AT UPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKE
Left to right: Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill, Yellow Wolf, and the author, relating his killing of a grizzly at this particular place, in the long-ago
Yes, this was once the country of the Crows. But the Blackfeet saw and coveted it. It was about two hundred years ago, as near as I can learn, that they came into it from their original home, the region of Peace River and the Slave Lakes, and little by little forced the Crows southward until they had driven them to the south side of the Yellowstone, or Elk River, as it is known to the various Indian tribes of the plains.
Perhaps, in the first place, the Blackfeet coveted more than anything else the cliffs on the Two Medicine,—just above Holy Family Mission,—where the buffalo were decoyed in great numbers and stampeded in a huge waterfall of whirling brown bodies to death on the rocks below.
The Blackfeet call such a place—there were several of them—a pi′skan, a trap. Extending back from the cliff, for a mile or more out on the plain, were two ever-diverging lines of rock piles, like a huge letter V. Behind these the people concealed themselves, and the buffalo caller, going out beyond the mouth of the V, by certain antics and motions aroused the curiosity of the herd until it finally followed him into the V. Then the people began to rise up behind it, and the result was that, unable to turn either to the right or left, from fear of the two lines of shouting, robe-waving stampeders, it was driven straight to the cliff and over it.
When I first saw the place, there were at the foot of the cliffs tons and tons of buffalo horn tips, the most time-resisting of any portion of a buffalo’s anatomy.
Last night, while the pipe was going the rounds, I asked what had become of old Red Eagle’s Thunder Medicine Pipe, and was told that it was still in the tribe, Old Person at present being the owner of it. Said Two Guns: “That is one of the most ancient and most powerful medicines we have. Do you know how it came into our possession?”
THE STORY OF THE THUNDER MEDICINE
“It was in the long ago. Our fathers had no horses then, but used dogs to carry their belongings.
“One spring, needing the skins of bighorn to tan into soft leather for clothing, the tribe moved up here to the foot of the Lower Two Medicine Lake, and began hunting. Many men would surround and climb a mountain, driving the bighorn ahead of them, their dogs helping, and at last they would come up to the game, often several hundred head, on the summit of the mountain. The dogs were then held back, and the hunters, advancing with ready bow and arrows, would shoot and shoot the bighorn at close range and generally kill the most of them.