races of Dakota and the Montana.  It is a useless struggle that which these Indians wage against their latest and most deadly enemy, but nevertheless it is one in which the sympathy of any brave heart must lie on the side of the savage.  Here, at the head-waters of the great River Missouri which finds its outlet into the Gulf of Mexico-here, pent up against the barriers of the “Mountains of the Setting Sun,” the Blackfeet offer a last despairing struggle to the ever-increasing tide that hems them in.  It is not yet two years since a certain citizen soldier of the United States made a famous raid against a portion of this tribe at the head-waters of the Missouri.  It so happened that I had the opportunity of hearing this raid described from the rival points of view of the Indian and the white man, and, if possible, the brutality of the latter—­brutality which was gloried in—­exceeded the relation of the former.  Here is the story of the raid as told me by a miner whose “pal” was present in the scene.  “It was a little afore day when the boys came upon two redskins in a gulch near-away to the Sun River” (the Sun River flows into the Missouri, and the forks lie below Benton).  “They caught the darned red devils and strapped them on a horse, and swore that if they didn’t just lead the way to their camp that they’d blow their b——­ brains out; and Jim Baker wasn’t the coon to go under if he said he’d do it—­no, you bet he wasn’t.  So the red devils showed the trail, and soon the boys came out on a wide gulch, and saw down below the lodges of the Pagans.  Baker just says, ’Now, boys, says he, ’thar’s the devils, and just you go in and clear them out.  No darned prisoners, you know; Uncle Sam ain’t agoin’ to keep prisoners, I guess.  No darned squaws or young uns, but just kill’em all, squaws and all; it’s them squaws what breeds’em, and them young uns will only be horse-thieves or hair-lifters when they grows up; so just make a clean shave of the hull brood.  Wall, mister, ye see, the boys jist rode in among the lodges afore daylight, and they killed every thing that was able to come out of the tents, for, you see, the redskins had the small-pox bad, they had, and a heap of them couldn’t come out nohow; so the boys jist turned over the lodges and fixed them as they lay on the ground.  Thar was up to 170 of them Pagans wiped out that mornin’, and thar was only one of the boys sent under by a redskin firing out at him from inside a lodge.  I say, mister, that Baker’s a bell-ox among sodgers, you bet.”

One month after this slaughter on the Sun River a band of Peagins were met on the Bow River by a French missionary priest, the only missionary whose daring spirit has carried him into the country of these redoubled tribes.  They told him of the cruel loss their tribe had suffered at the hands of the “Long-knives;” but they spoke of it as the fortune of war, as a thing to be deplored, but to be also revenged:  it was after the manner of their own war, and it did not