The Blackfeet Confederacy: Masters of the Northern Plains
By Daniel R. Holloway
Length4h 36m
About this audiobook
The waiting is the work. On the eastern face of the Rocky Mountain front, a line of hunters lies flat along a ridge above two thousand grazing buffalo, and the lead hunter, a man of about forty winters who has done this since his father first brought him to such a ridge at nine, has not yet picked up a weapon. The killing, when it comes, will take less time than tying a moccasin.
The people on that ridge were Niitsitapi, the real people: the Siksika along the Bow River, the Kainai between the Red Deer and the Saskatchewan, and the Piikani to the south and west on the upper Missouri. Three nations with one language, they held the passes, fords and sheltered winter bottoms along the mountains they called the backbone of the world. The horse and the gun came north to them, and after them the trading forts of the upper Missouri, the smallpox that tore through their camps in the summer of 1837, the whiskey traders and the war road, treaties signed on both sides of a new border, and the end of the buffalo.
To the hunters on that ridge the mountains were never a wall, only a spine to follow to the herds. Other nations drew the boundaries, and the Niitsitapi spent the twentieth century, in Montana and in Alberta, fighting to govern themselves on either side of them.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★★ 4.6 (12)
Includes Amazon
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 36 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The People of the Ridge
2Chapter 2: The Horse Comes North
3Chapter 3: Guns and the Northern Trade
4Chapter 4: The Buffalo Economy
5Chapter 5: A Fort on the Missouri
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 6: Strangers with Ink and Paper
7Chapter 7: Plagues of the Summer of 1837
8Chapter 8: The Whiskey and the War Road
9Chapter 9: Treaties and Boundary Lines
10Chapter 10: The Edge of the Buffalo
11Chapter 11: When the Herds Returned
12Chapter 12: Sovereignty in the Twentieth Century
13About the Author
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