426 ' FOREST AND STREAM. [Not. 25, w- 
In Ihe Lodges of the Blackfeet. 
I. — Fort Bentoa. 
Wide brown plain.s, distant, slender, flat-topped buttes ; 
still more distant giant mountains, blue-sided, sharp- 
peaked, snow-capped ; odor 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 pre- 
decessors. 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 those stirring j^ears 
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 w'as 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 vaca- 
tions. But the day came when I could go where and 
when I chose, and one warm April morning in the 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 reread Lewis and Clark’s “Journal,” Gat- 
lin’s “Eight Years,” “The Oregon Trail,” Fremont’s ex- 
peditions; at last I was to see some of the land and the 
tribes of which they told. The sturdy flat-bottom, shal- 
low-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 Missouri’s 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 sand stone, carved into all 
sorts of fantastic shapes and form by wind and storm, 
which are the feature of the upper portion of the navi- 
gable 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 bot- 
toms grazed bands of antelope, and there were bighorn 
on nearly every butte and cliff of the upper river. We 
also saw a great many grizzly bears, and wolves, and 
coyotes ; and 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 num- 
bers of buffalo we passed. All through Dacotah, 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 am inclined to believe that the treach- 
erous river and its quicksands, its unevenly frozen sur- 
face in winter, played as great havoc with the herds as 
did the Indian tribes Jiving along its course. Many and 
many a luckless animal, sometimes a dozen or more in 
a place, we passed, standing under some cut bluff which 
they had vainly endeavored 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 find- 
ing 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 rnany cases, did not do. Having once determined to 
go to a certain place, they made a bee-line for it; and, 
as in the case of those we saw dead and d3ung under 
the cut banks, it seemed as if they chose to.idie rather 
to ntake a detaiir in order to reach their destination. 
There were many places after we entered the buffalo 
country which I passed with regret ; I wanted to stop 
off and explore them. But the captain of the boat would 
say: “Don’t get impatient; you must keep on to Fort 
Benton ; that’s the place for you, for there you’ll meet 
traders and trappers from all over the northwest, men 
you can rely upon and travel with, and be reasonably 
safe. Good God, boy, suppose I should set you ashore 
here? Why, jmu wouldn’t in all likelihood keep your 
.scalp two days. These here breaks and groves shelter 
many a prowlin’ w'ar party. Oh, of course, you don’t 
see ’em, but they’re here all the same.” 
Foolish “tenderfoot,” innocent “pilgrim” that I was. 
I could not bring myself to believe that I, I who thought 
so much of the Indians, would live with them, would 
learn their w^ays, would be a friend to them, could pos- 
sibly receive any harm at their hands. But one day, 
somewhere between the Round Butte and the mouth of 
the Musselshell River, we came upon a ghastly sight. 
On a shelving, sandy slope of shore, by a still smoldering 
fire of which their half-burned skiff formed a part, lay 
the remains of three white men. I say remains ad- 
visedl}". for they had been scalped and literally cut to 
pieces, their heads crushed and frightfully battered, 
hands and feet severed and thrown promiscuously about. 
We stopped and buried them, and it is needless to say 
that I did not again ask to be set ashore. 
Ours was the first boat to arrive at Fort Benton that 
spring. Long before we came in sight of the place the 
inhabitants had seen the smoke of our craft and made 
preparations to receive us. When we turned the bend 
„and neared the levee, cannon boomed, flags waved, and 
..the entire population assembled on the shore to greet us. 
Foremost in the throng were the two traders who had 
some time before bought out the American Fur Com- 
pany, fort and all. They wore suits of blue broadcloth, 
their long-tailed, high-collared coats bright with brass 
buttons ; , they wore white shirts and stocks, and black 
cravats; their long hair, neatly combed, hung down to 
their shoulders. Beside them were their skilled em- 
ployes — clerks, tailor, carpenter — and they wore suits of 
black fustian, also brass buttoned, and likewise their hair 
was long, and these latter, almost without exception, 
wore parfleche-soled moccasins, gay with intricate and 
flowery designs of cut beads. Behind ' these prominent 
personages the group was most picturesque ; here were 
the French employes, mostly creoles from St. Louis and 
the lower Mississippi, men who had passed their lives in 
the employ of the American Fur Company, and had 
cordelled many a boat up the vast distances of the wind- 
ing Missouri. Without exception these men wore the 
black fustian capotes, or hooded coats, fustian or buck- 
skin trousers held in place by a bright-hued sash. Then 
there were bullwhackers, and mule-skinners, and inde- 
pendent traders and trappers, most of them attired in 
suits of plain or fringed and beaded buckskin, and nearly 
all of them had knives and Colt’s powder and ball six- 
shooters stuck in their belts ; and their headgear, espe- 
cially that of the traders and trappers, was home-made, 
being generally the skin of a kit fox roughly sewn in 
circular form, head in front and tail hanging down be- 
hind. Back of the whites were a number of Indians, men 
and youths from a nearby camp, and women married 
to the resident and visiting whites. I had already learned 
from what I had seen of the various tribes on our way 
up the river, that the everyday Indian of the plains is 
not the gorgeously attired, eagle plume bedecked crea- 
ture various prints and written descriptions had led me 
to believe he was. Of course, they had, all of them, such 
fancy attire, but it was worn only on state occasions. 
