lope is
very inquisitive and was easily led within the chute and there
frightened, as were the buffalo, by people who had been concealed
and who rose up and showed themselves after the antelope had passed.
This was done more in order to secure antelope skins for clothing
than their flesh for food.

Fish and reptiles were not eaten by the Blackfeet, nor were dogs,
although dogs, wolves, and coyotes are eaten by many tribes of
plains Indians. Most small animals, and practically all birds, were
eaten in case of need. In summer, when the wildfowl which bred
on so many of the lakes in the Blackfeet country lost their
flight-feathers, during the moult, and again in the late summer,
when the young ducks and geese were almost fullgrown but could not
yet fly, the Indians often went in large parties to the shallow
lakes which here and there dotted the prairie, and, driving the
birds to shore, killed them in large numbers.

Earlier in the season, when the fowl had begun to lay their eggs,
these were collected in great quantities for food. Sometimes they
were roasted in the hot ashes, but a more common way was to dig a
deep, narrow hole in the ground in which the eggs were to be cooked.
Several little platforms of small sticks or twigs were built in this
hole, one above another, and on these platforms they put the eggs.
Another much smaller hole was dug to one side of the large hole,
slanting down into it. The large hole was partly filled with water,
and was then roofed over by small sticks on which was placed grass
covered with earth. Stones were heated in a fire built near at hand,
and then were rolled down the side hole into the larger hole,
heating the water, which at last boiled and steamed, the steam
cooking the eggs.

When the Americans first met them on the prairie, the Blackfeet were
known as great warriors. But up to the time when they got from the
Hudson Bay traders better weapons than they had before known,
whether these were metal knives, steel arrow points, or guns, it is
probable that they did not do much fighting. There seems to have
been no reason why they should have fought, unless they quarrelled
about small matters with other tribes. It became quite different
when the Indians procured better arms and, above all, when they got
horses--a means of swiftly getting about over the country, something
that all people wanted to have and which all were so eager to obtain
that they would go into danger for them. In th