Uncongenial as it may be to our pride of race to admit the fact, it would seem certain that the Indian character has power of persistence over that of the Caucasian. Many were the white captives whose blood flowed in the veins of succeeding generations of red men, but that blood was never powerful even to modify the traits which were the inheritance of the Indian. It is most likely that the first white child ever born on our shores--that Virginia Dare whose story has been so often told that it is needless here to recapitulate it--was carried captive to the tents of the Indians and in time became the wife of some brave, and that her blood is in the veins of some of the survivors of the red men; but it had no power to make itself known in any persistence of trait. It is certain that a half-breed, whatever the circumstances of his education, almost invariably shows the dominance of the Indian nature over the white. This fact, which has not received adequate attention by students of ethnology, is worthy of consideration in its significance; but this is not the place for such consideration. After this somewhat lengthy digression, let us now return to our more immediate subject, the status of woman among the aborigines during their period of freedom from white influence. Enough has been said to show that such status was widely different from that usually attributed to the women of the Amerinds. It is most true that women were hewers of wood and drawers of water--that they performed most or all of the labor which civilization is accustomed to look upon as menial and much that it considers the rightful duty of man; but in this respect the American Indian did not differ from most or all primitive peoples. It is only civilization that has released woman from the tasks which she was accustomed to perform during the days when the chief sources of sustenance were found in the spoils of the chase, the duty of providing such sustenance naturally falling to the men of the community or household. This division of labor if so it can be called has been in all countries and among all peoples destructive to the claims of woman to high consideration. Among primitive peoples there has never been recognized that which is now known as chivalry toward the weaker sex; if only because of weakness, rendering resistance to tyranny and oppression impossible, women in such communities have always been relegated to the position of slaves and chattels. Yet this state of affairs obtained less strongly among the American Indians than among most races in similar conditions of civilization. With the former, woman had many privileges which she was usually denied among other similarly developed peoples. Not only, as has been shown, did she have the opportunity granted her to make herself a power in her tribe, if her intellect were of force sufficient to enable her thus to do, but she had certain well-defined privileges inherent in her sex--privileges which sometimes were powerful