James Willard Schultz

Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park James Willard Schultz

To-day we pitched our lodges under Rising Wolf Mountain, that massive, sky-piercing, snow-crested height of red-and-gray rock which slopes up so steeply from the north shore of Upper Two Medicine Lake. This afternoon we saw upon it, some two or three thousand feet up toward its rugged crest, a few bighorn and a Rocky Mountain goat. But we may not kill them! Said Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill: "There they are! Our meat, but the whites have taken them from us, even as they have taken everything else that is ours!" And so we are eating beef where once we feasted upon the rich ribs and loins of game, which tasted all the better because we trailed and killed it, and with no little labor brought it to the womenfolk in camp. Rising Wolf Mountain! What a fitting and splendid monument it is to the first white man to traverse the foothills of the Rockies between the Saskatchewan and the Missouri! Hugh Monroe was his English name. His father was Captain Hugh Monroe, of the English army; his mother was Amélie de la Roche, a daughter of a noble family of French émigrés. Hugh Monroe, Junior, was born in Montreal in 1798. In 1814 he received permission to enter the employ of the Hudson's Bay Company, and one year later-in the summer of 1815-he arrived at its new post, Mountain Fort, on the North Fork of the Saskatchewan and close to the foothills of the Rockies. At that time the Company had but recently entered Blackfeet territory, and none of its engagés understood their language; an interpreter was needed, and the Factor appointed Monroe to fit himself for the position.