Jack the Young Cowboy: An Eastern Boy's Experiance on a Western Round-up

by George Bird Grinnell

"One time, when I was younger and heard this same story told by two tribes, I thought maybe I'd found the people that used to belong to the Blackfeet; but I reckon that's not so. You know, if you've traveled around, that you'll find lots of different tribes that have the same story and each tribe thinks the story belongs to it. Nobody knows where that story originally came from, nor to whom it actually belongs."

"Say, Hugh," Mason asked, "did you ever hear that story told by John Monroe, about the first time the north Indians saw the white people?"

"Yes," replied Hugh, "I've heard that story; but a good while ago, and I don't feel sure that I could tell it. Do you remember it well enough to give it to us?"

"Well, I don't know that I do; but, if you'd like, I'll try it."

"Pitch in," said Hugh; and McIntyre added, "Go it, Mason."

"This happened a long time ago, old John Monroe said, but how long, of course, I can't tell, any more than he could; but, according to the story, this was the first time the Blackfeet ever saw any white people. John said that old Su' ta ne told him the story and Su' ta ne said that his grandfather was one of the Blackfeet people. It happened when the Blackfeet were living up North, as I've just told you about. Here's the story:

"A party of Indians were traveling south, and while they were going through a big patch of timber on the north of some big river, they saw something that they could not understand. It looked like beaver work where beavers had been cutting down trees, but when they looked at the stumps and the cuttings they could see that no beaver that they knew anything about could possibly have opened its mouth wide enough to cut such chips. They talked and wondered about this and finally concluded that the tree must have been cut down by some mysterious animal. You know the Blackfeet are great fellows for believing that there are strange animals and people living under the water, and they thought that this work must have been done by under-water animals.

"Presently they came to a place where one of the trees that had been cut down, after having its branches lopped off, had been dragged along the ground. They followed the trail, anxious to find out what was happening, and as they followed it they saw that all through the timber there were many other trails like this, and that presently they all came together in one big trail, and in this trail they found tracks that looked like the tracks of people, but they were not shaped like the track of a human foot, and besides that, at the back of this track there was a deep mark.

"Well, they followed the trail which was now getting to be a big one, and presently they came to where they could see that the timber ended and there was an open spot beyond, and as they looked out through the timber they saw some animals walking around on their hind legs. For a minute they thought that they were bears playing with sticks, but then they saw that these looked like people, and that they were lifting up logs and putting them in a great pile. As they looked, they saw that some of these animals had a great deal of hair or wool on their faces; they seemed to be naked, for they wore no robes. Some had red bodies and some black ones. So they saw that they could not be people. As they talked about it, they concluded that these were certainly some under-water animals, but they wondered what they could be doing with these sticks.