After spending his youth reading and re-reading The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, and John C. Frémont’s tales of Western exploration, 17-year-old James Willard Schultz boarded a flat-bottomed steamboat in St. Louis. Twenty-six hundred miles along the Missouri River later, having passed rolling green hills and sandstone cliffs, great herds of bison swimming in the river and bighorn sheep standing sentry on the buttes, elk and deer and grazing bands of antelope, and countless American Indian encampments along the shore, he would arrive at the boat’s final destination in Fort Benton, Montana. His life’s adventure was just beginning.
“Ours was the first boat to arrive at Fort Benton that spring. Long before we came in sight of the place, the inhabitants had seen the smoke of our craft and made preparations to receive us. When we turned the bend and neared the levee, cannon boomed, flags waved, and the entire population assembled on the shore to greet us. Foremost in the throng were the two traders who had sometime before bought out the American Fur Company, fort and all. They wore suits of blue broadcloth, their long-tailed, high-collared coats bright with brass buttons; they wore white shirts and stocks, and black cravats; their long hair, neatly combed, hung down to their shoulders. Beside them were their skilled employees — clerks, tailor, carpenter — and they wore suits of black fustian, also brass-buttoned, and their hair was likewise long, and they wore parfleche-soled moccasins, gay with intricate and flowery designs of cut beads. Behind these prominent personages the group was most picturesque; here were the French employees, mostly creoles from St. Louis and the lower Mississippi, men who had passed their lives in the employ of the American Fur Company, and had cordelled many a boat up the vast distances of the winding Missouri. These men wore the black fustian capotes, or hooded coats, fustian or buckskin trousers held in place by a bright-hued sash. Then there were bull-whackers, and mule-skinners, and independent traders and trappers, most of them attired in suits of plain or fringed and beaded buckskin, and nearly all of them had knives and Colt’s powder and ball six-shooters stuck in their belts; and their headgear, especially that of the traders and trappers, was homemade, being generally the skin of a kit fox roughly sewn in circular form, head in front and tail hanging down behind. Back of the whites were a number of Indians, men and youths from a nearby camp, and women married to the resident and visiting whites. I had already learned from what I had seen of the various tribes on our way up the river, that the everyday Indian of the plains is not the gorgeously attired, eagle-plume-bedecked creature various prints and written descriptions had led me to believe he was. Of course, all of them possessed such fancy attire, but it was worn only on state occasions. Those I now saw wore blanket or cow (buffalo) leather leggings, plain or beaded moccasins, calico shirts, and either blanket or cow-leather toga. Most of them were bareheaded, their hair neatly braided, and their faces were painted with reddish-brown ochre or Chinese vermilion. Some carried a bow and quiver of arrows; some had flintlock fukes, a few of the more modern cap-lock rifle. The women wore dresses of calico; a few ‘wives’ of the traders and clerks and skilled laborers even wore silk, and gold chains and watches, and all had the inevitable gorgeously hued and fringed shawl thrown over their shoulders.
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“At one glance the eye could take in the whole town, as it was at that time. There was the great rectangular adobe fort, with bastions mounting cannon at each corner. A short distance above it were a few cabins, built of logs or adobe. Back of these, scattered out in the long, wide flat-bottom, was camp after camp of trader and trapper, string after string of canvas-covered freighters’ wagons, and down at the lower end of the flat were several hundred lodges of Piegans. All this motley crowd had been assembling for days and weeks, impatiently awaiting the arrival of the steamboats. The supply of provisions and things brought up by the boats the previous year had fallen far short of the demand. There was no tobacco to be had at any price. Keno Bill, who ran a saloon and gambling house, was the only one who had any liquor, and that was alcohol diluted with water, four to one. He sold it for a dollar a drink. There was no flour, no sugar, no bacon in the town, but that did not matter, for there was plenty of buffalo and antelope meat. What all craved, Indians and whites, was the fragrant weed and the flowing bowl. And here it was, a whole steamboat load, together with a certain amount of groceries; no wonder cannon boomed and flags waved, and the population cheered when the boat hove in sight.”
