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LETTER—No. 7.
MOUTH OF YELLOW STONE, UPPER MISSOURI.
The Letter which I gave you yesterday, on the subject of “medicines” and “medicine-men,” has somewhat broken the “thread of my discourse;” and left my painting-room (in the bastion), and all the Indians in it, and portraits, and buffalo hunts, and landscapes of these beautiful regions, to be taken up and discussed; which I will now endeavour to do, beginning just where I left (or digressed) off.
I was seated on the cool breech of a twelve-pounder, and had my easel before me, and Crows and Blackfeet, and Assinneboins, whom I was tracing upon the canvass. And so I have been doing to-day, and shall be for several days to come. My painting-room has become so great a lounge, and I so great a “medicine-man,” that all other amusements are left, and all other topics of conversation and gossip are postponed for future consideration. The chiefs have had to place “soldiers” (as they are called) at my door, with spears in hand to protect me from the throng, who otherwise would press upon me; and none but the worthies are allowed to come into my medicine apartments, and none to be painted, except such as are decided by the chiefs to be worthy of so high an honour.
The Crows and Blackfeet who are here together, are enemies of the most deadly kind while out on the plains; but here they sit and smoke quietly together, yet with a studied and dignified reserve.
The Blackfeet are, perhaps, one of the most (if not entirely the most) numerous and warlike tribes on the Continent. They occupy the whole of the country about the sources of the Missouri, from this place to the Rocky Mountains; and their numbers, from the best computations, are something like forty or fifty thousand—they are (like all other tribes whose numbers are sufficiently large to give them boldness) warlike and ferocious, i. e. they are predatory, are roaming fearlessly about the country, even into and through every part of the Rocky Mountains, and carrying war amongst their enemies, who are, of course, every tribe who inhabit the country about them.