8 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[July 7, 1906. 
In the Lodges of the Blackfeet. 
XXXII.—The “Winter of Death." 
The summer days slipped by happily for all 
of us. Berry’s mother and the Crow Woman 
made themselves a little garden, where the 
Marias and its Dry Fork join, irrigating it with 
water carried from the river. Their corn and 
pumpkins and beans, all of the stock which the 
natives had cultivated long before Columbus saw 
America, grew apace. The old women erected 
a shelter hard by their thriving plants, a roof of 
brush supported by four posts; and there Nat- 
ah'-ki and I spent many a pleasant afternoon 
with them, listening to their quaint tales, and 
the still more quaint songs which they occasion¬ 
ally sung. Early in the spring, Berry had again 
torn up the earth with his bulls and plows, and 
sown it with oats and wheat. Strange to say—• 
for it was again a dry year—they grew and 
ripened, and were harvested and stacked, but 
never marketed. The pigs undermined the 
stacks, cattle and horses broke through the 
corral and trampled them, and all went to waste. 
We were no farmers whatever. 
All summer we had Piegans with us from time 
to time, and they told harrowing tales of hard 
times up at their Agency. The weekly rations, 
they said, lasted but one day. There was no 
game of any kind to be found; their Agent 
would give them nothing. Those with 11s and 
scattered along the river, by hard hunting, found 
deer and antelope enough to keep themselves 
alive, but those remaining at the Agency actually 
suffered for want of food. They were the ones 
who could not get away. They had lost their 
horses through a skin disease which had spread 
among the herds, or had sold them to the trader 
for provisions. 
In September Nat-ah'-ki and I went up to the 
Agency to see for ourselves what was the con¬ 
dition of affairs. Arriving at the main camp, 
just below the Agency stockade, at dusk, we 
stopped with old Lodge-pole Chief for the night. 
“Leave our food sacks with the saddles,” I said 
to Nat-ah'-ki, “we will see what they have to eat.” 
The old man and his wives welcomed us cor¬ 
dially. “Hurry,” he commanded the women, 
“cook a meal for our friends. They must be 
hungry after their long ride.” He spoke as if 
the lodge was filled with provisions. He smiled 
happily and rubbed his hands together as he 
talked. But his wives did not smile, nor hurry. 
From a parfleche they brought forth three 
small potatoes and set them to boil, and from 
another one, two quarter-pound trout, which 
they also boiled. After a time they set them 
before us. “ ’Tis all we have,” said one of the 
women, pathetically, brushing the tears from 
her eyes. “ ’Tis all we have. We are very 
poor.” 
At that poor old Lodge-pole Chief broke 
down. “It is the truth,” he said, haltingly. “We 
have nothing. There are no more buffalo, the 
Great Father sends us but a little food—gone 
in a day. We are very hungry. These are fish 
to be sure, forbidden by the gods, unclean. We 
eat them, however, but they do not give us any 
strength, and I doubt not that we will be pun¬ 
ished for eating them. It seems as if our gods 
had forsaken us.” 
Nat-ah'-ki went out and brought back one of 
our food sacks and handed to the women three 
or four tins of beans, corned beef and corn, 
some sugar, coffee and flour. To the old man 
she gave a piece of tobacco. Ah! how their 
faces brightened! How they talked and laughed 
as they cooked and ate a good meal. It was a 
pleasure to watch them. 
The next day we rode to the various camps 
and found the same conditions in each. Not 
what one could call actual starvation, but some¬ 
thing very near it, so near it that the most 
vigorous of the men and women showed the 
want of food. They appealed to me for help, 
and I gave freely what I had; but that of course 
was a mere nothing, as compared to their needs. 
Nat-ah'ki’s mother had been long in one of the 
camps, caring for a sick relative, now dead. We 
rescued her from the place of famine and made 
our way back to the Fort. 
