Going to Buffalo
Indian Hunting Migrations across the Rocky Mountains arlene Porsild

From Montana The Magazine of Western History, Volume 54 Number 1(Spring 2004), 26-44; this article is presented courtesy of the Montana Historical Society. All rights reserved, © 2004

Long before Lewis and Clark, buffalo hunters from west of the Rocky Mountains arduously made their way over the Continental Divide to the northern Great Plains to secure meat and robes. First, they came on foot with dogs. Then, with the advent and ease of horses, they came from even the most distant reaches of the Columbia Plateau. Distance, hardship, and even war and its losses did not slake their passion for this adventure. These hunting and fighting pilgrimages were called, in the parlance of the nineteenth century, "going to buffalo."
As the U.S. government expanded into the American West in the 1850s, it encountered these migrations while attempting to create a new political and legal order. In 1855, for example, the governor of Washington Territory, Isaac I. Stevens, on behalf of federal authorities entered into a series of treaties with Indian tribes from both sides of the Rockies. Three of these treaties formally recognized the right of the tribes of the Columbia River drainage to go to buffalo and, unconventionally, to do so in peace. These treaties even designated a "common hunting ground" on the headwaters of the Missouri River that would be shared by all signatories for ninety-nine years. Thus, there emerged a new dispensation on the northern buffalo plains-one in which the federal government was both a participant and a custodian.
Suddenly in the 1860s the dynamic of going to buffalo that had evolved so slowly-and the new political order the treaties were created to ensure-experienced dramatic and disrupting changes. Gold had been discovered in Idaho and Montana. Gold seekers, speculators, freighters, merchants, and stockmen flooded the valleys, gulches, and creeks near the Continental Divide. And while Montana's gold rushes and spotty settlement did not lead directly to organized war with Indian inhabitants as elsewhere, confrontations, small-scale hostilities, and stock theft became common. Organizing rapidly, the scattered but vocal white settlers acquired territorial status for Montana in 1864. Fearful of Blackfeet, Lakota, and even Arapaho attacks east of the Rocky Mountains and along the Bozeman Trail-the celebrated Oregon Trail cutoff that ran through prime buffalo country-white Montanans clamored loudly for federal help and, above all, military protection from marauding Indians.
For their part, the tribes complained bitterly about the increasing tide of encroachments, dwindling game populations, and ever-recurring epidemics, to say nothing of the illegal whiskey trade and undelivered treaty annuities. The common hunting ground south of the Missouri River, established by the 1855 Stevens treaties, witnessed frenzied boomtowns and floating populations looking for the next strike. The provisions of the Stevens treaties that promised the Indians on both sides of the Continental Divide peaceful buffalo hunting for ninety-nine years, less than a decade later appeared hopelessly out of date and, above all, inconvenient.
While warfare simmered and occasionally boiled over on the upper reaches of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, national attention focused on the southern and central plains where Indian violence was particularly threatening by the mid-1860s. These conflicts arose from the same old causes: gold and silver discoveries, aggressive settlement, and the continued destruction of buffalo and other game. Indian efforts to defend or revenge themselves further exacerbated this dangerous situation and led settlers to demand military action and Indian confinement. The result was a determination on the part of the U.S. government to thoroughly overhaul and reform federal Indian policy, including treaty making and the problems associated with an improvised and incomplete reservation system.1
This resolution to change Indian policy found expression in a number of areas. In 1865 Secretary of the Interior James Harlan instructed a special treaty commission that for their own good Indians must give up their "wandering life" and settle on reservations as remote as possible from whites. Amid cries for reform, Congress in June 1867 created the United States Indian Peace Commission, composed of both military and civilian authorities. The new body was charged with settling Indian hostilities on the central plains and negotiating new treaties that would emphasize Indian concentration on reservations. Above all, Indian tribes that had not secured reservations previously would now either enter new treaty negations or be assigned a reservation by the commission. Once separated and confined to a fixed location, generally isolated, Indian peoples could then be peacefully converted to agriculture, education, private property, and the rule of law-as well as that other harbinger of progress-Protestant Christianity.2
The Indian Peace Commission first at Medicine Lodge Creek with the Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches, Southern Cheyennes, and Arapahos in Kansas and then with the northern tribes, including the Sioux peoples and the Northern Cheyennes at Fort Laramie, continued to use the mechanism of treaties to establish an ambitious program of peace, the extinguishment of Indian land title, and reservations for Indian assimilation. That was not new. Nor were the provisions limiting buffalo hunting to defined areas and even then for only so long as the buffalo were there "in such numbers as to justify the chase."3 What was new was the principle that all Indians, including buffalo-hunting nomads, were to have reservations and were, with limited exceptions, expected to stay there.

There were, of course, breaches, often accompanied by violence. The buffalo hunters did what they wanted, what they had always done, or what they had to do. Reacting to these provocations, the Indian Peace Commission quickly declared such incidents to be depredations that, as such, justified government cancellation of treaty provisions for buffalo hunting beyond reservation boundaries. Such action further bolstered whites' demands for a compulsory reservation and confinement policy.
Keeping nomadic hunters, even friendly ones with treaties, confined to reservations challenged the federal government after 1868. Part of the problem was internal, having to do with institutional responsibilities and jurisdictions. Indian hostilities in the West during and after the Civil War had reinvigorated an old debate about which branch of government should be responsible for Indians. Would it be the civilian Office of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, with its extended network of Indian agents and agency employees, or would the responsibility devolve to the War Department and the U.S. Army, where it had resided prior to 1849? Army generals were especially critical of civilian management. Civilian authorities, they argued, were too often swayed by political expediency, vested interests, or, worse, the patronage of the inept.
As early as 1866 the commander of the army in the West, Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, had attempted to address the problem of "roving" Indians by proposing to concentrate all Plains Indians without reservations into two large districts. These consolidations were to be out of the way of the major east-west travel corridors that cut across the central plains. In Sherman's plan any Indian found outside the limits of these districts "without a written pass from some military commander, defining their object, should be dealt with summarily."4
In late summer 1868, responding to Cheyenne and Arapaho acts of what he termed "a desolating war, without one particle of provocation," Sherman announced: "I will solicit an order from the President declaring all Indians who remain outside of their lawful reservations to be declared 'outlaws,' and commanding all people-soldiers and citizens-to proceed against them as such." The situation was a new one, according to Sherman, because up until that time "we could not clearly point out to these Indians where they might rightfully go," namely reservations. Significantly, Sherman again struggled with the problem presented by peaceful buffalo hunters who had a treaty right to hunt off the reservations. As in 1866, Sherman proposed a permit for those desiring to hunt beyond their reservations. This permit differed, however, in that it would be first procured from the agent and then endorsed by "the commanding officer" of the nearest post.5
When the Indian Peace Commission met in Chicago in October 1868, it closely followed General Sherman's earlier suggestions and counseled the president that the federal government was indeed justified in "abrogating those clauses of the treaties made . . . at Medicine Lodge Creek," including the right "to roam and hunt outside their reservations." The commission further resolved that "Indians of the Plains should be requested to remove at once to said reservations" and remain there. However, a proviso added "that after peace shall have been restored, hunting parties may be permitted to cross their boundaries with written authority from their agent or superintendent." In a final resolution, the commission voted that those Indians who refused to go to their reservations should be compelled to do so by military force. As historian Robert Utley has pointed out, the commission's resolutions came to form the bedrock of President Ulysses Grant's celebrated Peace Policy for Indians. Sherman expressed the gist of this program when in his 1868 annual report he described it as "a double process of peace within reservations and war without."6
Hoping to clarify this divided civilian and military authority, Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, commander of the Division of the Missouri, relayed "General Order No. 8" on June 29, 1869. In this order:

All Indians when on their proper reservations are under the exclusive control and jurisdiction of their agents. . . . Outside the well-defined limits of their reservations they are under the original and exclusive jurisdiction of military authority. . . . All Indians . . . who do not immediately remove to their reservations, will be . . . treated as hostile, wherever they may be found.

