THE very last of the buffalo herds disappeared in 1883. In the spring of 1884 a large flotilla of steamboats was tied up at the Fort Benton levee; among them the “Black Hills” and “Dacotah,” boats of great size and carrying capacity. The latter came up but once in a season—when the Missouri was bank full from the melting snow in the mountains—and this was their last trip for all time to come. Not only was it the last trip for them, but for all the smaller boats. The railroad was coming. It had already crossed Dakota, and was creeping rapidly across the Montana plains. Tying up at night, using enormous quantities of wood fuel in order to overcome the swift current of the Missouri, the steamboats could not compete with the freight carrier of the rails.
When the railroad did finally enter the Rocky Mountain country, a branch running to Fort Benton, Great Falls, Helena, and Butte, the main line crossing the divide through the Two Medicine Pass, it brought in its coaches many immigrants from the “States,” at whom the old-timers laughed. “What are they coming here for?” they asked. “What are they going to do—these hard-hatted men and delicate looking women?”
They soon found out. The new-comers settled here and there in the valleys, and took up the available water rights; they opened stores in the towns and crossroads places and reduced prices to a five-cent basis; they even gave exact change in pennies. Heretofore a spool of thread, even a lamp-wick, had been sold for two bits. The old storekeepers and traders, with their easy, liberal ways, could not hold their own in this new order of things; they could not change their life-long habits, and one by one they went to the wall.
The men married to Indian women—squawmen, as they were contemptuously called—suffered most, and, strange to say, the wives of the new-comers, not the men, were their bitterest enemies. They forbade their children to associate with the half-breed children, and at school the position of the latter was unbearable. The white ones beat them and called them opprobrious names. This hatred of the squawman was even carried into politics. One of them, as clean-minded, genial, fearless, and honest a man as I ever knew, was nominated for sheriff of the county upon the party ticket which always carried the day; but at that election he and he alone of all the candidates of his party was not elected. He was actually snowed under. The white women had so badgered their husbands and brothers, had so vehemently protested against the election of a squawman to any office, that they succeeded in accomplishing his defeat. And so, one by one, these men moved to the only place where they could live in peace, where there was not an enemy within a hundred and more miles of them, the Reservation; and there they settled to pass their remaining days. There were forty-two of them at one time; few are left.
Let me correct the general impression of the squawmen, at least as to those I have known, the men who married Blackfeet women. In the days of the Indians’ dire extremity, they gave them all they could, and were content so long as there remained a little bacon and flour for their families; and some days there was not even that in the houses of some of them for they had given their all. With the Indian they starved for a time, perchance. Scattered here and there upon the Reservation, they built for themselves neat homes and corrals, and fenced their hay lands, all of which was an object lesson to the Indian. But they did more than that. They helped to build their red neighbours’ cabins and stables; surveyed their irrigating ditches; taught them how to plough, and to manage a mowing machine. All this without thought of pay or profit. If you enter the home of a Blackfoot, you nearly always find the floor clean, the windows spotless, everything about in perfect order, the sewing machine and table covered with pretty cloths; the bed with clean, bright-hued blankets; the cooking utensils and tableware spotless and bright. No Government field-matrons have taught them to do this, for they have had none. This they learned by observing the ways of the squawmen’s wives. I have seen hundreds of white homes—there are numbers of them in any city—so exceedingly dirty, their inmates so slovenly, that one turns from them in absolute disgust; but I have seen nothing like that among the Blackfeet.
In their opulent days, under a good agent, and when they had numbers of steers to sell, they bought much furniture, even good carpets. There came to me one day at that time a friend, and we smoked together. “You have a book with pictures of furniture,” he said, “show me the best bedstead it tells about.”
I complied. “There it is,” pointing to the cut. “All brass, best of springs; price $80.”
“Send for it,” he said, “I want it. It costs only two steers, and what is that?”
“There are others,” I went on, “just as good looking, part iron, part brass, which cost much less.”
“Huh!” he exclaimed. “Old Tail-feathers-coming-over-the-hill has one that cost fifty dollars. I’m going to have the best.”
Without the squawman, I do not know what the Blackfeet would have done in the making of their treaties with the Government; in getting rid of agents, of whom the less said the better—for the squawman fought their battles and bore the brunt of all the trouble. I have known an agent to order his police to kill a certain squawman on sight, because the man had reported to Washington his thievery; and others to order squawmen to leave the Reservation, separating them from their families, because they had spoken too openly regarding certain underhand doings. But at intervals there were good, honest, capable men in charge, under whom the Indians regained in a measure the prosperity they had lost. But such men did not last; with a change of administration they were always dismissed by the powers that be.
