WHITE TEETH AND SWEET BREATH—EVILS OF CLOTHING. 403 
hundred, even two hundred and fifty pounds ; tall, fine fellows, not gross, 
but sinewy, magnificent specimens of free and fighting savagery. On the 
other hand the desiccation of body in old age, especially in the women, is some- 
thing phenomenal. In a wigwam near Temecula I have seen an aged man 
who certainly would not have weighed over fifty pounds, so extraordinarily 
was he wasted and shrunken. Many others have nearly equaled him. This 
fact accounts for the repulsively wrinkled appearance of the aged, that 
which has made them so odious in the eyes of superficial writers and the 
fastidious tourists. There is probably no other race so excessively fat in 
youth and so wasted in old age. 
All of them emit an odor peculiar to themselves as that of the Chinese 
is to them. Although they are filthy in their wigwams and in their apparel, 
yet of the many hundreds I have seen there was not one who still observed 
the aboriginal mode of life that had not white teeth and a sweet breath. 
This is doubtless due to the fact that before they became civilized they ate 
their food cold; when they drink hot coffee and eat hot bread they are liable 
to toothache and offensive breath like ourselves. 
There is another singular and apparently paradoxical fact connected with 
their habits of body. Though they are so generally uncleanly about their 
lodges and clothing, there is no nation, unless it was the ancient Romans, 
who bathed oftener than they. ‘They were almost amphibious, and rival the 
Kanakas yet in their capacity to endure prolonged submergence. They 
had no clothing to put off and on, and they were always splashing in the 
water. ‘They never neglected the morning bath, and many of them do not 
to this day, though pestered with clothing. 
And never since the fatal hour when Adam and Eve tied about them 
the fig-leaves in Eden has clothing been a symbol so freighted with evil 
portent as to these people. On excessively hot days they would lay off 
the miserable rags of civilization which hampered and galled their free- 
born limbs; and then would come colds, coughs, croups, quick consumption, 
which swept them off by thousands. 
It is a curious fact which has frequently come under my observation, 
and has been abundantly confirmed by the pioneers, that among half-breed 
children a decided majority are girls. There is a reason for this which 
