XXIIIA. D. 1883THE PASSING OF THE BISON
MayI recommend a better book than this? If anybody wants to feel the veritable spirit of adventure, let him readMy Life as an Indian, by F. W. Schultz. His life is an example in manliness, his record the best we have of a red Indian tribe, his book the most spacious and lovely in frontier literature.
The Blackfeet got their name from the oil-dressed, arrow-proof leather of their moccasins (skin shoes) which were dark in color. They were profoundly religious, scrupulously clean—bathing daily, even through thick ice, fastidiously moral, a gay light-hearted people of a temper like the French, and even among Indians, the most generous race in the world, they were famed for their hospitality. The savage is to the white man, what the child is to the grown-up, of lesser intellect, but much nearer to God.
When the white men reached the plains, the Blackfeet mustered about forty thousand mounted men, hunters. The national sport was stealing horses and scalps, but there was no organized war until the pressure of the whites drove the tribes westward,crowding them together, so that they had to fight for the good hunting grounds. Then there were wars in which the Blackfeet more than held their own. Next came the smallpox, and afterward the West was not so crowded. Whole nations were swept away, and those that lived were sorely reduced in numbers. After that came white frontiersmen to trade, to hunt, or as missionaries. The Indians called them Hat-wearers, but the Blackfeet had another name—the Stone-hearts. The whites were nearly always welcomed, but presently they came in larger numbers, claiming the land for mining camps and ranching, which drove away the game. The Indians fought the whites, fought for their land and their food, their liberty; but a savage with bow and arrows has no chance against a soldier with a rifle. For every white man killed a hundred would come to the funeral, so the Blackfeet saw that it was no use fighting.
In 1853 they made a treaty that secured them their hunting ground, forever free. The Great Father at Washington pledged his honor, and they were quite content. It was the same with every western tribe that the United States was pledged by solemn treaty which the Indians kept, and the white men always broke. Troops drove the settlers off, but went away and the settlers came back. So young warriors broke loose from the chiefs to scalp those settlers and burn their homes; and the army would break vengeance. Such were the conditions when Schultz, a green New England boy of nineteen, came by steamer up the Missouri to Fort Benton.
The truly respectable reader will be shocked to learn that this misguided youth went into partnership witha half-breed trader, selling water with a flavoring of whisky at very high prices to the Indians. In other words, he earned his living at a very risky trade. He married a Blackfoot girl, becoming a squaw-man, which, as everybody knows, is beneath contempt. In other words, he was honest enough to marry a most charming woman instead of betraying her to ruin. He went on guilty expeditions to snatch scalps and steal horses. He shared the national sports and so learned the inmost heart of a brave people.
When our own countrymen get too self-righteous, bigoted, priggish, smug and generally beyond bearing, what a blessing it would be if we had a few wild Indians to collect their scalps!
Schultz had a chum, a Blackfoot warrior called Wolverine, who taught him the sign language and a deal of bush craft. At times this Wolverine was unhappy, and once the white man asked him what was wrong. “There is nothing troubling me,” answered the Indian, then after a long pause: “I lied. I am in great trouble. I love Piks-ah’-ki, and she loves me, but I can not have her; her father will not give her to me.”
The father, Bull’s Head, was a Gros Ventre, and hated Wolverine for being a Blackfoot.
“I am going,” said Wolverine, “to steal the girl. Will you go with me?”
So one evening the pair stole away from the Blackfoot camp, rode eastward across the plains, marching by night, hiding by day. Once, at a river crossing they discovered the trails of a large war party of Crees on the way to the Gros Ventre camp. “I knew,” said Wolverine, laughing happily, “that mymedicine would not desert me, and see, the way is clear before us. We will ride boldly into camp, to the lodge of the great chief, Three Bears. I will say that our chief sent me to warn him of a war party working this way. I will say that we ourselves have seen their tracks along the bars of the river. Then the Gros Ventres will guard their horses; they will ambush the enemy; there will be a big fight, big excitement. All the men will rush to the fight, and that will be my time. I will call Piks-ah’-ki, we will mount our horses and fly.” So riding hard, they came in sight of the Gros Ventre camp. “Ah!” said Wolverine, “there is the camp. Now for the big lie.” Then more seriously, “Pity me, great Sun! Pity me, you under water creatures of my dream! Help me to obtain that which I seek here.”
So they came to the lodge of Three Bears, presented tobacco as a present from the chief Big Lake and were welcomed with a special feast of boiled dog, which had to be eaten, no matter how sick they felt. Gros Ventres believed the enemy were coming and kept close watch on their herd, but Bull’s Head sat in the chief’s lodge, sneering at the visitors, “To-night,” he said, “I shall sit in my lodge and watch for women stealers, and my gun will be loaded.”
So he got up, and flounced out of the lodge.
