Page 95 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

F R ONTI E R P H I L OSOPHY: E U R OPEAN D I S COUR E S

primitivism among Indians.175 Rather than spending time and energy
trying to understand Indian customs they were quick to judge and con­
demn. During the 1 8 50s, one German traveler maintained that Indians
knew "little of the pure fe elings of shame and love." 176 Others explained
that they avoided insult when rejecting the offer of an Indian bride by
pointing to their wedding rings or giving presents to her f a mily and
f r iends. 177 Even Karl May, who was f a vorable to American Indians, had
trouble dealing with the issue in his novels. In one, May's Indian char­
acter declared: "The great Spirit has cursed every red woman who loves
a white man; therefore, the children of such a woman are like the
worm." In another, May went to the extreme of killing Winnetou's sister
to halt any f u rther affection between her and his hero, Shatterhand.178
The seeming liberality of premarital sexual practices among
American Indian groups also upset many Europeans. "When an unmar­
ried brave passes through a village, he hires a girl f o r a night or two, as
he pleases, and her parents find nothing wrong with this," the French
naval officer Jean Bernard Bossu puzzled during the 1 8 6 0s. He could
more easily understand why chiefs would urge young girls to give their
bodies to white men, an action which offered status and other advan­
tages. 179 Paul Wilhelm had a less kind explanation of why native women
got involved with white men and bore children out of wedlock. o him,
T
these women were outgoing, kind, and overly f o nd of ornaments. 18 0 T o
European eyes such practices not only appeared immoral and danger­
ous, but led to European-style prostitution, which Indians had not
known before the coming of white men. Apparently without scientific
evidence, W e ld claimed that prostitution among native women caused
sterility and therefore a decline in the Indian population, which not all
white men would have considered bad. 181
Europeans also reacted harshly to the f a ct that Indian f a thers chose
mates f o r their offspring. Coming f r om nineteenth-century Europe
where the concepts of romantic love and companion marriage were on
the rise, they considered parental mate selection a travesty. Observers
were often as shocked by the rigidity of this system as they were by the
f
lack of o rethought that seemed to characterize white marriages on the
f r ontier. Fredrika Bremer thought one of the worst f e atures of Indian
women's lives was that they were seldom able to choose their own