Dec. 26, 1883
A blizzard struck the northern plains of Montana, dropping temperatures well below zero. It signaled the start of the "Starvation Winter" for the Piegans, a stretch of more than a year that resulted in the deaths of as many as 600 men, women and children. More than one in every six Blackfeet in Montana Territory succumbed.
The weather was bad, but circumstances at the government agency on Little Badger Creek made it worse. Buffalo herds that had darkened the plains in the years before the railroad arrived were all but gone, as were the antelope. What meager government supplies that arrived at the agency were quickly depleted. Crops that the Blackfeet had been taught to grow were doomed by lack of adequate irrigation. An outbreak of smallpox dealt a lethal blow.
Bodies were piled on top of hills near the agency, ever after known as Ghost Ridge.
"From that time period on," the late Pikuni historian Curly Bear Wagner said in a 2001 interview, "our chiefs looked at our children and seen that they were hungry and so the only thing we had to bargain with was our land, and so we sell off big portions of our land like Glacier National Park, the Sweetgrass Hills, places that were important to our people. But the chiefs looked at our younger people and thought that they were more important for their survival so this is how the United States government started grabbing up our land. And when they grabbed up that land they started opening it up to free settlers."
A blizzard struck the northern plains of Montana, dropping temperatures well below zero. It signaled the start of the "Starvation Winter" for the Piegans, a stretch of more than a year that resulted in the deaths of as many as 600 men, women and children. More than one in every six Blackfeet in Montana Territory succumbed.
The weather was bad, but circumstances at the government agency on Little Badger Creek made it worse. Buffalo herds that had darkened the plains in the years before the railroad arrived were all but gone, as were the antelope. What meager government supplies that arrived at the agency were quickly depleted. Crops that the Blackfeet had been taught to grow were doomed by lack of adequate irrigation. An outbreak of smallpox dealt a lethal blow.
Bodies were piled on top of hills near the agency, ever after known as Ghost Ridge.
"From that time period on," the late Pikuni historian Curly Bear Wagner said in a 2001 interview, "our chiefs looked at our children and seen that they were hungry and so the only thing we had to bargain with was our land, and so we sell off big portions of our land like Glacier National Park, the Sweetgrass Hills, places that were important to our people. But the chiefs looked at our younger people and thought that they were more important for their survival so this is how the United States government started grabbing up our land. And when they grabbed up that land they started opening it up to free settlers."
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