That night all happened as Wolverine had said, for the Cree war party attempted to stampede the herd, and all the Gros Ventres, including Bull’s Head, ran out of camp for the battle. Wolverine and Schultz found Bull’s Head’s daughter ready but crying in her mother’s arms at parting. They mounted, they rode, they thought they were clear of the battle-field, whensuddenly a gun exploded in front of Wolverine, and down he went with his horse. Then the girl screamed, “They have killed him! Help, white man, they have killed him!”
But Wolverine fired his gun at something that moved in the sage brush, and a deep groan followed. Wolverine clubbed something three of four times with his rifle. Then stooping, he picked up the gun which had been fired at him. “I count a coup,” he laughed, and handed the enemy’s weapon to Schultz.
At that moment Bull’s Head appeared, and in a frightful passion seized his daughter’s horse by the head attempting to drag her from the saddle. She shrieked, while Wolverine sprang at her father, threw him, disarmed him and flung away his gun. Then the young lover leaped lightly behind the girl upon her pony, and the father raged astern while they fled.
Four days’ ride brought them home to the Blackfoot camp, but Bull’s Head got there first, and whined about his poverty until Wolverine gave him ten ponies, also the captured gun. It was not much to pay for a beautiful woman who became a faithful and loving wife.
One day news reached the three main camps of the Blackfoot nation that a white buffalo had been sighted in the herds. Midwinter as it was, the hunters turned out, for the man who killed a white buffalo was held to have the especial favor of the Sun, and not only he, but his tribe. The head chief of a nation has been known to use the robe for a seat, but it could never be sold, and at the next building of a temple to the Sun it was offered up as a national sacrifice.
Great was the hunting through many days of bitter cold, until at last the white buffalo was found by a lone horseman who brought it down with his arrows “When we rode up,” says Schultz, “the hunter was standing over it, hands raised, fervently praying, promising the Sun the robe and tongue of the animal.... Medicine Weasel was so excited, he trembled so that he could not use his knife ... and some of our party took off the hide for him, and cut out the tongue, he standing over them all the time and begging them to be careful, to make no gashes, for they were doing the work for the Sun. None of the meat was taken. It was considered a sacrilege to eat it; the tongue was to be dried and given to the Sun with the robe.”
Only one more white buffalo was ever taken, in 1881, two years before the last herds were destroyed.
Heavy Breast and Schultz were once out hunting, and the chief’s saddle was newly loaded with mountain sheep meat, when the hunters met a first-class grizzly bear. He sat up, fifty yards distant and wriggled his nose as he sniffed the air. Both men fired and with a hair-lifting roar old sticky mouth rolled over, biting and clawing his wound, then sprang up and charged, open mouthed. The hunters rode hard, Schultz firing backward a couple of shots while the bear with long bounds, closed upon the Indian. “I fired again, and made another miss and just then Heavy Breast, his saddle and his sheep meat parted company with the fleeing pony. The cinch, an old worn rawhide band, had broken.
“‘Hai Ya, my friend,’ he cried pleadingly, as he soared up in the air, still astride the saddle. Downthey came with a loud thud not two strides in front of the onrushing bear. And that animal, with a dismayed and frightened ‘woof,’ turned sharply about and fled back toward the timber, I after him. I kept firing and firing, and finally a lucky shot broke his backbone.
“‘Do not laugh, my friend,’ said Heavy Breast; ‘surely the Sun listened to my prayer. I promised to sacrifice to him, intending to hang up that fine white blanket I have just bought. I will hang up the blanket and my otter-skin cap.’”
There was no end of trouble about that bear, for Mrs. Schultz dared not skin a sacred animal until she had sacrificed her best blue frock, also one of her husband’s revolvers—the same being out of order. And when the skin was dressed, nobody dared to visit the lodge until it had been hidden.
I want to copy out the whole book, for every paragraph contains some fresh delight, but these two or three stories must have shown something at least of Blackfoot character. I knew, and loved these people.
It was in January, 1870, that Colonel Baker was sent with a force of United States regular troops to chasten a band of Blackfeet who had killed a trader. The band accused of the crime, belonged to the Northern Blackfeet of Canada, whose camp at the time was on Belly River, two hundred miles north of the boundary. The band found by Baker belonged to the Piegans, a southern tribe camped on their own lands in Montana. There were eighty families in camp, but the men were nearly all away hunting buffalo when Baker’s force attacked at the break of dawn. The chief, Bear’s Head, ran toward the white men,waving a paper, a certificate of good character. He fell. Then the slaughter began in cold blood: Fifteen fighting men, eighteen elder men, ninety women, fifty-five little children, and when the last wounded mothers and their babies had been put out of their misery, the soldiers piled the corpses upon the wreckage before they burned the camp.
