The United States has laws which prohibit, under severe penalties, the sale of intoxicants to Indians, but these laws are seldom enforced.  To the north of the boundary line, however, in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian Mounted Police have of late years made whiskey-trading perilous business.  Of Major Steell’s good work in putting down the whiskey traffic on the Blackfoot agency in Montana, I shall speak further on, and to-day there is not very much whiskey sold to the Blackfeet.  Constant vigilance is needed, however, to keep traders from the borders of the reservation.

In the winter of 1883-84 more than a quarter of the Piegan tribe of the Blackfeet, which then numbered about twenty-five or twenty-six hundred, died from starvation.  It had been reported to the Indian Bureau that the Blackfeet were practically self-supporting and needed few supplies.  As a consequence of this report, appropriations for them were small.  The statement was entirely and fatally misleading.  The Blackfeet had then never done anything toward self-support, except to kill buffalo.  But just before this, in the year 1883, the buffalo had been exterminated from the Blackfoot country.  In a moment, and without warning, the people had been deprived of the food supply on which they had depended.  At once they had turned their attention to the smaller game, and, hunting faithfully the river bottoms, the brush along the small streams, and the sides of the mountains, had killed off all the deer, elk, and antelope; and at the beginning of the winter found themselves without their usual stores of dried meat, and with nothing to depend on, except the scanty supplies in the government storehouse.  These were ridiculously inadequate to the wants of twenty-five hundred people, and food could be issued to them only in driblets quite insufficient to sustain life.  The men devoted themselves with the utmost faithfulness to hunting, killing birds, rabbits, prairie-dogs, rats, anything that had life; but do the best they might, the people began to starve.  The very old and the very young were the first to perish; after that, those who were weak and sickly, and at last some even among the strong and hardy.  News of this suffering was sent East, and Congress ordered appropriations to relieve the distress; but the supplies had to be freighted in wagons for one hundred and fifty or two hundred miles before they were available.  If the Blackfeet had been obliged to depend on the supplies authorized by the Indian Bureau, the whole tribe might have perished, for the red tape methods of the Government are not adapted to prompt and efficient action in times of emergency.  Happily, help was nearer at hand.  The noble people of Montana, and the army officers stationed at Fort Shaw, did all they could to get supplies to the sufferers.  One or two Montana contractors sent on flour and bacon, on the personal assurance of the newly appointed agent that he would try to have them paid.  But it took a long time to get even these supplies to the agency, over roads sometimes hub deep in mud, or again rough with great masses of frozen clay; and all the time the people were dying.