Sometimes, if two young people are fond of each other, and there is no prospect of their being married, they may take riding horses and a pack horse, and elope at night, going to some other camp for a while.  This makes the girl’s father angry, for he feels that he has been defrauded of his payments.  The young man knows that his father-in-law bears him a grudge, and if he afterwards goes to war and is successful, returning with six or seven horses, he will send them all to the camp where his father-in-law lives, to be tied in front of his lodge.  This at once heals the breach, and the couple may return.  Even if he has not been successful in war and brought horses, which of course he does not always accomplish, he from time to time sends the old man a present, the best he can.  Notwithstanding these efforts at conciliation, the parents feel very bitterly against him.  The girl has been stolen.  The union is no marriage at all.  The old people are ashamed and disgraced for their daughter.  Until the father has been pacified by satisfactory payments, there is no marriage.  Moreover, unless the young man had made a payment, or at least had endeavored to do so, he would be little thought of among his fellows, and looked down on as a poor creature without any sense of honor.

The Blackfeet take as many wives as they wish; but these ceremonies are only carried out in the case of the first wife, the “sits-beside-him” woman.  In the case of subsequent marriages, if the man had proved a good, kind husband to his first wife, other men, who thought a good deal of their daughters, might propose to give them to him, so that they would be well treated.  The man sent over the horses to the new father-in-law’s lodge, and the girl returned to his, bringing her things with her.  Or if the man saw a girl he liked, he would propose for her to her father.

Among the Blackfeet, there was apparently no form of courtship, such as prevails among our southern Indians.  Young men seldom spoke to young girls who were not relations, and the girls were carefully guarded.  They never went out of the lodge after dark, and never went out during the day, except with the mother or some other old woman.  The girl, therefore, had very little choice in the selection of a husband.  If a girl was told she must marry a certain man, she had to obey.  She might cry, but her father’s will was law, and she might be beaten or even killed by him, if she did not do as she was ordered.  As a consequence of this severity, suicide was quite common among the Blackfoot girls.  A girl ordered to marry a man whom she did not like would often watch her chance, and go out in the brush and hang herself.  The girl who could not marry the man she wanted to was likely to do the same thing.