Blackfeet and Buffalo: Memories of Life Among the Indians

775 Pages·1981·1.82 MB·English

by  James Willard Schultz Keith C. Seele

Blackfeet and Buffalo
Memories of Life among the Indians
by James Willard Schultz (Apikuni)
Edited and with an Introduction by Keith C. Seele
NORMAN UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Blackfeet and Buffalo : Memories of Life
title:
Among the Indians
author: Schultz, James Willard.
publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
isbn10 | asin: 0806117001
print isbn13: 9780806117003
ebook isbn13: 9780806170961
language: English
Siksika Indians--Social life and customs,
subject Siksika Indians--Legends, Frontier and
pioneer life--Montana.
publication date: 1962
lcc: E99.S54S27 1962eb
ddc: 970.00497
Siksika Indians--Social life and customs,
subject: Siksika Indians--Legends, Frontier and
pioneer life--Montana.
Page iv
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-10762 ISBN: 0-8061-
1700-1
Copyright © 1962 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman,
Publishing Division of the University. All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
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Page v
Wide brown plains, distant, slender, flat-topped buttes; still more
distant giant mountains, blue sided, sharp peaked, snow capped;
odor of sage and smoke of camp fire; thunder of ten thousand buf-
falo hoofs over the hard, dry ground; long drawn, melancholy howl
of wolves breaking the silence of night, how I loved you all!
James Willard Schultz, My Life as an Indian
Page vii
INTRODUCTION
The Writer Of These Lines has read thirty-three of James Willard
Schultz's thirty-seven books in the last two years. While he has long
been convinced that the first one of all, My Life as an Indian, is an
American classic of the old West, he sees now more than ever that
Apikunito refer to Schultz by his Blackfoot namewill forever be
remembered as the greatest interpreter of a noble Indian people to all
who are capable of appreciating them. Apikuni, however, in contrast to
many of the distinguished writers who in their turn have added to our
knowledge and understanding of Indian life and history, has permitted
the Blackfeetmore strictly the Pikunis (Piegans), southernmost branch
of the great Blackfoot Confederacyto interpret themselves in their
own words. Without being a journalist he has been a reporter, and a
very faithful one, on the daily life and conversations as well as the
deeper side of the Indian as revealed by his prayers, his religious
ceremonies, and his unswerving conviction of the indwelling presence
of the Above Ones in all his acts.
Apikuni's reporting is unique for the reason that, though a white man,
he was also truly an Indian. He was married to a remarkable woman
of the Pikunis, Fine Shield Woman (Mutsi-Awotan-Ahki, the lovely
Nätahki of My Life as an Indian), who became the mother of his son,
Hart Merriam Schultz (Lone Wolf), noted artist of Tucson, Arizona.
He learned the difficult Blackfoot language at the age of eighteen and
spoke it constantly with his family and Indian relatives
Page viii
and friends for more than fifty years. Thus he not only spoke
Blackfoot, he thought it as well. Moreover, from the beginning of his
life as an Indian, in 1877, he made excellent use of his talents and
opportunities. He not only listened to the stories of their lives and
adventures told by famous men and women story tellers like Crow
Woman, Earth Woman, Hugh Monroe, Tail-Feathers-Coming-Over-
the-Hill, Many-Tail-Feathers, Three Suns, and others; he kept
notebooks in which he recorded their stories. He spent countless
evenings before the lodge fires of his friends, hearing from different
ones their versions of the same events, until many of their stories were
burned into his memory.
With the death of Fine Shield Woman in 1903, Schultz considered his
life to be finished. The buffalo had gone, the Montana plains were
fenced and overrun with cattle and sheep, and now the passing of his
beloved wife removed his will to live. Yet, he had met George Bird
Grinnell in the eighties, they had named many of the mountains and
glaciers in the near-by Rockies, and he had begun to contribute stories
to Grinnell's Forest and Stream. Life was over in 1903, but thirty-
seven books and much additional writing were ahead of him and he
was to play an important role in the creation of Glacier National Park,
which he and Grinnell had conceived long before. Soon he would be
world famous as Apikuni the storyteller.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of Apikuni's books, in my
estimation, is the fact that nearly all of them were published for
youthful readers. I have read most of them for the first time after
reaching the age of sixty. Why were they published for young people?
First of all, they were fit for young people to readmore than can be
