The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (4 page)

The crowning achievement of the age, however, was the 363-mile Erie Canal, an astonishing feat of engineering begun in 1817 and finished just eight years later. In linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, the project united the agricultural heart of the nation to New York City, its most vital seaport, and in short order that easy access to the bounty of the Old Northwest made New York the Empire State. To celebrate its completion, Governor DeWitt Clinton, who had staked his reputation on the success of the venture, “wedded the waters” on 26 October 1825 by pouring a keg drawn from Lake Erie into the Atlantic Ocean. At once thrilled and humbled by the achievement, he asked that “the God of Heavens and the Earth smile most propitiously on the work, and render it subservient to the best interests of the human race.”
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I
N A WEST
even beyond the West, the Blackfeet held a different world-view. Like DeWitt Clinton and his fellow Americans, they believed that their Creator, whom they called Napi (Old Man), took a special interest in them.
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To early white explorers like Meriwether Lewis and even rival native groups of the northern Plains, it surely seemed that the territory inhabited by the Blackfeet was a gift from a benevolent higher being. It was magnificent country. Rolling hills swept the landscape, verdant from late spring to the end of summer, becoming dun-colored as the weather turned cold. Fast-running tributaries knifed through forests and prairies before emptying into the Saskatchewan and Missouri Rivers. And looming on the western horizon were the tremendous Rocky Mountains, known to the Blackfeet as
Mistakis:
“the backbone of the world.”

The opportunities and limitations presented by the environment determined the rhythms of Blackfeet daily life, especially the quest for sustenance. Napi, they believed, had shown his people how to gather and prepare a wide variety of plants, chief among them the prairie turnip, the fruit of the red willow, and a range of berries. The most important nonmeat food for the Blackfeet was the camas root, gathered when it bloomed during a short window in the early summer and then roasted in an enclosed pit. Eager children would huddle at the edge of the fire, waiting for an adult to remove the grass covering so that they could taste the syrup that oozed out onto branches and leaves. Women then laid the roots in the sun to dry before storing them in parfleche sacks for later use.
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The lifeblood of Blackfeet existence, however, was the bison, to such an extent that the Indians structured their entire lives around the movements of this enormous, shaggy beast. For much of the year, the Blackfeet broke into smaller bands composed of several family groups, following the undulations of the herds throughout the spring, summer, and fall. This meant almost constant motion for the Indians, who before the arrival of the horse relied on dogs to haul their belongings across the immense spaces of the northern Plains. With the end of autumn, the bison took to the river valleys and the Blackfeet did likewise, pitching their winter camps near dependable sources of wood and water to wait out the snow and wind that pummeled the tablelands above them.
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Before they had horses, the Blackfeet used several ingenious methods to kill bison. One of these was the surround, in which Indians on foot drove a group of buffalo into a corral constructed of rocks, logs, or brush, and then shot them with bows. Particularly effective was the
piskun,
or buffalo jump: stampeded animals plunged over the precipice and either died on impact or from the hail of rocks and arrows showered upon them by Indians waiting at the bottom of the cliff. Whatever the technique, the Blackfeet then divided up the spoils among members of the band; the hump and tongue were deemed the choicest parts. As an indication of the importance of buffalo meat to the Blackfeet, the Indians called it
nita’piwaskin,
or “real food,” suggesting that anything else was counterfeit.
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Of course, the bison was more than food to the Blackfeet, and women made use of virtually the entire animal, from the horns (which became spoons and ladles) to the tail (fashioned into a flyswatter). From an early age, Coth-co-co-na would have learned how to use the parts in between to meet multiple additional needs: dressed skins, with the hair left on, served as winter robes; tanned hides stitched together made lodges; hooves became glue; ribs provided a variety of scraping tools; scapulas lashed to sticks with tendon or sinew made axes and hoes; and skin from the hind legs furnished moccasins and leggings. In short, the bison was a walking commissary for the Indians, and with the gift of its many products the Blackfeet crafted a hard but satisfying existence that endured for generations.
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And yet, as with the American colonies to the east, sweeping changes had begun to transform the Blackfeet world of Coth-co-co-na’s ancestors starting in the mid-eighteenth century. The first and most important of these was the arrival of horses, which appeared among the Blackfeet around 1730, acquired by theft from their bitter rivals, the Shoshones. One elderly Indian man remembered that the strange new animal “put us in mind of a Stag that had lost his horns … [and] he was a slave to Man, like the dog.” They came to call the animal
ponokaomita
, or “elk dog.”
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In short order, horses revolutionized the life and culture of the Blackfeet (and other Plains tribes, for that matter), because with them the Indians “had conquered their oldest enemy, which was distance.”
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Horses were infinitely more efficient than dogs in lugging camps from one location to the next, and mounted hunters could find, pursue, and kill bison with a degree of ease previously unimaginable. By 1830, the earliest year for which such estimates are available, the Piegans possessed an average of ten horses per lodge, while the Bloods and Blackfoot had about five each.
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George Catlin,
Buffalo Hunt, Chase
—No. 6. Lithograph, ca. 1844. Horses gave Plains Indian peoples increased mobility and greatly facilitated the bison hunt. Courtesy of the Museum of Nebraska Art.

