Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/192

172 wasted no commiseration on such tyros, well knowing that there was but one way of permanent relief, and that that would come through endurance and patient practice. Sometimes, when there was but a thin coating of ice over the snow, which by yielding lacerated the flesh of travellers — man or beast — by edges sharp as glass, it was usual to bind strips of skin or fur round the legs of the dogs, and thus give them shoes.

Little needs to be added to what has been already said about the wigwams or lodges of the aborigines. These, where they were constructed for anything like permanency of habitation, might be made comfortable, bating only the annoyances of smoke, vermin, and untidiness, — which, however, to the Indian were hardly an abatement of comfort. When a war-party or the necessity of hunting for daily supplies did not call the master of the lodge away, but left him an interval of domestic leisure, he divided his time between eating, sleeping, and working upon his simple tackle and implements. Where there was a group of such lodges in a village, the men would have their coteries by themselves; while the squaws, when not engaged upon the family food or apparel, would find a congenial resource in gossip. The practice of polygamy, though universally allowable, seems to have been indulged in only in the small minority of households. There was nothing to prevent a man from having as many wives as he had means to purchase from their parents, and was able to maintain. The usual risks incidental to married life, especially where there were duplicated or multiplied demands upon the care and attention of a husband, were of course in some instances realized. But all testimony accords in assuring us that there was no more, if not really less, of discord in an Indian lodge, even with this provocative occasion for it, than in the homes of all the degrees of civilized people.

Doubtless there were seasons, especially in the northern regions of the country, when in the grip of a lengthened