This is a true story of a float trip down the Missouri. It
compares, in some ways, to the most famous float trip in American
literature, the one that Huck Finn took down the Mississippi.
At the end of his trip, young Huck says, ..".I reckon I got to
Light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally
she's going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can't stand it. I
been there before."
That young escapee, to extend the comparison, is epitomized in
James Willard Schultz. Just expelled from military school, the
seventeen-year-old Schultz goes West, stays, grows up and lives
among the Indians, marries into the Blackfoot tribe, and lived the
kind of life he loved.
In the fall of 1901, Apikuni and his Piegan wife, Nataki, took a
long float trip down the Missouri. They camped out and lived off
the land for the entire trip, from Fort Benton to the juncture off
the Missouri and Milk rivers. The account of that trip is presented
here in book form for the first time.
Like Huck's adventure, this was something more than a simple
float trip. It was a trip through space and time through memories
of early experiences along the river, of friends and enemies
(Assiniboines, Crees, Sioux, and others), of early white trappers
and traders, of carefree days of the buffalo hunt, of a
naturalist's dream world populated with the deer, eagle, antelope,
fish, bear, wolf, and animals known only in Indian mythology.
This idyll was nostalgic trip that could not be repeated, for
the river and world were changing, Apikuni and Nataki knew
first-hand the many changes of the past and sensed the momentous
changes coming.
With the advance of the white man's world, with the dams and
reservoirs, it would be impossible for today's adventurer to
duplicate the trip described here. But, for the armchair
adventurer, it is still possible, though the account that has been
left for us, to take this remarkable trip.
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