Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/152



CHAPTER 9

SQUAw WIVES AND SQUAw MEN

I love thee, I love but thee! With a love that shall not die Till the sum grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book onfold! bayard Taylor

OF INDIAN women the first Ruth amid the alien corn was Powhatan’s daughter. Pocahontas was the first squaw wife and John Rolfe was the first squaw man. She became what modern newspaper reporters would call a social registerite and he gained rather than lost caste in the polite gregariousness of his day. It seemed a charming and appropriate marriage then, and, due to the pretty reports on it by generations of school historians, it has seemed so ever since. Be cause of the enchanting pages of those old writers, many a boy in wistful reverie has pictured that Indian girl stealing forth once more from the wigwams of her people to the gates of Jamestown; and this time he was the one for whom she asked, it was upon him she smiled—and these anachronistic longings repeated through a succession of dreaming boyhoods would have done nothing less than transform grandmother, mother and wife, all into Pocahontases. Some who were nourished on this romantic delicacy in the little school texts, will no doubt find it a harshness to their sensi bilities, a rude outspokenness, to hear John Rolfe called a squaw man. It shows that a particularized impression, as wide and long-standing as this one has been, will not always mold public opinion t... s pattern... this cas... has been snugly harbored along with general views exactly