The Indians were arriving when the boys reached the meadows below the falls, and were already beginning to set up their wigwams, or tepees, beside the Swift Current. The chiefs and braves, in their Indian dress, with feathered head-gear and bright blankets, were on horseback, and so were most of the squaws and children; but the tepees were being transported from the reservation out on the prairie in motor buses, and there was even an entire Indian family in a touring car, with the brave at the wheel!
“Gee whiz, times change all right,” said Spider. “Even the Indians have automobiles.”
Nearly a hundred Blackfeet arrived, all told, fine looking men and women for the most part, although the older squaws were fat and huddled up in their blankets, looking like funny bears. What struck Joe and Tom first of all, however, was the good nature of these Indians.
“I always thought Indians were silent and sort of grouchy,” Tom said to Mills, who was on hand to help the Indians get settled in camp and see that the hotel, which had induced them to come, provided enough for them to eat.
“Not at all,” the Ranger answered. “They are always laughing and joking, as you see. They are a very happy people, and they have a mighty hard time of it, too. They don’t know how to raise cattle or grain, because they’ve always been hunters. Now the government has taken the Park away from them, and won’t let ’em hunt here, and they half starve every winter. I tell you, I’m sorry for ’em.”
The boys moved among them freely, listening to their strange language, and watching the tepees go up. Some of these tepees were made of tanned skins, mostly elk skins, but one or two very old ones of buffalo skins. They were stretched around a frame of lodge-pole pines, leaving a hole at the peak where the smoke could rise, as through a chimney. On the outside were painted in various colors bands and designs, and in the case of the chiefs, funny figures of buffalo and men chasing them on horseback, and other men being killed in battle. These pictures, Mills said, were painted by the chiefs themselves, and depicted the life history and exploits of each warrior.
“Good idea,” Tom laughed. “You sort of paint your autobiography on the outside of your house.”
“I suppose when you get home, you’ll draw a picture of yourself climbing a cliff, over your front door,” said Joe.
“And you can draw yourself falling down the cellar hatchway,” Tom retorted.
By late afternoon, the tepees were all up, smoke was ascending from the peaks, the horses of each brave were tethered near their master’s lodge, in the centre of the camp was a large, flat open space, to be used later for the dances, and here the little Indian children were now playing. When the flap of a lodge was lifted, you could see women inside, cooking or laying beds of skins and blankets. The funny Indian dogs, mongrels of all shapes, sizes and colors, were roaming around. Beside the camp flowed the Swift Current, green and foaming, and behind it rose the towering walls of the cañon sides. Except for the tourists who had come down from the hotel to watch, and the one Indian automobile parked near by, the camp might have been an Indian village of two hundred years ago, before the white men ever came. Tom and Joe were reluctant to leave, it all seemed so like a picture out of the past, the picture of a life and a race now fast vanishing from the earth. They took many pictures of the camp before they finally went back to their own camp, to see if any hikers had arrived.