“And it was so, and the Great Chief murmured: ‘It is so. The horse is now complete. Take it, my son,’ and the great council was ended.
“Then the grandmother turned to the boy and gave him a sack of pemmican, saying:
“‘My son, treasure this carefully. It is a magic sack of pemmican and will never be empty, though you eat from it all the time.’
“And with this they left him wondering. Then he mounted his mare and rode to his people who marveled at the strange animal. The mare soon had a colt, and then another, and in a short time there were horses enough to pack his uncle’s lodge-skins and lodge-poles from camp to camp. Then the others became envious and the young man told the chief, his uncle, to take his tribe on the morrow to the great lake and that there he would make strong medicine and perform a miracle. And the chief did as he was told.
“In the morning all the people dug holes near the edge of the lake and waited, hiding in them, and then the young man came riding down from the hills on his mare, with her many colts following behind. Calling his uncle he said to him:
“‘I am going to leave you. You will never see me again. Here is the magic sack of pemmican. Keep it and you will never go hungry. I have made strong medicine and before I go I will make every fish in the lake turn into a horse so that there will be plenty for all your people. Tell them to watch and when the horses come rushing from the lake to catch as many of them as they can. But do you wait and catch none until my old mare comes from the water; then do you catch her and her alone. Do then as I tell you and all will be well.’
“With these words the young man mounted on his mare, rode into the lake and was soon lost to view in the deep waters. Soon the surface of the lake began to bubble and foam and the Indians were frightened and would have run away had not the old chief ordered them back to their posts. And in a little while horses’ heads could be seen on the water as the animals came swimming towards the shore. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, and as they dashed up the bank the Indians sprang out and captured many of them and many escaped, and those which got away formed the wild bands which even to-day are found on the wide plains. But the chief caught none of them until the old mare came out of the water, and the last to come out of the lake. She he caught while the people laughed, for the old mare was aged and feeble, but he answered never a word to their jeering, for he had faith in his nephew. At night he picketed the mare near his lodge, and just as the moon was coming up over the distant hills the mare neighed three times and out of the thick brush thousands of colts came running up. Soon the lodge was surrounded and the chief had hundreds and hundreds of horses and his people no longer jeered at him, for he was rich and richer than them all.
“And that was how the Great Spirit gave horses to the Indians.”
This is the tale the chief’s daughter heard as she crouched at the feet of her grandfather listening, wondering, awed as the slow words came from his lips as he sat in the dim light of a smouldering lodge fire. As Black Bear said, “it was told to my father’s father and to his father’s father hundreds of winters ago.”
Many other legends existed among the Northern tribes of Indians. They believed in good and bad spirits and that there is some kind of a hereafter. The first missionaries who visited the Flatheads for the first time said that those Indians then believed that after death the good Indians went to a country of perpetual summer and there met their relatives; and that the buffalo, elk, deer and horses were there in great numbers and in its rivers fish were in great abundance. And, on the other hand, that the bad Indians were doomed to a place covered with perpetual snow and there they would be forever shivering with cold. They would see fire a long ways off, but could not get to it; also water was in sight, but, though dying for the want of it, they could not reach it. It may be that those ideas which exist in the minds of the red people of the forest are but human instincts, but to me they seem to be the intellectual ruins of a prehistoric race that was once versed in the architecture of the universe, and believed in the Creator of all things.