Distinctly Montana Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.distinctlymontana.com/i/1541969
46 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 5 - 2 0 2 6 and Blackfeet. The missionary learned about some winter survival strategies. The Gros Ventres told him they relied on wolf hides for caps, scarves, and mittens. In this re- gion, people lined their thick-soled hide moccasins with rabbit fur in win- ter, or with the fine textured leaves of sedges, if fur was not readily available. Children were sur- prisingly active during the cold winter days. Father Point was particu- larly struck by their various games. One especially com- pelling sight was to see children on little wooden sledges careen- ing down the frozen mountain "with astonishing speed." Others were seen slid- ing over the ice, "standing straight as candles." The missionary noted some of the chil- dren, bent over holes they had broken in the ice, where they were "dabbing their hands in the cold water." Perhaps they were fishing? Another game involved spin- ning tops by stroking them with "birchrod" sticks to keep them going. Around the time dawn was emerging from an extremely cold February night, the sky around Fort Lewis lit up with a perfectly formed cross. "Its beams were red in color just as the much larger disc that framed it. The e x t r e m i t i e s of the vertical beam were con- tained within this disc, but the horizontal beam stretched out along the horizon." The missionary, no doubt, was try- ing to capture the details so that he could later paint this celestial dis- play which was described to him by others. He had missed the event en- tirely. He not- ed that the "small equi- distant, concentric rings of different and various colors" arranged along the horizontal line, "at points where it intersected the circumference of the disc… it intersected still another cir- cle made visible only at these points of intersection." He noted that "the local physicists (among the Indians) call these rings buck-eyes." He learned from them that "they have seen similar phenomena many times before," but this was the most dramatic. They also told him that these manifestations only occur at times of extreme cold, but he wondered if it might result from more than frigid weather. To him, the de- scription suggested something more than "a paraselene," which Merri-