Rising Wolf, the White Blackfoot / Hugh Monroe's Story of His First Year on the Plains

by James Willard Schultz

And that reminds me of something. At the foot of the buffalo trap cliffs on the Two Medicine I picked up one evening a number of flint and obsidian arrow points, many of them perfectly and beautifully fashioned. I took them to the lodge and offered them to Lone Walker, thinking that I was doing him a good turn. But he started back from them as though they had been a rattlesnake, and refused to even touch them. "Some of those, especially the black ones, are surely Crow points, and so unlucky to us," he explained. "This was Crow country. We took it from them. Maybe our fathers killed the owners of those points. But the shadows of the dead keep coming back to watch their property, and cause sickness, trouble, to any who take it. I wish that you would take the points back where you got them and leave them there."

I did so, but carefully cached them under a rock, and years later recovered them. But that is not all. After returning to the lodge I asked Lone Walker where the people obtained the black, as they called it, ice rock for making their arrows, and he told me that away to the south, near the head of Elk River, or in other words, the Yellowstone, were springs of boiling water, some of them shooting high in the air with tremendous roaring, and that near one of these springs was a whole butte of the ice rock, and it was there that his people went to get their supply. "But it is a dreadful place!" he concluded. "We approach it with fear in our hearts, and make great sacrifices to the gods to protect us. And as soon as we arrive at the ice rock butte we snatch up what we need of it and hurry away."

He was telling me, of course, of the wonderful geysers of the Yellowstone. I believe that I am the first white person who ever heard of them.

But to continue: When Red Crow and I returned home that evening, I asked Lone Walker if his people had seen the white men who had left the cut logs in the trail around the falls, and he replied that neither the Pi-kun-i, nor any other of the Blackfeet tribes had seen them, but he himself had heard of them from the Earth House People—the Mandans—when visiting them several summers back. They had been a large party, traveling in boats, had wintered with the Mandans and gone westward, even to the Everywheres-water of the west, and the next summer had come back, this time on horses instead of in boats. If you have read Lewis and Clark's "Journal," you will remember that they met and fought—on what must have been Cutbank River—some people that they thought were Blackfeet. They were not. They must have been a war party of Crows or some other tribe going through the country.

I next asked Lone Walker if he had ever seen white men on the Missouri River waters.

"Two. In the Mandan camp. Of a race the Mandans call Nothing White Men," he answered.

And from that time the Blackfoot name for the French has been Kis-tap-ap-i-kwaks (Useless, or Nothing White Men), as distinguishing them from the English, the Red Coats, and the Americans, Long Knives.

Lone Walker's answer pleased me; it was evident that the American Fur Company had not entered the Blackfoot, or even the Mandan country, far below. But even then that company was pushing, pushing its forts farther and farther up the Missouri, and the day was coming, far off but coming, when I would be one of its employees!

We camped there at the falls several days and hunted buffaloes, making several big runs and killing all the meat that was wanted at that time. Our lodges were pitched close to the river, right where the whites are now building the town they have named Great Falls.