When a man loses his wife, it is considered as a duty to marry her sister, if she has one; or he may, if he pleases, have them both at the same time.
It will appear from the fatal consequences I have repeatedly imputed to the use of spirituous liquors that I more particularly consider these people as having been, morally speaking, great sufferers from their communication with the subjects of civilized nations. At the same time they were not, in a state of nature, without their vices, and some of them of a kind which is the most abhorrent to cultivated and reflecting man. I shall only observe, that incest and bestiality are among them.
When a young man marries, he immediately goes to live with the father and mother of his wife, who treat him, nevertheless, as a perfect stranger, till after the birth of his first child: he then attaches himself more to them than his own parents; and his wife no longer gives him any other denomination than that of the father of her child.
The profession of the men is war and hunting, and the more active scene of their duty is the field of battle, and the chase in the woods. They also spear fish, but the management of the nets is left to the women. The females of this nation are in the same subordinate state with those of all other savage tribes, but the severity of their labour is much diminished by their situation on the banks of lakes and rivers, where they employ canoes. In the winter, when the waters are frozen, they make their journeys, which are never of any great length, with sledges drawn by dogs. They are, at the same time, subject to every kind of domestic drudgery; they dress the leather, make the clothes and shoes, weave the nets, collect wood, erect the tents, fetch water, and perform every culinary service; so that when the duties of maternal care are added, it will appear, that the life of these women is an uninterrupted succession of toil and pain. This, indeed, is the sense they entertain of their own situation; and under the influence of that sentiment, they are sometimes known to destroy their female children, to save them from the miseries which they themselves have suffered. They also have a ready way, by the use of certain simples, of procuring abortions, which they sometimes practise, from their hatred of the father, or to save themselves the trouble which children occasion: and, as I have been credibly informed, this unnatural act is repeated without any injury to the health of the women who perpetrate it.