An excellent test of the Indian's capacity for refined amorous feeling
may be found in his attitude toward personal beauty. Does he admire
real beauty, and does it decide his choice of a mate? That there are
good-looking girls among some Indian tribes cannot be denied, though
they are exceptional. Among the thousands of squaws I have seen on the
Pacific Slope, from Mexico to Alaska, I can recall only one whom I
could call really beautiful. She was a pupil at a Sitka Indian school,
spoke English well, and I suspect had some white blood in her. Joaquin
Miller, who married a Modoc girl and is given to romancing and
idealizing, relates (227) how "the brown-eyed girls danced, gay and
beautiful, half-nude, in their rich black hair and flowing robes."
Herbert Walsh,[208] speaking of the girls at a Navajo Indian school,
writes that
"among them was one little girl of striking beauty,
with fine, dark eyes, regularly and delicately modelled
features, and a most winning expression. Nothing could
be more attractive than the unconscious grace of this
child of nature."
I can find no indication, however, that the Indians ever admire such
exceptional beauty, and plenty of evidence that what they admire is
not beautiful. "These Indians are far from being connoisseurs in
beauty," wrote Mrs. Eastman (105) of the Dakotas. Dobrizhoffer says of
the Abipones (II., 139) what we read in Schoolcraft concerning the
Creeks: "Beauty is of no estimation in either sex;" and I have also
previously quoted Belden's testimony (302), that the men select the
squaws not for their personal beauty but "their strength and ability
to work;" to which he should have added, their weight; for bulk is the
savage's synonym for beauty. Burton (_C.S._, 128) admired the pretty
doll-like faces of the Sioux girls, but only up to the age of six.
"When full grown the figure becomes dumpy and _trapu_;" and that is
what attracts the Indian. The examples given in the chapter on
Personal Beauty of the Indians' indifference to geological layers of
dirt on their faces and bodies would alone prove beyond all
possibility of dispute that they can have no esthetic appreciation of
personal charms. The very highest type of Indian beauty is that
described by Powers in the case of a California girl
"just gliding out of the uncomfortable obesity of
youth, her complexion a soft, creamy hazel, her wide
eyes dreamy and idle ... a not unattractive type of
vacuous, facile, and voluptuous beauty"
--a beauty, I need not add, which may attract, but would not inspire
love of the sentimental kind, even if the Indian were capable of it.