men, gave them protection in the valley, and when Chief Joseph and his band came through the land bent on vengeance, leaving ashes and blood in their wake, Charlot and his braves met the war party and declared that if one white settler in the Bitter Root were harmed, the Selish would rise against Joseph and his men.

Yet it was not long after this that the Garfield treaty was drafted and presented to Charlot to sign. In that document Charlot was required to renounce forever the home of his forefathers and retire with his tribe to the Jocko reservation, which included the region of Sin-yal-min. It was a stern, impassive gathering. Charlot, great chief, in reality king of his tribe, Arlee the war-chief, elected to that office by the vote of the people, and others represented the Indians, while the Government of the United States had eloquent and persuasive statesmen armed with documentary force and red tape to persuade Charlot that his evacuation of the Bitter Root was at once desirable and necessary. But Charlot was a man of shrewdness and iron will. He declined the offer of a pension and the privilege of roaming at large over the pastures of the Jocko. The Bitter Root was the home of his fathers. There they had lived from time immemorial; he, himself, was born within its glades; there he had grown to maturity and sunk, as sinks the sun towards its setting, into old age. He added with finality that there also he would lie down to his eternal sleep.

Arlee, the war-chief, had no such patriotic scruples. He signed the treaty thereby courting and receiving Governmental favor and by the decree of those to whom he pandered, superceded Charlot as Great Chief and drew the pension and other preferment that went with that high trust. Before this extreme measure was carried out, the old chief, with Duncan McDonald, Chief Antoine Moise and other faithful followers decided that if the President, the Great Father himself, understood, he would not be so harsh with an old man whose years to live would be few and whose wrongs were many and sore. they went to Washington and told their story. Charlot asked for nothing but the "poor privilege" of living where his fathers had lived, and lying down to rest where

So

they had rested through the centuries, before the echo of the white men's booted tread disturbed the primeval quiet. He said, moreover, that he would never be taken alive to the Jocko. After this ultimatum, which was listened to rather coldly, the Indians went as they had come, shadows out of a gaily-colored past who aroused the frank curiosity, and often the fear of the orderly citizens of the capital. Their mission had failed; they returned to the Bitter Root empty-handed, heavy-hearted. Charlot might remain in the valley, the wise men had said, but in remaining he sacrificed his title, his land rights, his pension-in other words he was an outcast and a pauper.

For years he lingered on in his old, beloved haunts and happily there is no record of the indignity and poverty he suffered, but this much we do know: he

turned with all his will against the white man, and his former love was changed to hate. He lifted no hostile hand against his enemies-indeed, his hands were shackled in all but actual fact-but no word of the despised tongue profaned his lips and no expression of forgiveness softened the iron hardness of his face. At last, closer and closer pressed, he and his braves arrayed in the jealously preserved remnants of their war-regalia, issued forth proudly, like a conquering army, and entered the Jocko. There was rejoicing among the Selish, even those who had followed Arlee honored the royal Charlot, and paid him homage when, with the mien of a triumphant victor, he rode into the land of exile.

A wealth of folk-lore and poetry will pass with the passing of the reservation; therefore, it is well to stop and listen before the light is quite vanished from the hill-tops, while still the streams sing with articulate murmur, and the trees whisper regretfully of things lost forever, and a time that will come no more. We of the work-a-day world are too prone to believe that our own country is lacking in myth and tradition, in hero-tale and romance, yet here in our midst is a legended land where every land-mark is a chapter in the great, natural record-book of a folk whose day is done and whose song is but an echo.

trace these stories out is almost as difficult as to follow the spider's strand or to surprise the wild bird, yet the task is worth the labor. The scope of the present sketch permits the recital of only a few legends gathered from the Indians themselves, and therefore they have been chosen with some care. A foreword of explanation may be necessary to make their meaning clearer. The Indians believe that there was a time when men and beasts conversed together in a common tongue. To that era belonged Coyote, the mythical hero of the tribe.

How the Selish Came Out of the
Mountains.

In the long, long ago, the valley land was inhabited by a terrible Monster who fed on human victims. Through fear of him the Indians kept to the lean hills, ever gazing with yearning eyes upon the fertile fields spreading out in an emerald flood below. At length Coyote, the most daring of all the braves, challenged the Monster to mortal combat. The Monster accepted the challenge, and Coyote sought out the poison spider in the rocks and bade it sting the Monster to the death. But not even the spider's venom could penetrate the horned scales of the enemy. Then Coyote took counsel of the Fox, his crafty friend, and prepared himself for the fray. He bound a strong, leathern thong around. his body and tied the other end of it fast to a great pine tree. The Monster approached with gaping jaws and poison breath, and Coyote retreated farther and farther until the thong stretched taut and the pine curved like a bow. Finally, the tree, strained to the ultimate limit, sprang back with terrific force, felling the Monster with a deadly blow. Coyote was victorious, and the Woodpecker, coming to his aid, cut the pine and sharpened its trunk to a point. Coyote drove this through his dead enemy's breast, impaling him to the earth. Thus the valley was rid of the man-eater, and Coyote, the deliverer of his people, led them down into the verdant fields, where they lived in plenty and content.

Next in interest to to this allegorical story of the advent of the Selish into the lowlands is, perhaps, the more modern ac

count of the naming of the valley and the range of

Sin-yal-min, "The Surrounded."

Once in a glade by a little stream upon the mountain side, a hunting party surrounded and killed a herd of elk. Not long thereafter in the same vicinity a band of the Selish did battle with their enemies, the Blackfeet, and by the strategy of surrounding them, won the day. From these two incidents the mountains and the valley became known as Sin-yal-min, the surrounded.

Unfortunately, like most of the names which bind the places which they desig

nate with some historical fact or fanciful tradition, this title of Sin-yal-min is passing into disuse, having been superceded by the very commonplace and meaningless name of the "Mission" Mountains and Valley. In their religious zeal and pious desire to destroy every trace of that paganism which it was their aim to kill, root and branch, the early Jesuit fathers supplanted the old names with others symbolical of the Catholic faith. The loss of sentiment and fitness has been great, and before it is too late, the ancient designations, with their wealth of suggestion, should be restored. Happily, some of the Indian names, such as Missoula, a corruption of In-Mis-Sou-Let-ka, remain, and to each of them is attached a story replete with tradition and poetical imagery. Of all the many myths of the Selish there is none more touching nor spiritual than that of the sacred pine which runs thus:

The Sacred Pine.

Upon the hills of the Jocko stands a venerable pine tree. It has been there past the memory of the great-grandfathers of the present generation, and from time immemorial it has been held sacred by the Selish tribe. High upon its branches hangs the horn of a big horn sheep, fixed there so firmly by an unknown hand that the blizzard has not been strong enough to wrest it from its place nor the corroding frost to gnaw it away. No one knows whence the sheep's horn came, nor what it signifies, but the tree is held in reverence, and the Indians believe that it possesses supernatural powers. Offerings are made to it of moccasins, beads, weasel skins (ermine), and such little treasures of wearing apparel or handiwork as the givers most esteem, and at certain seasons, beneath the cool, sweet shadow of its spreading boughs, the simple worshipers assemble to dance with religious fervor around its bole upon the green, thus doing honor to the old, beloved object of their devotion, in the primitive, pagan way.

A patriarch of the Flathead Tribe

Last summer at the time when the sun reached his greatest strength, according to ancient custom the Selish gathered to