said for much that is published today. But most of all, they are
youthful in spirit; they breathe the wholesome atmosphere of the
mountains and the plains; they tell of a clean, decent, high-minded
racethe terrible Blackfeet, the "savages," the cruel and bloody "raiders
of the northwest plains," who turned out to be wholly human, kindly,
generous, friendly, hospitable, joking and laughing, loving and
lovable. Yes, they were stealers of horses, yet they were honest and
truthful; they were relentless killers of their
Page ix
enemies, but a Blackfoot was certainly killed by a white man before
he became a killer of white men.
Apikuni lived this Indian life and understood it as none before him and
few at any time. He was a storyteller, but he never set himself up to be
a historian or scientist. It is of the utmost importance that the
historian and searcher after facts neatly verified not look to him for
definitive historical truth. This was not his forte nor his aim. What
appears in this book has, however, something of the indispensable
value of a George Frederick Ruxton in Life in the Far West. As such,
it may have that same atmospheric value for an interpretation of
Indian life that Ruxton's recaptured lingo and adventures of the
mountain man of a century and a quarter ago have for an
interpretation of life in the Far West.
Apikuni listened to the Indian storytellers, and he became one of the
best of them. But, unlike them, he could transfer their stories of the
lodge fires to paper for thousands to enjoy forever. His literary styles
is unique; it is Blackfoot talk in English words and sentences. He is an
artist of narrative and a master of suspense. One follows his stories
with breathless interest and deplores the thinning pages at the end of
the book. If only there were more and more and more! If only his
books were not so fewonly thirty-seven. But now there is anotherthis
wonderful volume of reminiscences and stories.
There are a few discrepancies in Apikuni's stories. Sometimes his
memory failed him where his notes were incomplete. Not infrequently
the same tale was related by different persons at long intervals, so that
the details and at times even the participants varied. (In this
connection it must be recalled that one and the same Indian bore
several different names in the course of his life; renaming after an
important exploit was a commonplace. Apikuni's name was given to
him by Running Crane, who had been Apikuni in his youth.)
Nevertheless, his stories are for the most part historical. Few events
related in the books and shorter works did not actually take place. In
rare instances, Apikuni narrated in the first person an episode in which
he had not personally participated. The only example in the present
volume is "Cut-Nose" (Chapter 15). This is a true story of a
Page x
tragic event such as Apikuni had himself witnessed, but he related
"Cut-Nose" in the first person as a vivid literary device. He was
always intent on verifying the facts which he reported and never
ceased his attempts to clarify in his own mind the smallest detail of
every adventure which he chronicled.
Schultz was, like all humans, not wholly free from prejudice. He was
not infallible and never pretended that he was. At times he drew
mistaken conclusions from the incomplete facts at his disposalmost
conspicuously, perhaps, in his estimate of Major Young, agent on the
Blackfoot reservation during the "Starvation Year" of 188384. Recent
research seems to prove that Young attempted to obtain from
Washington the help required to save his charges from starvation. He
may not, therefore, have been quite the dishonest, lying wretch that he
was painted in My Life as an Indian. However, my own inquiries
among the Blackfeet on the reservation at Browning plainly show that
Major Young was regarded as anything but a sympathetic and
understanding "father" to his Indian children. They may have had
their natural prejudices against the white overlord who tyrannically
controlled their destiny in those awful months of 188384, but, in view
of the fact that some five hundred of them died for want of food, I am
convinced that such prejudices were based on more than mere
misunderstanding. Realizing that there still remain marked differences
of opinion of this subjectsometimes influenced by whatever source a
person has consultedI should like personally to re-examine all those
faded letters directed by Major Young to Washington before coming
to positive conclusions on the relation of the Major to his charges.
There are historical facts in this book which have been, and will be,
disputed by other authors. Thus, notably, in Chapter 2, "Buffalo
Robes," Chief White Calf is represented as having been unaware of
the two executive orders which deprived the Pikunis of their lands
between the Yellowstone and Marias rivers. And in Chapter 24, "A