hile the Indian was drinking, and an effort was usually made to get him
out of the store as soon as he had finished. Nevertheless, drunken fights
in the trading-stores were of common occurrence, and the life of a
whiskey-trader was one of constant peril. I have talked with many men who
were engaged in this traffic, and some of the stories they tell are
thrilling. It was a common thing in winter for the man who unbarred and
opened the store in the morning to have a dead Indian fall into his arms as
the door swung open. To prop up against the door a companion who had been
killed or frozen to death during the night seems to have been regarded by
the Indians as rather a delicate bit of humor, in the nature of a joke on
the trader. Long histories of the doings of these whiskey trading days have
been related to me, but the details are too repulsive to be set down. The
traffic was very fatal to the Indians.

The United States has laws which prohibit, under severe penalties, the sale
of intoxicants to Indians, but these laws are seldom enforced. To the north
of the boundary line, however, in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian
Mounted Police have of late years made whiskey-trading perilous
business. Of Major Steell's good work in putting down the whiskey traffic
on the Blackfoot agency in Montana, I shall speak further on, and to-day
there is not very much whiskey sold to the Blackfeet. Constant vigilance is
needed, however, to keep traders from the borders of the reservation.

In the winter of 1883-84 more than a quarter of the Piegan tribe of the
Blackfeet, which then numbered about twenty-five or twenty-six hundred,
died from starvation. It had been reported to the Indian Bureau that the
Blackfeet were practically self-supporting and needed few supplies. As a
consequence of this report, appropriations for them were small. The
statement was entirely and fatally misleading. The Blackfeet had then
never done anything toward self-support, except to kill buffalo. But just
before this, in the year 1883, the buffalo had been exterminated from the
Blackfoot country. In a moment, and without warning, the people had been
deprived of the food supply on which they had depended. At once they had
turned their attention to the smaller game, and, hunting faithfully the
river bottoms, the brush along the small streams, and the sides of the
mountains, had killed off all the deer, elk, and antelope; and at the
beginning of the winter found