The whisky traders, like Schultz, have been blamed for the ruin of the Blackfeet; but since they had to die, it seems to me that the liquor gave them a certain amount of fun and excitement not so bad for them as Baker, or smallpox, or their Indian agent, or the white robbers who slaughtered their herds of buffalo, and stole their treaty lands. In 1874, Schultz was one of fifty-seven white men hunting or trading with the Canadian or Northern Blackfeet. They had trading forts at Whoop-up, Standoff, Slideout, the Leavings, all in Canada. But the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian wolfers made complaint against these American rivals; and so the Canadian government raised the Northwest Mounted Police. Three hundred men were sent across the plains to take possession and run the American traders out of the country. But the police were only tenderfeet in those days, eastern Canadians unused to the western ways, who came hungry through the countless herds of the bison. A band of hunters brought news to the Blackfeet. “Some men are coming,” they said, “who wear red coats, and they are drawing a cannon.”
“Oh,” said the Blackfeet, “these must be Hudson’s Bay.” For in old times the company’s officers are said to have worn red coats when they administered justice, so that the color was a sign of honest dealing. So the police were not attacked by the Blackfeet, and they were welcomed by the American traders, who sold them food in abundance.
The liquor trade ceased altogether but the police and the traders became fast friends, while the police and the Northern Blackfeet have been loyal allies ever since. After the buffalo vanished, the tribes were fed by the Canadian government and not lavishly, perhaps rather stingily, helped to learn the important arts of ranching.
Meanwhile far away to the southward, the white men were slaughtering buffalo for their hides, and in Kansas alone during ten years, thirty-five million carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The bison herds still seemed as large as ever, the country black with them as far as the eye could reach. But men like Schultz who had brains, had news that away from these last migrating herds, the plains were empty for thousands of miles. I remember the northern plains like a vast graveyard, reaching in all directions to the sky-line, bare save for its tombstones, the bleached skulls of millions of bison. Afterward the sugar refiners sent wagons and took them all away.
In 1880, the whole of the prairie nations surrounded the last herds, and white men took a hundred thousand robes leaving the carcasses to rot as usual. The Indians slaughtered also but sold the robes for groceries, and dried the whole of the meat for winter food.
“We are near the end of it,” said Red Bird’s Tail. “I fear that this is our last buffalo hunt. Are you sure,” he asked Schultz, “that the white men have seen all the land between the two salt waters?”
“There is no place,” answered the trader, “where the white men have not traveled, and none of them can find buffalo.”
“That being the case,” said the chief with a deep sigh, “misery and death are at hand for me and mine.”
The Indians were compelled to strip the plains of every living creature, the Blackfeet, despite their religion, to eat fish and birds. Then came the winter; Schultz and his wife rode at dusk to the camp of Lodge-Pole chief.
“Hurry,” he commanded his women, “cook a meal for our friends. They must be hungry after their long ride.”