When on a war party, however, they go on foot, to enable them to skulk
through the country with greater secrecy; to keep in thickets and
ravines, and use more adroit subterfuges and stratagems. Their mode
of warfare is entirely by ambush, surprise, and sudden assaults in the
night time. If they succeed in causing a panic, they dash forward with
headlong fury: if the enemy is on the alert, and shows no signs of fear,
they become wary and deliberate in their movements.

Some of them are armed in the primitive style, with bows and arrows; the
greater part have American fusees, made after the fashion of those of
the Hudson's Bay Company. These they procure at the trading post of the
American Fur Company, on Marias River, where they traffic their peltries
for arms, ammunition, clothing, and trinkets. They are extremely fond
of spirituous liquors and tobacco; for which nuisances they are ready
to exchange not merely their guns and horses, but even their wives and
daughters. As they are a treacherous race, and have cherished a lurking
hostility to the whites ever since one of their tribe was killed by
Mr. Lewis, the associate of General Clarke, in his exploring expedition
across the Rocky Mountains, the American Fur Company is obliged
constantly to keep at that post a garrison of sixty or seventy men.

Under the general name of Blackfeet are comprehended several tribes:
such as the Surcies, the Peagans, the Blood Indians, and the Gros
Ventres of the Prairies: who roam about the southern branches of the
Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, together with some other tribes further
north.

The bands infesting the Wind River Mountains and the country adjacent
at the time of which we are treating, were Gros Ventres of the Prairies,
which are not to be confounded with Gros Ventres of the Missouri, who