370 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1942 



clung to the forests at this time and made only brief incm*sions onto 

 the treeless prairies. Kelsey found the Blackfoot wandering on foot 

 in small bands that ceaselessly pursued the numberless herds of buf- 

 falo. He met them, however, in summer only, and whether or not 

 they too retreated to the edge of the forests at the onset of winter is 

 uncertain. Less than 50 years later they had obtained horses from a 

 United States tribe to the southwest and a fev/ guns from Hudson 

 Bay. At the same time the neighboring Sarcee, Cree, and Assiniboine 

 Indians had begun to press into their territory, and to demand a 

 greater share of the buffalo hunting now that the mobility given by 

 the horse and the effectiveness of the firearms had made hunting easier 

 and more profitable. Rivalry in war and the chase then brought about 

 internal reorganizations in all the tribes. Some of them graded their 

 young men into semimilitary societies and adopted a circular form of 

 encampment with the tent of the highest chief in the center. All alike 

 elevated warfare to the level of a national sport, and instituted a 

 regular system of rewards for the taking of scalps and the capture 

 of guns or horses. 



So it came about that the plains became one vast guerrilla zone in 

 which men hunted and were hunted without cease. The dress, the 

 customs, even the religion of the Indians reflected the change that 

 had taken place, and under uniform geographic and economic condi- 

 tions tended to become uniform also. Every tribe, for example, 

 adopted the institution of the sun dance, and possessed its quota of 

 precious medicine bundles, each with its individual ritual. 



All this time, however, Europeans were slowly filtering into the 

 prairies from the north, south, and east, and the indiscriminate mas- 

 sacre of the buffalo herds by both races was rapidly destroying the 

 foundation of the Indians' economic life. By 1879 the great herds 

 had ceased to exist and the old free hunting life suddenly collapsed. 

 With almost no warning the starving Indians were confronted with 

 their second revolution. Henceforth they had to confine their move- 

 ments within narrow tracts of land set apart for them by disdainful 

 white overlords, and to divert their energies from the exciting buffalo 

 hunt, with its intervals of pleasant idleness, to the monotonous drudg- 

 ery of farming and ranching, tasks which their forefathers w^ould 

 have regarded with contempt. We cannot wonder that most of the 

 ex-warriors of the first generation lost heart at the abrupt transforma- 

 tion, and that for a period the population of the plains' Indians 

 registered a decline. 



Similar declines of population are not rare. On the contrary they 

 have occurred in British Columbia, in parts of Africa, and through- 

 out almost the whole of the South Seas ; so commonly, in fact, during 

 the last 200 years as to be almost the rule wherever uncivilized peoples 

 have been suddenly confronted with European civilization. Not one 



