wunDpocH.] MARRIAGE. 411 
discover that she was treated as a servant. She went with them to 
the spring deer hunt, but we were distinctly given to understand that 
the young couple would not be married till after the return from this 
hunt, and that no intercourse would take place between them before 
that time. When the season came for catching reindeer fawns, the 
couple started off together, with sled and dogs and camp equipage in 
pursuit of them, and always afterwards were considered as man and 
wife. 
Most of the marriages took place before we heard of them, so that 
we had no opportunity for learning what ceremony, if any, occurred at 
the time. Some of the party, however, who went over to make a visit 
at Utkiavwin one evening, found the house full of people, who were 
singing and dancing, and were told that this was to celebrate the mar- 
riage of the daughter of the house. Marriage ceremonies appear to 
be rare among the Eskimo. A pretended abduction, with the consent 
of the parents, is spoken of by Bessels at Smith Sound! and Egede in 
Greenland (p. 142), and Kumlien was informed that certain ceremonies 
were sometimes practiced at Cumberland Gulf? Elsewhere I have not 
been able to find any reference to the subject. A man usually selects a 
wife of about his own age, but reasons of interest sometimes lead to a 
great disparity of age between the two. I do not recollect any case 
where an old man had a wife very much younger than himself, but we 
knew of several meu who had married widows or divorced women old 
enough to be their mothers,’ and in one remarkable case the bride was 
a girl of sixteen or seventeen, and the husband a lad apparently not 
over thirteen, who could barely have reached the age of puberty. 
This couple were married late in the winter of 1882~83, and immedi- 
ately started off to the rivers, deer hunting, where the young husband 
was very successful. This union, however, appeared to have been dis- 
solved in the summer, as I believe the girl was living with another and 
older man when we left the station. In this case, the husband came 
to live with the wife’s family. 
As is the case with most Eskimo, most of the men content them- 
selves with one wife, though a few of the wealthy men have two each. 
I do not recollect over half a dozen men in the two villages who had 
more than one wife each, and one of these dismissed his younger wife 
during our stay. We never heard of a case of more than two wives. 
As well as we could judge, the marriage bond was regarded simply as 
a contract entered into by the agreement of the contracting parties 
and, without any formal ceremony of divorce, easily dissolved in the 
same way, on account of incompatibility of temper, or even on account 
of temporary disagreements. 
We knew of one or two cases where wives left their husbands on 
' Naturalist, vol. 18, pt. 9, p. 877. 
2Contributions, p. 16. 
*Compare Holm’s observations in East Greenland—‘‘idet et ganske ungt Menneske kan vere gift 
med en Kone, som kunde vere hans Moder.” Geografisk Tidskrift, vol. 8, p. 91. 
