“I had heard much of a certain white man named Hugh Monroe, and in Blackfoot, Rising Wolf. One afternoon I was told that he had arrived in camp with his numerous family, and a little later met him at a feast given by Big Lake. In the evening I invited him over to my lodge and had a long talk with him while he ate bread and meat and beans, and smoked numerous pipefuls of tobacco.” White man’s food is good after years without any. “We eventually became firm friends. Even in his old age Rising Wolf was the quickest, most active man I ever saw. He was about five feet six in height, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and his firm square chin and rather prominent nose betokened what he was, a man of courage and determination. His father, Hugh Monroe, was a colonel in the British army, his mother a member of the La Roches, a noble family of French émigrés, bankers of Montreal and large land owners in that vicinity. “Hugh, junior, was born on the family estate at Three Rivers (Quebec) and attended the parish school just long enough to learn to read and write. All his vacations and many truant days from the class room were spent in the great forest surrounding his home. The love of nature, of adventure and wild life were born in him. He first saw the light in July, 1798. In 1813, when but fifteen years of age, he persuaded his parents to allow him to enter the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company and started westward with a flotilla of that company’s canoes that spring. His father gave him a fine English smoothbore, his mother a pair of the famous La Roche dueling pistols and a prayer book. The family priest gave him a rosary and cross and enjoined him to pray frequently. Traveling all summer, they arrived at Lake Winnipeg in the autumn and wintered there. As soon as the ice went out in the spring the journey was continued and one afternoon in July, Monroe beheld Mountain Fort, a new post of the company’s not far from the Rocky Mountains. “Around about it were encamped thousands of Blackfeet waiting to trade for the goods the flotilla had brought up and to obtain on credit ammunition, fukes (trade guns), traps and tobacco. As yet the company had no Blackfoot interpreter. The factor perceiving that Monroe was a youth of more than ordinary intelligence at once detailed him to live and travel with the Piegans (a Blackfoot tribe) and learn their language, also to see that they returned to Mountain Fort with their furs the succeeding summer. Word had been received that, following the course of Lewis and Clarke, American traders were yearly pushing farther and farther westward and had even reached the mouth of the Yellowstone. The company feared their competition. Monroe was to do his best to prevent it.