Page:The Souvenir of Western Women.djvu/172

164 them still, but the love that prompts it is wholly unlike the old slavish fear. They work as hard, but with a new motive.

The Indian woman now knows the children playing about her door will not be torn from her". In heathenism time if a woman had no children, or her children died, it was considered a sufficient reason for putting her away for a younger, stronger woman. This is not allowed by Christian Indians. The only living child of a Christian chief had no children. He wanted to follow the old custom and put his wife away, but his father would not permit it. He said: "If God thought you could take care of children He would have given them to you. Keep the wife you've got."

An old woman, talking about her family, said: "I do not know why my children died." Then she added: "Perhaps they were tired." She was as good a shot as her husband, and day after day she trudged by his side in the chase with her babe on her back. In the evening she prepared the campfire and cooked while he rested. Her work was varied. Sometimes she examined the traps and skinned the animals she found therein; at other times she laid low the prowling bear or lordly deer and prepared their hides for market. Altogether it was a "hard life." When her babe, sickened through its mother's incessant toil, fell asleep, it was she who stripped the birch of its covering and in the soft fold of the birch bark laid her little one, and buried it in a grave dug by her own hands. She would tell you her husband was not unkind; it was only the custom. Her mother heart was wrung when she laid it away. "It will be mine, mine, mine there." she said, pointing her long, bony arms upward.

Christianity means the breaking up of old customs and the bringing in of new duties. When an Indian woman ceases to do a man's work, she learns the household arts. It is an interesting sight to see her seated on the ground with a child on each side whom she is teaching to sew. Their Christianity may be crude, but it leads to a new life, and the brightness of this new life is vivid when contrasted with the impenetrable gloom of the old.

Mrs. Jane Gage Goodhue Thomas contributes this interesting incident of crossing the plains: "The road was strewn for hundreds of miles with discarded things from overloaded wagons—food, bedding, wearing apparel, even trunks full of ball dresses, books, furniture, machinery—everything, in fact, that could be mentioned. On the Platte River, where we camped one evening, we noticed a white tent in the bushes near by. Upon examination there was found pinned to the tent a note which read, 'Died of cholera.' Inside was a neatly-made bed and a trunk full of woman's clothing. Beside the tent was the grave. The dead were buried by putting in a layer of earth and then a layer of prickly pear, alternately, to prevent wild animals from digging the bodies up. At Fort Laramie the wagons were searched and all liquors confiscated."