His wives brought out three small potatoes and two little trout, which they boiled. “’Tis all we have,” said one of them, brushing the tears from her eyes, and then the chief broke down.
“We have nothing,” he said haltingly. “There are no more buffalo. The Great Father sends us but a little food, gone in a day. We are very hungry. There are fish, to be sure, forbidden by the Gods, unclean. We eat them, but they do not give us any strength, and I doubt not we will be punished for eating them. It seems as if our gods had forsaken us.”
Mrs. Schultz went out and brought back a sack of food, and they made a feast, merry as in the days of plenty, which were gone forever.
Schultz came from the starving camps to write a letter to a New York paper, but it was never printed—a matter of politics. Then he advised the Indians to kill their agent, but they remembered Colonel Baker’s visit.
In his next annual report the agent wrote much about the Blackfeet, whose “heathenish rites were most deplorable.” And then came the Winter of Death, when a chief, Almost-a-dog, checked off daily the fate of a starving people. Women crowded round the windows of the agent’s office, holding out skinny children. “Go,” he would say; “go away! I have nothing for you!”
The thirty thousand dollars provided for their food had all been stolen, but there was plenty of corn to fatten fifty chickens, some geese and ducks.
Wolf Head, once known as Wolverine, rode south to Schultz’s trading post where he and his partner were feeding hosts of people, but when they heard his story of death after death, one by one they stole away out into the darkness, sitting upon the frozen ground where they wailed for their dead.
That night Schultz wrote to a friend of his in New York, known to the Indians as Fisher Cap. Then he rode hard and far to consult with Father Prando, a Jesuit priest, who had also been writing letters. Thanks to Fisher Cap, perhaps, or to Father Prando, the government sent an inspector, and one day he drove into the agency. “Where is that chicken house?” he yelled, and when he found the place, kicked it open. “Here you!” he called to the Indians, and they did the rest.
Next, he kicked open the agent’s office. “You —— —— ——,” said he.
Since then some agents have been honest, but the Piegan tribe has never recovered from the Winter of Death, for in their weakness, they fell a prey to disease, and only a remnant is left of that ruined people. But for Schultz, the despised squaw-man, not one would be left alive.