One thing the squawmen never succeeded in doing—they were never able to rid the Reservation of the great cattle kings’ stock. The big men had an “understanding” with some agents, and at other times with certain politicians of great influence. So their stock remained and increased and fed down the rich grasses. Most of the Indians and most of the squawmen carefully tended their little herds in some favourable locality as near as possible to their homes; but always, once in the spring, once in the fall, the great round-up of the cattle kings swept like wild fire across the Reservation. Thirty or forty swift riders would swoop down on one of these little herds. Some of their cattle would be mixed in with them; but they did not stop to cut them out; there wasn’t time; and they drove them all to some distant point or branding corral, and the owner of the little herd lost forever more or less of them. At last, so I am told, the Indians prevailed upon the Department to fence the south and east sides of the Reservation in order to keep the foreign stock out, and their own inside. There was no need of fencing the west and north sides, for the Rocky Mountains form the western boundary, and the Canadian line the northern. It cost $30,000 to build that fence, and then the cattle kings obtained permission to pasture 30,000 head of cattle within it. But perhaps it is as well. It is only hastening the end a bit, for the Blackfeet, as I have said before, are to have their lands allotted. Then will come the sheepmen, desolation in their wake, and then the end. It has been nearly the end for them this past winter. The Department decreed that no able-bodied person should receive rations. In that bleak country there is no chance of obtaining work, for the white men’s ranches are few and far between. Even if a man obtained three months’ work in summer time—something almost impossible—his wages could not by any means support his family for a year. A friend wrote me in January: “I was over on the Reservation to-day and visited many old friends. In most of the homes there was little, generally no food, and the people were sitting sadly around the stove, drinking wild tea.”
In the hegira of the old-timers to the Reservation, Berry and I took part. Fort Conrad had been sold. Berry bought out the Reservation trader, goodwill and goods, for three hundred dollars.
I got an insane idea in my head that I wanted to be a sheepman, and locating some fine springs and hay ground about twelve miles above Fort Conrad, I built some good sheds, and a house, and put up great stacks of hay. The cattlemen burned me out. I guess they did right, for I had located the only water for miles around. I left the blackened ruins and followed Berry. I am glad that they did burn me out, for I thus can truthfully say that I had no part in the devastation of Montana’s once lovely plains.
We built us a home, Nät-ah′-ki and I, in a lovely valley where the grass grew green and tall. We were a long time building it. Up in the mountains where I cut the logs, our camp under the towering pines was so pleasant that we could hardly leave it for a couple of days to haul home a wagon-load of material. And there were so many pleasant diversions that the axe leaned up against a stump during long dreamy days, while we went trout fishing, or trailed a deer or bear, or just remained in camp listening to the wind in the pine tops, watching the squirrels steal the remains of our breakfast, or an occasional grouse strutting by.
“How peaceful it all is here,” Nät-ah′-ki once said, “How beautiful the pines, how lovely and fragile the things that grow in the damp and shadowy places. And yet, there is something fearsome about these great forests. My people seldom venture into them alone. The hunters always go in couples or three or four together, the women in large numbers when they come to cut lodge poles, and their men always with them.”
“But why are they afraid?” I asked. “I don’t see why they should be.”
“There are many reasons,” she replied. “Here an enemy can easily lie in wait for one and kill without risk to himself. And then—and then they say that ghosts live in these long, wide, dark woods; that they follow a hunter, or steal along by his side or in front of him; that one knows they are about, for they sometimes step on a stick which snaps, or rustle some loose leaves with their feet. Some men, it is said, have even seen these ghosts peering at them from behind a distant tree. They had terrible, big, wide faces, and big, wicked eyes. Sometimes I even have thought that I was being followed by them. But, though I was terribly afraid, I have just kept on going, away down there to the spring for water. It is when you are away off there chopping and the blows of your axe cease, that I am most afraid. I stop and listen; if you begin to chop again soon, then all is well, and I go on with my work. But if there is a long silence then I begin to fear, I know not what; everything; the dim shadowy places away out around; the wind in the tree-tops which seems to be saying something I cannot understand. Oh, I become afraid, and I steal out to see if you are still there—if anything has happened to you——”
“Why—how is that?” I interposed, “I never saw you.”
