1839 - 1870

1839: Kutenai War

1840: DeSmet visits the Small Robes Band of Blackft.

1841: DeSmet founds St. Mary Mission in Bitterroot Valley. Point and Manuel visit the Blackft. December 25 the first five Blackft are baptized by Father DeSmet.

1844: Harvey et al massacred Blackft at Piegan post and ruined trade. 50 lodges of Small robe band destroyed by invasion of Crow. 160 women and children captured. Small Robes down to 20 lodges. Smallpox strikes again.

1845: Culbertson makes a new peace with the Blackft. Monroe camps with the Kutenai at St. Mary. DeSmet approaches Waterton/Glacier area from the north.

1846: DeSmet and Point (Jesuit missionaries) visit Piegan. Jesuit map made. Chief Victor (Flathead) helps the Small Robes (now 12 lodges) defeat a superior force of Crow in retaliation for 1944. In September 2,000 lodges of Blackft, Blood, North Blackft, Gros Ventre, Flathead, Nez Perce attend a mass by Father DeSmet. All wish to learn the “Black Robe” medicine.

1847: Fort Benton is built. Paul Kane hears the Big Horn battle story.

1849: BIA transferred from the War Department to the newly formed Department of the Interior. Blackft wipe out a 52-man Assiniboine horse raiding party.

1850: Treaty. Negotiations begun by Isaac Stevens, Governor of Washington Territory, to provide for a transcontinental railroad route. One outcome considered is moving the Blackfeet off their reservation. Alfred Cumming, head of the Central Indian Affairs Superintendency in St. Louis, came to incorporate the Blackft and Gros Ventre into the “Peace of the Plains” becaues they were not in Fort Laramie in 1851 when the others signed. Part of this treaty was the allotment of $15,000 for the instruction of Indians in proper agricultural skills. Annuity goods delivered through the Chouteau Company (successor to the American Fur Company).

1851: Cholera epidemic on the upper Missouri. Laramie Treaty Council defines the hunting grounds of the various plains Indians.

1853: Isaac Stevens meets with the Blackft to prepare a treaty. He remarks that the “quantity of buffaloes is unbelieveable.”

1854: Lieutenant Doty and Monroe explore eastern Glacier Park area. Crow forego Laramie Treaty annuities for fear of the Blackft. 

1855: Isaac Stevens makes Judith Treaty (AKA “Lame Bull Treaty”). $15,000 gift. First treaty between Blackft and U.S. Government. No more Small Robes band left.

1856: Edwin Hatch appointed first agent for the Blackfeet Agency. He was present for five out of the next nine months.

1856: Lame Bull, chief signer of the Judith Treaty, is killed when his horse is run over by a large bull during a hunt.

1857: “The Slipping Year.” Area is covered with ice. Agent Vaughn establishes the Sun River Farm. Alfred Vaughn came as a replacement. He was married to an Indian and had worked for the Office of Indian Affairs for fifteen years. Complained constantly to the government about the quality of annuity goods. Smallpox strikes again.

1858: Thomas Blakiston explores Waterton and northern Glacier. Estimate 7,000 Blackft.

1859: Jesuits accept Alfred J. Vaughn’s invitation to build a mission among the Blackft.

1860: Boundaries of the reservation surveyed. Bull Society (for the big powerful men) dies out. First steamship makes it to For Benton.

1861: Henry Reed is the next agent. Described as “weak and inept.” That same year the Blackft annuities supposedly burned with the steamboat Chippewa. Chouteau offered to replace them from his own stock. Reed put Malcolm Clarke in charge of the problem. Suggestions of graft.

1862: The Mullan Road is in progress. The annuities came with no proper bills of lading and 20 boxes were missing.

1863: Reed goes home to Iowa. 18-month gap with no agent. James Vail is the supervising farmer, evidently not a good one. There is an eclipse in summer. Smallpox again.

1864: Montana Territory created. Gad E. Upson is next agent. He is inexperienced and into private mining. Whiskey trade booming. Goods arrived late, damaged and incomplete. Vail is still hired.

