| and friends for more than fifty years. Thus he not only spoke Blackfoot, he thought it as well. Moreover, from the beginning of his life as an Indian, in 1877, he made excellent use of his talents and opportunities. He not only listened to the stories of their lives and adventures told by famous men and women story tellers like Crow Woman, Earth Woman, Hugh Monroe, Tail-Feathers-Coming-Over-the-Hill, Many-Tail-Feathers, Three Suns, and others; he kept notebooks in which he recorded their stories. He spent countless evenings before the lodge fires of his friends, hearing from different ones their versions of the same events, until many of their stories were burned into his memory. |
| With the death of Fine Shield Woman in 1903, Schultz considered his life to be finished. The buffalo had gone, the Montana plains were fenced and overrun with cattle and sheep, and now the passing of his beloved wife removed his will to live. Yet, he had met George Bird Grinnell in the eighties, they had named many of the mountains and glaciers in the near-by Rockies, and he had begun to contribute stories to Grinnell's Forest and Stream. Life was over in 1903, but thirty-seven books and much additional writing were ahead of him and he was to play an important role in the creation of Glacier National Park, which he and Grinnell had conceived long before. Soon he would be world famous as Apikuni the storyteller. |
| One of the most extraordinary aspects of Apikuni's books, in my estimation, is the fact that nearly all of them were published for youthful readers. I have read most of them for the first time after reaching the age of sixty. Why were they published for young people? First of all, they were fit for young people to readmore than can be said for much that is published today. But most of all, they are youthful in spirit; they breathe the wholesome atmosphere of the mountains and the plains; they tell of a clean, decent, high-minded racethe terrible Blackfeet, the "savages," the cruel and bloody "raiders of the northwest plains," who turned out to be wholly human, kindly, generous, friendly, hospitable, joking and laughing, loving and lovable. Yes, they were stealers of horses, yet they were honest and truthful; they were relentless killers of their |
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