Snow and Ice and Rock

The words in this one aren't mine. They were taken down in council and printed by the United States Senate. September of eighteen ninety-five. The top of this road was the western edge of the Blackfeet Reservation then, and the crest above you was the line. Three commissioners came to buy the mountains, because the government believed they held gold, silver and copper. William Pollock. Walter Clements. And George Bird Grinnell, the Blackfeet's friend and confidant, who had the tribe on his mind and a future national park besides. We are not here to drive a bargain, Clements told them. They offered a million dollars. Little Dog named the price. Three million. There are many things in which the Great Father has cheated us, he said. You must not forget that we have wives and children. It is for them that we ask this money. Those mountains will last forever. The money will not. Pollock answered him. You can keep those mountains forever and not realize anything from them, he said. The money will be gone after a time, but in the meantime you will be getting clothing, blankets, cattle, wagons, food. That money offers you all these things, while the mountains offer you nothing but snow and ice and rock. I leave it for you to choose. Little Dog answered. I know that they are of some benefit to us, he said. When a small child places a value upon an article, an older person will take pity and give it more than it asks. We want you to treat us in the same manner. Four Horns looked at what they were wearing. The metal that is in your watch chains is good without doubt, he said. The same kind of metal is to be found in the mountains. You have named your price and we have named ours, Little Dog said. We will never recede. For two days the commissioners waited. The Blackfeet conferred with their agent, and they came back at one and a half million dollars, for more land than they'd meant to sell. They held back the right to cut timber, hunt and fish, so long as it stayed public land. There was no park yet. On the day it was settled, White Calf said this. Chief Mountain is my head. Now my head is cut off. The mountains have been my last refuge. He shook their hands. If you come for any more land, he told them, we will have to send you away. The land yielded no minerals. Many Blackfeet don't accept that it was ever a sale. Jim Kipp, a Blackfeet scholar, said in two thousand thirteen that the leaders agreed only to a fifty-year mining lease. That lease expired in nineteen forty, he said. The mountain on the Divide above this road is Pollock Mountain, named for the man who said it. All summer long, people pay at the gate, climb this road and stand with their heads tipped back, looking at snow and ice and rock.