This is a compendium of oral legends and tales passed down by the Blackfeet. Stories vary, but the name "Blackfeet" or "Blackfoot," applied to them by others, may have come originally from their practice of dying their moccasin soles black. That said, their use of an Algonquian language group may indicate that they were relatively recent newcomers to the region from somewhere in the Northeast. The territory of the Blackfeet, at its greatest extent, encompassed a vast area from the eastern Rocky Mountains of Alberta and Montana and extending several hundred miles out onto the Great Plains,...

Several letters were handed into my study, where I sat at work among my books. I was then pastor of a Church in the city of Hamilton. Showers of blessing had been descending upon us, and over a hundred and forty new members had but recently been received into the Church. I had availed myself of the Christmas holidays by getting married, and now was back again with my beloved, when these letters were handed in. With only one of them have we at present anything to do. As near as I can remember, it read as follows:

Without even knocking at the door there noiselessly entered our northern home two large, unhandsome Indians. They paid not the slightest attention to the grown-up palefaces present, but in their ghostly way marched across the room to the corner where the two little children were playing on the floor. Quickly but gently picking them up they swung them to their shoulders, and then, without a word of salutation or even a glance at the parents, they noiselessly passed out of that narrow door and disappeared in the virgin forest. They were pagan Saulteaux, by name Souwanas and Jakoos.