Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/130

122 T. W. DAVENPORT. Woman 's sphere ! Man 's sphere ! How natural the sound ! The uncivilized man thinks the female should do all things not in the heroic sphere, which service he disdains as beneath the dignity of a warrior. The civilized man thinks voting and holding office is outside of woman's sphere, because she is not, by natural aptitude, a warrior ; and voting and holding office are antecedent concomitants of war. Really, what is the difference, except in circumstances of application? The sentiment is the same, the caste of sex, which, in the case of the Indian, has been a destructive fatal- ity. If he had not been too proud to stoop from the heroic, there was nothing in the way of his becoming an agriculturist and therefore civilized. From the earliest accounts, we learn that the squaws were cultivators of vegetables and fruits. Away in advance of civil- ization, travelers found corn, melons, potatoes, etc., raised probably in imitation of the whites. But agriculture, to be successful as a dependence for a living, must be a vocation and cannot be confined to the female sex. What would be- come of it among the whites, if the male's sphere held him aloof from the drudgery of farming? The first and most important thing to be done when the Federal Government commenced the agency business, was the eradication of the sex-caste, which of course could not have been done by compulsory methods, but by the stimulus of rewards. Among the North American Indians the governmental auth- ority for the punishment of offenses against persons or prop- erty, was exercised by the chiefs of the tribes ; and if we are to credit the accounts of those in a position to know, criminal offenses were quite as rare in such rude societies as among more advanced peoples. But after the establishment of the agency system, which was, at best, an imperfect effort to change nomads to resident tillers of the soil, the morals of the Indians rapidly declined. And there were very good reasons for this retrogression. Philosophically speaking, and in the