These prairies now seem bare of life, but it was not always so.  Not very long ago, they were trodden by multitudinous herds of buffalo and antelope; then, along the wooded river valleys and on the pine-clad slopes of the mountains, elk, deer, and wild sheep fed in great numbers.  They are all gone now.  The winter’s wind still whistles over Montana prairies, but nature’s shaggy-headed wild cattle no longer feel its biting blasts.  Where once the scorching breath of summer stirred only the short stems of the buffalo-grass, it now billows the fields of the white man’s grain.  Half-hidden by the scanty herbage, a few bleached skeletons alone remain to tell us of the buffalo; and the broad, deep trails, over which the dark herds passed by thousands, are now grass-grown and fast disappearing under the effacing hand of time.  The buffalo have disappeared, and the fate of the buffalo has almost overtaken the Blackfeet.

As known to the whites, the Blackfeet were true prairie Indians, seldom venturing into the mountains, except when they crossed them to war with the Kutenais, the Flatheads, or the Snakes.  They subsisted almost wholly on the flesh of the buffalo.  They were hardy, untiring, brave, ferocious.  Swift to move, whether on foot or horseback, they made long journeys to war, and with telling force struck their enemies.  They had conquered and driven out from the territory which they occupied the tribes who once inhabited it, and maintained a desultory and successful warfare against all invaders, fighting with the Crees on the north, the Assinaboines on the east, the Crows on the south, and the Snakes, Kalispels, and Kutenais on the southwest and west.  In those days the Blackfeet were rich and powerful.  The buffalo fed and clothed them, and they needed nothing beyond what nature supplied.  This was their time of success and happiness.

Crowded into a little corner of the great territory which they once dominated, and holding this corner by an uncertain tenure, a few Blackfeet still exist, the pitiful remnant of a once mighty people.  Huddled together about their agencies, they are facing the problem before them, striving, helplessly but bravely, to accommodate themselves to the new order of things; trying in the face of adverse surroundings to wrench themselves loose from their accustomed ways of life; to give up inherited habits and form new ones; to break away from all that is natural to them, from all that they have been taught—­to reverse their whole mode of existence.  They are striving to earn their living, as the white man earns his, by toil.  The struggle is hard and slow, and in carrying it on they are wasting away and growing fewer in numbers.  But though unused to labor, ignorant of agriculture, unacquainted with tools or seeds or soils, knowing nothing of the ways of life in permanent houses or of the laws of health, scantily fed, often utterly discouraged by failure, they are still making a noble fight for existence.