1865: Meagher attempts unauthorized treaty with Blackft which precipitates hostilities at Fort Benton. Fighting between Blackfeet and white settlers. Another reservation push-back of boundaries: never ratified, signed by a minor chief passing by. Residents of Fort Benton, where the agency is, attack Bloods who retaliate against woodcutters. (They sold the wood to steamships.) Upson negotiated a treaty, but died on the way to Washington, D.C. Deputy Agent Hirum Upham became a clerk to Indian Trader T.C. Power & Co. Whiskey trade flourishes.

1866: Little Dog and son assassinated. George B. Wright becomes agent. He rents warehouse space from William J. Clarke, a business partner of the late Gad Upson. Wright does a lot of traveling. He is accused of selling annuity goods.

1861 to 1866: War between Blackft and Gros Ventre, who are now starving.

1887: Acting governor Thomas Francis Meagher issues a proclamation for volunteers to join the war against the Blackft. Idea terminated when Meagher takes a dive in the night from a steamboat at Fort Benton and is never seen again. (For a novelized biography of the fiery Irish Meagher, try “The Exile” by Richard S. Wheeler.) The new governor, Green Clay Smith, is ex-officio Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Montana. He asks for the Indian goods money in cash to his own account, but can’t keep track of it. Uses Indian money to pay his own debts and gambles some of it. Agency is moved to Teton river and then Milk River. Special Agent Nathaniel Pope finds the situation corrupt and recommends reform.

1868: Sioux Treaty of 1868 gives the Teton Sioux the Black Hills. Special Agent William J. Cullen recommends reform.

1869: First rebellion of Riel in Canada. Prospectors are arriving. Three Persons Agency is established at Choteau and headquarters are moved there. Site picked by chiefs. (Now marked with huge stones. An excellent video of kids visiting the site is available through Piegan Institute, PO Box 909, Browning, MT. 59417)

1869-70: Years of hunger and smallpox, violence and whiskey trade. Much interference from the “merchant princes” I.G. Baker and T.C. Power.

1870: The "Baker" Massacre

The whole situation cries out for comparison with today’s Afghanistan and Iraq.  If you're doing original research, some records are in Helena.

• Bibliographic Information

  Title

  Blackfeet Agency records, 1856-1857

  Author

  United States. Office of Indian Affairs. Blackfeet Agency.

  Abstract

  This collection consists of Blackfeet Indian agency annual reports (1856-1857, 1879) by E. A. C. Hatch, Alfred Vaughn, and John Young; and a letter (March 24, 1874) from agent R. F. May to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, opposing a change in reservation boundaries. [1857 report is handwritten; 1856 and 1879 reports are typed transcripts]

  Item info:

  1 copy at Montana Historical Society Research Center.

1806-1837

TIME-LINE 1806 - 1837

1806: Captain Lewis and companions skirmish on the Marias after leaving Camp Disappointment at the junction of the Two Medicine and Badger Creek. He-That-Looks-at-the-Calf and another are shot.

1806: John Colter makes his famous stripped “race for life.”

1808: Finan McDonald builds a post at Kutenai Falls.

1809: David Thompson founds a post at Thompson Falls, visits Flathead Lake. Henry submits a population count: Piegan, 350 lodges and 700 warriors; Blackfoot, 200 lodges and 520 warriors; Blood, 100 lodges and 200 warriors. Whites in trading posts: 200.

1810: Thompson sends McDonald, Michel Bourdeaux and Batiste Boucher with many Indians over Marias Pass. They battle the Blackfeet near Skyland Siding on Bear Creek. Andrew Henry and Pierre Menard are driven out of Three Forks by Blackft. Joseph Howse may have post near present Kalispell. Blackft have first contact with US Soldiers. Robert Stewart skirts Blackft territory and charts the Oregon Trail.

1811: Empty Kutenai lodges still standing near Rocky Mountain House.

1818: 49th parallel becomes US/Canada border.

1820: Hugh Monroe is living with the Blackfeet.

1823: Blackfeet attack Henry near Great Falls.

1828: Kenneth McKenzie and James Kipp found Fort Union.

