Bug's Boys

The Blackfeet vs the American Fur Trappers

The fur trapper’s called ‘em Bug’s boys. Sons of Satan.

A tribe so fierce that dozens, if not hundreds, of mountain men fell to their arrows, lances, and bullets over the course of just a few decades. But what was it that caused the Blackfeet to hate the Americans so?

The ill feelings can partially be traced back to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. On the Corp’s return trip from the Pacific coast, they split up into two separate groups. Captain Lewis’s bunch had a violent confrontation with the Indigenous that resulted in the death of two Blackfeet. After this, it seems that it was game on as The Blackfeet attempted to kill any and all American fur trappers they could find.

It was they who attacked John Colter in 1809, killing his companion and forcing him to make his famous run. And it was the Blackfeet who were responsible in shuting down Andrew Henry’s first post on the Three Forks of the Missouri. Once William Henry Ashley’s fabled One Hundred ascended the Big Muddy to trap beaver, it was the Blackfeet who soon became their fiercest resistors.

The confrontation between Captain Meriwether Lewis and the Blackfeet is an oversimplification, however. The truth is much more complicated and nuanced.

When the first trickle of fur trappers crossed the Great Plains and began trapping beaver, the Blackfeet Confederation was truly a force to be reckoned with, controlling a vast swath of territory; from present-day Edmonton, Alberta down to Yellowstone Lake, from Glacier National Park in Northwestern Montana all the way east damn near to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

They, too, profited from the trading of beaver pelts, using the rodent’s fur as a form of currency to obtain goods - especially firearms - from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the north; firearms they would need to defend against their enemies such as the Crow, Cheyenne, Lakota, Shoshone, and Nez Perce.

The mountain men who suddenly began invading their land not only became allies with their most bitter enemies, but they also depleted the waterways of the Blackfeet’s most valuable commodity - beaver.

Nevertheless each fall after the annual Rendezvous, fur brigades would risk everything by pushing deep into Blackfeet territory. As such, each season the two groups would clash with predictably deadly results.

THE PLAGUE

In 1836 a steamboat traveled up the Missouri with a passenger unwittingly infected with smallpox. The disease spread like a wildfire among the Arikara and Mandan as the steamboat pushed north and then west, likewise wreaking absolute havoc on the Blackfeet Nation.

This epidemic would end up killing an estimated 17,000 Native Americans along the Missouri River, wiping out 2/3rds of the population of Blackfeet and ending their reign as the Lords of the Northern Plains.

No longer would the fur trapper have to fear these fierce warriors; at least not as much as they once did. But then again, the Mountain Man was a dying breed at this time as well. The beaver market was drying up, civilization was creeping ever westward, and they’d soon have to adapt to a new, foreign way of life.

Perhaps they had more in common with the Blackfeet than they thought.