Here we have seven love-stories as romantic as you please and full of
sentimental touches. Do they not disprove my theory that uncivilized
races are incapable of feeling sentimental love? Some think they do,
and Waitz is not the only anthropologist who has accepted such stories
as proof that human nature, as far as love is concerned, is the same
under all circumstances. The above tales are taken from the books of a
man who spent much of his life among Indians and issued a number of
works about them, one of which, in six volumes, was published under
the auspices of the United States Government. This expert--Henry R.
Schoolcraft--was member of so many learned societies that it takes
twelve lines of small type to print them all. Moreover, he expressly
assures us[196] that "the value of these traditionary stories appears
to depend very much upon their being left, as nearly as possible, in
their original forms of thought and expression," the obvious inference
being an assurance that he has so left them; and he adds that in the
collection and translation of these stories he enjoyed the great
advantages of seventeen years' life as executive officer for the
tribes, and a knowledge of their languages.
And now, having given the enemy's battle-ship every possible
advantage, the reader will allow me to bring on my little
torpedo-boat. In the first place Schoolcraft mentions (_A.R_., I., 56)
twelve persons, six of them women, who helped him collect and
interpret the material of the tales united in his volumes; but he does
not tell us whether all or any of these collectors acted on the
principle that these stories could claim absolutely no _scientific_
value unless they were verbatim reports of aboriginal tales, _without
any additions and sentimental embroideries by the compilers_. This
omission alone is fatal to the whole collection, reducing it to the
value of a mere fairy book for the entertainment of children, and
allowing us to make no inferences from it regarding the quality and
expression of an Indian's love.
Schoolcraft stands convicted by his own action. When I read his tales
for the first time I came across numerous sentences and sentiments
which I knew from my own experience among Indians were utterly foreign
to Indian modes of thought and feeling, and which they could no more
have uttered than they could have penned Longfellow's _Hiawatha_, or
the essays of Emerson. In the stories of "The Red Lover," "The Buffalo
King," and "The Haunted Grove,"[197] I have italicized a few of these
suspicious passages. To take the last-named tale first, it is absurd
to speak of Indian "fairies who love romantic scenes," or of a girl
romantically sitting on a rocky promontory,[198] or "gathering strange
flowers;" for Indians have no conception of the romantic side of
nature--of scenery for its own sake. To them a tree is simply a grouse
perch, or a source of fire-wood; a lake, a fish-pond, a mountain, the
dreaded abode of evil spirits. In the tale of the "Buffalo King" we
read of the chief doing a number of things to win the affection of the
refractory bride--telling the others not to displease her, giving her
"the seat of honor," and going so far as to fast himself, whereas in
real life, under such circumstances, he would have curtly clubbed the
stolen bride into submission. In the tale of the "Red Lover" the girl
is admired for her "slender form," whereas a real Indian values a
woman in proportion to her weight and rotundity. Indians do not make
"protestations of inviolable attachment," or "pledge vows of mutual
fidelity," like the lovers of our fashionable novels. As Charles A.
Leland remarks of the same race of Indians (85), "When an Indian seeks
a wife, he or his mutual friend makes no great ado about it, but
utters two words which tell the whole story." But there is no need of
citing other authors, for Schoolcraft, as I have just intimated,
stands convicted by his own action. In the second edition of his
_Algic Researches_, which appeared after an interval of seventeen
years and received the title of _The Myth of Hiawatha and other Oral
Legends of the North American Indians_, he seemed to remember what he
wrote in the preface of the first regarding these stories, "that in
the original there is no attempt at ornament," so he removed nearly
all of the romantic embroideries, like those I have italicized and
commented on, and also relegated the majority of his ludicrously
sentimental interspersed poems to the appendix. In the preface to
_Hiawatha_, he refers in connection with some of these verses to "the
poetic use of aboriginal ideas." Now, a man has a perfect right to
make such "poetic use" of "aboriginal ideas," but not when he has led
his readers to believe that he is telling these stories "as nearly as
possible in their original forms of thought and expression." It is
very much as if Edward MacDowell had published the several movements
of his Indian Suite as being, not only in their ideas, but in their
(modern European) harmonies and orchestration, a faithful transcript
of aboriginal Indian music. Schoolcraft's procedure, in other words,
amounts to a sort of Ossianic mystification; and unfortunately he has
had not a few imitators, to the confusion of comparative psychologists
and students of the evolution of love.
It is a great pity that Schoolcraft, with his valuable opportunities
for ethnological research, should not have added a critical attitude
and a habit of accuracy to his great industry. The historian Parkman,
a model observer and scholar, described Schoolcraft's volumes on the
Indian Tribes of the United States as
"a singularly crude and illiterate production, stuffed with
blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page
of a striking unfitness for historical or scientific
inquiry."[199]