"General Order No. 10," issued in 1871, extended these instructions to the Department of Columbia, applying the strictures to the various tribes from the Columbia River Plateau who so enthusiastically went to buffalo.7
Office of Indian Affairs officials, beginning with Commissioner Ely S. Parker in 1869, agreed to the newly divided responsibility in which they were to have "exclusive control and jurisdiction" of all Indians on their reservations. Commissioner Parker, a Seneca himself, felt the new policy of "peace on the reservations, war off" represented a "perfect understanding" of the new situation. By 1872 the new commissioner of Indian affairs, Francis A. Walker, wrote of the government's need for a "legalized reformatory control" by which federal authorities would have the right to keep Indians upon the reservations. Essential was the authority "to arrest and return them whenever they wander away." Only by such means could these "vagabond" peoples, "elements of a gypsy population," and "shifting sores upon the public body" be brought under "parental control."8
All parties, except, of course, Indians, deemed necessary what Commissioner Walker termed a "policy of seclusion." It came as no surprise then, when on November 1, 1873, another new commissioner of Indian affairs, Edward. P. Smith, informed Congress that as a result of intertribal depredations he had issued an order that "no Indians be permitted to leave their reservation without permit from the Agent." Commissioner Smith went on to say that the secretary of war had been requested "to direct the commanders of military posts to prevent Indians from passing from one agency to another without such permit; and if they find Indians marauding . . . to strike them without parley." General Sherman's 1868 recommendation for a permit system were finally being implemented.9
This emerging national Indian policy generated a particular predicament in Montana Territory where the last years of the 1860s saw increased intertribal raiding, hostilities, and casualties. Indian-white conflicts often attended the intertribal warfare. Young men in war parties were not above temptation when they encountered livestock owned by scattered whites, especially those east of the Rocky Mountains. Whites in the more settled mountain valleys on both sides of the divide, with or without reason, also felt gravely threatened by these "depredations." They demanded federal measures to prevent Indians from traipsing through the country on their way to buffalo.
Confinement would be difficult, however, as the Deer Lodge New North-West acknowledged in 1869: "So far as the migrations of the Pen d'Oreilles [sic], Flatheads, Kootenais, Nez Perces and the infinitude of northwestern fragments are concerned, it will be well if it can be stopped. It will be hard to do. 'Going to the buffalo'-trailing over the country-begging and stealing though the settlements, hunting and living among the buffalo in the lower country, is the nature of them."10
General Alfred Sully, who had been appointed superintendent of Indian affairs for Montana in 1869, was emphatic as to why Indians had to leave their reservations in search of food. There were too many settlements and too many people-all affecting already scarce game resources. Hunting in the surrounding country, let alone on the reservations themselves, could not support their inhabitants. Speaking of the Salish and Kootenais, Sully wrote:

Not having the means of supporting themselves by farming, they are therefore obliged to move out every year, East, to the Mussellshell [sic] River, for the Buffalo, traveling a distance of nearly three hundred miles and over half the distance through a country partly settled. Being poor, without any means of support, they must resort to begging, and when this does not succeed, to stealing. This and drunkenness frequently leads to bloodshed and when they return from their hunt in the spring, they are as poorly off as when they started.

Sully's conclusions were widely shared by numerous contemporary evaluations, especially in military reports of the 1870s.11
In Montana Territory Indian-white conflict had already led to establishment of Fort Ellis in the Gallatin Valley and Fort Shaw on the Sun River in 1867. Fort Shaw became the regimental headquarters for the newly formed District of Montana within the Department of Dakota, yet from the outset it was disadvantaged as an infantry post in a horse-mounted world of buffalo hunters. Its purpose was to bring peace to the northern plains and to protect the gold miners and settlers using the Mullan Road as it headed south from Fort Benton toward Helena. Fort Ellis, on the other hand, from its inception had both cavalry and infantry units. With its two companies of the Thirteenth Infantry and two from the Second Cavalry, it guarded the Gallatin Valley and was tasked with policing the nearby mountain passes.12
These military posts, however, did not bring an end to the trouble, nor were they or their soldiers numerous enough to enforce confinement. In 1869 a grand jury of the Third Judicial District of Montana Territory met to address Blackfeet depredations and the threat of "roving Indians." White settlers accused the Pend d'Oreilles of stealing horses, setting prairie fires, and possibly even committing murder while on their way to hunt on the Yellowstone. The grand jury, hoping to call attention the "exposed condition of the people," concluded its report with a recommendation to both the military and the Office of Indian Affairs: "Their passage throughout settled valleys should be prohibited by the authorities."13
General Winfield Scott Hancock, commanding the Department of Dakota, was dubious about the possibility of accomplishing this task, noting: "The passion for buffalo hunting is such, and its profits are a matter of so much importance to the Indians, that even the tribes from the Pacific slope of the Rocky Mountains, and from Oregon and Washington, come over to engage in it. The Flatheads, Nez Perces, Pend d'Oreilles, and Coeur d'Alenes are prominent among them. The two former tribes come to the number of one thousand or two thousand in a party, with their horses and remain all winter in the buffalo country, returning in the spring, sometimes early enough to raise crops."14
Nor was Hancock necessarily opposed to these specific off-reservation migrations. Problems arose, however, when parades of these western Indians slowly moved through the settlements. Almost inevitably whiskey compounded these difficulties. It was hard for the Indians to resist the temptations of the rough settlements, and in 1869 there was essentially no civil law punishing those whites who sought Indians out to trade whiskey for buffalo robes, horses, or women. Nor did the situation improve. Six years later the Weekly Missoulian asserted that it was well known that "the Indians, to and from their annual hunts, are so abundantly supplied with whiskey as to make the whole outfit drunk during the whole of their wanderings."15

Committed to the general concept of Indian confinement, General Hancock was of the opinion that "it would be better if these Indians be kept on their reservations." Yet, because of his experience with the mountain and Plateau buffalo hunters, Hancock realistically conceded an alternative, "unless, at least, an agent accompany them to lead them through the settlements." This unusual idea of providing a responsible escort or governmental mediator was an inspired solution to what had been an intractable problem. Equally unexpected, Hancock also asserted that the Indian leadership welcomed such protective companionship, writing in his annual report that "The chiefs, still desiring to hunt, are anxious that an agent be sent with them in order to settle such disputes as may arise between the Indians and the whites while passing through."16
Responding to local solicitations for protection and yet recognizing the long tradition of going to buffalo, General Hancock established Camp Baker, later called Fort Logan, with one company of the Thirteenth Infantry, some thirteen miles east of Diamond City in the final days of November 1869.17 Located near the entrance to the critical pass between the Little Belt and Castle Mountains, this area was something of a crossroads. Here the Blackfeet moved south, sometimes threading the gap between the Big and Little Belt Mountains, sometimes skirting east, in order to get to the common hunting ground. For their part, the western Indians pushed east from the Continental Divide passes and crossed the Missouri and the pine-forested mountains on their way to the plains of the Judith Basin and the Musselshell River, or further, to Yellowstone country. Camp Baker's assignment was to secure communications between Fort Ellis and Fort Shaw and to curtail the numerous depredations in and around Diamond City and Confederate Gulch.
