Schultz - My life as an Indian: the story of a Red woman and a White man in the lodges of the Blackfeet

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Adam Bozarth

Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-427-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0036-9

Printed in the United States of America

Fort Benton, from a photograph taken in the early eighties

Under the title of In the Lodges of the Blackfeet, this story originally appeared as a serial in Forest and Stream.

In this account of his long residence with the Blackfeet, Mr. Schultz has given us a remarkable story. It is an animated and vivid picture of Indian life. The scene is on the plains in the old days, in the picturesque period when the tribe lived in a primitive way, subsisting on the buffalo and at war with hostile neighbours. It is a true history and not romance, yet abounds in romantic incident. In its absolute truthfulness lies its value.

The book has extraordinary interest as a human document. It is a study of human nature in red. The author has penetrated the veil of racial indifference and misunderstanding and has got close to the heart of the people about whom he writes. Such an intimate revelation of the domestic life of the Indians has never before been written. The sympathetic insight everywhere evident is everywhere convincing. We feel that the men and the women portrayed are men and women of actual living existence. And while in the lodges on the Marias the elemental passions have fuller and franker sway, we recognise in the Blackfoot as here revealed a creature of common humanity like our own. His are the same loves and hates and hopes and fears. The motives which move him are those which move us. The Indian is the white man without the veneer of civilisation.

The chapters of this volume were published serially in Forest and Stream under the title In the Lodges of the Blackfeet and over the pseudonym W. B. Anderson. The title page now bears the authors real name. Not only is the story a true one, but many of the characters still live, though to-day under conditions as different as though centuries had intervened. F ATHER P RANDO died in the year 1906.

G EO . B IRD G RINNELL .

N T - AH - KI A Blackfoot Indian girl who becomes the wife of the A UTHOR ; a cheerful and sweet-tempered woman about whom the interest of the story centres. The books finest character.

T HE C ROW W OMAN An Arickaree captured long ago by the Grows and later taken from them by the Bloods.

M RS . B ERRY A Mandan woman, wife of an old time Indian trader, mother of B ERRY and friend of the C ROW W OMAN ; learned in the ancient lore of her tribe.

D IANA An orphan Indian girl, educated by A SHTON ; a noble and brilliant woman, who meets a tragic death.

T HE A UTHOR At the age of twenty goes west to Montana Territory in search of wild life and adventure, and finds both with the Piegan Blackfeet; he marries into the tribe and lives with them for many years; goes with them on the hunt, and on the warpath; joins in their religious ceremonies; and as a squawman lives the Indian life.

B ERRY A mixed-blood Indian trader, born on the upper Missouri River; speaks half a dozen Indian languages, and is very much at home in Indian camps; an adept at all the tricks of the Indian trade.

S ORREL H ORSE White man, trapper, and Indian trader; has an Indian family.

A SHTON A young white man from the East who carries about with him a secret sorrow but finds peace at last.

F ATHER P RANDO A devoted Jesuit Priest whose life is given to mission work among the Indians. The Blackfeets friend, comforter, and helper during the terrible Famine Year.

R ISING W OLF Early Hudson Bay man, typical trapper, trader, and interpreter of the romantic days of the early fur-trading period.

H EAVY B REAST A Blackfoot partisan, leader of war parties, the possessor of a medicine pipe.

W OLVERINE A Blackfoot, brother-in-law of S ORREL H ORSE , whom the A UTHOR helped to steal his wife.

W EASEL T AIL

T ALKS - WITH - THE - BUFFALO

Blackfeet, close friends and hunting and war companions of the A UTHOR .

W IDE, brown plains, distant, slender, flat-topped buttes; still more distant giant mountains, blue-sided, sharp-peaked, snow-capped; odour of sage and smoke of camp fire; thunder of ten thousand buffalo hoofs over the hard, dry ground; long-drawn, melancholy howl of wolves breaking the silence of night, how I loved you all!

I am in the sere and yellow leaf, dried and shrivelled, about to fall and become one with my millions of predecessors. Here I sit, by the fireplace in winter, and out on the veranda when the days are warm, unable to do anything except live over in memory the stirring years I passed upon the frontier. My thoughts are always of those days; days before the accursed railroads and the hordes of settlers they brought swept us all, Indians and frontiersmen and buffalo, from the face of the earth, so to speak.

The love of wild life and adventure was born in me, yet I must have inherited it from some remote ancestor, for all my near ones were staid, devout people. How I hated the amenities and conventions of society; from my earliest youth I was happy only when out in the great forest which lay to the north of my home, far beyond the sound of church and school bell, and the whistling locomotives. My visits to those grand old woods were necessarily brief, only during summer and winter vacations. But a day came when I could go where and when I chose, and one warm April morning long ago I left St. Louis on a Missouri River steamboat, bound for the Far West.

The Far West! Land of my dreams and aspirations! I had read and re-read Lewis and Clarks Journal, Catlins Eight Years, The Oregon Trail, Fremonts expeditions; at last I was to see some of the land and the tribes of which they told. The sturdy flat-bottom, shallow-draft, stern-wheel boat was tied to the shore every evening at dusk, resuming her way at daylight in the morning, so I saw every foot of the Missouris shores, 2,600 miles, which lay between the Mississippi and our destination, Fort Benton, at the head of navigation. I saw the beautiful groves and rolling green slopes of the lower river, the weird bad lands above them, and the picturesque cliffs and walls of sandstone, carved into all sorts of fantastic shapes and form by wind and storm, which are the features of the upper portion of the navigable part of the river. Also I saw various tribes of Indians encamped upon the banks of the stream, and I saw more game than I had thought ever existed. Great herds of buffalo swimming the river often impeded the progress of the boat. Numberless elk and deer inhabited the groves and slopes of the valley. On the open bottoms grazed bands of antelope, and there were bighorn on nearly every butte and cliff of the upper river. We saw many grizzly bears, and wolves, and coyotes; and in the evenings, when all was still aboard, the beavers played and splashed alongside the boat. What seemed to me most remarkable of all, was the vast number of buffalo we passed. All through Dakota, and through Montana clear to Fort Benton, they were daily in evidence on the hills, in the bottoms, swimming the river. Hundreds and hundreds of them, drowned, swollen, in all stages of decomposition, lay on the shallow bars where the current had cast them, or drifted by us down the stream. I believe that the treacherous river, its quicksands, and its unevenly frozen surface in winter, played as great havoc with the herds as did the Indian tribes living along its course. We passed many and many a luckless animal, sometimes a dozen or more in a place, standing under some steep bluff which they had vainly endeavoured to climb, and there they were, slowly but surely sinking down, down into the tenacious black mud or sands, until finally the turbid water would flow smoothly on over their lifeless forms. One would naturally think that animals crossing a stream and finding themselves under a high cut bank would turn out again into the stream and swim down until they found a good landing place; but this is just what the buffalo, in many cases, did not do. Having once determined to go to a certain place, they made a beeline for it; and, as in the case of those we saw dead and dying under the cut banks, it seemed as if they chose to die rather than to make a detour in order to reach their destination.