SINOPAH

The Indian Boy

BY
James Willard Schultz
(AP-I-KUN-I)

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
E. BOYD SMITH

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON · NEW YORK · CHICAGO · DALLAS
SAN FRANCISCO
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY JAMES WILLARD SCHULTZ

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE
THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

Contents

Illustrations

From drawings by E. Boyd Smith

SINOPAH
The Indian Boy

CHAPTER I SINOPAH GETS HIS NAME

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