406 GENERAL FACTS. 
game and brings most of it home, and brings in a considerable portion of 
the fuel. In a company of fifty-seven who passed through Healdsburgh, 
there were twenty-four squaws riding on horseback and only three walking, 
while there were thirteen braves riding and seventeen walking. The young 
boy is never taught to pierce his mother’s flesh with an arrow to show him 
his superiority over her, as among the Apaches and Iroquois; though he 
afterward slays his wife or mother-in-law, if angry, with very little com- 
punction. But there is one fact more significant than any other, and that 
is the almost universal prevalence, under various forms, of a kind of secret 
league among the men, and the practice of diabolical orgies, for the purpose 
of terrorizing the women into obedience. It shows how they were contin- 
ually struggling up toward equality, and what desperate expedients their 
lords were compelled to resort to to keep them in due subjection. 
The total absence of barbarous and bloody initiations of young men 
into secret societies was a good feature of their life. They show sufficient 
capacity to endure prolonged and terrible self-imposed penances or ordeals, 
but these seldom take any other form than fasting, and that principally 
among the northern tribes. In their liability to intense religious frenzy, or 
rather, perhaps, a mere nervous exaltation and exhaustion, resulting from 
thei passionate devotion to the dance, they equal the African races. The 
same religious bent of mind reveals itself in the strange, crooning chants 
which they intone while gambling. 
As they were not a race of warriors, so they were not a race of hunt- 
ers. They have extremely few weapons of the chase, but develop extraor- 
dinary ingenuity in making a multitude of snares, traps, ete. At least 
four-fifths of their diet was derived from the vegetable kingdom. 
If there is one great and fatal weakness in the California Indians, it is 
their lack of breadth and strength of character ; hence their incapacity to 
organize wide-reaching, powerful federative governments. They are infi- 
nitely cunning, shrewd, selfish, intriguing; but they are quite lacking in 
grasp, in vigor, and boldness. Since they have mingled with Americans 
they have developed a Chinese imitativeness, and they take rapidly to the 
small uses of civilization; but they have no large force, no inventiveness. 
Their history is painfully deficient in mighty captains and great orators. 
