When On A War Party, However, They Go On Foot, To
Enable Them To Skulk Through The Country With Greater Secrecy; To
Keep In Thickets And Ravines, And Use More Adroit Subterfuges And
Stratagems.
Their mode of warfare is entirely by ambush,
surprise, and sudden assaults in the night time.
If they succeed
in causing a panic, they dash forward with headlong fury: if the
enemy is on the alert, and shows no signs of fear, they become
wary and deliberate in their movements.
Some of them are armed in the primitive style, with bows and
arrows; the greater part have American fusees, made after the
fashion of those of the Hudson's Bay Company. These they procure
at the trading post of the American Fur Company, on Marias River,
where they traffic their peltries for arms, ammunition, clothing,
and trinkets. They are extremely fond of spirituous liquors and
tobacco; for which nuisances they are ready to exchange not
merely their guns and horses, but even their wives and daughters.
As they are a treacherous race, and have cherished a lurking
hostility to the whites ever since one of their tribe was killed
by Mr. Lewis, the associate of General Clarke, in his exploring
expedition across the Rocky Mountains, the American Fur Company
is obliged constantly to keep at that post a garrison of sixty or
seventy men.
Under the general name of Blackfeet are comprehended several
tribes: such as the Surcies, the Peagans, the Blood Indians, and
the Gros Ventres of the Prairies:
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