Fort Worth Gazette

THE PRICE OF A WIFE

Savages Place a Varying Value on Their Chosen Helpmates.

In the earliest times a wife was bartered for useful goods or for care rendered to her father. In the latter Jacob purchased Rachel and her sister. This was a Beena marriage, where the man, as in Genesis, leaves his father and mother and cleaves unto his wife and become one flesh or kin—the woman remaining in her own tribe.

The price of a bride in British Columbia, Vancouver Island, varies from $10 worth of articles. In Oregon an Indian gives for a wife horses, blankets of buckskin robes; in California, shell money or barter; in Africa, cattle. A poor Damara will give a daughter for one cow; a richer one for two. If a marriage recently existed, she may be bought a second time, and her purchaser expects from three to five children as the interest on his investment. In Uganda, where a girl can be given, her family receives from ten to thirty cows. With the Bar along the Zambesi the price is a gun and a few pounds of powder; a poor man may substitute half a dozen needles or a coat. An ordinary price is a couple of buckskins or twenty percussion caps. At other places five to fifty roubles, or at others, a cart-load of wood or hay. A princess may be purchased for three thousand roubles. In Fiji, her equivalent is twenty small oxen; a poor man may sell his daughter for five pounds of butter, or a military, a woman can be had for a whale tooth. In some places where a rich man can be obtained for similar prices elsewhere, are eloquent testimony to the little value a savage sets on a wife.