There was no end of trouble about that bear, for Mrs. Schultz dared not skin a sacred animal until she had sacrificed her best blue frock, also one of her husband’s revolvers--the same being out of order. And when the skin was dressed, nobody dared to visit the lodge until it had been hidden. I want to copy out the whole book, for every paragraph contains some fresh delight, but these two or three stories must have shown something at least of Blackfoot character. I knew, and loved these people. It was in January, 1870, that Colonel Baker was sent with a force of United States regular troops to chasten a band of Blackfeet who had killed a trader. The band accused of the crime, belonged to the Northern Blackfeet of Canada, whose camp at the time was on Belly River, two hundred miles north of the boundary. The band found by Baker belonged to the Piegans, a southern tribe camped on their own lands in Montana. There were eighty families in camp, but the men were nearly all away hunting buffalo when Baker’s force attacked at the break of dawn. The chief, Bear’s Head, ran toward the white men, waving a paper, a certificate of good character. He fell. Then the slaughter began in cold blood: Fifteen fighting men, eighteen elder men, ninety women, fifty-five little children, and when the last wounded mothers and their babies had been put out of their misery, the soldiers piled the corpses upon the wreckage before they burned the camp. The whisky traders, like Schultz, have been blamed for the ruin of the Blackfeet; but since they had to die, it seems to me that the liquor gave them a certain amount of fun and excitement not so bad for them as Baker, or smallpox, or their Indian agent, or the white robbers who slaughtered their herds of buffalo, and stole their treaty lands. In 1874, Schultz was one of fifty-seven white men hunting or trading with the Canadian or Northern Blackfeet. They had trading forts at Whoop-up, Standoff, Slideout, the Leavings, all in Canada. But the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian wolfers made complaint against these American rivals; and so the Canadian government raised the Northwest Mounted Police. Three hundred men were sent across the plains to take possession and run the American traders out of the country. But the police were only tenderfeet in those days, eastern Canadians unused to the western ways, who came hungry through the countless herds of the bison. A band of hunters brought news to the Blackfeet. “Some men are coming,” they said, “who wear red coats, and they are drawing a cannon.” “Oh,” said the Blackfeet, “these must be Hudson’s Bay.” For in old times the company’s officers are said to have worn red coats when they administered justice, so that the color was a sign of honest dealing. So the police were not attacked by the Blackfeet, and they were welcomed by the American traders, who sold them food in abundance.