While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Fifty years ago the name Blackfoot was
one of terrible meaning to the white
traveler 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.
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 coulee.
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
Kutenai, 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
Crow on the south, and the
Snake,
Kalispel, and Kutenai 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.
1: For a more extended account of this
migration, see American Anthropologist, April, 1892, p. 153.
