Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park

by James Willard Schultz

UPPER TWO MEDICINE LAKE. RISING BULL MOUNTAIN ON RIGHT

“Ai! Rising Bull was a brave man. And oh, so gentle-hearted! So good to the widows and orphans; to all in any kind of distress! We must in some way see that this mountain continues to bear his name,” said Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill.

And to that I most heartily agree.

July 15.

We are a considerable camp of people: Yellow Wolf, my old uncle-in-law; Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill, another uncle-in-law; Big Spring; Two Guns; Black Bull; Stabs-by-Mistake; Eagle Child; Eli Guardipe, or Takes-Gun-Ahead. And with them they have their eleven women and fourteen children. All are my especial friends, and all the men have been to war—some of them many times—and have counted coup upon the enemy. Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill has many battle scars on different parts of his body. I was with him when he got the last one, in a fight with the Crees. The bullet struck him in the forehead, ripped open the scalp clear to the back of his head, but did not penetrate the skull. He dropped instantly when struck, and we at first thought that he was dead. It was some hours before he regained consciousness.

With all these men, and especially Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill and Guardipe, I hunted and traveled much in the old days. Naturally, we spend much of our time telling over this-and-that of our adventures. Meantime the children play around, as happy as Indian children ever are, and their mothers do the lodge work, which is light, and gather in groups to chat and joke. The boys have just been skipping stones on the smooth surface of the lake. The number of skips a stone makes before it finally sinks, denotes the number of wives the caster will have when he reaches manhood.

Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill and Two Guns are medicine men. The former has the Elk medicine pipe, the latter the Water medicine pipe, both ancient medicines in the tribe. They are spiritual, not material, medicines. In fact, they are the implements used in prayers to the sun and other gods, and each carries with it a ritual of its own. Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill has just told me that we will have some prayers with his pipe a few days from now. I shall be glad to take part in it all once more.

July 16.

Again my people are filled with resentment against the whites. I told them this afternoon that the falls in the river between this and the lower lake had been given a foolish white men’s name. I could not tell them what it was, for there is no Blackfeet equivalent for the word “Trick.” But what a miserable, circus-suggesting name that is to give to one of the most beautiful of waterfalls, and the only one of its kind in America, and in all the world, for all I know! A short distance below the outlet of the upper lake the river sinks, and a half-mile farther on gushes into sight from a jagged hole halfway up the side of a high and almost perpendicular cliff.