themselves without their usual stores of
dried meat, and with nothing to depend on, except the scanty supplies in
the government storehouse. These were ridiculously inadequate to the wants
of twenty-five hundred people, and food could be issued to them only in
driblets quite insufficient to sustain life. The men devoted themselves
with the utmost faithfulness to hunting, killing birds, rabbits,
prairie-dogs, rats, anything that had life; but do the best they might, the
people began to starve. The very old and the very young were the first to
perish; after that, those who were weak and sickly, and at last some even
among the strong and hardy. News of this suffering was sent East, and
Congress ordered appropriations to relieve the distress; but the supplies
had to be freighted in wagons for one hundred and fifty or two hundred
miles before they were available. If the Blackfeet had been obliged to
depend on the supplies authorized by the Indian Bureau, the whole tribe
might have perished, for the red tape methods of the Government are not
adapted to prompt and efficient action in times of emergency. Happily, help
was nearer at hand. The noble people of Montana, and the army officers
stationed at Fort Shaw, did all they could to get supplies to the
sufferers. One or two Montana contractors sent on flour and bacon, on the
personal assurance of the newly appointed agent that he would try to have
them paid. But it took a long time to get even these supplies to the
agency, over roads sometimes hub deep in mud, or again rough with great
masses of frozen clay; and all the time the people were dying.

During the winter, Major Allen had been appointed agent for the Blackfeet,
and he reached the agency in the midst of the worst suffering, and before
any effort had been made to relieve it. He has told me a heart-rending
story of the frightful suffering which he found among these helpless
people.

In his efforts to learn exactly what was their condition, Major Allen one
day went into twenty-three houses and lodges to see for himself just what
the Indians had to eat. In only two of these homes did he find anything in
the shape of food. In one house a rabbit was boiling in a pot. The man had
killed it that morning, and it was being cooked for a starving child. In
another lodge, the hoof of a steer was cooking,--only the hoof,--to make
soup for the family. Twenty-three lodges Major Allen visited that day, and
the little rabbit and the st