William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

“ [178] girls are wild. You pinch and slap them for a month or more. When they are taken from the lodge, they mope and cry; you beat them till they stop, then they are good. When you fetch a young squaw, old one likes to come. She makes the young one stumble on stones, and sleep with two eyes open. That ties her tongue.”

Red Dog is not worse than others of his pagan tribe. To him a squaw is nothing but a drudge and beast. He keeps her like a cow, and treats her like a dog. He buys her, sells her, as he likes. Nobody interferes. American law knows nothing of a Red man's lodge. If Red Dog were to beat his bride, while all these White men were about, he would be lynched. But if he kills her in the night, when no White men are near, no sheriff will pursue him for the crime.

While she remains a member of her tribe, a woman has some natural defender, in her father, in her brother, in her son. When drafted into another tribe, her only hope is in the favour and compassion of her lord. In other days such sales of women into other tribes were rare, but as the tribes fall off in numbers, the women pass more