Then on January 23, 1870, came the ignominious Baker massacre that, along with the ravages of renewed smallpox, broke the back of Blackfeet independence. Encouraged, General Hancock later that spring extended military protection to local settlers by establishing a temporary summer camp of two companies of cavalry north of Fort Shaw, near the eastern entrance to Cadotte's Pass on the Continental Divide. A military camp at this important crossing, referred to by the Blackfeet as "Easy Pass," would give protection "if required, to settlers in that vicinity against hunting parties of the Pend d'Oreilles, Nez Perces, and other tribes of Indians living west of the mountains, en route to the valley of the Yellowstone."18
In this environment of suspicion and hostility, it would have been easy for Congress to abrogate the off-reservation treaty rights of the western Indians on the grounds that they had forfeited those rights because of their continued fighting with the Blackfeet, Crows, and Sioux. While such an action was possible, it was not realistic-either in terms of actually confining the Indians or receiving the federal support necessary to feed those Indians now confined to their reservations. Moreover, the question whether chronic intertribal warfare qualified as "depredations" remained. The Deer Lodge New North-West reflected the majority opinion when, after a large body of Flatheads, Nez Perces, and Pend d'Oreilles passed through town, it reported that "Some several hundred warriors remained behind to engage in the semi-annual set to with the Sioux, by way of keeping up the spirit of their forefathers. A courier had arrived from the field bearing the joyful news . . . that hostilities had actually commenced, and that the Flatheads were already in possession of fifty head of Sioux ponies and some hair. Let 'em fight!"19
In a similar vein, the Missoula Pioneer alerted its readers that the Sioux and Crows had "cleaned out" Big Canoe and his Pend d'Oreilles in the Yellowstone country. "We will shortly have them back here," the paper warned, "in a destitute and dilapidated plight on their return home, where starvation awaits them." In fact, the Pend d'Oreilles had been dealt with severely. They had lost a good many men, had been stripped of all their possessions, including horses, and were "returning on foot without an ounce of meat." The Pend d'Oreille losses were of no particular concern to the newspaper nor were they considered to be depredations. The newspaper's only anxiety was the possibility that in their destitute state the Pend d'Oreilles might steal from the settlements, kill stock, or become a nuisance as they begged or scavenged scraps. In other words, Indian fighting Indian was of no interest.20
Given attitudes like these, nullification of treaties and confinement were to be saved for real hostiles, such as the Sioux, leaving the other tribes in the northern Rockies, at least prior to the Nez Perce conflict of 1877, to be judged by another standard. Yet even this determination raised questions. Could such a contrived reading of depredations be squared legally with the earlier administration decisions denying the Sioux? Or, for that matter, could the intertribal warfare be reconciled with the intertribal peace requirements set down for the buffalo hunters by the Stevens treaties? It was a conundrum. The Deer Lodge New North-West editorialized that the Indians should be allowed to go to buffalo-"turn them back, and they will hang about the settlements-beg, steal, perhaps become hostile, or perish of starvation. There are two evils, which is the lesser?"21
On the other hand, Indian-white hostilities continued to plague the territory, particularly the Sun, Missouri, Clark Fork, and Gallatin Valleys, and these conflicts fueled anxiety and fear. Arguing they were unable to tell the difference between friends and hostiles, whites regularly and without formality killed all Indians found in the vicinity of the settlements. As the Bozeman Avant-Courier blithely reported, the settlers had "adopted the sensible plan that it is better to first shoot the Indian and then to find out his status." In any case, the newspaper concluded, "as any sensible person knows, all Indians are decidedly better after they are dead." Clearly, friendly Indians exercising their guaranteed treaty rights to go to buffalo needed military protection.22
In the Rocky Mountain West the difficult and intricate problem of reconciling an incoherent policy of Indian confinement with the guaranteed right of some to go to buffalo seems to have been at least partially addressed as early as 1871. In an August 28, 1871, circular letter issued from the District of Montana headquarters at Fort Shaw, the commanding officers at Forts Shaw, Ellis, Benton, and Camp Baker learned that the new superintendent of Indian affairs for Montana Territory, Jasper A. Viall, had instructed his agents that "in all cases where friendly Indians desire to pass through the white settlements for hunting or other legitimate purposes, they shall first apply for permission, and on this being granted, a military guard will be furnished to accompany them through the settlements." Headquarters ordered its commanders to furnish " a small guard under a Commissioned Officer to accompany them for the purpose of guarding against any depredations by them or against them."23
When there was time, the orders for such applications were to be issued from district headquarters. In cases of necessity, however, officers were not to wait for such orders, but to provide the escort "on the application of the Superintendent of Indian affairs, the nearest Indian Agent, or even the Indians themselves." These escorts, the circular noted, were to remain with the Indians "as long as they remain within the white settlements and their passage through will be required to be as expeditious as possible." Finally, the letter addressed not only the issue of treaty Indians going to buffalo, but also of their returning: "All friendly Indians passing from the hunting grounds to the East of the Missouri, back to their reservations in the West will be required by you to report at the nearest military post and remain there until an escort can be furnished them."24
This is the first evidence of a combination of civilian passes and military escorts being used in Montana Territory. Peace on reservations and war off had not been a workable policy. The growing scarcity of food, the inability of the reservation Indians to successfully transform themselves into farmers, and the unwillingness of the federal government to provide rations forced Indians to continue to leave their reservations. Yet, just as clearly, by 1871 peaceful reservation Indians needed protection. Together, at least in principle, the escorts and permits came to constitute a viable regional alternative to the failed confinement policy and yet one that fit the requirements of President Grant's so-called Peace Policy. If not a policy of strict confinement, at least the new effort provided separation in key areas-the settlements.
