German Impressionist artist Julius Seyler had already made a name for himself in Europe when America beckoned. While in St. Paul, Minnesota, he encountered Louis Hill, head of the Great Northern Railroad, who wanted to encourage travel to Montana's newly created Glacier National Park. To that end, Hill enticed the adventuresome Seyler to visit this majestic landscape and to see the Blackfeet Indians who lived there. This book marks both an appreciation of Seyler's unique art and a fascinating glimpse into the promotion of a national park in its early years.

William E. Farr has written the first biographical portrait of Seyler, focusing on his two summers at Glacier in 1913 and 1914, his special relationship with the Blackfeet, and the magnificent art he created in the Northern Rockies. The book features more than one hundred images--many in color--including Seyler's major works from Glacier, other paintings from his European years, and historic photographs from the park.

Seyler enjoyed wide recognition in Europe in his day, but the wartime destruction of his European works has since relegated him to obscurity. This lavish volume shows the stunning visual impact of his art and secures his place as one of the paramount portrayers of a place we still call the Crown of the Continent.

In 1879, a Canadian Blackfoot known as Spopee, or Turtle, shot and killed a white man. Captured as a fugitive, Spopee narrowly escaped execution, instead landing in an insane asylum in Washington, D.C., where he fell silent. Spopee thus "disappeared" for more than thirty years, until a delegation of American Blackfeet discovered him and, aided by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, exacted a pardon from President Woodrow Wilson. After re-emerging into society like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, Spopee spent the final year of his life on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, in a world that had changed irrevocably from the one he had known before his confinement.

"Blackfoot Redemption" is the riveting account of Spopee's unusual and haunting story. To reconstruct the events of Spopee's life--at first traceable only through bits and pieces of information--William E. Farr conducted exhaustive archival research, digging deeply into government documents and institutional reports to build a coherent and accurate narrative and, through this reconstruction, win back one Indian's life and identity.

In revealing both certainties and ambiguities in Spopee's story, Farr relates a larger story about racial dynamics and prejudice, while poignantly evoking the turbulent final days of the buffalo-hunting Indians before their confinement, loss of freedom, and confusion that came with the wrenching transition to reservation life.

In 1886 Walter McClintock went to northwestern Montana as a member of a U.S. Forest Service expedition. He was adopted as a son by Chief Mad Dog, the high priest of the Sun Dance, and spent the next four years living on the Blackfoot Reservation. The Old North Trail, originally published in 1910, is a record of his experiences among the Blackfeet.