The Great Salt Lake Trail

by Henry Inman; Buffalo Bill

The characteristics of the Blackfeet were bravery, hardiness, and a ferocity that made them formidable enemies to the other tribes with which they were constantly at war. Particularly were they the everlasting foes of the Crows, from whom they stole horses by the wholesale; but very frequently the tables were turned, and the Crows retaliated, robbing the Blackfeet of thousands.

They were probably the best hunters of all the plains' tribes, and in the early days before their contact with the whites their weapons were of the most primitive character. They used merely bows with stone-pointed arrows, and they resorted to the most ingenious methods in order to capture the buffalo, which was their principal food. In fact, they subsisted almost entirely upon that great ruminant.

One of their plans to catch the huge beasts was known as the “pis-kun,” literally meaning deep blood-kettle. It was really an immense corral, generally constructed just below a steep precipice, and its sides and ends enclosed by logs, stone, or brush—anything that came handy and answered the purpose. On the prairie above the precipice, wings extended out on either side, in shape of an open triangle. Into this the buffalo were carefully driven, and in their fright precipitated themselves over the brink.

The proceedings were always conducted with much ceremony, and involved a good deal of savage mummery. The sun, which was one of their deities, must be propitiated. The evening previous to the attempt to drive a herd of buffalo into the pis-kun, one of the medicine-men of the band commenced by praying to the sun for the success of the undertaking. He was the one to make the buffalo come, and early in the morning he got out his robes and started on his mission, after warning his wives that they must not show themselves, even by looking out of the door of the lodge, until he came back from his mission, but that they must constantly burn sweet grass as an offering to the god of the day.

He must necessarily fast when engaged in this duty, and when he was ready to make his appearance on the prairie the warriors all followed him, hiding themselves behind the temporary fence that bounded the pis-kun. He then dressed himself in a bonnet which was made of the head of a buffalo, and with a robe of the same animal thrown around him slowly approached the peacefully grazing herd.

Arriving in the immediate vicinity, the buffalo, attracted by the apparition, looked up. The medicine-man walked then very deliberately toward the opening of the pis-kun. Generally the buffalo began to follow him, and as he saw that they did so he increased his pace, the animals, whose curiosity was aroused, at the same time doing the same.

When the herd was securely within the corral, the hidden Indians suddenly rose from their places, yelling as only savages can, at the same instant shaking their robes, and the stampeded animals rushed headlong to their death over the precipice. Hundreds were instantly killed, while others were so dreadfully disabled as to make them an easy prey. Then commenced an indiscriminate skinning and cutting up, the chiefs and most noted warriors receiving the choicest meat.

As has been the fate of nearly all the Indian tribes west of the Missouri River, the smallpox made fearful inroads among the Blackfeet. It first appeared in 1845, and the tribe was decimated. In fact, it is said that the disease almost swept the plains of Indians. In 1757-1758, it again visited them, but was not so virulent as at its first appearance. The measles carried off thousands in 1864; and again, in 1869, the smallpox broke out in the Blackfeet villages. In 1883-1884, strange as it may appear, twenty-five per cent of the Piegan band actually died from hunger! The cause of this terrible disaster was that the buffalo had been driven from the Blackfoot country, or rather exterminated, and the tribe, which had ever wholly depended upon that animal for their subsistence, in a short time was reduced to a state of absolute starvation.

Like the buffalo, the once powerful Blackfeet are nearly all gone. The few left are living on a small reservation, and are somewhat self-sustaining. What a sad commentary! Fifty years ago the Blackfeet numbered over forty thousand warriors, and their name was a terror to the white man who had the temerity to travel through their country.

The Blackfoot account of creation is not a very definite one; portions of it are too vulgar for refined ears, but in it is to be found a story of a once great flood, which seems to be common to the cosmogony of all tribes.