In neighboring Idaho, in the Department of the Columbia, Brigadier General Edward R. S. Canby suggested something similar, only in this case the incident sparking the proposal was the annual intertribal assemblage at Camas Prairie. In 1872 some twenty-five hundred Nez Perces, Umatillas, and Indians from the Shoshone and Bannock reservations peacefully gathered there, causing considerable consternation among white settlers, although the Indians had left their reservations with the permission of their agents. According to General Canby, they were on Camas Prairie because "their country was almost entirely destitute of game," a complaint rendered all the more believable because of its frequency. A second cause was also registered, namely that the fish supplies in the upper rivers were diminishing because of "the settlement of the country below." The situation was so dire, reported General Canby, that the Indians had to starve or steal or, alternatively, "go to camas." Yet when Indians, even friendly ones, gathered in such numbers, local whites became uneasy. As a result, Canby proposed an immediate policy "to send with the Indians from each reservation an agent or employe [sic], who would be useful in controlling the Indians, and as a medium of communication between them and the settlers, in allaying any apprehensions that might be felt by them as to the objects and intentions of the Indians." As for the following year, General Canby suggested dispatching a cavalry force to Fort Boise that would act as military escorts "during the camas-digging." General Canby's proposal demonstrated how regionally widespread the escort solution had become in less than a year since its implementation.25
Not everyone agreed that this arrangement offered a practical and legal solution. The Missoula Pioneer, for example, complained bitterly about the Nez Perces whose annual excursions to the "buffalo country" were made not so much for food and robes, it asserted, but "to trade in 'fire-water,' steal, and rob white settlers of their horses and mules, destroy grain fields with their bands of horses, lay waste and pillage unprotected farms and farm houses, assault and frighten defenceless [sic] women and children." The newspaper insisted that the government should immediately put a stop to these annual invasions and "urged similar steps be taken to keep the Kootenais and Pen d'Oreilles [sic] upon their reservations in the Jocko." Confinement was the only answer. "Keep the Indians upon their reservations-free from all contact with the whites."26
Total separation was, of course, as impossible as confinement. Even the Missoula Pioneer concluded its editorial demand with the recognition that going to buffalo should cease "as far as possible." Although the permit-escort mechanism was being explored as early as 1871, not all elements were in place-nor was the design as laid out consistently followed. On September 18, 1873, for example, Captain Henry B. Freeman at Camp Baker reported, "The Nez Perces and Flathead Indians passed through from their reservations to the west side of the Buffalo range on the Mussellshell [sic] and Judith rivers in February and March last, returning a month later-both tribes had written authority for their journey from the Superintendent of Indian Affairs and did not molest any settlers along the route." The hunting party, however, had no military escort and was, therefore, not formally in compliance.27
Yet, in general, the use of permits and military escorts progressed rather well. By the 1870s both the army and citizens were accustomed to federal soldiers providing a variety of escort services. Moreover, escorting Indians was not fundamentally different from other military policing tasks. Complete control of the buffalo hunters, however, was out of the question. The difficulty of the situation can be seen from a Camp Baker report that noted small bands of Nez Perces and Flatheads "almost constantly wandering to and fro through this section of the country." They were not openly hostile, but they "give the settlers just cause for complaint." The Weekly Missoulian was certain it had found a new social dictum as it announced to its frontier audience: "The further an Indian gets from home the more lawless he becomes."28
By 1874, Colonel John Gibbon, in charge of the District of Montana, was of the opinion that both post commanders and Indian agents were ignoring Viall's permit and escort solution. Attempting to correct this situation, Gibbon had Superintendent Viall's 1871 instructions reiterated to military commanders. He then wrote his superior in St. Paul, Minnesota to request approval for his actions and to ask that the same instructions be issued to the Indian agents in the territory through the Office of Indian Affairs. By the end of November Secretary of War W. W. Belknap had forwarded Gibbon's requests to the commissioner of Indian affairs for appropriate action.29
With surprising promptness Commissioner Edward P. Smith issued "Circular 186" on December 17, 1874. In it, Smith repeated his office's October 31, 1873, instructions "forbidding the exercise of such roaming propensities," but he also spelled out two important modifications. No Indians would be permitted to leave their reservations without a military escort and a written permit from the agent or superintendent. Should they do so, the Indians would be treated as hostiles. Second, recognizing agents' empathy for their wards and their basic impotence in terms of enforcement, Smith ordered that before issuing a permit, application must be made to the commanding officer of the nearest military force "who will furnish a sufficient guard of soldiers to accompany and remain with the Indians as long as they remain within the white settlement, and who will require their passage through such settlement to be expeditious as possible."30
Smith's directive, however, ran afoul of the agents' ability and willingness to keep their charges on their reservations. In the case of the consolidated Flatheads, Pend d'Oreilles, and Kootenais, as Flathead agent Charles Medary informed Montana governor Benjamin Franklin Potts, their chiefs insisted on having the right to leave the reservation "at pleasure." Then, after quoting the 1855 Hell Gate Treaty, Medary defended his actions: "I have used every effort at my command to restrain them from absenting themselves without leave; but owing to the failure of their crops . . . and no provision being made for this Agency by the Government to subsist them-they are in a measure compelled to leave the reservation in search of game and berries." Besides, he added, no military escort was available to him, and without such a military force he was powerless to enforce the orders of the Indian Office. For that reason, he recommended the establishment of a military post in the vicinity of Missoula, where many of the tribes collected in numbers reaching two and three thousand, with from three to four thousand head of horses, before moving on through the Hell Gate Canyon. In a parting shot, he concluded, "The Department orders for Indians to remain on their reservation except when on their way to the buffalo country, when they are required to get permission from their agent and be escorted by a detachment of United States troops, cannot be enforced."31
It was not just the practical issues that bewildered local officials. That a moral dimension kept cropping up was clear from the letter Colonel Gibbon wrote to Blackfeet agent John Wood. In 1875 destitute bands of Flatheads and Pend d'Oreilles were pressing into Blackfeet territory. "As I cannot see them starve and have not the means of feeding them I have made no objection to their going north as far as the Marias River if necessary, but have warned them against committing depredations."32
Complicating the situation was the case of some western Indians who had no reservation. Receiving no aid from the federal government, they were compelled to go to buffalo, which they did without permission or military escorts. Superintendent Viall, upon assuming office in 1871, had pointed out that "mixed Bannacks, Shoshones, and Sheepeaters" lacked a fixed home and were migrating at will "to and from the Yellowstone country and the Salmon River." In an effort to address this problem, Viall ordered the Indians to be brought together "about twenty miles above the mouth of the Lemhi Fork" to establish a reservation. A full five years later Harrison Fuller, special agent at the Lemhi Agency in Idaho, found himself facing similar difficulties. "We seem to be the head-center for roaming bands of Indians to congregate," he complained. The Flatheads came over the Bitterroot divide and were there for salmon fishing, and the Bannocks and Shoshones from Fort Hall visited, camped, and begged for government supplies on their "route to the buffalo country." Feeling his stores were inadequate, Agent Fuller reported "oftentimes I am forced reluctantly to issue our people passes to go to the mountains and surrounding country in pursuit of game."33
Sometimes the western buffalo hunters sought a permit and escort only after-sometimes long after-they had left their reservations. In such cases, they would stop at a fort and there attempt to secure travel authorization. In such fashion, Second Lieutenant J. T. Van Orsdale at Fort Shaw gave Pend d'Oreille chief François permission "to transit the Blackfeet Agency" on his way to the prominent landmark "The Knees," just west from "The Goosebill" and north of the Teton River. Van Orsdale also provided François with a proper escort. Blackfeet agent John Wood, irritated and already at a loss as to how to deal with wandering tribes from the Jocko Agency because of their agent's unwillingness to restrict his charges, fired off a communication to Colonel Gibbon, complaining about this after-the-fact permission. Gibbon, not slow in his own defense, replied that "the bands of Flathead and Pend d'Oreille Indians . . . represent themselves as in a state of destitution and are going north to supply themselves with food. . . . So long as the agents of the Indian Dept. grant tribes permission to leave their reservations to subsist themselves, it will be impracticable to confine them to any particular limits."34 In other cases, parties unwilling to return with the main group would follow in their wake three or four weeks later and, when questioned, argue that they were a part of the previously escorted band.35
Such instances demonstrate that escort procedures were not as yet well practiced and by no means uniform. Close cooperation between the military and civilian authorities often gave way to other priorities. Insufficient personnel or horses led post commanders to deny requests for escorts or to postpone them. In other cases, District of Montana headquarters intervened, pronouncing that it did not "consider that an escort will be necessary."36
Indian agents too remained uncertain as to how to provide written authorization. In the 1870s agents usually wrote out passes in their own idiosyncratic way to "whomever it may concern." Such was the case when Flathead agent Peter Whaley wrote a permit in June 1875 for "Arlee, head chief of the Flathead Tribe of Indians with a portion of his people under his guidance to leave this reservation and proceed without delay thro' the 'white settlements' to the Buffalo country North of the Sun River for the purpose of procuring Meat and Hides." Although he had no escort, when Arlee passed by Fort Shaw twelve days later, he dutifully reported to its commander, Captain Charles C. Rawn. From him, Arlee received permission to pass through the Blackfeet Reservation "to the hunting ground" described by Whaley. In military fashion Captain Rawn penned his "endorsement" on the bottom of the agent's letter of permission. In time, government-authorized passes would be printed and include such information as the length of the visit, its purpose, the date issued, and to whom the individual or band would report.37
Another recurring problem was that parties of buffalo hunters with different destinations often had to wait for long periods of time at a military fort for their turn at an escort. In other cases, the military escorts, say from Fort Missoula, would only travel part way, perhaps as far as Fort Shaw or Helena, expecting to "be relieved by another escort, who will see the Indians on their way to 'buffalo rejoicing.'"38 Once through the settlements and on the other side of the Missouri, the Indians were released from the protective custody and prodding of the military escort; they were turned loose into beckoning buffalo country, and the soldiers with relief turned around and headed back to their respective posts.