The whisky traders, like Schultz, have been blamed for the ruin of the Blackfeet; but since they had to die, it seems to me that the liquor gave them a certain amount of fun and excitement not so bad for them as Baker, or smallpox, or their Indian agent, or the white robbers who slaughtered their herds of buffalo, and stole their treaty lands. In 1874, Schultz was one of fifty-seven white men hunting or trading with the Canadian or Northern Blackfeet. They had trading forts at Whoop-up, Standoff, Slideout, the Leavings, all in Canada. But the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian wolfers made complaint against these American rivals; and so the Canadian government raised the Northwest Mounted Police. Three hundred men were sent across the plains to take possession and run the American traders out of the country. But the police were only tenderfeet in those days, eastern Canadians unused to the western ways, who came hungry through the countless herds of the bison. A band of hunters brought news to the Blackfeet. “Some men are coming,” they said, “who wear red coats, and they are drawing a cannon.”
“Oh,” said the Blackfeet, “these must be Hudson’s Bay.” For in old times the company’s officers are said to have worn red coats when they administered justice, so that the color was a sign of honest dealing.So the police were not attacked by the Blackfeet, and they were welcomed by the American traders, who sold them food in abundance.
The liquor trade ceased altogether but the police and the traders became fast friends, while the police and the Northern Blackfeet have been loyal allies ever since. After the buffalo vanished, the tribes were fed by the Canadian government and not lavishly, perhaps rather stingily, helped to learn the important arts of ranching.
Meanwhile far away to the southward, the white men were slaughtering buffalo for their hides, and in Kansas alone during ten years, thirty-five million carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The bison herds still seemed as large as ever, the country black with them as far as the eye could reach. But men like Schultz who had brains, had news that away from these last migrating herds, the plains were empty for thousands of miles. I remember the northern plains like a vast graveyard, reaching in all directions to the sky-line, bare save for its tombstones, the bleached skulls of millions of bison. Afterward the sugar refiners sent wagons and took them all away.
In 1880, the whole of the prairie nations surrounded the last herds, and white men took a hundred thousand robes leaving the carcasses to rot as usual. The Indians slaughtered also but sold the robes for groceries, and dried the whole of the meat for winter food.
“We are near the end of it,” said Red Bird’s Tail. “I fear that this is our last buffalo hunt. Are you sure,” he asked Schultz, “that the white men have seen all the land between the two salt waters?”
“There is no place,” answered the trader, “wherethe white men have not traveled, and none of them can find buffalo.”
“That being the case,” said the chief with a deep sigh, “misery and death are at hand for me and mine.”
The Indians were compelled to strip the plains of every living creature, the Blackfeet, despite their religion, to eat fish and birds. Then came the winter; Schultz and his wife rode at dusk to the camp of Lodge-Pole chief.
“Hurry,” he commanded his women, “cook a meal for our friends. They must be hungry after their long ride.”
His wives brought out three small potatoes and two little trout, which they boiled. “’Tis all we have,” said one of them, brushing the tears from her eyes, and then the chief broke down.
“We have nothing,” he said haltingly. “There are no more buffalo. The Great Father sends us but a little food, gone in a day. We are very hungry. There are fish, to be sure, forbidden by the Gods, unclean. We eat them, but they do not give us any strength, and I doubt not we will be punished for eating them. It seems as if our gods had forsaken us.”
Mrs. Schultz went out and brought back a sack of food, and they made a feast, merry as in the days of plenty, which were gone forever.
Schultz came from the starving camps to write a letter to a New York paper, but it was never printed—a matter of politics. Then he advised the Indians to kill their agent, but they remembered Colonel Baker’s visit.
In his next annual report the agent wrote much about the Blackfeet, whose “heathenish rites weremost deplorable.” And then came the Winter of Death, when a chief, Almost-a-dog, checked off daily the fate of a starving people. Women crowded round the windows of the agent’s office, holding out skinny children. “Go,” he would say; “go away! I have nothing for you!”
The thirty thousand dollars provided for their food had all been stolen, but there was plenty of corn to fatten fifty chickens, some geese and ducks.
Wolf Head, once known as Wolverine, rode south to Schultz’s trading post where he and his partner were feeding hosts of people, but when they heard his story of death after death, one by one they stole away out into the darkness, sitting upon the frozen ground where they wailed for their dead.
That night Schultz wrote to a friend of his in New York, known to the Indians as Fisher Cap. Then he rode hard and far to consult with Father Prando, a Jesuit priest, who had also been writing letters. Thanks to Fisher Cap, perhaps, or to Father Prando, the government sent an inspector, and one day he drove into the agency. “Where is that chicken house?” he yelled, and when he found the place, kicked it open. “Here you!” he called to the Indians, and they did the rest.
Next, he kicked open the agent’s office. “You —— —— ——,” said he.
Since then some agents have been honest, but the Piegan tribe has never recovered from the Winter of Death, for in their weakness, they fell a prey to disease, and only a remnant is left of that ruined people. But for Schultz, the despised squaw-man, not one would be left alive.