Book of a Hundred Bears (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos or missing text. Not indexed. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1909. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... His return adventures included an encounter with the Blackfeet Indians in which he was stripped, made to run a race with their fleetest warriors, escaped and made his way, naked and unarmed, for three hundred miles, to the post at Three Forks. Bradbury, the English traveler, saw him at St. Louis in 1810, and published an account of his wanderings. At that time there were three great tribes of Indians who surrounded the Park and held all the ways, north and south, east and west: the Blackfeet of the Algonquins, the Crows of the Sioux, and the Bannocks and Eastern Shoshones of the Shoshone family. None of these lived in the Park or seemed to have visited it, except along the northern portion through which ran a faint trail evidently seldom traveled. The only Indians who occupied the Park were the Sheep Eaters, a branch of the Shoshones, without horses or weapons, who lived, precariously, in huts of brush, by snaring animals. These Indians were feeble, poor and degenerate. Among them was a tradition of volcanic eruptions, of great fires and convulsions of nature. More or less, the other Indians were superstitious about the Park. Without exact knowledge as to its wonders, the Great Spirit had there made himself manifest. He was still at work and they avoided it. Even the Sheep Eaters inhabited only the northern portion and knew nothing, except by tradition, of the Geyser Basins. For long the Hudson Bay Fur Company held this territory with its patriarchal sway until John Jacob Astor and the American Fur Company, following the Lewis and Clarke expedition, disputed their title. The Astor Company abandoned the field, but the Northwest Fur Company, of Montreal, lawed the old company almost to its ruin, until a compromise was effected, in 1821, and the Hudson Bay Co...