Besides the atrocious punishments inflicted on women who forgot their
role as private property, some of the Indians had other ways of
intimidating them, while reserving for themselves the right to do as
they pleased. Powers relates (156-61) that, among the California
Indians in general,
"there is scarcely such an attribute known as virtue or
chastity in either sex before marriage. Up to the time
when they enter matrimony most of the young women are a
kind of _femmes incomprises_, the common property of
the tribe; and after they have once taken on themselves
the marriage covenant, simple as it is, they are
guarded with a Turkish jealousy, for even the married
women are not such models as Mrs. Ford.... The one
great burden of the harangues delivered by the
venerable peace-chief on solemn occasions is the
necessity and excellence of _female_ virtue; all the
terrors of superstitious sanction and the direst
threats of the great prophet are levelled at
unchastity, and all the most dreadful calamities and
pains of a future state are hung suspended over the
heads of those who are persistently lascivious. All the
devices that savage cunning can invent, all the
mysterious masquerading horrors of devil-raising, all
the secret sorceries, the frightful apparitions and
bugbears, which can be supposed effectual in terrifying
women into virtue and preventing smock treason, are
resorted to by the Pomo leaders."
Among these Pomo Indians, and Californian tribes almost universally
(406), there existed secret societies whose simple purpose was to
conjure up infernal terrors and render each other assistance in
keeping their women in subjection. A special meeting-house was
constructed for this purpose, in which these secret women-tamers held
a grand devil-dance once in seven years, twenty or thirty men daubing
themselves with barbaric paint and putting vessels of pitch on their
heads. At night they rushed down from the mountains with these vessels
of pitch flaming on their heads, and making a terrible noise. The
squaws fled for dear life; hundreds of them clung screaming and
fainting to their valorous protectors. Then the chief took a
rattlesnake from which the fangs had been extracted, brandished it
into the faces of the shuddering women, and threatened them with dire
things if they did not live lives of chastity, industry, and
obedience, until some of the terrified squaws shrieked aloud and fell
swooning upon the ground.