This book has been on my list for so long, I have no idea how I heard of it or why it's on the list. James Willard Schultz was an explorer and historian. In this volume, he collects four eyewitness accounts and preserves them for future generations.
The stories are Bird Woman (Sacajawea [sic]), Lone Bull's Mistake, Rising Wolf - the White Blackfoot and Apauk Caller of Buffalo. I didn't make it through the whole book.
The first story kept my interest, but I can't really relate much of what I read. All I know is Sacajawea had a horrible husband, and her original name was Grass Woman.
The second story was the highlight for me. It's the story of Lone Bull and his pride. He gets punished for disobeying the hunting rules and relocates his family. It's not an easy thing for them, and disaster seems to follow them everywhere. But Lone Bull lives up to his name of being stubborn, and the hits just keep on coming.
Toward the end of the third story, I was done. In the story, Hugh Monroe describes his first year with the Blackfoot tribe. He worked for a trapping company, married a Blackfoot woman and had 10 children. The issue I had was the killing. I am definitely an animal person, so while I would understand the killing of the buffalo, I wasn't super happy about it. This story had a whole section dedicated on how to butcher an animal. Yeah, I skipped that. I didn't like the senseless killing. To me, killing an animal for its pelt, and only for its pelt, is a senseless killing. The mountain goat killing seemed pointless to me. They even knew ahead of time the meat was bad. Killing a mountain lion and her young that had run from you and hidden was just too much. The wolf trap? It created a fish-in-a-barrel scenario. And the story about running a herd of buffalo over a cliff? Pass. I understand it's a personal thing with me. I'm not a fan of hunting, and there was so much of it in this section that I was over the whole thing. And they killed so many beavers.
When I read a snippet of the fourth story, I saw that Apauk was a buffalo caller, or a man who was renowned for his skill in calling the buffalo to their deaths. So I stopped reading.
Overall, I'm not sorry I started reading it. The hunting was just too much for me. I didn't realize it would be such a large part of the book overall. Lone Bull is still a worthwhile story, and my non-hunter heart was okay with that one. The third story just lost me, but these are still important stories that I'm glad aren't lost to time. Even if they do make me cringe.
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