard forms of the guessing game than in the American national card game, the decisive element being the match of character against character, the fascination which the game exercises on the Indian's mind is easy to understand.

The economic basis of life and the estimation of the purpose of wealth among the Indians are so different from our own, that gambling, instead of incurring odium, was not only sanctioned but approved. Nevertheless the underlying human similarity of the emotional processes connected with the practice is revealed in a most interesting way by the common belief in a connection between success at play and in relations with the opposite sex: lucky in love, the reverse at cards, and vice versa, is our proverbial superstition. But the Indian, regarding, like the ancient Hebrews and ourselves, sexual affairs as normally destructive of supernatural or magical potency, draws in a particular case an opposite inference. Two Yokuts myths relate how the favorite hero of these tales, the prairie-falcon, was uniformly successful in winning all stakes, in the one case at shinny, in the other with the hoop and poles, until the coyote was induced to disguise himself as the victor and thus take advantage of the latter's wife. As soon as this misfortune, although unknown, befell the falcon, his luck turned, until he lost everything. The modern gambler would perhaps expect the opposite event.