Schoolcraft relates a story of an Indian girl who saved her aged
father's life by carrying him on her back to the new camping-place
(_Oneota,_ 88). Now Schoolcraft is not a witness on whom one can rely
safely, and his case could be accepted as an illustration of an
aboriginal trait only if it had been shown that the girl in question
had never been subject to missionary influences. Nevertheless, such an
act of filial devotion may well have occurred on the part of a woman.
It was in a woman's heart that human sympathy was first born
--together with her child. The helpless infant could not have survived
without her sympathetic care, hence there was an important use for
womanly sympathy which caused it to survive and grow, while man,
immersed in wars and selfish struggles, remained hard of heart and
knew not tenderness.
Yet in woman, too, the growth of sympathy was painfully slow. The
practice of infanticide, for selfish reasons, was, as we shall see in
later chapters, horribly prevalent among many of the lower races, and
even where the young were tenderly reared, the feeling toward them was
hardly what we call affection--a conscious, enduring devotion--but a
sort of animal instinct which is shared by tigers and other fierce and
cruel animals, and which endures but a short time. In Agassiz's book
on Brazil we read (373), that the Indians "are cold in their family
affections; and though the mothers are very fond of their babies, they
seem comparatively indifferent to them as they grow up." As an
illustration of this trait Agassiz mentions a sight he witnessed one
day. A child who was to be taken far away to Rio stood on the deck
crying, "while the whole family put off in a canoe, talking and
laughing gaily, without showing him the least sympathy."