Fifty years ago the name Blackfoot was one of terrible meaning to the white
traveller who passed across that desolate buffalo-trodden waste which lay
to the north of the Yellowstone River and east of the Rocky Mountains. This
was the Blackfoot land, the undisputed home of a people which is said to
have numbered in one of its tribes--the Pi-k[)u]n'-i--8000 lodges, or
40,000 persons. Besides these, there were the Blackfeet and the Bloods,
three tribes of one nation, speaking the same language, having the same
customs, and holding the same religious faith.

But this land had not always been the home of the Blackfeet. Long ago,
before the coming of the white men, they had lived in another country far
to the north and east, about Lesser Slave Lake, ranging between Peace River
and the Saskatchewan, and having for their neighbors on the north the
Beaver Indians. Then the Blackfeet were a timber people. It is said that
about two hundred years ago the Chippeweyans from the east invaded this
country and drove them south and west. Whether or no this is true, it is
quite certain that not many generations back the Blackfeet lived on the
North Saskatchewan River and to the north of that stream.[1] Gradually
working their way westward, they at length reached the Rocky Mountains,
and, finding game abundant, remained there until they obtained horses, in
the very earliest years of the present century. When they secured horses and
guns, they took courage and began to venture out on to the plains and to go
to war. From this time on, the Blackfeet made constant war on their
neighbors to the south, and in a few years controlled the whole country
between the Saskatchewan on the north and the Yellowstone on the south.

[Footnote 1: For a more extended account of this migration, see _American
Anthropologist_, April, 1892, p. 153.]

It was, indeed, a glorious country which the Blackfeet had wrested from
their southern enemies. Here nature has reared great mountains and spread
out broad prairies. Along the western border of this region, the Rocky
Mountains lift their snow-clad peaks above the clouds. Here and there, from
north to south, and from east to west, lie minor ranges, black with pine
forests if seen near at hand, or in the distance mere gray silhouettes
against a sky of blue. Between these mountain ranges lies everywhere the
great prairie; a monotonous waste to the stranger's eye, but not without
its charm. It is brown and bare; for, e