ction>James Willard Schultz
True Life Story: Rising Wolf the White Blackfoot
Hugh Monroe's Story of His First Year on the Plains
Published by
Books
- Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -
2018 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-4528-4
Table of Contents
The Crows Attack the Blackfeet
Introduction
One of the greatest pleasures of my long life on the plains was my intimate friendship with Hugh Monroe, or Rising Wolf, whose tale of his first experiences upon the Saskatchewan-Missouri River plains is set forth in Rising Wolf just as I had it from him before the lodge fires of the long ago.
At first an engagé of the Hudson's Bay Company, then of the American Fur Company, and finally free trapper, Hugh Monroe saw more "new country" and had more adventures than most of the early men of the West. During the last years of his long life he lived much with his grandson, William Jackson, ex-Custer scout, who was my partner, and we loved to have him with us. Slender of figure, and not tall, blue-eyed and once brown-haired, he must have been in his time a man of fine appearance. Honest he was and truthful. Kind of heart and brave. A good Christian, too, and yet with no small faith in the gods of his Blackfoot people. And he was a man of tremendous vitality. Up to the very last he went about with his loved flintlock gun, trapping beavers and shooting an occasional deer.
He died in his ninety-eighth year, and we buried him in the Two Medicine Valley, under the shadow of the cliffs over which he had so many times helped the Pi-kun-i stampede herds of buffalo to their death, and in sight of that great, sky-piercing height of red rock on the north side of the Two Medicine Lake, which we named Rising Wolf Mountain. It is a fitting monument to the man who was the first of his race to see it, and the great expanse it overlooks.
J. W. S.
Chapter I.
With the Hudson's Bay Company
You ask me for the story of my life. My friend, it would fill many volumes, for I have lived a long life of great adventure. But I am glad! You shall have the story. Let us set it forth in order. So! I begin:
I was born in Three Rivers Settlement, Province of Quebec, July 9, 1798. My father was Captain Hugh Monroe, of the English Army. My mother was Amélie de la Roche, daughter of a noble family of French émigrés. Her father owned a fine mansion in Montreal, and the large estate in Three Rivers, where my father lived with her what time he was not with his regiment on some expedition.
My childhood days were quiet enough. I played with the children of our peasantry; a Jesuit Father, resident with us, taught me a smattering of reading and writing in both French and English; and presently I got a gun, a beautiful, light smoothbore carrying thirty balls to the pound. From that time on it was always the gun with me. I ceased playing with the peasant children, and spent the most of my time hunting in the great forest surrounding the settlement. In my twelfth summer I killed my first deer. I shot two black bears when I was thirteen, and oh, how proud I was of that! An old pensioner of my mother's, a half-breed Montagnais Indian, too old and feeble to do much himself, taught me to trap the beaver, the otter, and the land fur-bearers, the fox, fisher, marten, and mink, and I caught many of them. Every spring my Grandfather de la Roche sold the pelts for me in Montreal for a good price, one winter catch, I remember, bringing me in thirty pounds, which was a large sum for a boy to earn in a few months' time.
After the beginning of 1812 I saw little of my father, for then, you know, began the war between the English and the Americans, and he was with his regiment here and there, and took part in several battles. It was in the autumn of that year that my grandfather sent for us to move in to Montreal and live with him.
I did not like the town. I could neither hunt nor trap. I had little to do with the town boys; I did not understand their ways, so different from my ways. Mornings I attended the parish school; afternoons I rowed on the river, or visited in the warehouses of the Hudson's Bay Company, with which my grandfather had much to do. There I met voyageurs and trappers from far places—men dressed all in buckskin clothes, with strangely fashioned fur caps on their heads, and beaded moccasins encasing their feet. Some were French, and some English, the one race having little to do with the other, but that made no difference with me; I made friends with both factions, and passed many, many pleasant hours listening to their tales of wild adventure, of fights with Indians, encounters with fierce bears of the Far West, and of perilous canoe trips on madly running rivers.
"That is the kind of life I want to lead," I said to myself, and, young as I was, began to importune my mother to allow me to engage with the great company. At first she but laughed at me. But as winter and summer and winter went by, and I never ceased my entreaties, not only to her, but to my grandfather, and to my father when he visited us, it became a matter not to be dismissed with idle jests.
And at last I had my way. "He was born for the adventurous life, and nothing else,"
