No formal marriage ceremony is gone through as a rule.  The heart is the certificate and the Great Spirit the priest.  Under the tribal government of the Indians, the rights of women were respected and clearly defined.  She was the head of the house, and all property, save an insignificant amount, descended at death to her.  She was in many tribes personified as the principal object of worship, prayer and adoration, in the tutelary goddess of the tribe.  Now all is changed.  The Indian of to-day is not the Indian of fifty years ago, and cannot be studied in the same light.  His manners, customs and habits are all changed, and polygamy, more and more, creeps in with all its appalling degradations.

On special occasions an entire tribe is gathered under an open space in the cottonwoods to celebrate their principal dances.  Hands are wildly waved above the heads of the dancers around a central fire of logs, piled in a conical heap.  Around this blazing pile runs the dark circle which was built at sunset, inclosing sacred ground, which must not be trespassed on.  The old chanter stands at the gate of the corral and sings.  The men built the dark circle in less than an hour.  When done, the corral measures forty paces in diameter.  Around it stands a fence eight feet high, with a gate in the east ten feet wide.

At night-fall many of the Navajo people move, temporarily, all their goods and property into the corral, and abandon their huts or hogans.  Those who do not move in are watchers to protect their property, for there are thieves among the Navajos.  At 8 o’clock a band of musicians enters, and, sitting down, begins a series of cacophonous sounds on a drum.  As soon as the music begins, the great wood pile is lighted.  The conflagration spreads rapidly and lights the whole landscape and the sky.  A storm of red, whirling sparks fly upward, like bright golden bees from out a hive, to a height of a hundred feet.  The descending ashes fall in the corral like a light shower of snow.  The heat soon grows so intense that in the remotest parts of the enclosure it is necessary for a person to screen his face when he looks towards the fire.

Suddenly a warning whistle is heard in the outer darkness, and a dozen forms, lithe and lean, dressed only with the narrow white breech-clout and mocassins, and daubed with white earth until they seem a group of living marbles, come bounding through the entrance, yelping like wolves, and slowly moving round the fire.  As they advance, in single file, they throw their bodies into diverse attitudes, some graceful, some strained, some difficult, some menacing, and all grotesque.  Now they face the east, now the west, now the south, now the north, bearing aloft their slender wands, tipped with eagle down, holding and waving them with surprising effects.  Their course around the fire is to the left, east, west, south, north, a course invariably taken by all the dancers of the night.