Ferrying the willing and the not-so-willing Indians back and forth kept military contingents from Forts Shaw, Logan, Ellis, and Missoula busy. Escorting was not easy, as Lieutenant C. A. Booth and a detachment of twelve soldiers from Fort Shaw learned while accompanying Pend d'Oreille chief Big Canoe and his band of some five hundred "assorted Indians" back from the plains where the Pend d'Oreilles and their allies had spent the winter-"they were eleven days out from Fort Shaw, were hard to herd and lazy to travel."39
Other escorts had leveled similar accusations. Captain J. Parker of the Third Infantry, for instance, left Fort Logan in March 1879 with an escort of three noncommissioned officers and "11 privates of Co. 'K'" to accompany Charlo's band of Flatheads back to the Bitterroot Valley. At the start, Captain Parker had an interview with Charlo, explaining the object of the escort and "enjoined upon him the policy, as well as necessity, of keeping his men well closed on the march and also of preventing straggling. The condition of the ponies-some of which were very thin in flesh, and all worn with travel-was such that it was a matter of extreme difficulty to keep them well together."40
While the trip was successful-"all left, and arrived in camp together"-Captain Parker resorted to a strategy of "not breaking camp myself, until I saw the last of the band en-route, thus keeping them in front of me." He also allowed no communication "between the men of my command and the Indians, nor were the latter encouraged to visit my camp. I only permitted members of the Escort to visit the Indian camp once, and this in my presence." After nine days the group arrived in Deer Lodge and the first green grass, where the soldiers expected to meet their relief escort, presumably from Fort Missoula. Unfortunately, it had not yet arrived. After waiting a day to no effect, Captain Parker deemed it prudent "to remain with the Indians until they again broke camp and resumed their march. This I did."41
Lieutenant Booth, on another escort mission in February 1876, this time for assorted Pend d'Oreilles, Flatheads, and Spokanes traveling from Fort Shaw to the vicinity of Missoula, where they would split up to make their way to their respective reservations, was ordered to "keep the Indians as much together as possible and make the trip as rapidly as is consistent with their modes of travelling. Exercise what control you can in keeping the Indians from whiskey. . . . Investigate all matters of complaints by whites against the Indians or the latter against the whites and apply such remedies as be in your power."42
In this case, the escort was expected to last for some thirty days. During this lengthy period, Lieutenant Booth received orders to communicate with the Indians primarily through their chiefs and to do so with the "greatest mildness and consideration, telling them plainly what you want in each case." Booth's instructions pointedly reminded him that "these Indians are especially jealous about their women and you will therefore see that your men are circumspect in their bearing towards them, and that they are acting as protectors to the Camps."43 This warning, of course, would have been unnecessary had soldiers not previously misbehaved. Again, the emphasis was clearly prevention.
Indians who went to buffalo encountered white antagonisms and racism. White Montanans wanted to be rid of them. These attitudes were particularly prevalent in the towns. The Helena Daily Herald, when reporting on a nearby Flathead and Pend d'Oreille encampment in fall 1873, remarked: "Bucks and squaws are to be seen at all hours on our streets. . . . They are an excellent substitute for hogs about a slaughterhouse, and garbage and offal disappear under their manipulation with a suddenness and dexterity." Elsewhere in the territory, newspapers railed against the demoralization of "both reds and whites" that mingling in town inevitably brought. "It is better," wrote the Weekly Missoulian editor, "that the two races should be kept apart."44
With or without passes and escorts, western Indians continued to go to buffalo as they always had, and did so through the growing gauntlet of towns, ranches, and fences for the very reasons they had always had, only now under greater pressure as other resources dwindled. Buffalo hunting was still richly rewarding. Perhaps the most convincing testimony of this fact came from Duncan McDonald, the mixed-blood son of Hudson's Bay Company trader Angus McDonald. In a January 1875 letter to the editor of the Weekly Missoulian, McDonald described a buffalo hunt the previous November in which some six hundred Pend d'Oreilles, Coeur d'Alenes, Kootenais, Spokanes, Colvilles, and others participated. Hunting in three heats, each lasting two hours, the alliance had enjoyed amazing success. Trying to calculate the value of these supplies, McDonald singled out five individuals who alone had killed 104 fat cows and bulls, which he said equaled 52,000 pounds of meat, not counting tongues, sinews, robes, and so on. Then, using this kill rate as an average, McDonald extrapolated that the hunters had secured the equivalent of 3,240,000 pounds of beef. The beef, he claimed, would have been worth a half a million dollars at the Chicago stockyards, an amount greater than the federal government's expenditures at the Flathead Agency theretofore.45
That buffalo hunting retained an immense economic value for western Indians and for which there was no ready substitute could not be denied. No wonder, as General Sherman observed during a visit to Deer Lodge in 1877, the "Flatheads, Pend d'Oreilles, Spokanes, and Coeur d'Alenes" would dash off upon hearing that the buffalo were "near, i.e. 300-400 miles northeast" and that whatever anyone might say, "they are bound to go after them." General Sherman, fully aware that "the [Flathead] agent has not a dollar and no authority to promise them meat," drew the inevitable conclusion: "These Flathead are friendly, but they must go for buffalo or starve." This was an amazing evaluation, coming hard on the heels of the Nez Perce conflict, by the Civil War general who had desolated the South and who was often accused of attempting to solve the "Indian problem" by confining Indians to their reservations-or worse, by engineering army participation in the destruction of the buffalo, the so-called "commissary of the Plains Indian."46

In spite of General Sherman's recognition of the problem, the Sioux and Nez Perces hostilities, coming back-to-back in 1876 and 1877, inhibited the free exercise of off-reservation treaty rights by western Indians. Even going to town "to saw wood, wash, and do other kinds of work" was called into question. Whites were no longer willing to tolerate even supervised comings and goings, editorialized the Weekly Missoulian. The newspaper then compared Montana Territory's unusual Indian policy of off-reservation travel with other regions where "the general orders from army headquarters are rigidly enforced, and every Indian off his reservation is arrested." Accommodations that had once made perfect sense could no longer be countenanced.47
In response, the white population renewed calls for Indian confinement and demanded more military posts and greater federal protection. The Indian Office banned all sales of arms or ammunition. One of the reasons for these new restrictions, averred the Helena Weekly Herald, was that in these hostile times identification was a problem. "Not one person in a thousand can tell [to] what tribe an Indian belongs." And if tribal identity could not be ascertained, then who was a hostile and who was a treaty Indian was equally difficult to determine.48
