fallen trees, into the Buffalo Illahee, the buffalo country of the Missouri. And for this the Blackfeet fought them.
The Blackfeet, too, had been from time immemorial the deadly foe of the Flatheads, their bone of contention for ever the buffalo. The Blackfeet claimed as their own all the country lying east of the main range, and looked upon the Flatheads who went there to hunt as intruders.
The Flathead country was west and at the base of the main Rockies, along the Missoula and Clark's Fork and northward to the Fraser. With their sole weapon, the arrow, and their own undaunted audacity, twice a year occurred the buffalo chase, once in Summer and once in Winter. But "the ungodly Blackfeet," scourge of the mountains, lay in wait to trap and destroy the Flatheads as they would a herd of buffalo.
And so it had been war, bitter war, for ages. But a new force had given to the Blackfeet at the west and the Sioux at the east supremacy over the rest of the tribes,—that was the white man's gun from the British forts on the Saskatchewan.
For spoils and scalps the Blackfeet, Arabs of the North, raided from the Saskatchewan to Mexico. They besieged Fort Edmonton at the north, and left their tomahawk mark on the Digger Indian's grave at the south. The Shoshone-Snakes, too, were immemorial and implacable enemies of both the Blackfeet and the Columbia tribes. They fought to the Dalles and Walla Walla and up through the Nez Percés to Spokane. Their mad raiders threw up the dust of the Utah desert, and chased the lone Aztec to his last refuge in Arizona cliffs.
The Blackfeet fought the Shoshones, the Crows, by superior cunning, fought the Blackfeet, the Assiniboines fought the Crows, and the Sioux, the lordly Sioux, fought all.
It was time for the white man's hand to stay the diabolical dance of death.
