Fifty years ago the name Blackfoot was one of terrible meaning to the white
traveller who passed across that desolate buffalo-trodden waste which lay
to the north of the Yellowstone River and east of the Rocky Mountains. This
was the Blackfoot land, the undisputed home of a people which is said to
have numbered in one of its tribes--the Pi-k[)u]n'-i--8000 lodges, or
40,000 persons. Besides these, there were the Blackfeet and the Bloods,
three tribes of one nation, speaking the same language, having the same
customs, and holding the same religious faith.
But this land had not always been the home of the Blackfeet. Long ago,
before the coming of the white men, they had lived in another country far
to the north and east, about Lesser Slave Lake, ranging between Peace River
and the Saskatchewan, and having for their neighbors on the north the
Beaver Indians. Then the Blackfeet were a timber people. It is said that
about two hundred years ago the Chippeweyans from the east invaded this
country and drove them south and west. Whether or no this is true, it is
quite certain that not many generations back the Blackfeet lived on the
North Saskatchewan River and to the north of that stream.[1] Gradually
working their way westward, they at length reached the Rocky Mountains,
and, finding game abundant, remained there until they obtained horses, in
the very earliest years of the present century. When they secured horses and
guns, they took courage and began to venture out on to the plains and to go
to war. From this time on, the Blackfeet made constant war on their
neighbors to the south, and in a few years controlled the whole country
between the Saskatchewan on the north and the Yellowstone on the south.
[Footnote 1: For a more extended account of this migration, see _American
Anthropologist_, April, 1892, p. 153.]
It was, indeed, a glorious country which the Blackfeet had wrested from
their southern enemies. Here nature has reared great mountains and spread
out broad prairies. Along the western border of this region, the Rocky
Mountains lift their snow-clad peaks above the clouds. Here and there, from
north to south, and from east to west, lie minor ranges, black with pine
forests if seen near at hand, or in the distance mere gray silhouettes
against a sky of blue. Between these mountain ranges lies everywhere the
great prairie; a monotonous waste to the stranger's eye, but not without
its charm. It is brown and bare; for, except during a few short weeks in
spring, the sparse bunch-grass is sear and yellow, and the silver gray of
the wormwood lends an added dreariness to the landscape. Yet this seemingly
desert waste has a beauty of its own. At intervals it is marked with green
winding river valleys, and everywhere it is gashed with deep ravines, their
sides painted in strange colors of red and gray and brown, and their
perpendicular walls crowned with fantastic columns and figures of stone or
clay, carved out by the winds and the rains of ages. Here and there, rising
out of the plain, are curious sharp ridges, or square-topped buttes with
vertical sides, sometimes bare, and sometimes dotted with pines,--short,
sturdy trees, whose gnarled trunks and thick, knotted branches have been
twisted and wrung into curious forms by the winds which blow unceasingly,
hour after hour, day after day, and month after month, over mountain range
and prairie, through gorge and coulée.
These prairies now seem bare of life, but it was not always so. Not very
long ago, they were trodden by multitudinous herds of buffalo and antelope;
then, along the wooded river valleys and on the pine-clad slopes of the
mountains, elk, deer, and wild sheep fed in great numbers. They are all
gone now. The winter's wind still whistles over Montana prairies, but
nature's shaggy-headed wild cattle no longer feel its biting blasts. Where
once the scorching breath of summer stirred only the short stems of the
buffalo-grass, it now billows the fields of the white man's
grain. Half-hidden by the scanty herbage, a few bleached skeletons alone
remain to tell us of the buffalo; and the broad, deep trails, over which
the dark herds passed by thousands, are now grass-grown and fast
disappearing under the effacing hand of time. The buffalo have disappeared,
and the fate of the buffalo has almost overtaken the Blackfeet.
As known to the whites, the Blackfeet were true prairie Indians, seldom
venturing into the mountains, except when they crossed them to war with the
Kutenais, the Flatheads, or the Snakes. They subsisted almost wholly on the
flesh of the buffalo. They were hardy, untiring, brave, ferocious. Swift
to move, whether on foot or horseback, they made long journeys to war, and
with telling force struck their enemies. They had conquered and driven out
from the territory which they occupied the tribes who once inhabited it,
and maintained a desultory and successful warfare against all invaders,
fighting with the Crees on the north, the Assinaboines on the east, the
Crows on the south, and the Snakes, Kalispels, and Kutenais on the
southwest and west. In those days the Blackfeet were rich and powerful.
The buffalo fed and clothed them, and they needed nothing beyond what
nature supplied. This was their time of success and happiness.
Crowded into a little corner of the great territory which they once
dominated, and holding this corner by an uncertain tenure, a few Blackfeet
still exist, the pitiful remnant of a once mighty people. Huddled together
about their agencies, they are facing the problem before them, striving,
helplessly but bravely, to accommodate themselves to the new order of
things; trying in the face of adverse surroundings to wrench themselves
loose from their accustomed ways of life; to give up inherited habits and
form new ones; to break away from all that is natural to them, from all
that they have been taught--to reverse their whole mode of existence. They
are striving to earn their living, as the white man earns his, by toil. The
struggle is hard and slow, and in carrying it on they are wasting away and
growing fewer in numbers. But though unused to labor, ignorant of
agriculture, unacquainted with tools or seeds or soils, knowing nothing of
the ways of life in permanent houses or of the laws of health, scantily
fed, often utterly discouraged by failure, they are still making a noble
fight for existence.
Only within a few years--since the buffalo disappeared--has this change
been going on; so recently has it come that the old order and the new meet
face to face. In the trees along the river valleys, still quietly resting
on their aerial sepulchres, sleep the forms of the ancient hunter-warrior
who conquered and held this broad land; while, not far away, Blackfoot
farmers now rudely cultivate their little crops, and gather scanty harvests
from narrow fields.
It is the meeting of the past and the present, of savagery and
civilization. The issue cannot be doubtful. Old methods must pass away. The
Blackfeet will become civilized, but at a terrible cost. To me there is an
interest, profound and pathetic, in watching the progress of the struggle.