your share of what
food there may be in the lodge. For his friend he will die, if need be. He
is glad to perform acts of kindness for those he likes. While travelling in
the heats of summer over long, waterless stretches of prairie, I have had
an Indian, who saw me suffering from thirst, leave me, without mentioning
his errand, and ride thirty miles to fetch me a canteen of cool water.

The Indian is intensely religious. No people pray more earnestly nor more
frequently. This is especially true of all Indians of the Plains.

The Indian has the mind and feelings of a child with the stature of a man;
and if this is clearly understood and considered, it will readily account
for much of the bad that we hear about him, and for many of the evil traits
which are commonly attributed to him. Civilized and educated, the Indian of
the better class is not less intelligent than the average white man, and he
has every capacity for becoming a good citizen.

This is the view held not only by myself, but by all of the many old
frontiersmen that I have known, who have had occasion to live much among
Indians, and by most experienced army officers. It was the view held by my
friend and schoolmate, the lamented Lieutenant Casey, whose good work in
transforming the fierce Northern Cheyennes into United States soldiers is
well known among all officers of the army, and whose sad death by an Indian
bullet has not yet, I believe, been forgotten by the public.

It is proper that something should be said as to how this book came to be
written.

About ten years ago, Mr. J.W. Schultz of Montana, who was then living in
the Blackfoot camp, contributed to the columns of the _Forest and Stream_,
under the title "Life among the Blackfeet," a series of sketches of that
people. These papers seemed to me of unusual interest, and worthy a record
in a form more permanent than the columns of a newspaper; but no
opportunity was then presented for filling in the outlines given in them.

Shortly after this, I visited the Pi-k[)u]n-i tribe of the Black-feet, and
I have spent more or less time in their camps every year since. I have
learned to know well all their principal men, besides many of the Bloods
and the Blackfeet, and have devoted much time and effort to the work of
accumulating from their old men and best warriors the facts bearing on the
history, customs, and oral literature of the tribe, which are presented in
this volume.

In 1889 my book on the