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to the brush close by, where he lay for a short time. He heard no sound from his companions, but knew that the Indians were rounding up their horses and driving them off. He made his way, wounded though he was, through the brush and down the river toward the bend below. Here he waded into the stream, and sometimes swimming, sometimes wading, put some distance between himself and the camp.

What this Mexican underwent would be difficult to conceive, but he wandered down the river and then across a wide strip of prairie till he came to the banks of the St. Mary's river, a distance of at least one hundred miles. When at last discovered by a Peigan Indian in an old log shanty, he was out of his mind and almost dead. He had gone for thirteen days with nine bullets in his body, living on roots and berries the while.

Many tales of daring and nerve are told, of attack and reprisal; yes, and of heroism, too. In years somewhat later, Fred Kanouse, a prominent oldtimer of the West and still alive, ran counter of a band of hostile Indians. He made a stand in a bend of the Old Man River on the old Pioneer Ranch, a point still pointed out by the youngsters of Macleod. When the Mounted Police arrived, seven dead Indians marked the pioneer's skill with his gun. Not far from the scene of this fight there is a dugout or log cabin where early settlers resisted repeated attacks of the Blackfeet.

In the early days of their reservation life, following 1877, deprived of the buffalo by the wholesale slaughter of these animals by the whites, they were in a perilous state, and took the ranchers' cattle as a gift from the Great Spirit. In 1879, the IV ranch found that it had 59 out of a bunch of 133 steers, and other ranchers had suffered equally or worse.

A terrible revenge is related in "The Ranch Men," in the story of the trader Evans, who mourning the loss of a partner while trading with Indians in the Cypress Hills, swore to enact an awful payment. Some time in the late

sixties, Evans and a partner were trading with the Blackfeet when the partner was killed by the Indians and their horses stolen. Evans swore revenge, and hastening to St. Louis, he is said to have purchased bales of blankets that were infected with a most virulent form of smallpox which had been raging there. Carefully wrapping these bales, he shipped them up the Missouri River, and when in the heart of the Indian country, left them on the banks for the first first passerby. Of course, the red men seized upon this treasure trove with natural avidity, and the smallpox raged through the tribes, sweeping thousands into the happy hunting grounds.

One of the most interesting stories connected with the Blackfeet is told by A. H. D. Ross, Professor of Forestry in Toronto University. With Dr. R. T. McKenzie, now professor of medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Ross was a follower of the chain and lever, and encountered some very stirring experiences when surveying the trail from Macleod to Lethbridge, across the Blood Reserve of the Blackfeet tribe.

When the Indians were given their reserve the government did not make them understand that their old haunts were to be preserved to perpetuity. And so when the party of surveyors entered their domain a certain faction of the red men under the leadership of "Three Bulls" were inclined to make things unpleasant for them. They could not be made to understand that the party were doing them good, and they delighted to torment and frighten the pale faces. One of their favorite schemes of torture to the minds of the surveyors was the riding of their cayuses at full tilt toward the chain men while they were at work.

"They would come up to within four or five feet of us," tells Mr. Ross, "and stop with a jerk. When they saw that we didn't care, they would ride off and come back again at us harder than ever and closer than before. They had us pretty well buffaloed, but we stood our ground, and they finally left us to con

coct some new means of bothering us. I don't think they would have been long in really doing us some harm had we not solicited the aid of old Chief Crowfoot, who was leader of the more peaceful faction of the same tribe.

"Piapot, the notorious Indian, who really started the Riel Rebellion, was a member of the Blood band, and all of his followers were viciously inclined. When we appealed to Crowfoot, the notorious ones were getting real bloodthirsty. Their favorite pastime was the pulling of all our stakes as soon as they were driven. But Crowfoot was a very wise and good Indian, and he had a great deal of influence with his own followers. After he had been apprised of the real meaning of our mission, he had no trouble in retaining peace. After that we were the best of friends with all the Indians, and often spent our Sundays teaching them acrobatic stunts which they appreciated very much.

they

"One of their favorite sports was racing around a stake on horseback against one of us on foot. They would place the amount of money wished to bet on the ground, and if it were covered, the winner, who was usually the rider, would collect the spoils. The most marvelous thing in connection with their riding was the ease with which they could reach the ground from the backs of their horses when picking up the stakes."

Crop-Eared Wolf, the last of the old chiefs of the Blackfeet, died last year. He was head of the Blood band and had under him some 1,200 of the least civilized of the Indians of Canada. He was stern with his people, but kind with the white man so long as he did not infringe in any way on Indian rights.

Some six years ago an agitation was raised among the Indians to sell the southern half of their reserve, the largest in Canada. A price was offered that would have made every Indian on the reserve independently rich. But the old chief refused to agree to it. He would have nothing to do with the sale of Indian lands to the white man.

