The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau pg.89-90

The Blackfeet Indians were successful stock men recognized in the 1896 Agreement/Article Five and their reservation was “purely a grazing country” held by treaty to hold the entire reservation as a common grazing tract for the exclusive use and benefit of the Blackfeet cattle industry. The Indians only sustained cultivation were the small ditches they had dug by 1896 to water their rich buffalo grass hay meadows to produce winter feed for their cattle herds.

The Great Northern Railroad was arbitrarily granted many government gratuities at the expense of the Blackfeet Indians in developing an access route to the newly created Glacier National Park. The creation of Glacier National Park and the Lewis & Clark National Forest extinguished Blackfeet treaty rights to reserved tribal grazing and timber lands in the ceded strip, as well as hunting, fishing, gathering wild plants and berries, and immemorial sacred sites for tribal religious ceremonies.

                                    father & son robber barons

The Secretary of the Interior waived any compensation to the Blackfeet for construction of a wagon road to transport tourists to James J. Hill’s hotels from its train station at Midvale to the east entrance to Glacier Park at St. Mary Village all on the reservation’s western mountain lands. The Secretary of the Interior waived any charges for the use of tribal timber, gravel, and asked only a nominal payment for the right-of-way for a telephone line. The Interior Department approved $28,000 of tribal funds to pay for construction of James J. Hill’s wagon road and permitted the railroad to construct hotels and take tribal lands from town sites on the reservation from its Midvale station to the east entrance to Glacier Park, and to lease the entire St. Mary Valley for ten cents an acre to the Great Northern subsidiary, the Park Saddle Horse Company, preventing any Indian businesses to be established near the east entrance to Glacier Park. The Blackfeet Indians protested the excesses of the railroad and James J. Hill in appropriating their money, land and resources without any compensation or consent of the Indians.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau  
pg.89-90