But this land had not always been the home of the Blackfeet.  Long ago, before the coming of the white men, they had lived in another country far to the north and east, about Lesser Slave Lake, ranging between Peace River and the Saskatchewan, and having for their neighbors on the north the Beaver Indians.  Then the Blackfeet were a timber people.  It is said that about two hundred years ago the Chippeweyans from the east invaded this country and drove them south and west.  Whether or no this is true, it is quite certain that not many generations back the Blackfeet lived on the North Saskatchewan River and to the north of that stream.[1] Gradually working their way westward, they at length reached the Rocky Mountains, and, finding game abundant, remained there until they obtained horses, in the very earliest years of the present century.  When they secured horses and guns, they took courage and began to venture out on to the plains and to go to war.  From this time on, the Blackfeet made constant war on their neighbors to the south, and in a few years controlled the whole country between the Saskatchewan on the north and the Yellowstone on the south.

[Footnote 1:  For a more extended account of this migration, see American Anthropologist, April, 1892, p. 153.]

It was, indeed, a glorious country which the Blackfeet had wrested from their southern enemies.  Here nature has reared great mountains and spread out broad prairies.  Along the western border of this region, the Rocky Mountains lift their snow-clad peaks above the clouds.  Here and there, from north to south, and from east to west, lie minor ranges, black with pine forests if seen near at hand, or in the distance mere gray silhouettes against a sky of blue.  Between these mountain ranges lies everywhere the great prairie; a monotonous waste to the stranger’s eye, but not without its charm.  It is brown and bare; for, except during a few short weeks in spring, the sparse bunch-grass is sear and yellow, and the silver gray of the wormwood lends an added dreariness to the landscape.  Yet this seemingly desert waste has a beauty of its own.  At intervals it is marked with green winding river valleys, and everywhere it is gashed with deep ravines, their sides painted in strange colors of red and gray and brown, and their perpendicular walls crowned with fantastic columns and figures of stone or clay, carved out by the winds and the rains of ages.  Here and there, rising out of the plain, are curious sharp ridges, or square-topped buttes with vertical sides, sometimes bare, and sometimes dotted with pines,—­short, sturdy trees, whose gnarled trunks and thick, knotted branches have been twisted and wrung into curious forms by the winds which blow unceasingly, hour after hour, day after day, and month after month, over mountain range and prairie, through gorge and coulee.