THE ROMANCE OF MONTEREY
pick up the enemy’s arrows, and hand them to their men to be shot back.
The battles didn’t last long, for the
participants were constitutionally lazy, and soon tired of the exertion.
Marriage was a very simple matter, and divorce still simpler. A man and a woman agreed to live together— that was marriage. They quarreled, and concluded to live apart—that
was
divorce. Father
Palou, who
was intimately associated with the great work in California, in his “Life of Junipero Serra,” written two years after Serra’s death, says of the native Indians, their marriages, but with no more “They have ceremony than a mutual agreement which lasts until they quarrel or separate, taking up again with another man or another woman, the children usually following their mother. . . . They do not pay any attention to relationship in marriage, but rather the tendency is to take to wife all the sisters of the first wife, and even the mother-in-law; and so it is the common thing to be understood that when a man takes a woman, he has all her sisters, too, so they live in polygamy, having many wives without there appearing to be any sign of jealousy among them. As a rule, the children of the younger sisters, who may be second or third wives, are looked upon with just as much affection as one’s own, and all live together in one house. . . . We have had occasion to baptize in this Mission three children born all of them within two months of one another, sons of the same pagan man, and
