a legal status but not full rights of wifeship. Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that polygamy, apart from its moral aspect, was an institution for which the Indian wife had cause to be profoundly grateful. It ameliorated her lot in such wise that she was really subject to no more hardships than is the European peasant woman of the present day.

On the other hand, it would seem that at least in some instances the husband had absolute rights of life and death over his wife. In the not very edifying--and probably even less authentic--autobiography of James Beckwourth, the white man who was long chief of the Crow tribe, there is related an incident where, his Blackfoot wife having shown disregard to his commands, he coolly took up his war club and struck her on the head, stunning her, and, as was thought at the time, killing her. The blow turned out not to be fatal; but this does not obscure the point of the incident, which lies in the fact that the father of the woman, who was present, told Beckwourth that he had done perfectly right and acted entirely as befitted a great warrior. Beckwourth rather plumed himself upon his conduct,--though it is difficult to see wherein the incident called for the display of any very heroic qualities,--and in his narration almost apologizes for the fact that he did not strike quite so hard a blow as he had intended; but, while the story has its amusing features, our concern in the matter lies in the fact that such conduct seems to have been entirely conventional. This incident occurred in the beginning of the last century; but it is evident that it must have been a survival of custom, and not a novelty introduced by a fresh civilization.

Yet we hear at times of women taking part in the most important councils of their nations, of their even leading warriors to battle, of their exercise of all the functions of a ruler. Women have been made head chiefs; a very notable instance of a woman ruler was the "Queen of Pamunkey," who was the widow of Totapotamoi, a great Indian chief in the Virginias. She came to one of the councils of the Virginia Burgesses in the time of Berkeley, and was the recipient of much attention. She was described as a woman of majestic presence, who entered the council chamber "with a comportment graceful to admiration, grave court-like gestures, and a majestic air on her face"; and through the quaint old verbiage we can descry a woman of carriage and powers of intellect remarkable in her race. Her dress was picturesque; she wore a sort of crown of black and white wampum plaited together, and her fine figure was covered by a robe of buckskin, dressed with the hair outward and decorated with fringes--not impossibly scalplocks--from the shoulders to the hem. She had been summoned to the council to give a promise of help; but she had her own grievances to relate in the fact that her husband had been slain while fighting for the English, and yet she had never received any compensation or acknowledgment of his services. The incident holds for us its chief interest as a proof of the high standing of individual women among the tribes of the Atlantic slope. This female rule was not a passing custom; it was evidently of long establishment at the time of the coming of the colonists, and it continued into later colonial and even into Revolutionary times. Of the later instances of women chiefs, Queen Esther furnishes a noted example. This abominable woman, who played such a prominent part in the massacre of Wyoming in 1778, was a half-breed, probably the daughter of Catherine Montour, also a half-breed and a fiend incarnate. In the attack upon Wyoming Valley, led by Major John Butler, son of that Walter Butler whose name was so execrated by the colonists,--the Senecas took part, led by a noted chief named Gi-on-gwah-tuh and by Queen Esther, who was probably, though this is not certain, in supreme command of the Indians. However this may be, we know that she led the attack, fighting like a fiend, and that after the action sixteen prisoners were placed in a circle around a large stone, known to this day as Queen Esther's Rock. Striking up a chant, she passed around the circle, at each step dashing out the brains of a victim. Two of the prisoners, however, managed to make a dash for liberty and succeeded in effecting their escape, and it is to them that we owe our account of the massacre.

As is so often the case in matters of colonial record, there is a confusion between Queen Esther and her mother, and most writers allege that the "queen" was herself the Catherine Montour whom others claim to have been the mother of the chieftainess. The latter theory is probably correct. When in 1744 Catherine Montour, who, in her youth, had been captured and adopted by the Senecas, appeared at a council of the Indian commissioners and delegates from the Six Nations, the council being held at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we are told by Stone, in his life of Sir William Johnson, that "Although so young when made a prisoner, she had nevertheless preserved her language; and being in youth and middle age very handsome and of good address, she had been greatly caressed by the gentlewomen of Philadelphia during her occasional visits to that city with her people on business. Indeed, she was always held in great esteem by the white people, invited to their houses, and entertained with marked civility."

It would seem, then, that in 1744 Catherine Montour had already passed middle age, and indeed we know from the account of Lord Cornbury that she was born some time before the close of the seventeenth century. It would therefore seem most probable that Queen Esther was the daughter of the Catherine Montour who was a Huron by birth and a Seneca by adoption; but this matters little in the search for the deductions to be made from the story of Queen Esther and the unfortunate Wyoming Valley. Accepting as accurate only that part of her history which deals with the massacre, we know that Esther was a war chief of the Senecas and that she had absolute control over them. We also find that the Catherine Montour of Stone's account, whether or not she was identical with Queen Esther, was of such influence with her tribe that she was selected by them as a delegate to an important convention. This, then, furnishes us with a specific instance of the power of women among the Indians.

An incident in this same massacre of Wyoming is illustrative of a somewhat curious fact with regard to Indian life, the adaptability of their captives to the life of the woods. There was captured by the Indians a little girl named Frances Slocum, about five years old. For long all trace of her was lost; but in 1835, more than fifty years after the massacre, an old woman known as Maconaqua, living in a Miami village in Indiana, was by accident identified as the lost Frances Slocum. To all appearance she was an Indian; and she was really so in costume, habits, and even in manner of thought. When the events of her childhood were recalled to her memory, she herself was able to give evidence which rendered her identification unquestionably complete. But when pressed to return to civilization and her relatives, she absolutely declined. "I cannot go," she said; "I have always lived with the Indians; I am used to them; I wish to live and die with them. My husband and my boys are buried here, and I cannot leave them. I have a house and land, two daughters, a son-in-law, and grandchildren. I was a sapling when they took me. It is all gone past. I should not be happy with my white relatives. I am glad to see them; but I cannot go."

So she was left with her red brothers by adoption; but when, some ten years later, the Miami Indians were moved West; a bill was introduced into Congress by a Mr. Bidlack, securing to Maconaqua and her heirs a tract of land a mile square, embracing the home in which she had so long lived. But she pined after her red kindred, and in 1847 died from sheer weariness of the new conditions of her existence, and was buried near the confluence of the Wabash and the Missisinewa Rivers.

This incident is