No one liked the situation. Some Indians had permits and escorts, and some did not. In other cases, the situation was unclear. The Bozeman Avant-Courier, for example, noted in June 1879 that a large camp of Flatheads had passed thorough town on their way to the Yellowstone. "We did not see any military escort with them, and wonder if they are absent from their reservation without leave." Perhaps they had a permit from the agent but had been denied an escort. Perhaps they were the peaceful Bitterroot Flatheads under Charlo who had refused to retire to their designated reservation and were regarded as "domestic Indians," not subject to the dictates of the Flathead agent. Letters to the editor flooded in from outlying farmers and ranchers along the routes to buffalo as they reported on the whereabouts, numbers, direction, and status of the migrations or complained about their lack of military escorts. Control over the hunting parties, in other words, remained an ongoing problem.49
Camp Baker commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel C. C. Gilbert had determined already in 1877 that the best way to deal with the problem of permits and escorts was to request that "the territory east of the Smith River be closed to Indian hunting parties," a recommendation that he sent to headquarters at Fort Shaw. Responding, Colonel John Gibbon reported up the chain of command that he saw no remedy for ongoing problems associated with the killing of livestock by "roving" Indians "except to prohibit the annual migrations of these Indians to the Buffalo country." General Alfred Terry was quite willing to endorse Gibbon's recommendation to his superior, General Sheridan. Sheridan was of the same mind as Terry, agreeing that Indians belonging to reservations west of the mountains "should be prevented from roaming to the eastward and through the settlements." He pointed out, however, there was little use in deciding upon "a plan for the management of these tribes" unless the government would provide a sufficient military force to actually enforce its decision.50
Stopping all reservation traffic would have been an impossible task given the size of the army in Montana. Prior to 1876, for example, there were fewer than six hundred personnel scattered among the military posts in the territory. Even after the 1876 Great Sioux War and the flight of the Nez Perces in 1877, which led to a remarkable army buildup and expansion, including the construction of Forts Keogh, Custer and Missoula in 1877, there were still fewer than three thousand soldiers in Montana, hardly enough to control or police an estimated thirteen thousand Indians.51
Indians kept going to buffalo. Indeed, as late as 1879 the Montana territorial legislature still sought to confine Indians to their reservations by officially petitioning the president to beef up the army presence and to increase its federal troop strength. In such cases where tribal entities had agency permits and legitimate reasons to travel, the territorial legislature wanted these Indians to be provided "with a suitable and sufficient military escort to protect the property of our citizens, and prevent the depredations above complained of."52
Two years later, Granville Stuart, the famed Judith Basin rancher, was still attempting to bring pressure on the federal government to confine Indians by petitioning the secretary of the interior. On behalf of stockgrowers in Meagher and Chouteau Counties, Stuart circulated a letter for signatures in which he complained bitterly about "an evil too great to be quietly borne"-namely Indians "rambling about among us." They roamed at will over the stock ranges and settlements, they killed stock, and they were insolent. These included not only "alien Indians," by which Stuart meant Bloods, Piegans, and Crees from Canada, but also Crows and "the semi-annual irruption of the Flatheads, and Pend d'Oreilles and allied tribes, from their reservation in the western part of the territory and across and through the settlements and ranges of all the eastern portion, where they, too, kill cattle, obtain whisky, and sometimes steal horses."53
Unable militarily to keep treaty Indians at "home," unwilling to feed them, and unwilling to fight them except where hostile actions necessitated it, governmental authorities in Montana Territory, federal and territorial, military and civilian, had reached for an alternative solution-a permit and escort system. Reluctantly, officials recognized the immediacy of Indian subsistence needs and accommodated the western Indians because of their treaties, their friendly status, the scarcity of game, the Indian need of protection, and their long tradition of buffalo hunting. All coalesced to provide these Indians with an exceptional mechanism, albeit one that was cobbled together haphazardly. The result was that confinement to reservations, in spite of national Indian policy, was not enforced in Montana with the same standards or zeal as elsewhere.
This federal accommodation is particularly surprising in light of recurring assertions of the army's complicity in the buffalo's destruction. Such an argument rested on the questionable assumption that their eradication would force the buffalo hunters to retire to their reservations. While there is ample evidence that this belief was shared by some of the army leadership, especially General Sherman in the early stages of his western career, there is little evidence that it was directly acted upon in any significant way. And, at least with the treaty Indians on the crowded buffalo ranges of Montana, as General Sherman's "they must go for buffalo or starve" statement made clear, just the opposite was the case. The army, by participating in the development of permits and escorts, not only tolerated, but stood by the treaty Indians, actually enabling and promoting off-reservation buffalo hunting to the consternation of territorial newspapermen, settlers, miners, and stockmen.54
Whatever transpired elsewhere, the frontier army in Montana Territory did not deny western Indians access to buffalo. Nor did it doggedly confine all Indians to their reservations, however serious the provocations. For those cynically inclined to see a general and covert army policy, it can be argued that this practice of providing local military escorts deceitfully assisted the eventual destruction of the buffalo. That was not the intent. The army's interest did not lay in reducing buffalo numbers to insure dependency and confinement. Instead the army in the District of Montana attempted to lessen the tensions between friendly Indians and territorial interests by controlling the geographical mobility of Indians. Protection and control of Indians-limiting white access to them and vice versa, not their confinement or the destruction of the buffalo-these were the issues with which the army grappled. Acknowledging the army's protective efforts, Duncan McDonald wrote to the Deer Lodge New North-West in 1878, expressing his opinion that for non-hostiles, "the army is without doubt, the Indian's best friend."55
Moreover, the army was not a monolith, and military leadership not of one mind. Nor was it in position to dictate. There were civilian constraints. The army could not have acted unilaterally had it wanted to-and it did not. Permits and escorts involved the Indian Office and local Indian agents. Military authorities did not even insist upon providing the numerous escorts themselves. As early as 1869 General Hancock suggested that it would be quite proper for Indian agents to accompany hunting parties as they passed through the settlements. The impetus for such escorting frequently came from the chiefs themselves. Eventually, Indian police units or even trusted elders would provide this protective service.56
Indian horizons were definitely narrowing after 1878. The common hunting ground of the 1855 Stevens treaties had disappeared beneath mining discoveries and settlements. It was harder to go to buffalo. There were fewer animals, and they were more concentrated. The enterprise had become more competitive and dangerous than ever before. Still, the passion and the need were such that small bands frequently ignored white requirements and went anyway. Increasingly they did so at their own peril, either to be hauled back to their reservations by military patrols, shot by incensed whites, or exposed to the intertribal warring that intensified as buffalo grew scarcer. Still, the western Indians remained a concrete and visible presence on the buffalo plains because of their determination, their need, and because there was not an adequate alternative to their staying home or going anywhere else.
