Letters from the Rocky Mountain Indian Missions reveals the life of an Italian Jesuit as he worked at three missions in the northern Rocky Mountains from 1874 to 1878. Meticulously translated and carefully annotated, the letters of Father Philip Rappagliosi (1841-78) are a rare and rich source of information about the daily lives, customs, and beliefs of the many Native peoples that he came into contact with: Nez Perces, Kootenais, Salish Flatheads, Coeur d'Alenes, Pend d'Oreilles, Blackfeet, and Canadian Metis. These never-before-translated letters reveal the shifting, sometimes volatile...

The story of the cattle barons has often overshadowed the experiences of the common cowboy on whose labor the ranchers wealth was built. Malcolm McLeod recorded the life of privation and danger of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mixed-blood cowboy. He worked for cattle owners across Montana and in southern British Columbia and eastern Washington. Born in Washington Territory in 1870 of Scotch, French Canadian, and Chippewa Indian heritage, McLeod traveled countless miles over the years. But home remained the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, where he was...

This history of the Nez Perce War was written in 1878 79 by Duncan McDonald, a relative of Chief Looking Glass and the son of a Hudson s Bay Company fur trader and a Nez Perce Indian woman. McDonald spent most of his life on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana.


McDonald wrote the history based on interviews and family sources. In 1878 he traveled to Canada to interview Nez Perce chief White Bird and learn his side of the story. Remarkably, the history was published in a Deer Lodge, Montana, newspaper only a year or two after the war ended.


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