Sinopah the Indian Boy (Complete Edition). James Willard Schultz

      Chapter I.

       Sinopah Gets His Name

       Table of Contents

      This is the Story of Sinopah, a Blackfoot Indian boy; he who afterward became the great chief Pitamakan, or, as we say, the Running Eagle. I knew Pitamakan well; also his white friend and partner in many adventures, Thomas Fox. Both were my friends; they talked to me much about their boyhood days, so you may know that this is a true story.

      It was a great many years ago, in the time of the buffalo, that Sinopah was born, and it was on a warm, sunny day in June that he first saw the light of the sun, to which he was afterward to make many a prayer. The great camp of the Blackfeet was pitched on the Two Medicine River, one of the prettiest streams in all Montana. Only a few miles to the west of the camp the sharp peaks of the Rocky Mountains rose for thousands of feet into the clear blue air. To the north, and south, and east the great plains stretched away to the very edge of the horizon, and they were now green with the fresh grasses of spring. The mile-wide valley of the Two Medicine lay like a great gash in the plain, and several hundred feet below it. Along the shores of the stream there was a belt of timber: big cottonwood trees, with bunches of willow, service berry, and rose-brush growing under them. Elsewhere the wide, level bottoms were splotched with the green of lowland grass and the pale silver-green of sweet sage. Thousands of horses grazed on these bottoms and out on the near plains; the Blackfeet had so many of the animals that they could not count them all in a week's time. There were more than five hundred lodges, or wigwams, in the camp, and they were strung along the bottom, just outside of the timber belt, for several miles. Each lodge was the home of one or two families, the average being eight persons to the lodge, so there were about four thousand people in this one camp of the three tribes of the Blackfeet Nation.

      Those were wild days in which Sinopah was born. Fort Benton, owned by the American Fur Company, was the only white settlement in all Montana. The Blackfeet owned all of the country from the Saskatchewan River, in Canada, south to the Yellowstone River, and from the Rocky Mountains eastward for more than three hundred miles. The plains were covered with buffalo and antelope; in the mountains and along the rivers were countless numbers of elk, deer, bighorn, moose, black and grizzly bears, wolves, and many smaller animals. So it was that the Blackfeet were very rich. They had always plenty of meat and berries, soft robes and furs, and with their many horses they roamed about on their great plains and hunted, and were happy.

      Usually the birth of a child in the great camp was hardly mentioned. But on this June morning the news spread quickly from one end to the other of it that in the lodge of White Wolf there was a baby boy. There was much talk about it because White Wolf was a great chief, and it was well known that he had long wanted a son. Everybody now said that the gods had been good, and had given him his wish. All that day the medicine men and warriors kept going to his lodge to say how pleased they were that this had come to him.

      The chief's lodge was a very large one. It was made of twenty cow buffalo skins that had been tanned into soft leather, cut to the right shape, and sewed together with sinew thread. This, the lodge skin, as it was called, was stretched over twenty-four long, tough, and slender pine poles set in the shape of a cone. The lower edge or skirt of the skin did not touch the ground by a space of something like four inches. But inside there was a lining of leather, weighted to the ground by the couches and sacks of household property, and extending upward for five or six feet. Thus, between this lining and the outer lodge skin there was a space of the thickness of the lodge poles, and this was the draught flue. The cold air rushed up through it and out of the open top of the lodge, carrying with it the smoke from the fire. There were two large wings, or "ears," at the top of the skin, held stretched out by two long poles. These were shifted one way or another to protect the opening from the wind, and so the lodge was always free from smoke. The skin was waterproof; the lining kept the wind out; and so, even in the coldest winter weather, a very small fire in the centre of the lodge made the people very comfortable. At night, when the fire died out, they lay in their warm beds of buffalo robes and slept just as well as you do ill your warm home.

      It was in the afternoon that Wesley Fox, a great man of the American Fur Company, and uncle of Thomas Fox, came to White Wolf's lodge. A number of warriors coming out of it greeted him pleasantly. He waited until they had passed, then raised the curtain of the little, oblong doorway, and stepped inside. "Ok-yi!" (Welcome) said White Wolf, and motioned him to a place on his right, which was the seat for honored guests. The chief's face was all smiles. He rubbed his hands together, then spatted them, and said, in his own language, of course, "White brother mine, this is the happiest day of my life. I have a son. Look, now, what a fine one he is, how big for one born this day as the sun was coming up. We are going to name him right away, and I ask you to stay and take part in the naming feast."

      Wesley

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