By 1882, in a blink of an eye, the buffalo would be gone from the Great Plains, and with their demise, destitution settled over the reservations and the northern plains like a fog. Indians could not find their way. White Calf, one of the leaders of the southern Piegans, remembered the Blackfeet wandering around, not knowing where they were going or where they were. "They could see the things close to them but the things that were further off were hidden," he said, "so they were like people who were lost." Bewildered by the disappearance of the buffalo, broken by the devastating effects of whiskey, even to the point of trading away their horses, the buffalo hunters, now afoot, were frequently escorted back to their agencies and into the chaos of further dependency. As White Calf achingly remembered it, "They had nothing and they knew nothing."57 The buffalo were gone.
Many years later, in 1935, a Crow Indian named Max Big Man testified to a government committee. "In the old days the buffalo gave us our meat; the buffalo gave us our clothes; the buffalo gave us our houses, our fuel, our tools," he said. "Then the whiteman came and killed the buffalo." "Now," Big Man concluded, summarizing the reservation experiences of the last fifty years, "the white man is our buffalo. We want him to stay our buffalo." It was a new dispensation. Unfortunately, the old horse cavalcades, the call of adventure, the promise of plenty were replaced by delegations to Washington, D.C., and "going to buffalo" became "going to Washington." Somehow it wasn't the same.58

WILLIAM E. FARR is professor of history and associate director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana in Missoula. He is author of The Reservation Blackfeet, 1882-1945: A Photographic History of Cultural Survival (1984) and a frequent contributor to this magazine.

1.William E. Farr, "When We Were First Paid": The Blackfeet Treaty, the Western Tribes, and the Creation of the Common Hunting Ground, 1855," Great Plains Quarterly, 21 (Spring 2001), 131-54; Michael P. Malone, Richard B. Roeder, and William L. Lang, Montana: A History of Two Centuries, rev. ed. (Seattle, 1976), 50-94; Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West (Norman, 1991), 92-104.
2.Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 279-81; Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols. (Lincoln, 1984), 1:488-92; U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, December 23, 1869, by Ely Parker, Commissioner, 41st Cong., 2d sess., H. Doc. 1, pt. 3, serial 1414, 445-48.
3.Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1904), 2:977-89.
4.U.S. Department of War, Annual Report of the General of the Army, 1866, Report, Nov. 5, 1866 of Lieut. General W. T. Sherman, 39th Cong., 2d sess., H. Doc. 1, serial 1285, 21. This proposal is included in Ulysses S. Grant to E. M. Stanton, January 15, 1867, in 40th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc.13, serial 1308, 17-18. General Sherman's proposal is also included in Report of Indian Peace Commissioners to the President, January 7, 1868, 40th Cong., 2d sess., H. Doc. 97, serial 1337, 13.
5.W. T. Sherman to J. M. Schofield, September 17, 1868, in U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1868, 40th Cong., 3d sess., H. Doc. 1, vol. 2, serial 1366, 536-37.
6.U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1868), 831-32; U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, 1868, Report of Lieutenant General W. T. Sherman, Military Division of the Missouri, Nov. 1, 1868, 40th Cong., 3d sess., H. Doc. 1, serial 1367, 8; Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (Lincoln, 1973), 139.
7. "General Orders, No. 8," General Orders and Circulars, Division of the Missouri, 1865-1882, Adjutant General's Office Collection of Orders, vol. 801, Record Group 94 (hereafter RG 94), Records of the Adjutant General's Office, National Archives, Washington D.C. (hereafter NA); "General Orders, No. 10," General Orders and Circulars, Division of the Pacific, Adjutant General's Office Collection of Orders, vol. 813, ibid.
8.U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1869), 447, referring to a June [12], 1869, circular letter (see attachment to Report No. 151, p. 894); U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 1, 1872, Francis A. Walker, 42d Cong., 3d sess., H. Doc 1, vol. 1, serial 1560, 399-400. Later, out of office, Walker spoke of roving Indians as "shifting sores." Francis A. Walker, The Indian Question (Boston, 1874), 142.
9.Walker, Indian Question, 94; U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, November 1, 1873, by Commissioner Edw. P. Smith, 43d Cong., 1st sess., H. Doc. 1, pt. 5, serial 1601, 8.
10.Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, October 15, 1869, 2.
11.Alfred Sully to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, January 14, 1870, frames 253-254, roll 490, Montana Superintendency, Letters Received, 1870, microcopy 234 (hereafter M234), Record Group 75 (hereafter RG 75), Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, NA. A good example of the appearance of this observation is U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, 1875 by W. T. Sherman, 44th Cong., 1st sess., H. Doc. 1, serial 1674, 34; and U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, 1875, Report, Sept. 1, 1875 of Brvt. Major General John Pope for the Department of the Missouri, ibid., 76.
12.Utley, Frontier Regulars, 121; Merrill G. Burlingame, The Montana Frontier (Helena, Mont., 1942), 194-212.
13.See U.S. grand jury report, October 9, 1869, Montana Territorial Court, Third Judicial District (Helena), "Journal of Proceedings 1868-1875," vol. 10, pp. 86-89, Record Group 21, Records of District Courts of the United States, National Archives, Pacific Northwest Region, Seattle, Washington. The matter of Indian depredations and the evidence of the grand jury were covered in the Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, October 15, 1869, 2; and New York Times, October 28, 1869.
14.U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, 1869, Report, Oct. 20, 1869, of Major-General W. S. Hancock, Department of Dakota, 41st Cong., 2d sess., H. Doc., vol. 1, pt. 2, serial 1412, 64.
15.Missoula (Mont. Territory) Weekly Missoulian, August 25, 1875, 2.
16.U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, Report . . . of Major-General W. S. Hancock (1869), 65.
17.Burlingame, Montana Frontier, 212-13.
18.U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, 1870, Report, Nov. 1, 1870, of Major-General Hancock, Nov. 1, 1870, Department of Dakota, 41st Cong., 3d sess., H. Doc. 1, pt. 2, serial 1446, 28. For the designation "Easy Pass," see James Willard Schultz's manuscript, "An Indian Massacre," p. 4, file 5, box 5, Collection 10, James Willard Schultz Papers, Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections, Montana State University Libraries, Montana State University, Bozeman.
19.Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, March 16, 1872, 3.
20.Missoula (Mont. Territory) Pioneer, November 17, 1870, 2.
