terror, while the firebrands were heating for his torment, has been rescued from the jaws of death and adopted as brother or lover by some laughing young squaw, or as a son by some grave wrinkled warrior.  In such cases the new-comer was allowed entire freedom and treated like one of the tribe....  Pocahontas, therefore, did not hazard the beating out of her own brains, though the rescued stranger, looking with civilized eyes, would naturally see it in that light.  Her brains were perfectly safe.  This thirteen-year-old squaw liked the handsome prisoner, claimed him, and got him, according to custom.”

VERDICT:  NO ROMANTIC LOVE

In the hundreds of genuine Indian tales collected by Boas I have not discovered a trace of sentiment, or even of sentimentality.  The notion that there is any refinement of passion or morality in the sexual relations of the American aborigines has been fostered chiefly by the stories and poems of the whites—­generally such as had only a superficial acquaintance with the red men.  “The less we see and know of real Indians,” wrote G.E.  Ellis (111), “the easier will it be to make and read poems about them.”  General Custer comments on Cooper’s false estimate of Indian character, which has misled so many.

“Stripped of the beautiful romance with which we have been so long willing to envelop him, transferred from the inviting pages of the novelist to the localities where we are compelled to meet with him in his native village, on the warpath, and when raiding upon our frontier settlements and lines of travel, the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the ‘noble red man’” (12).

The great explorer Stanley did not see as much of the American savage as of the African, yet he had no difficulty in taking the American’s correct measure.  In his Early Travels and Adventures (41-43), he pokes fun at the romantic ideas that poets and novelists have given about Indian maidens and their loves, and then tells in unadorned terms what he saw with his own eyes—­Indian girls with “coarse black hair, low foreheads, blazing coal-black eyes, faces of a dirty, greasy color”—­and the Indian young man whose romance of wooing is comprised in the question, “How much is she worth?’”

One of the keenest and most careful observers of Indian life, the naturalist Bates, after living several years among the natives of Brazil, wrote concerning them (293): 

“Their phlegmatic, apathetic temperament; coldness of desire and deadness of feeling; want of curiosity and slowness of intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninteresting companions anywhere.  Their imagination is of a dull-gloomy quality, and they seemed never to be stirred by the emotions—­love, pity, admiration, fear, wonder, joy, enthusiasm.  These are characteristics of the whole race,”

In Schoolcraft (V., 272) we read regarding the Creeks