xcept during a few short weeks in
spring, the sparse bunch-grass is sear and yellow, and the silver gray of
the wormwood lends an added dreariness to the landscape. Yet this seemingly
desert waste has a beauty of its own. At intervals it is marked with green
winding river valleys, and everywhere it is gashed with deep ravines, their
sides painted in strange colors of red and gray and brown, and their
perpendicular walls crowned with fantastic columns and figures of stone or
clay, carved out by the winds and the rains of ages. Here and there, rising
out of the plain, are curious sharp ridges, or square-topped buttes with
vertical sides, sometimes bare, and sometimes dotted with pines,--short,
sturdy trees, whose gnarled trunks and thick, knotted branches have been
twisted and wrung into curious forms by the winds which blow unceasingly,
hour after hour, day after day, and month after month, over mountain range
and prairie, through gorge and coulee.

These prairies now seem bare of life, but it was not always so. Not very
long ago, they were trodden by multitudinous herds of buffalo and antelope;
then, along the wooded river valleys and on the pine-clad slopes of the
mountains, elk, deer, and wild sheep fed in great numbers. They are all
gone now. The winter's wind still whistles over Montana prairies, but
nature's shaggy-headed wild cattle no longer feel its biting blasts. Where
once the scorching breath of summer stirred only the short stems of the
buffalo-grass, it now billows the fields of the white man's
grain. Half-hidden by the scanty herbage, a few bleached skeletons alone
remain to tell us of the buffalo; and the broad, deep trails, over which
the dark herds passed by thousands, are now grass-grown and fast
disappearing under the effacing hand of time. The buffalo have disappeared,
and the fate of the buffalo has almost overtaken the Blackfeet.

As known to the whites, the Blackfeet were true prairie Indians, seldom
venturing into the mountains, except when they crossed them to war with the
Kutenais, the Flatheads, or the Snakes. They subsisted almost wholly on the
flesh of the buffalo. They were hardy, untiring, brave, ferocious. Swift
to move, whether on foot or horseback, they made long journeys to war, and
with telling force struck their enemies. They had conquered and driven out
from the territory which they occupied the tribes who once inhabited it,
and maintained a desultory and successful warfare against a