Read Ebook: Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park by Schultz James Willard

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UPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKE AND RISING BULL MOUNTAIN 8

PI?-TA-MAK-AN FALLS 12

AT UPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKE 20 Showing Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill, Yellow Wolf, and the author

MOVING CAMP FROM TWO MEDICINE 42

OUR CAMP ON CUTBANK RIVER 46 Showing Wonderful Runner and Little Plume Mountains

STREAM FROM UNNAMED GLACIER POURING INTO CUTBANK CANYON 52

THE BEAVER DAM 60

BIGHORN COUNTRY. HEAD OF CUTBANK RIVER 80

CUTBANK RIVER. A GOOD TROUT RIFFLE 84

BLACK BULL AND STABS-BY-MISTAKE NEAR LOWER END OF CUTBANK CANYON 96

STABS-BY-MISTAKE, SUN WOMAN, AND HER SON, LITTLE OTTER, IN CUTBANK CANYON 106

BIG SPRING PAINTING AUTOBIOGRAPHY ON THE FLESH SIDE OF A TANNED ELK-SKIN 110

SUN WOMAN 128

CAMP NEAR LOWER END OF UPPER ST. MARY'S LAKE 146

AT THE NARROWS, UPPER ST. MARY'S LAKE 152

GOING-TO-THE-SUN MOUNTAIN 156

GOING-TO-THE-SUN CHALET, UPPER ST. MARY'S LAKE 180

OPENING OF THE ELK MEDICINE PIPE CEREMONY 206

ELK MEDICINE PIPE DANCE 210

TAIL-FEATHERS-COMING-OVER-THE-HILL PROPITIATING THE DREADED UNDER-WATER PEOPLE AT UPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKE 212

ICEBERG LAKE 226

EN ROUTE TO ICEBERG LAKE 234

GLACIER ON TRAIL TO ICEBERG LAKE 240

BLACKFEET TALES OF GLACIER NATIONAL PARK

TWO MEDICINE

HUGH MONROE

After an absence of many years, I have returned to visit for a time my Blackfeet relatives and friends, and we are camping along the mountain trails where, in the long ago, we hunted buffalo, and elk, and moose, and all the other game peculiar to this region.

To-day we pitched our lodges under Rising Wolf Mountain, that massive, sky-piercing, snow-crested height of red-and-gray rock which slopes up so steeply from the north shore of Upper Two Medicine Lake. This afternoon we saw upon it, some two or three thousand feet up toward its rugged crest, a few bighorn and a Rocky Mountain goat. But we may not kill them! Said Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill: "There they are! Our meat, but the whites have taken them from us, even as they have taken everything else that is ours!" And so we are eating beef where once we feasted upon the rich ribs and loins of game, which tasted all the better because we trailed and killed it, and with no little labor brought it to the womenfolk in camp.

Instead of one winter, Monroe had passed two years with the tribe, and in that time had acquired a wife, a daughter of the great chief, a good knowledge of the language, and an honorable name, Ma-kwi?-i-po-wak-s?n , which was given him because of his bravery in a battle with the Crows in the Yellowstone country.

How I envy Hugh Monroe, the first white man to traverse the plains lying between the Upper Saskatchewan and the Upper Missouri, and the first to see many portions of the great stretch of the mountain region between the Missouri and the Yellowstone. He has himself often told me that "every day of that life was a day of great joy!"

Monroe was a famous hunter and trapper, and a warrior as well. He was a member of the Ai?-in-i-kiks, or Seizer band of the All Friends Society, and the duty of the Seizers was to keep order in the great camp, and see that the people obeyed the hunting laws--a most difficult task at times. On several occasions he went with his and other bands to war against other tribes, and once, near Great Salt Lake, when with a party of nearly two hundred warriors, he saved the lives of the noted Jim Bridger and his party of trappers. Bridger had with him a dozen white men and as many Snake Indians, the latter bitter enemies of the Blackfeet. The Snakes were discovered, and the Blackfeet party was preparing to charge them, when Monroe saw that there were white men behind them. "Stop! White men are with them! We must let them go their way in peace!" Monroe shouted to his party.

"But they are Snake white men, and therefore our enemy: we shall kill them all!" the Blackfeet chief answered. However, such was Monroe's power over his comrades that he finally persuaded them to remain where they were, and he went forward with a flag of truce, and found that his friend Jim Bridger was the leader of the other party. That evening white men and Snakes and Blackfeet ate and smoked together! It was a narrow escape for Bridger and his handful of men.

Monroe had three sons and three daughters by his Indian wife, all of whom grew into fine, stalwart men and women. Up and down the country he roamed with them, trapping and hunting, and often fighting hostile war parties. They finally all married, and in his old age he lived with one and another of them until his death, in 1896, in his ninety-eighth year. We buried him near the buffalo cliffs, down on the Two Medicine River, where he had seen many a herd of the huge animals decoyed to their death. And then we named this mountain for him. A fitting tribute, I think, to one of the bravest yet most kindly men of the old, old West!

