As the Blackfeet became more numerous, their strength in fighting men increased and they organized them more effectively. They continued to send out a large war party under some popular leader at the end of the big sun-dance ceremony each summer. In 1781 Blackfoot scouts found a large Shoshoni village on the south bank of the Bow River. The place was strangely quiet, with no sign of life, not even a stray dog. At first the scouts feared a trap, but they finally ventured into the tipis and found them full of dead people. The entire village had been wiped out by smallpox. By the time the Blackfeet had despoiled the camp they were infected with the dread disease and unknowingly carried it back to their own villages.
Possibly two-thirds of the Blackfeet died in the next few weeks. The frightened remnants concluded that the disease had been sent to them as a punishment for their war against the Shoshoni. They sent envoys south to find the Shoshoni and propose a peace settlement, but the whole Shoshoni country south to the Marias River was deserted. The few Shoshoni who survived the plague had retreated far to the southwest, beyond the mountains.
With the Shoshoni menace removed, the Blackfeet attacked the Kutenai, who at that time held the upper basin of the Bow River as far south as Waterton Lakes. In a series of fierce attacks the outnumbered and outgunned Kutenai were forced west across the continental divide into the upper Columbia country. Then the Blackfeet turned against the Flatheads and pushed them back through Marias Pass.
As the Blackfeet moved south into new plains country, they killed more and more buffalo by the chase, but they continued to use the piskin, for the wise old men of the tribe said it was not right to let the ancient sacred customs die.
The Blackfeet continued to drive to the south, seemingly determined to take all the old Shoshoni lands. By 1811 Blackfoot camps were common along the Sun River, and the tribe claimed the land up the Missouri to Three Forks and beyond. In time this southward push to dominate the upper Missouri drainage at length brought the tribe into fierce conflict with the American fur traders pushing westward, up the Missouri, up the Yellowstone, and into the upper Snake River country from the south.
Thousands of years ago, long before bows and arrows, horses, and guns were introduced into North America, Indians lit fires and drove stampeding buffalo off cliffs, or jumps, such as the one shown in this diorama. (Montana Historical Society)
9. Buffalo East of the Mississippi
In the summer of 1612 Samuel Argoll was exploring along the western side of Chesapeake Bay. There he found a river and sailed up it as far as his ship could go, "and then marching into the countrie, I found a great store of cattle as big as kine, of which the Indians that were my guides killed a couple, which we found to be very good and wholesome meate, and very easy to be killed, in regard they are heavy, slow, and not so wild as other beasts in the wildernesse."
These shaggy beasts in lowland Virginia were the extreme eastern fringe of the wandering herds that had pushed across the Mississippi River when the grasslands of the Great Plains became crowded. The buffalo first crossed the Mississippi in significant numbers about A.D. 1000 and gradually worked their way east until they reached the Atlantic coast about the end of the sixteenth century.
This eastward movement was but part of the spread of the buffalo during that period. Other herds were moving northward to the Canadian forests and into the mountain valleys and passes of Montana and Wyoming. The movement to the east through the Ohio Valley was in a country of open hardwood forests interspersed with small meadows. The buffalo avoided brushy country and dense evergreen forests, such as those in northern Wisconsin and much of Michigan, where they could find no pasture.
As the herds built up in numbers along the west bank of the Mississippi, some of the animals found easy crossings near the Falls of St. Anthony at low water in late summer or on the ice in winter. Once across the river they had all of southern Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania open to them.
After the herds were well established in southern Ohio, some of them managed to cross the Ohio River, either by swimming or on the ice, and filled the Kentucky lowlands and the western valleys of West Virginia. They continued south to the Tennessee River and worked their way east along its northern bank, up the Great Valley until they could go east again through the water gap into Virginia, the Carolinas, and northeastern Georgia. One small herd even wandered across Georgia to its extreme southwestern corner. Other herds coming from Kentucky used the Cumberland Gap as a passage to the east. The buffalo had just begun to get settled in the new country when the northern fringe of the advancing herd was reported by Argoll.
There are several indications that the buffalo were newcomers to the Atlantic seaboard. The herds were small, widely scattered, and the total number much less than the pasture could easily support; nor had they reached any major barrier to their onward movement. If the herds had completely stocked the pastures of Virginia, the pressure of their numbers would have pushed bands northward into Maryland, eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, all suitable areas. They would have gone southward into all of Georgia, and probably into northern Florida. Capacity herds in Tennessee would have stocked Alabama and Mississippi.
The hunting and killing of buffalo in Virginia east of the mountains received little attention in the old accounts, giving the impression that the animal was not considered an important resource by the early settlers. In 1701 a new colony of Huguenots on the James River captured some buffalo calves and attempted to domesticate them, but the calves were too stubborn and unruly. In 1729 Colonel William Byrd, when surveying the Virginia-Carolina boundary, reported sighting buffalo about 150 miles inland from the ocean.
Near Roanoke, Virginia, was a large salt lick where buffalo were common until about the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1750 Thomas Walker visited the place and reported, "This lick has been one of the best places for game in these parts and would have been of much greater advantage to the inhabitants than it has been if the hunters had not killed the buffalo for diversion."
Several early references mention buffalo in the northwestern counties of Virginia. These would be on the western drainage on streams flowing into the Ohio, in modern West Virginia. Scattered herds of buffalo were found in both South Carolina and Georgia from the Piedmont to the coast. George Oglethorpe, first governor of Georgia, reported in 1733 that buffalo were among the wild animals native to the colony. Up country, in 1739, an account mentioned "Killing buffaloes… of which there is a very great plenty, and they are very good eating. Though they are a very heavy beast they will outrun a horse and quite tire him." And that same year, in another part of Georgia, "We seeing several herds of sixty or upwards in a herd." But by 1770 all the buffalo in Georgia had been killed.
Buffalo were hunted for many years in the Piedmont region of South Carolina, and a herd of 300 was reported about 1770, but the last of the animals were killed off by 1775. The presence of fairly large herds, for the Atlantic seaboard, in both Georgia and South Carolina suggests that the animals had come in appreciable numbers through eastern Tennessee into these states, with the southern edge of the occupation only a short distance south of the Savannah River, although that one small stray herd was found 250 miles to the southwest in the remote corner of Georgia in 1698. This pattern shows that these southern buffalo did not go around the southern flank of the Appalachians in Georgia, but came down from the north. There is no good evidence for any buffalo trails crossing the Appalachians except up the Great Valley in eastern Tennessee and through the Cumberland Gap from southeastern Kentucky.