Sex and the Single Squaw

DAUGHTERS OF THE COUNTRY by Walter O'Meara. 368 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95.

Few veins of Americana have been more assiduously mined than the Western fur trade. From Francis Parkman to Bernard De Voto, scholars have unearthed the routes and reminiscences of the "mountain men" in the 19th century, devoting volumes to their exploits. Surprisingly, Novelist and Popular Historian Walter O'Meara's anecdotal appreciation seems to be the first to deal with the lives of the women of the fur traders and mountain men. Not surprisingly, their relationships with women turn out to be as rich and varied as the rest of the mountain legend.

The women were predominantly Indian--Stone Age girls with few of the hopes or hang-ups of their white Victorian Age sisters. In most tribes, premarital sex was common (and was sometimes encouraged as a practical check against the cuckolding of married warriors by unmarried braves when the husbands were afield), and the Indian girl usually displayed a hearty appetite.

Instant Nose Job. White trappers, with their ingrained leaning toward monogamy and lingering romantic respect for womanhood, often made gentler husbands than Indian braves. Among the Blackfeet, for example, a woman caught in adultery by her Indian husband had to submit to an instant nose job, performed with a skinning knife. Many of the white traders were exceptionally devoted to their Indian wives. When John ("Liver Eating") Johnson's Flathead wife, the Swan, was murdered by Crow warriors, for example, Johnson went on the warpath, killed some 300 Crows, and ate their livers in revenge.

In the mid-1800s, when the first "sod-busters" arrived in the West with their constricting fences and farming habits, epithets like "squawmen" and "Indian lover" became part of the American language, and a special form of racism became widespread. Yet to the trappers, the Indian woman made the best wife. She skinned and fleshed his beaver and buffalo hides, sewed and ornamented his clothing, fashioned moccasins and snowshoes for him, and prepared him such delicacies as boiled buffalo hump, boiled unborn calf, and dried moose nose. If she had any drawback, it was galloping garrulity: contrary to stereotype, Indian women were constantly giving off streams of village gossip and household news.

Live Coals. Unfortunately, the Indian women and their men brought some unadmirable traits to one another. Traditionally responsible for the torture of prisoners in their tribes, the women were capable of incredible cruelty. When Colonel William Crawford, a friend of George Washington's, was captured in 1782, it was the Indian women who pelted him with live coals, jabbed him with burning poles and, after a warrior had torn off the prisoner's scalp with his teeth, poured a shovelful of live coals onto his exposed skull while he was still alive. Even so, says O'Meara, "beneath her streak of savagery the Indian woman frequently revealed a tenderness and compassion that touched even the casehardened trader." As for the mountain men, they all too often brought their Indian women liquor, prostitution and so much unhappiness that many "country wives" hanged themselves.

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