The second element that irrevocably altered Blackfeet life was the gun. The Piegans obtained firearms at about the same time they got their first horses, in the late 1720s or early 1730s. Having suffered for years at the hands of the Shoshones, the Piegans reached out for help from their then allies, the Crees and the Assiniboines, who supplied them with muzzle-loaders. Shortly thereafter the Piegans faced the Shoshones in battle, with ten weapons concealed among them. At a set time the chosen warriors discharged their guns, killing or wounding every Shoshone at whom they had aimed. Armed only with short stone clubs, the overmatched Shoshones eventually fled, and the Piegans and their allies celebrated the next day by presenting each rifleman with a scalp torn from the head of one of the fallen enemy.
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Despite all the advantages they conferred, such technological advances had a steep downside. For one thing, guns required ammunition, for which the Indians depended upon Europeans. Moreover, in contrast to conditions on the southern Plains, where milder temperatures and better feed allowed groups like the Comanches to amass substantial herds, conditions at the opposite end of the grasslands were harsher and therefore made it difficult to sustain horses. As a result of their scarcity among northern tribes, horses became a form of currency for groups like the Blackfeet, for whom equine wealth equaled social capital. This new measure of status eroded the egalitarianism of northern peoples, including the Blackfeet, as the number and quality of a man’s steeds became key factors in determining his political and marital prospects. And since the surest way to gain additional horses and to win recognition for bravery was to steal mounts from enemies, a cycle of near-constant raiding and warfare on the northern Plains thus began in the mid-eighteenth century, made more lethal by the proliferation of guns. Women sometimes constituted 65–75 percent of northern tribes because their men fell so often in battle.
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As a girl, Coth-co-co-na surely witnessed the terrible aftermath of such violence, marked by the elaborate mourning rituals through which Blackfeet women grieved deceased husbands and sons (but not daughters): the bereaved cut their hair short, lacerated their calves, and sometimes amputated several fingers at the joints.
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The Piegans bore the brunt of these assaults because of their exposed position at the southern edge of Blackfeet territory, where they were sandwiched between the confederacy’s chief rivals: the Shoshones to the southwest and the Crows to the southeast. This prime country was more temperate than the northern lands of their Blood and Blackfoot kinsmen and boasted the “superb winter sanctuary” of the Marias River. Thus the Piegans—with an early nineteenth-century population of approximately 2,800 (350 lodges with 8 persons per lodge)—dwarfed both the Blackfoot (1,600) and the Bloods (800), and they were far wealthier in horses.
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And yet because of their vulnerability, the Piegans according to one observer led a more “precarious and watchful life,” with the result that “from their boyhood [they] are taught the use of arms, and to be good warriors, they become more martial and more moral than the others, and many of them have a chivalrous bearing, ready for any enterprise.”
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Piegan men certainly looked the part: brave, fearsome, and seemingly invincible. Though one early visitor found the typical Blackfeet costume of tanned shirt and leggings largely unremarkable for the region, he came away haunted by the Piegan warriors’ crimson-colored faces, an effect created by the application of vermilion, sometimes accentuated with a stripe of bluish ore running down the forehead, across the bridge of the nose, and ending at the chin.
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Another traveler considered the Blackfeet gaudy but no less intimidating, writing breathlessly of these “wild red knights of the prairie” and the awesome spectacle they presented when mounted for a raiding expedition. This, of course, was to say nothing of their adornments, which sometimes consisted of scalps sawed from the heads of their enemies—natives or even the occasional white man who had ventured boldly, if unwisely, into Piegan territory.
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George Catlin,
Blackfoot Indian Pe-Toh-Pee-Kiss, The Eagle Ribs.
Lithograph. According to Catlin, Eagle Ribs “boasts of eight scalps, which he says he has taken from the heads of trappers and traders with his own hand.” Courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.

According to Blackfeet belief, before he left them, Napi had marked off the ground he reserved for the tribe and said, “When people come to cross the line, take your bows and arrows, your lances and your battle axes, and give them battle and keep them out. If they gain a footing, trouble will come to you.”
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The Blackfeet listened, and so they fought off not only the Shoshones but also the Flatheads and the Kutenais, and eventually even their former allies, the Crees and the Assiniboines. By the close of the eighteenth century, the Blackfeet—with their unwavering vigilance and pugnacity—were ascendant, dominating their rivals and establishing full control of the northwestern Plains. But they soon faced new opponents, men more powerful than any of their previous enemies, who came not for their horses or even to make captives of their women and children; rather, the outsiders sought
ksisskstaki
, the beaver. One such man was an expelled West Point cadet named Malcolm Clarke.