“No, you didn’t see me. I went very quietly, very cautiously, just like one of those ghosts they talk about; but I always saw you. You would be sitting on a log, or lying on the ground, smoking, always smoking, and then I would be satisfied, and go back as quietly as I came.”
“But when you came out that way, why didn’t you come further and sit down and talk with me?” I asked.
“Had I done so,” she replied, “you would have sat still longer idle, smoked more, and talked of those things you are ever dreaming and thinking about. Don’t you know that the summer is nearly gone? And I do so much want to see that house built. I want to have a home of my own.”
Thereupon I would for a time wield the axe with more vigour, and then again there would be a reaction—more days of idleness, or of wandering by the stream, or on the grim mountain slopes. But before snow came we had our modest home built and furnished, and were content.
It was the following spring that Nät-ah′-ki’s mother died, after a very short illness. After the body had been wrapped with many a blanket and robe and securely bound with rawhide thongs, I was told to prepare a coffin for it. There was no lumber for sale within a hundred and fifty miles, but the good Jesuits, who had built a mission nearby, generously gave me the necessary boards and I made a long, wide box more than three feet in height. Then I asked where the grave should be dug. Nät-ah′-ki and the mourning relatives were horrified. “What,” the former cried “bury mother in a hole in the dark, heavy, cold ground?
“No! our Agent has forbidden burials in trees, but he has said nothing about putting our dead in coffins on the top of the ground. Take the box up on the side of the hill where lie the remains of Red Eagle, of other relatives, and we will follow with all the rest in the other wagon.”
I did as I was told, driving up the valley a half-mile or so, then turning up on the slope where lay half a dozen rude coffins side by side on a small level place. Removing the box from the wagon, I placed it at some little distance from the others and with pick and spade made an absolutely level place for it. Then came the others, a number of friends and relatives, even three men, also relatives of the good woman. Never before nor since have I known men to attend a funeral. They always remained in their lodges and mourned; so this was even greater proof of the love and esteem in which Nät-ah′-ki’s mother had been held.
Nät-ah′-ki, from the moment her mother had died, had neither slept nor partaken of food, crying, crying all the time. And now she insisted that none but she and I should perform the last ceremonies. We carried the tightly wrapped body and laid it in the big box, very carefully and tenderly you may be sure, and then placed at the sides and feet of it various little buckskin sacks, small parfleche pouches, containing needles, awls, thread and all the various implements and trinkets which she had kept and guarded so carefully. I raised and placed in position the two boards forming the cover. Everyone was now crying, even the men. I held a nail in position, and drove it partly down. How dreadfully they sounded, the hammer blows hollowly, loudly reverberating from the big, half-empty box. I had kept up thus far pretty well, but the cold, harsh, desecrating hammering unnerved me. I tossed the implement away, sat down, and in spite of all my efforts to control myself, I cried with the rest. “I cannot do it,” I said, over and over, “I cannot drive those nails.”
Nät-ah′-ki came and sat down, leaned on my shoulder and reached out her trembling hands for mine.
“Our mother!” she said, “Our mother! just think; we shall never, never see her again. Oh, why must she have died while she had not even begun to grow old?”
One of the men stepped forward, “Go you two home,” he said, “I will nail the boards.”
So, in the gathering dusk, Nät-ah′-ki and I drove home, unhitched the horses and turned them loose; and then entering the silent house we went to bed. The Crow Woman, always faithful and kind, came later, and I heard her build a fire in the kitchen stove. Presently she brought in a lamp, then some tea and a few slices of bread and meat. Nät-ah′-ki was asleep; bending over me she whispered; “Be more than ever kind to her now, my son. Such a good mother as she had! There was not one quite so good in all the earth; she will miss her so much. You must now be to her both her man and mother.”
“I will,” I replied, taking her hand. “You know that I will,” whereupon she passed as silently out of the room and out of the house as she had come. It was a long, long time though before Nät-ah′-ki recovered her naturally high spirits, and even years afterward she would awake me in the night, crying, to talk about her mother.
Since the rails of the great road had crossed the land which Big Lake had said should never be desecrated by fire-wagons, I thought that we might as well ride upon them, but it was some time before I could persuade Nät-ah′-ki to do so. But at last she fell grievously ill, and I prevailed on her to see a famous physician who lived in a not far distant city, a man who had done much for me, and of whose wonderful surgical work I never tired telling, So, one morning we took seats in the rear Pullman of a train and started, Nät-ah′-ki sitting by the open window. Presently we came to a bridge spanning an exceedingly deep cañon, and looking down she gave a little cry of surprise, and terror, dropped to the floor and covered her face with her hands. I got her back on the seat, but it was some time before she recovered her composure. “It looked so awfully far down there,” she said, “and supposing the bridge had broken, we would all have been killed.”
