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

by James Willard Schultz

Except for playing children and quarreling dogs, ours was a very quiet camp those days there on It-Crushed-Them. The people still mourned for their dead and, for that matter, did so for a year or more. Those not mourning had no heart for social pleasure. All waited impatiently for the coming of the Kai-na. Day after day the medicine men got out their sacred pipes and smoked and prayed to the gods to give the warriors great success against the Crows, still encamped upon The-Other-Side Bear River, as the scouts kept reporting. I wondered if the Crows had scouts out keeping equally close watch upon our camp.

One morning Lone Walker sent Red Crow and me to the Black Butte, the extreme eastern end of the Moccasin Mountains, with dried meat and back fat for the four scouts stationed there. We started very early, arrived at the foot of the butte by something like ten o'clock, and there left our horses in a grove of cottonwoods, and began the ascent with our packs of meat. It was a long, steep, winding climb up around to its southern slope, and thence to its summit, and we did not attain it until mid-afternoon. We found two of the watchers asleep in a little enclosure of rocks just under the summit, and the two others sitting upon the highest point. They had seen us approaching the butte on our horses, and were expecting us. They had no word for us to take back; no enemies had appeared, the country seemed to be free from them.

It was from this high point that I got my first good view of the Bear Paw, and Wolf Mountains, across on the north side of the Missouri, and the great plains of the Missouri-Musselshell country. The plains were black with buffaloes as far out in all directions as the eye could distinguish them. I cannot begin to tell you how glad I was to be there on that high point looking out upon that vast buffalo plain, its grand mountains, its sentinel buttes, and deep-gashed river valleys. I had a sense of ownership in it all. White though my skin, and blue my eyes, I was a member of a Blackfoot tribe, yes, even a member of its law and order society. And so, in common with my red people, an owner of this great hunting-ground!

And even as I was thinking that, Red Crow turned from a long lookout upon it and said to me: "Rising Wolf, brother, what a rich, what a beautiful land is ours!"

No, that doesn't express it; he said, "Ki-sak-ow-an-on!" (Your land and ours!)

"Ai! That is truth!" I answered, and we hastened down the steep butte, mounted our horses and went homeward across the plain.

We arrived in camp to find the messengers returned from the north. With them had come several hundred warriors of the Kai-na, and the whole tribe would be with us on the following day. For the first time since the fight with the Crows our camp livened up; feasts were prepared in many lodges for our guests, and later in the evening several bands of the All Friends Society gave dances in which they joined. For the first time, I put on my Crow war suit and joined in the dance of the Braves. As I had been practicing the step all by myself in the brush, I did quite well, and even got some praise.

The Kai-na trailed in and set up their lodges just below us the next afternoon. I counted the lodges and found that there were eleven hundred and thirty, including twenty-five or thirty lodges of Gros Ventres. All together we were a camp of nearly three thousand lodges—about fifteen thousand people. I looked out at the horses grazing upon the plain; there was no estimating the number; there were thousands and thousands of them!

That evening Eagle Ribs, head chief of the Kai-na, came with his clan chiefs to our lodge to council with Lone Walker and his clan chiefs. They all used such big words to express what they had to say that I would never have known what the talk was about had they not also used signs, these for the benefit of the Gros Ventre clan chief, who did not understand the Blackfoot language anywhere near as well as I did. The council lasted far into the night. When it broke up the decision was that we were to break camp early in the morning, travel all day on the trail to the Crow camp, and on the following morning go on, the warriors as fast as possible, the rest at the usual pace. It was the general opinion that we could strike the Crow camp early in the afternoon of the second day.