"When Father Constantine Scollen first met the Blackfeet Indians in 1861 he saw them as a proud, haughty, numerous people, having a regular politico-religious organization [Blackfoot Confederacy-Sun Religion]. After 1870 however, the Blackfeet-Piegans had lost more than half their population and their social organization was in deep decay. Father Scollen observed, "They have been utterly demoralized as a people; the surviving relatives of the small pox epidemic of 1870 and the survivors of the massacred went more and more for the use of alcohol. They endeavored to drown their grief in the poisonous beverage, sold their robes and horses by the hundreds for it, and now had begun killing one another, so that in a short time they were divided into small parties, afraid to meet on the prairie. Formerly, they had been the most opulent Indians in the country, and now they walked without horses, clothed in rags." At a Council of the Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan Tribes of Indians, held at the Blackfeet Agency, Blackfeet Indian Reservation, on the 20th, 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, days of April, A.D., 1875, an election was had and a code of laws adopted outlawing whiskey in Blackfoot Confederacy lands, and the killing of persons while under the influence of whiskey."
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau
pg.23
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