— Excerpted from My Life as an Indian by James Willard Schultz (Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1907)
It is easy to imagine the excitement of 17-year-old James Willard Schultz as the steamboat pulled away from the docks in St. Louis on a warm April morning in 1877. The free-spirited child of a staid New England family, he had recently ended his junior year at military school by firing the campus cannon and shattering many windows. Lean and lively, he loved to hunt and roam outdoors, and from an early age he had yearned for big adventures in the Far West.
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Now he was heading up the Missouri River to Fort Benton in the Montana Territory. He had letters of introduction to the fur traders at the fort, a Henry rifle for hunting buffalo, and, luckily for us, a good supply of notebooks and ink. Later in life, when he began writing books about his experiences, the details recorded in those journals would be invaluable.
Schultz is best known for his first book, an enduring classic of frontier literature called My Life as an Indian. It opens with a colorful account of the steamboat journey and his arrival at Fort Benton. The inhabitants had run out of flour, bacon, sugar, and tobacco over the winter, and they were nearly out of liquor. Knowing that the steamboat was heavily laden with all these commodities and more, they celebrated its approach with loud cheers, flag-waving, and booming explosions from the fort’s cannons.
As soon as the steamboat was unloaded, the Piegan Blackfeet started trading their buffalo hides and wolf pelts for whiskey, tobacco, knives, guns, powder, blankets, Chinese vermilion, and other goods. Young Schultz must have been confident and likeable, because that evening, as drunken warriors charged up and down on their ponies, recklessly shooting their guns, he made a good impression on two older traders. Joseph Kipp, given the pseudonym “Berry” in My Life as an Indian, invited him to a traders’ and trappers’ ball at a cabin outside the fort. Schultz danced the quadrille with a Piegan woman, and later that night he struck up a friendship with her husband — a white trader known as Sorrel Horse who lived in a tepee and spoke fluent Blackfeet.
Sorrel Horse was heading out onto the plains with a band of Piegans for the summer bison hunt, and he invited Schultz to come along. It was the kind of invitation Schultz had dreamed of in giddy moments back in Boonville, New York, and he accepted at once. That summer he learned the thrill of galloping into a herd of running bison and shooting from the saddle, knowing at any moment that his horse could stumble in a badger hole and send him flying toward a certain death under the trampling hooves. He picked up the sign language of the Plains, and made swift progress in the difficult Blackfeet language. He helped his best friend Wolverine steal the girl he loved from a camp of Gros Ventres.
Schultz had promised his mother he would come home and resume his studies. Instead, he spent just three months in New York before returning to Montana. By the following winter, he was holed up at Fort Conrad on the Marias River with Kipp and 3,500 Piegans camped a short distance away.
As Schultz immersed himself deeper into the Blackfeet way of life, he began talking at length with medicine men and older warriors, recording tribal customs, beliefs, religious ceremonies, and oral traditions. The three tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy — the Piegans, Bloods (or Kainai), and Blackfeet proper — dominated the northern Montana and southern Alberta plains. Now they were back making war on their traditional enemies: Crows, Crees, Assiniboines, Sioux.
Scholars warn that Schultz can be an unreliable source. He was not a trained ethnographer but a storyteller who didn’t let inconvenient facts get in the way of a rollicking good yarn. He’s vague and contradictory with dates and locations. He introduces elements of fiction into his memoirs. That being said, according to his biographer Warren L. Hanna, he’s dependable and accurate when describing the beliefs and lifeways of the Blackfeet because, instead of portraying cultural stereotypes, he was largely writing about his own good friends.
When he describes a horse-stealing raid on a Cree war party, he’s able to give us several different perspectives, including his own, because he was right there in the thick of things shooting at the enemy.
Source: https://www.cowboysindians.com/2015/08/my-life-as-an-indian/
