Lanterna Rally

Author: James Willard Schultz

Publisher: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13:

Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park 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. The Blackfeet were leaving the Fort to hunt and trap along the tributaries of the Missouri during the winter, and he went with them, under the protection of the head chief, who had nineteen wives and two lodges and an immense band of horses. By easy stages they traveled along the foot of the Rockies to Sun River, where they wintered, and then in the spring, instead of returning to the Saskatchewan, they crossed the Missouri, hunted in the Yellowstone country that summer, wintered on the Missouri at the mouth of the Marias River, and returned to Mountain Fort the following spring with all the furs their horses could carry. Instead of one winter, Monroe had passed two years with the tribe, and in that time had acquired a wife, a daughter of the great chief, a good knowledge of the language, and an honorable name, Ma-kwi′-i-po-wak-sĭn (Rising Wolf), which was given him because of his bravery in a battle with the Crows in the Yellowstone country.