After a talk with Berry, I determined to write 
a full account of what I had seen on the Reser¬ 
vation, and this I did, sending it to a certain 
New York paper for publication. I wanted the 
American people to know how their helpless 
wards were being used. I knew that some good 
people somewhere, would take the matter up 
and see that sufficient food was sent them to 
keep soul and body together. My contribution 
was never printed. I was a subscriber to the 
paper, and scanned its columns for weeks and 
months after I had sent in my registered manu¬ 
script. Alas! I did not then know how much 
politics affected even such an ordinary position 
as Indian Agent, and especially at that time, 
when the “Indian Office” was in the hands of a 
“ring.” I had sent my story to the paper which 
was the mainstay of the Administration. Of 
course, they would not print it, and I gave up. 
Both Berry and I advised the Indians to kill 
their Agent, and see if that would not awaken 
people to their necessities; but they were afraid 
to do it; they remembered the Baker massacre. 
I know now where I could have sent that story, 
whence it would have been scattered broadcast 
throughout the land; but I was young, and eas¬ 
ily discouraged, and so matters drifted and 
drifted along from bad to worse. Not many of 
the people died during the winter from actual 
want. 
Summer came. The Agent gave out a few 
potatoes to the Indians to plant. Some actually 
did plant them; others were so hungry that they 
ate what was given them. Also, in the early 
spring they scraped the inner bark of pine and 
cottonwood, and dug “pomme blanch,” a tuber¬ 
ous growth something like a turnip, for food. 
Then came fishing time, and they caught trout. 
Somehow they got through the summer, and 
then came winter again, the starvation winter, 
the winter of death, as it was called, and from 
which ever afterward, everything was dated. In 
his annual report of the summer, dated Aug. 
13, 1883, the Agent had much to say about the 
heathenish rites of his people, and but little of 
their needs. He told of the many hundred 
acres they had planted with potatoes and turnips 
—they may have planted five acres all told. In 
fact, he gave no hint of the approaching calam¬ 
ity. For years in his annual report he had re¬ 
corded a constant increase in the tribe’s re¬ 
sources; he would not now, it seemed, take back 
his words and make himself out a liar. It had 
been through his own single, strenuous efforts 
that the Blackfeet had risen to their present 
stage of civilization, “but their heathenish rites 
were most deplorable,” he said. 
Early in the fall, about fifty lodges of people 
came down and remained with us. There were 
still a few antelope, but when they failed to 
make a successful hunt, we gave them from 
what we had. None of them perished. But up 
at the Agency, as January and February passed, 
the situation was terrible. Old Almost-a-Dog, 
day after day, by ones and twos and threes, 
checked off the deaths of the starved ones. 
Women crowded around the windows of the 
Agent’s office, held up their skinny children to 
his gaze, and asked for a cup of flour or rice 
or beans or corn—anything, in fact, that would 
appease hunger. He waved them away. “Go.” 
he would say, surlily, “go away! Go away! I 
have nothing for you.” Of course he hadn’t. 
The $30,000 appropriated for the Blackfeet had 
disappeared—somewhere, I suppose. The In¬ 
dian ring got a part, and the rest, from which 
must be subtracted a freight tariff of 5 cents 
per pound, was used to buy many unnecessary 
things. Beef and flour were what the people 
needed, and did not get. In one part of the 
stockade the Agent kept about fifty chickens, a 
couple of tame wild geese and some ducks, 
which tvere daily fed an abundance of corn, 
freighted all the way from Sioux City up to 
Fort Benton by steamboat, and then more than 
a hundred miles overland, for the use of the 
Indians. The corn was Government property, 
which, by law, the Agent could neither buy nor 
in any way convert to his own use. Neverthe¬ 
less, he fed it liberally to his hens, and the In¬ 
dian mothers stood around mournfully watch¬ 
ing, and furtively picking up a kernel of the 
grain here and there. And day by day the peo¬ 
ple died. There were several thousand pounds 