Those I now saw wore blanket or cow (buffalo) leather 
leggins, plain or beaded moccasins, calico shirts, and 
either blanket or cow leather toga. Most of them were 
bareheaded, their hair neatly braided, and their faces 
were painted with reddish brown ochre or Chinese ver- 
milion. Some of them carried a bow and quiver of 
arrows ; some had flint-lock fukes, a few the more mod- 
ern cap-lock rifle. The women wore dresses of calico ; a 
few “wives” of the traders and clerks and skilled labor- 
ers even wore silk, and gold chains and watches, and all 
had the inevitable gorgeously hued and fringed shawl 
thrown over their shoulders. 
With one glance the eye could take in the whole town, 
as it was at- that time. There was the great rectangular 
adote fort, with bastions igounting cannon at each cor- 
ner. A short distance above it were a few cabins, built 
of logs or adobe. Back of these, scattered out in the 
long, wide flat bottom, was camp after camp of trader 
and trapper, string after string of canvas covered freight- 
ers’ wagons, and down at the lower end of the flat were 
several hundred lodges of Piegans. All this motley crowd 
had been assembling for days and weeks, impatiently 
awaiting the arrival of the steamboats. The supply of 
provisions and things brought up by the boats the pre- 
vious year had fallen far short of the demand. There 
was no tobacco to be had at any price. Keno Bill, who 
ran a saloon and gambling house, was the only one who 
had any liquor, and that was alcohol diluted with water, 
four to one. He sold it for a dollar a drink. There 
was no flour, no sugar, no bacon in the town, but that 
didn’t matter, for there was plenty of buffalo and an- 
telope meat. What all craved, Indians and whites, was 
the fragrant weed and the flowing bowl. And here it 
was, a whole steamboat load, together with a certain 
amount of groceries ; no wonder cannon boomed and 
flags waved, and the population cheered when the boat 
hove in sight. 
I went ashore and put up at the Overland Hotel, which 
was a fair-sized log cabin with a number of log walled 
additions. For dinner we had boiled buffalo boss ribs, 
bacon and beans, “yeast powder” biscuit, coffee with 
sugar, molasses and stewed dried apples. The regular 
guests scarcely touched the meat, but the quantities of 
bread, syrup and dried apples they stowed away was 
something surprising. 
That was a day to me, a pilgrim fresh from the effete 
East, from the “States,” as these frontiersmen called it, 
full of interest. After dinner I went back to the boat to 
see about my luggage. There was a gray-bearded, long- 
haired old trapper standing on the shore looking absently 
out over the water. His buckskin trousers were so 
bagged at the knees that he seemed to be in the attitude 
of one about to jump out into the stream. To- him ap 
proached a fellow passenger, a hair-brained, windy, con- 
ceited young fellow bound for the mining country, and 
said, looking intently at the aforesaid baggy knees : 
■■'Well, old man, if you’re going to jump, why don’t you 
jump, instead of meditating over it so long?” 
He of the buckskins did not at first comprehend, but 
following the questioner’s intent stare he quickly saw 
what was meant. “Why, you pilgrim,” he replied, “jump 
yourself.” And instantly grasping the youth by the legs 
below the knees he heaved him out into about three feet 
of water. What a shout of laughter and derision arose 
from the bystanders when the ducked one reappeared 
and came gasping, spluttering, dripping, ashore. He 
looked neither to the right nor the left, but hurried on 
board to the seclusion of his cabin, and we saw him no 
more until he pulled out on the stage the next morning. 
I had letters of introduction to the firm which had 
bought out the American Fur Company. They received 
me kindly and one of them took me around introducing 
me to the various employes, residents of the town and to 
several visiting traders and trappers. Of the latter I 
met one, a man only a few years older than myself, 
whom I was told was the most successful and daring 
of all the traders of the plains. He spoke a number of 
Indian languages perfectly, and was at home in the camp 
of any of the surrounding tribes. We somehow took to 
each other at once, and I passed the balance of the after- 
noon in his company; we eventually became great 
friends. He still lives; therefore, as I may in the course 
of this story tell some of the things we did together, for 
which we are now both truly sorry, I will not give his 
right name. The Indians called him the Berry; and as 
Berry he shall be known in these chronicles of the old 
plains life. Tall, lean, long-armed and slightly stoop- 
shouldered, he was not a fine looking man, but what 
splendidly clear, fearless dark brown eyes he had; eyes 
that could beam with the kindly good nature of those 
of a child, or fairly flash fire when he was aroused to 
anger. 
It w'as not half an hour after the arrival of the steam- 
boat, before whisky dropped to the normal price of “two 
bits” per drink, and tobacco to $2 per pound. The white 
inen, with few exceptions, hied to the saloons to drink, 
and smoke, and gamble. A few hurried to load their 
wagons with sundry kegs and make for the Indian camp 
at the lowvr end of the bottom, and another, still larger, 
ran out on the Teton as fast as their horses couli run. 