1830: McKenzie sends Jacob Berger to win over Blackft for trade. Berger meets Blackft on Badger Creek. Blackft agree to traders but NOT trappers. Worcester vs. Georgia: U.S. Supreme Court rules Indian tribes must be recognized as foreign nations with the right to govern their own internal affairs. Severe winter. Many Blackft perish and the warriors go on the warpath the next summer to capture women and children to recoup losses.

1831: McKenzie arranges a peace between Blackft and Assiniboine.

1832: First steamboat reaches Fort Union, bringing George Catlin, who says the Blackft are “perhaps the most powerful tribe on the continent: 16,500 people.”

1833: Prince Maximilian and Alexander Culbertson arrive upriver. Maximilian estimates 18,000 to 20,000 Blackfeet. A MAJOR meteor shower, taken as bad luck. On August 28, 600 Sioux and Assiniboine attack 20 Blackft lodges outside Fort MacKenzie. Bodmer witnesses and depicts it. Blackft push Sioux and Assiniboine back to the Marias River and east past the Bear’s Paw. There is a total eclipse of the sun.

1834: Bureau of Indian Affairs is formed in the War Department. First government official designated to meet with the Blackft. Fort McKenzie lists their intake thus: 9,000 buffalo hides; 1,020 beaver; 180 wolf; 19 bear; 390 buffalo tongues; 40 otter; 2,800 muskrat; 200 red fox; 1,500 prairie dogs.

1836: Hugh Monroe sees the St. Mary Lakes. Smallpox pandemic along the Missouri. Mandan exterminated. Pikuni Blkft suffer grave losses. 6,000 Blood and North Blackfeet perish. Estimated 7 - 12 thousand Blackft perish in the U.S. No life from Fort Benton to Three Forks. Horses and dogs dead. Some evidence of deliberate infection.

1837: Smallpox in Blackft and all tribes north of the Sioux. Caused by clothes infected with smallpox. Alfred Jacob Miller estimated forty to fifty trappers killed by the Blackft. Americans blame the British for inciting killings.


By now trappers, traders, adventurers and artists are milling around in Blackft country, infecting the locals with deadly disease. The modern parallel might be Africa or South American frontiers where humans act as vectors, both carrying disease in and carrying them out. HIV/AIDS is the long slow modern pandemic and Ebola Fever is the disease so violent that it usually kills the vectors before they can pass it on. Smallpox was in between.

It’s clear that though at first whites didn’t think of infecting Indians deliberately, they soon realized the potential, and though Lewis & Clark carried smallpox vaccine with them, they didn’t vaccinate enough people to do much good. Of course, it is widely speculated that syphillis caught in the NW killed Lewis and the others except Clark.  They had thought it was safe to seek a little comfort since they were so far from whites -- but it hadn’t occurred to them that sailors had been accessing the Pacific Coast for a long time and he wasn’t so far from that coast. (A fictionalized history of Lewis’ fate is “Eclipse: A Novel of Lewis and Clark” by Richard Wheeler, Forge, 0-312-87846-X.) When explorers start out nowadays, they take a lot of condoms.

Long, long ago I took a history class in which the professor gave us some pointers on how to read journals and other sequential document records of chronological events. What he pointed out was that even the gaps will tell you something. There is one conscientious accounting of births and deaths in Europe that comes to a thirty year blank. Puzzling until you realize that the gap covers the Black Plague pandemic that decimated Europe. It was brought back from Mongolia by the silk trader caravans -- Marco Polo and all that. What’s amazing that the recording book starts back up again.

Lately I’ve been seeing reinterpretations of the European plague as a kind of social harrowing that broke up rigid controls by small kingdoms and religious orders. New religious orders appeared. (The Cistercians formed at this time to put land back into crops and always built their monasteries right on top of mountain streams so that they could channel clean water in and filth out. A rigorous bunch.) There is even the suggestion that the plague indirectly caused the Renaissance by making people anxious to find new ways, to learn new things. It took a century or so to flower.

A Blackft renaissance may be on the way now. It doesn’t happen overnight. One of the most interesting phenomena is that so many youngsters see the value of college and their goal, when they finish school, is to return to the reservation to help their people. It’s not lip service. They’re doing it. Some did it twenty years ago. They don’t make a big fuss -- they just get to work.