I assured her that the bridges could not break, that the men who built them knew just how much they could hold up, and that was more than could be loaded on a train. Thenceforth she had no fear and loved the swift glide of a train, her favourite place in suitable weather being a seat out on the rear platform of the last Pullman.
We hadn’t been on the train fifteen minutes when I suddenly realised something that I had never thought of before. Glancing at the women seated here and there, all of them dressed in neat and rich fabrics, some of them wearing gorgeous hats, I saw that Nät-ah′-ki was not in their class so far as wearing apparel was concerned. She wore a plain gingham dress, and carried a shawl and a sun-bonnet, all of which were considered very “swell” up on the Reservation, and had been so regarded in the days of the buffalo traders at Fort Benton. To my surprise, some of these ladies in the car came to talk with Nät-ah′-ki, and said many kind things to her. And the little woman was highly pleased, even excited by their visits. “Why,” she said to me in surprise, “I did not think that white women would speak to me. I thought they all hated an Indian woman.”
“Many do,” I answered, “but they are not women of this class. There are women, and women. My mother is like these you have spoken to. Did you notice their dresses?” I added. “Well, so you must dress. I am glad that we arrive in the city at night. You shall be dressed like them before we go to the hospital.”
Our train pulled into the city on time, and I hurried Nät-ah′-ki into a cab, and thence to the side entrance of a hotel, thence upstairs to a room which I had telegraphed for. It was a Saturday night and the stores were still open. I found a saleswoman in a department store to accompany me to the hotel and take Nät-ah′-ki’s measure. In a little while we had her fitted out with waists and skirts, and a neat travelling coat. How pleased she was with them, and how proud I was of her. There was nothing, I thought, good enough to clothe that true and tried little body, whose candour, and gentleness, and innate refinement of mind were mirrored in her eyes.
We had dinner in our room. I suddenly remembered that I had not thought of one article of costume, a hat, and out I went to get it. In the lobby of the hotel I met an artist friend, and besought his aid in selecting the important gear. We looked at about five hundred, I thought, and at last decided upon a brown velvet thing with a black feather. We took it up to the room and Nät-ah′-ki tried it on. “’Twas too small,” we all declared, so back we went after another one. There didn’t seem to be any larger ones, and we were discouraged. “They don’t fit down,” I told the woman, “can’t be made to fit like this,” raising my hat and jamming it down in place. The woman looked at me in astonishment. “Why, my dear sir!” she exclaimed, “Women do not wear their hats that way. They place them lightly on the top of the head, and secure them there with large pins, hat pins, running through the hair.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “That’s the way, is it? Well, give us back the hat and some pins, and we’ll be fixed this time, sure.”
But we weren’t. Nät-ah′-ki wore her hair in two long braids, tied together and hanging down her back. There was no way of skewering that hat on, unless she wore her hair pompadour, or whatever you call it, bunched up on top of the head, you know, and of course she wouldn’t do that. Nor did I wish her to; I liked to see those great heavy braids falling down, away down below the waist.
“I have it,” said my friend, who had ridden some himself—in fact, had been a noted cowpuncher—“we’ll just get a piece of rubber elastic sewed on, like the string on a sombrero. That will go under the braids, close to the skin, and there you are.”
The store was just closing when I finally got the elastic, some thread and needles, and Nät-ah′-ki sewed it on. The hat stayed. One could hardly knock it off. Tired and thirsty, the artist and I withdrew in search of a long, fizzing drink, and Nät-ah′-ki went to bed. I found her wide awake when I returned. “Isn’t this splendid!” she exclaimed, “everything as one could wish it. You merely push a little black thing and someone comes up to wait on you, to bring you your dinner, or water, or whatever you want. You turn faucets, and there is your water. With one turn you make the lightning-lamps burn, or go out. It is wonderful, wonderful. I could live here very happily.”
“Is it better than the neat lodge we had, when we travelled about, when we camped right here where this city stands and hunted buffalo?”
“Oh, no, no,” she cried, “it is not like those dear, dead, past times. But they are gone. Since we must travel the white man’s road, as the chiefs say, let us take the best we can find along the way, and this is very nice.”
In the morning we drove to the hospital, and took the elevator to the floor and room assigned to us. Nät-ah′-ki was put to bed by the Sisters, with whom she immediately became infatuated. Then came the doctor. “It is he,” I told her, “the one who saved me.”