At the upper east side and head of this beautiful lake rises a pyramidal mountain of great height and grandeur. A frowse of pine timber on its lower front slope, and its ever-narrowing side slopes above, give it a certain resemblance to a buffalo bull. Upon looking at a recent map of the country I found that it had been named "Mount Rockwell." So, turning to Yellow Wolf, I said: "The whites have given that mountain yonder the name of a white man. It is so marked upon this paper."

The old man, half blind and quite feeble, roused up when he heard that, and cried out: "Is it so? Not satisfied with taking our mountains, the whites even take away the ancient names we have given them! They shall not do it! You tell them so! That mountain yonder is Rising Bull Mountain, and by that name it must ever be called! Rising Bull was one of our great chiefs: what more fitting than that the mountain should always bear his name?"

"Rising Bull was a chief in two tribes," Yellow Wolf went on. "In his youth he married a Flathead girl, at a time when we were at peace with that people, and after a winter or two she persuaded him to take her across the mountains for a visit with her relatives. Rising Bull came to like them and all the Flathead people so well that he remained with them a number of winters, and because of his bravery, and his kind and generous nature, the Flatheads soon appointed him one of their chiefs. When he was about forty winters of age, some young men of both tribes quarreled over a gambling game and several were killed on each side. That, of course, ended the peace pact; war was declared, and as Rising Bull could not fight his own people, he came back to us with his Flathead wife, and was a leader in the war, which lasted for several years. When that was ended, he continued to lead war parties against the Crows, the Sioux, the Assiniboines, and the far-off Snakes, and was always successful. Came the dreadful Measles Winter, and with hundreds of our people, he died. He left a son, White Quiver, a very brave young warrior, and two years after his father's death, he was killed in a raid against the Crows."

The winter of 1859-60.

"Ai! Rising Bull was a brave man. And oh, so gentle-hearted! So good to the widows and orphans; to all in any kind of distress! We must in some way see that this mountain continues to bear his name," said Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill.

And to that I most heartily agree.

With all these men, and especially Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill and Guardipe, I hunted and traveled much in the old days. Naturally, we spend much of our time telling over this-and-that of our adventures. Meantime the children play around, as happy as Indian children ever are, and their mothers do the lodge work, which is light, and gather in groups to chat and joke. The boys have just been skipping stones on the smooth surface of the lake. The number of skips a stone makes before it finally sinks, denotes the number of wives the caster will have when he reaches manhood.

Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill and Two Guns are medicine men. The former has the Elk medicine pipe, the latter the Water medicine pipe, both ancient medicines in the tribe. They are spiritual, not material, medicines. In fact, they are the implements used in prayers to the sun and other gods, and each carries with it a ritual of its own. Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill has just told me that we will have some prayers with his pipe a few days from now. I shall be glad to take part in it all once more.

Again my people are filled with resentment against the whites. I told them this afternoon that the falls in the river between this and the lower lake had been given a foolish white men's name. I could not tell them what it was, for there is no Blackfeet equivalent for the word "Trick." But what a miserable, circus-suggesting name that is to give to one of the most beautiful of waterfalls, and the only one of its kind in America, and in all the world, for all I know! A short distance below the outlet of the upper lake the river sinks, and a half-mile farther on gushes into sight from a jagged hole halfway up the side of a high and almost perpendicular cliff.

"In the long ago we named that Pi?tamakan Falls," said Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill.

"Yes? And who was he?" I asked, although I had a fair recollection of the story of that personage. But I had forgotten the details of it, and wanted them all.

"Not he, but she!" he corrected me.

"But Pi?tamakan is a man's name," I objected.

"True. But this woman earned the right to bear a man's name, and so it was given her. She was the only woman of our people to receive that honor, so far as I know. Listen! You shall hear all about it."

THE WOMAN WHO EARNED A MAN'S NAME

"As a girl, her name was Weasel Woman. She was the eldest of two brothers and two sisters, and when she had seen fifteen winters both their father and mother died. But unlike children in such circumstances, they did not give up their lodge and scatter out to live with relatives and friends. Said Weasel Woman: 'Somehow, some way, we can manage to live. You boys are old enough to hunt and bring in meat and skins. We three sisters will keep the lodge in good order, and tan the skins for our clothing and bedding, and other uses.' And as she said, so it was done, and the orphan family prospered.

"But Weasel Woman was not satisfied. Many young men and many old and rich men wanted to marry her, and to all she said 'No!' so loudly, and so quickly, that after a time all knew that she would not marry. Wherever a party of warriors gathered for a dance or a feast, there she was looking on, listening to their talk, and giving what help she could. And when a party returned from war, she was loudest in praising them. All she talked of, all she thought about, was war.

"On an evening in her twentieth summer a large party of warriors started out to cross the mountains and raid the Flatheads. They traveled all night, and when daylight came found that Weasel Woman was with them.

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