Time-Line

April 8, 2005

Time-lines

When I went back to teaching high school English on the Blackft Reservation in 1971, the school board (always Indian) had made it a rule that all new teachers in the district would have to take a class in Blackft history. Great! At the same time, an Indian in a Boston detective’s trenchcoat had returned to the reservation and they figured he was the perfect guy for the job. They were right.

Darrell Kipp had been a senior at Browning High School the first year I taught in Browning, which was junior high so I was never Darrell’s teacher. But I saw him one of the first days I went up to the school buildings. A kid was being teased by a big high school guy and another smaller high school guy in government-issue eyeglasses made him stop. The guy with the glasses was Darrell and that was pretty typical of him. He attended Eastern Montana College because it was free and his teachers (especially his senior English teacher, Mrs. Holloway, who had a face like an old-fashioned rose) thought he should. Then, after serving in Korea in the military so that he had the GI Bill, he went to Harvard to get a master’s in sociology and then went to Goddard in the hippy years for an MFA.

The first problem he faced was that no one in the class could agree on “Blackft History” because to them it meant “reality” and no two people -- even those who grew up right there -- could agree on the reality of what happened. Darrell’s Harvard solution was to rename the course “Blackft Philosophy.” Everyone understood that philosophy is a matter of opinion and argument, so then it was okay to go ahead and argue without getting so mad.

The new teachers were an odd assortment -- from whites who’d never been there before, to locals -- and even some of Darrell’s old classmates. He started us off with a time-line. This was before computers, but I put my time-line in a card-file, one card per year, so I wouldn’t have to retype the whole thing every time I added something, and I added a lot -- even after the class had been over for a long time. We got our dates from reading, from sharing and swapping, and from just guessing -- especially the dates for the coming of the horse and guns. Sometimes I’d pull a card or sequence of cards and lay them out on a table top to think about.

My time-line is now in the computer, 26 pages long. When I run it out, I put a wire spine on the back, add covers I also print on my computer, and have a handy reference book. It’s never put away, because I use it so often. In fact, as I work on this blog, I often make a little three-by-five penciled card with an index of things like the births and deaths of famous people I’m discussing. Otherwise it’s sometimes hard to see that their differences are due to the times they were in -- their relative ages.

I’ll give you a sample to start you off on your own time-line.

1720: Blackft get guns and horses.
1739 First trading posts at forks of Saskatchewan River.
1754: Anthony Henry meets Blackft along present Alberta/Saskatchewan border. Guided by Cree, he visits the “archithune” which is Cree for strange/enemy/slave, likely Blackfeet.
1769: Contact between Blackft and de le Verendrye
1772: Mathew Cocking of Hudson’s Bay Co. describes Blackft.
1774: Cumberland House trading post established on the lower Saskatchewan River.
1778: Continental Congress signs the first Indian treaty -- with the Delaware Nation. At this time the US Articles of Confederation say that one purpose of the Articles is to regulate trade with the Indians.
1780: Blkft population estimated at 15,000, distributed over the top half of Montana and bottom half of Alberta & Saskatchewan but only east of the Rockies.
1781: Devastating epidemic of smallpox, evidently caught from raiding the Shoshone.
1782: Snake and Shoshoni tribes flee the Bow River area. Smallpx mortality among the Blackft is about half the population.
1784: Congress grants the War Department rule over Indian Affairs. Hudson’s Bay and Northwest Fur Co. are competing for Blackft trade.
1787 David Thompson winters with the Blackft on the Bow river. “Dog Days” old men (those who remember pre-horse) say they came from the NE. Blackft war party goes south to Santa Fe and steals horses from Spanish miners.
1790 Duncan McGilviray is in the area. Trade and Inercourse Act passed to license Indian traders.
1792 Peter Fidler approaches Chief Mountain.
1794: Blackft trade at Fort George on the Saskatchewan River.
1795: Kutenai tribe offers horses to the Blackft to get passage to Fort George, but Blackft say NO for fear of them getting guns as well.
1796: On July 14 Chief Mountain is identified and given the English version of its Indian name.
1799: Northwest Fur Co. builds Rocky Mountain House at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River.
1800 Trappers LeBlanc & La Grosse of Northwest Fur Co. come to live with the Kutenai. Pikuni group is master of the plains.
1801: McKenzie, explorer, estimates the Blackfeet warrior class as 9,000 men.
1802: The Louisiana Purchase
1803: Disease among the buffalo
1804: On March 10 formal ceremonies in St. Louis finalize the Louisiana Purchase. In May Lewis & Clark start west.

The actual time-line that I use includes a lot of material from a Canadian winter-count book that is copyrighted, so I don’t include it here. (” Winter Count: A History of the Blackfoot People” Paul M. Raczka. Oldman River Cultural Centre: Brocket Alberta, 1979)

I’ll post more time-line later. What’s clear from this excerpt is that the Blackft were first approached by white people from the north. They were Hudson’s Bay employees because Canada was not a separate country and the Canadian prairie was only a mercantile franchise. The Blackft got right with the program and were soon organized to sell dry meat, pemmican, and tanned buffalo hides to the new people. They were NOT inclined to wade around in a lot of icy water to catch beaver -- let the Cree and the Metis do that. (Discussion in “Anthropological Esssays” by Oscar Lewis. Random House, @ 1946, 1949, 1953, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1970. So many years because these are articles written and published separately, then anthologized. There were no ISBN numbers then but the Library of Congress Cat. Card # is 79-85586. The article is called “The Effects of White Contact upon Blackfoot Culture, 1942.”)