He insisted that the treaty gave the land to the Indians while water ran and the sun shone, and from this position he could not be moved.

One of the last things that CropEared Wolf did before his death was to call a council of his minor chiefs and people, and make them promise that they would never sell their land to the whiteman.

The old chief was, of course, a brave. On more than one occasion he has bared his breast and shown the writer the scars of many a severe test. From his armpits to his very throat there were thong marks, but never in one of the ordeals did he flinch or show anything but the bravery that would one day make him a chief of his band.

It will surprise most people to know that Crop-Eared Wolf had a comfortably furnished home. Carpets covered the floors. A modern range did the cooking instead of the open fire of the teepee. Iron bedsteads replaced the blanket on the ground. Lamps lit the house, blinds covered the windows, cooking utensils were in their proper place, and a table was set such as any man might dine at.

Wolf became an adherent of the Roman Catholic faith. At his funeral a brass band composed of Indian boys from the boarding schools played "Nearer My God to Thee," and instead of the old chief passing out to the happy hunting grounds of his forefathers, he died in the faith of the Son of God, and went to be with Him.

The Blackfeet tribe of Indians is the richest of any group of people in Canada. It is a peculiar coincidence that a tribe of Indians closely related to the Black feet is the richest group in the United States. The total wealth of the Blackfeet including their annual yearly income, is $10,987,250. This, divided among 2,329 bucks, squaws and papooses, will give them average per capita wealth of $4,675. It is well known that squaws and Indian children control no part of the wealth of the nation. If the immense sum credited to the Blackfeet were divided among the males over 20 years it would give

each $16,445. Ten is not considered large for an Indian family, but if we could suppose there were seven members to each family among the Blackfeet, the head of each household would control the immense sum of $32,725.

There are many interesting legends and traditions among the Blackfeet. The most interesting of these has to do with a famine in the land of the Blackfeet which is said to have prevailed from 1835 to 1837. The legend is told by a Blackfoot Indian of education and refinement living on the South Peigan Reserve in Montana. At that time the Blackfeet Indians owned everything from the Hudson's Bay to the Rockie Mountains, and in all that land there was no green spot except in the valley which is called Two Medicine. Even the buffalo left the country because there was no food for them.

The old men of the tribe built lodges in this valley of Two Medicine and worshipped the Great Spirit, and prayed that they might be saved from the famine. And the Great Spirit heard them and directed them to send seven of their patriarchs to the top of Chief Mountain, where the Wind God was then residing. They followed these directions, but the old men were afraid to go near to the Wind God to make their prayer, and after their long jour ney they went back empty handed to their people.

The Medicine man then directed them to send fourteen of their bravest young warriors to intercede with the Wind God. These young men eventually reached him and made their prayer. He listened, and his wings. quivered and quivered, and gradually clouds began to gather over the plains, and the rain fell as in a deluge. He stretched one wing over the plains, telling them in this way to go back out there and they would find the famine gone.

The young men returned to their people and they found that already the buffalo had returned and the famine was gone.

The Blackfeet is still the largest tribe of Indians in the world. They have become quite peaceful, and where it once took several detachments of Royal Northwest Mounted Police to keep them in subjection, now one policeman on each of the three reserves is all that is necessary. Government agents are in charge, and competent instructors in the various crafts and in agriculture direct the work of those who have a desire to become self-supporting.

Good schools are established, and the religious life of red men cared for by the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. Notwithstanding diligent mission work, there are sixty per cent of the Blackfeet still in paganism.

THE PICNIC

The bee drew all the nectar
From honeysuckle vines,

And cloying sweets that slumbered
In purple columbines.

He took a tear of bleeding heart's,
And with a sunbeam stirred,

Then spread it on his primrose plates

And called the humming-bird.

SADIE BELLE Neer.

T

The Problem

By Ralph Cummins

HE man shifted his rifle from shoulder to crooked elbow, and half-slid down the steep, frostcovered bank.

"Durn that tooth!" he muttered. "I'd oughta had it yanked out."

Caressing his red-bearded cheek, he swung round the splintered stump of a giant cedar, and stepped out upon the natural bridge formed by a hundred feet of its trunk. He was met by a volley of shot-like snow that rattled down the canyon.

For six winters Burd Quigley had crossed on that fallen cedar. Bridging the rocky gulch, it was a time and labor saver, and had become as much a part of the trap line trail as Buckhorn Pass and the granite ledge above the big slide. Now, on his first round of the season, the trapper merely noted that his foot-log was still in place, and with his usual confidence. waddled forward upon it. Accommodating his short, choppy steps to the log's undulations, he allowed his weight to increase the rolling motion.

The

A splitting, falling crash, and a twenty-foot piece of the small end of the log rolled into the canyon. The broken end of the main trunk fell ten feet, and lodged against the bank. The man slipped down the incline, scratched wildly at the loose bark, rolled off, and fell heavily upon the frozen creek-bed.