21.Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, October 15, 1869, 2.
22.Bozeman (Mont. Territory) Avant-Courier, September 13, 1871.
23."Circular Letter. Instruction as to action to be taken with Indians passing through White Settlements," August 28, 1871, box 1, Fort Ellis, Letters Received, 1867-1874, pt. 5, Military Installations, 1821-1920, Record Group 393, Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands (hereafter RG 393), NA. See also Bozeman (Mont. Territory) Avant-Courier, September, 18, 1871, 2.
24.First Lieutenant James Madison Johnson Sanno to Commander, Fort Ellis, August 28, 1871, box 1, Fort Ellis, Letters Received, 1868-1874, pt. 5, RG 393, NA.
25.U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, 1872, Report, October 1, 1872, of Brigadier-General Canby, Department of the Columbia, 42d Cong., 3d sess., H. Doc. 1, pt. 2, serial 1558, 70; David H. Chance, People of the Falls (Colville, Wash., 1986), 104.
26. Missoula (Mont. Territory) Missoula Pioneer, September 21, 1872, 2.
27.Ibid.; Captain H. B. Freeman, September 18, 1873, Fort Logan, Letters Sent, 1870-1880, pt. 5, RG 393, NA. See also Burlingame, Montana Frontier, 213.
28.U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, 1870, Report . . . of Major-General Hancock, 28-29; Captain H. B. Freeman letter, August 8, 1875, Fort Logan, Letters Sent, 1870-1880, pt. 5, RG 393, NA; Missoula (Mont. Territory) Weekly Missoulian, August 25, 1875, 2.
29.John Gibbon to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of Dakota, October 23, 1874, frames 1323-1328, roll 500, Montana Superintendency, Letters Received, 1874, M234, RG 75, NA.
30."Circular No. 186," December 17, 1874, pp. 81-82, Letter Book 22, RG 75, NA.
31.Charles Medary to Benjamin Franklin Potts, August 14, 1875, frame 646, roll 502, Montana Superintendency, Letters Received, 1875, M234, RG 75, NA; General Alfred Sully to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, January 21, 1870. See also Lieutenant Colonel W. Merritt to Headquarters, Military Division of the Missouri, February 8, 1876, printed in the Missoula (Mont. Territory) Weekly Missoulian, March 29, 1876, 2.
32.Colonel John Gibbon to John S. Wood, November 1, 1875, folder 25, box 1, Blackfeet Agency, Letters Received, 1873-1909, RG 75, National Archives, Rocky Mountain Region, Denver, Colorado (hereafter NA, Denver).
33.U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1871, Montana Superintendency, Report of J. A. Viall, Sept. 15, 1871, 42d Cong., 2d sess., H. Doc. 1, serial 1505, 831-32;U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1876, Report, August 21, 1876, of Harrison Fuller, Special Agent, Lemhi Special Agency, 44th Cong., 2d sess., H. Doc. 1, pt. 5, serial 1749, 448.
34.J. T. Van Orsdale to John Wood, October 19, 1875, set 2, Blackfeet Agency, Letters Received, 1873-1909, RG 75, NA, Denver; Gibbon to Wood, November 1, 1875.
35.Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, June 16, 1876, 2.
36.Headquarters, Helena, Montana Territory to Commanding Officer, Fort Logan, March 31, 1880, box 2, Fort Logan, Letters Received, 1870-1880, pt. 5, RG 393, NA.
37.Peter Whaley permit, June 8, 1875, p. 4, Blackfeet Agency, Letters Received, 1873-1909, RG 75, NA, Denver. The appended endorsement at Fort Shaw was dated June 20, 1875.
38.Weekly Missoula (Mont. Territory) Missoulian, September 27,1878, 2.
39.Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, March 3, 1876, 3.
40.Captain J. Parker to Post Adjutant, Fort Logan, April 11, 1879, box 2, Fort Logan, Letters Received, 1870-1880, pt. 5, RG 393, NA.
41.Ibid.
42.First Lieutenant Levi Brunett to Second Lieutenant C. A. Booth, February 16, 1876, Fort Shaw, Letters Sent, 1867-1891, pt. 5, RG 393, NA.
43.Ibid.
44.Helena (Mont. Territory) Daily Herald, October 24, 1873, 3; Missoula (Mont. Territory) Weekly Missoulian, April, 25, 1879, 3.
45.Missoula (Mont. Territory) Weekly Missoulian, January 13, 1875, 3.
46.Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, November 2, 1877, 4; Prucha, Great Father, 1:561.
47.Missoula (Mont. Territory) Weekly Missoulian, April 25, 1879, 3.
48.Peter Ronan to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, August 20, 1877, frames 379-381, roll 507, Montana Superintendency, M234, RG 75, NA; Helena (Mont. Territory) Weekly Herald, July 25, 1878, 2.
49.Bozeman (Mont. Territory) Avant-Courier, June 12, 1879, 3. For Flatheads as "domesticated Indians who are permitted to go to and fro as they please being subject to the laws of Montana only," see Missoula (Mont. Territory) Weekly Missoulian, April 25, 1879, 3; and Captain A. E. Rothermilch, ed., "Early Days at Fort Missoula," Frontier and Midland, vol. 16, no. 3 (1936), 235.
50."Report of Commanding Officer, Camp Baker, Montana Territory relative to complaints of ranchmen against roaming Indians," frames 1011-1022, roll 508, Montana Superintendency, 1877, M234, RG 75, NA.
51.Burlingame, Montana Frontier, 243.
52."Memorial of the Legislative Assembly of that Territory, February 18, 1879," frame 826, roll 514, Montana Superintendency, Letters Received, 1879, M234, RG 75, NA.
53.Fort Benton (Mont. Territory) River Press, April 27, 1881, reprinted in Hysham (Mont.) Midland Empire Farmer, August 12, 1935.
54.Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, November 2, 1877, 4; David D. Smits, "The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo, 1865-1883," Western Historical Quarterly, 25 (Autumn 1994), 313-38; William Dobak, "The Army and the Buffalo: A Demur," Western Historical Quarterly, 26 (Summer 1995), 197-202; David D. Smits, "More on the Army and the Buffalo," ibid. See also William Dobak, "Killing the Canadian Buffalo, 1821-1881," Western Historical Quarterly, 27 (Spring 1996), 33-52.
55.Deer Lodge (Mont. Territory) New North-West, August 16, 1878, 3.
56.Sherry L. Smith, The View from Officer's Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (Tucson, 1990), 182; Michael L. Tate, The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West (Norman, 1999), 247; U.S. Department of War, Report of the General of the Army, Report . . . of Major-General W. S. Hancock (1869), 65.
57.White Calf to George Bird Grinnell, n.d., folder 108, "Pi nutu ye istsim okan," George Bird Grinnell Selected Papers, Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, California.
58."Attitude toward Government," November 1935, folder 7, box 1, series 1, Felix Cohen Papers, MSS S-1325, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, quoted in Paul C. Rosier, "The Old System Is No Success": The Blackfeet Nation's Decision to Adopt the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934," American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 23, no. 1 (1999), 32 n. 58.

From Montana The Magazine of Western History, Volume 54 Number 1(Spring 2004), 26-44; this article is presented courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.  All rights reserved, © 2004.