She rose up in bed and grasped one of his hands in both her own. “Tell him,” she said, “that I will be good and patient. That no matter how bad his medicines taste, I will take them, that no matter how much he hurts me, I will not cry out. Tell him I wish to get well quickly, so I can walk around, and do my work, and be happy and healthy once more.”
“It is nothing organic,” said the doctor. “It does not even need the knife. A week in bed, some medicine, and she can go home as well as ever.”
This was pleasing news to Nät-ah′-ki, when she came to her senses. The chloroform did not even make her ill, and she was as cheerful as a lark from morning until night. The Sisters and nurses were always coming in to talk and joke with her, and when I was not on hand to interpret, they still seemed to understand one another, Nät-ah′-ki in some way making her thoughts known. One could hear her cheery laughter ringing out of the room and down the hall at almost any hour of day.
“Never in my life,” said the Sister Superior, “have I known such another cheerful, innocent, happy woman. You are a lucky man, sir, to have such a wife.”
Then came the happy day when we could set out for home again. We went, and for a long time Nät-ah′-ki talked of the wonderful things she had seen. Her faith in the Blackfoot men and women doctors was shattered, and she did not hesitate to say so. She told of the wonderful way in which her doctor had cut patients in the hospital and made them well; of his wonderful lightning-lamp (X-ray), with which one’s bones, the whole skeleton, could be seen through the flesh. The whole tribe became interested and came from far and near to listen. After that, many a suffering one went to the great hospital and to her doctor, no matter what their ailment, in full faith that they would be cured.
On our homeward way, I remember, we saw a man and two women loading a hay wagon, the man on top of the load, the women sturdily pitching up great forkfuls of hay to him, regardless of the extreme heat of the day. The little woman was astonished, shocked. “I did not think,” she said, “that white men would so abuse their women. A Blackfoot would not be so cruel. I begin to think that white women have a much harder time than we do.”
“You are right,” I told her, “most poor white women are slaves; they have to get up at three or four o’clock in the morning, cook three meals a day, make, mend, and wash their children’s clothes, scrub floors, work in the garden, and when night comes they have hardly strength left to crawl to bed. Do you think you could do all that?”
“No,” she replied, “I could not. I wonder if that is not why some white women so dislike us, because they have to work so dreadfully hard, while we have so much time to rest, or go visiting, or ride around here and there on the beautiful plains. Surely our life is happier than theirs, and you, oh, lucky was the day when you chose me to be your little woman.”
The years passed happily for Nät-ah′-ki and me. We had a growing bunch of cattle which were rounded-up with the other Reservation stock twice a year. I built two small irrigating ditches and raised some hay. There was little work to do, and we made a trip somewhere every autumn, up into the Rockies with friends, or took a jaunt by rail to some distant point. Sometimes we would take a skiff and idly drift and camp along the Missouri for three or four hundred miles below Fort Benton, returning home by rail. I think that we enjoyed the water trips the best. The shifting, boiling flood, the weird cliffs, the beautifully timbered, silent valley had a peculiar fascination for us such as no place in the great mountains possessed. It was during one of these river trips that Nät-ah′-ki began to complain of sharp pain in the tips of her right hand fingers. “It is nothing but rheumatism,” I said, “and will soon pass away.”
But I was wrong. The pain grew worse, and abandoning our boat at the mouth of Milk River, we took the first train for the city where our doctor lived, and once more found ourselves in the hospital, in the very same room; the same good Sisters and nurses surrounding Nät-ah′-ki and trying to relieve her of the pain, which was now excruciating. The doctor came, felt her pulse, got out his stethoscope and moved it from place to place until, at last, it stopped at a point at the right side of the neck, close to the collar bone. There he listened long, and I began to feel alarmed. “It is not rheumatism,” I said to myself. “Something is wrong with her heart.”
The doctor gave some directions to the nurse; then turning to Nät-ah′-ki he said, “Take courage, little friend, we’ll pull you through all right.”
Nät-ah′-ki smiled. Then she grew drowsy under the influence of an opiate; and we left the room.
“Well, old man,” said the doctor, “this time I can do little. She may live a year, but I doubt it.”
For eleven months we all did what we could, and then one day, my faithful, loving, tender-hearted little woman passed away, and left me. By day I think about her, at night I dream of her. I wish that I had that faith which teaches us that we will meet again on the other shore. But all looks very dark to me.