He was conscious of a jarring shock, and a blinding pain in his head. For a moment he lay quite still, with his eyes closed, then his powerful will dragged his senses from the brink of unconsciousness. His first mental effort informed him that the toothache was gone.

Opening his eyes, he saw the still

waving foot-log; had he been standing he could nearly have touched its under side. He raised first one hand, then the other; with a snort of disgust at his mishap he rose to a sitting position and looked for his rifle. His searching glance traveled no farther than his outstretched legs.

Into his brain flashed a deadening, hammer-like blow, followed by a surging wave of dread. For a long time he did not move, but stared at the two feet resting upon the gravel. Then in a dazed, mechanical manner he produced pipe, plug and knife, and shaved the tobacco into his hand. But his trance-like gaze never wandered from the revelation of that right foot lying heel up, before him.

"Busted my leg! I sure busted my leg!"

He spoke aloud, but quietly, with nothing of the irritation that he had bestowed upon the aching tooth.

He lit his pipe and settled down on one elbow. Sharp twinges prodded to life a dull gnawing in the injured leg. His mind raced back over the years to the painful "shinny" games of his boyhood.

"Busted my shin! Now here's a purty mess. Busted my old shin!"

He swung to the other elbow, and glanced up the canyon. Mighty granite boulders littered the creek-bed; fir and hemlock and cedar trees towered from the banks; in the distance, grim and forbidding, rose a snowcapped ridge.

Slowly into his groping mind pressed insistently the reluctant thought that beyond that white summit, three long days down the rough Shakleford, lay the habitation of his nearest neighbor. Sixty miles of soft snow and jumbled

rocks! In summer, three days' travel -well-nigh impassable now, with the cliff-like drifts guarding the ridges ridges and the cold north slopes.

Lowering himself upon his back, he clasped his hands under his head, and forced his mind to a frank survey of his predicament. His nearest neighbor was Bill Wade, a homesteader on Little Elk Creek. That was sixty miles, and it was ten miles from Wade's to Red Bank, the little mining town where he worked summers. In all directions frowned the barrier of the snow-bound Sierras. He had often congratulated himself on the fact that his trapping ground was well off the beaten track, in fact it was his boast that during the six seasons he had spent in the Marble Range, he had never had a human caller. His line of thought raced up to the present, and encountered the knowledge that it was ten miles to his camp-ten miles to shelter and food.

An extra twinge drew his mind from the gloomy outlook. Firmly grasping Firmly grasping his ankle, he turned the leg over. The bowl of his brier pipe fell to the ground-he had bitten through the rubber stem. With quiet deliberation he removed his shoe, unlaced his canvas legging, and ripped the seam of his blue overalls. He hesitated over the leg of his woolen drawers, then ripped it down the side and slashed it off at the knee. Somewhere he had heard that an injury was much less dangerous if the skin was not broken. With great relief he discovered that the fractured bone had not punctured the skin. While his jaw clamped, and his eyes grew to hard slits, he poked and prodded. All that he could determine was that the shin bone was broken near its center.

Again he filled his pipe, and again, with filmy gaze, he regarded the broken limb. But his mind was no longer inactive; it had begun to grapple with the problem. First he tried to recall what he had heard of mountain accidents.

The list was not an encouraging one. There was the squatter on Indian

Creek who had slashed his foot with an axe and bled to death. He remembered hearing Old Dan Morgan tell of a man breaking his arm and traveling two hundred miles to the outside. Then he had read of a miner who had shot himself, and had tried to amputate his foot; his body had been discovered the next spring. He called up a vague history of a score of such injuries, but a review of them served only to deepen the hopelessness of his position. Several times his mind dwelt for a moment upon the horror with which he had always thought of an accident when alone.

From an open contemplation of the serious possibilities he hurried to more practical reminiscences. He brought to mind his meagre knowledge of anatomy, and tried to remember the things that were so vital in the task before him. Never during the course of an adventurous life had he witnessed the reduction of a fracture. Still, an enlightening chapter from the past rose before him, and he grasped it eagerly. He had prospected, one summer, with a man who limped because his leg had not been properly set. The man had a grievance against the hospital that had treated him, and never tired of telling all the details of how the malpractice occurred. The prospector's leg had been broken above the knee, but Quigley could not see that that made the case very much different from his own. For a long time he prowled about in his memory of that man's camp-fire tales.

He looked at his watch. It was noon. Again he examined the fracture. Rolling up overalls and drawers on the other leg, he probed long and thoughtfully about the bone. Then for a solid hour he sat and studied, and figured, and planned.

When, finally, he went to work, it was with the same air of confident determination that he displayed in setting a trap or in hunting a deer. Bedding the throbbing leg upon his mackinaw jacket, he hitched backward, an inch at a time, until he sat upon a large, flat rock. A clump of straggling willows

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