Blackfoot History after 1500

Throughout the 1500's and 1600's AD,
the Blackfoot continued to live in the same way they had lived before 1500.
But the lives of Blackfoot people changed a lot in about 1730 AD, when they
got horses from other North
American tribes. Once they had horses, they could hunt buffalo and get their
food more easily than from farming or gathering. They also got guns in trade
about the same time. Soon, like the Cree, the Blackfoot
abandoned their land near the Great Lakes and traveled west to the Great
Plains to hunt buffalo full-time.
By 1800, the Blackfoot nation controlled a lot of north-western
North America (the modern provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada,
and the modern state of Montana in the United States). This was a lot of
land, and the Blackfoot nation was powerful and successful.
In this period, Blackfoot people were nomads. In the summer, they followed the buffalo and hunted them for most of their food. They traveled in small bands of just a few families. If people weren't getting along, they just changed their band.
In the long, cold winter (almost half the year), people settled down in winter camps and didn't move again until spring.
In this period, Blackfoot people were nomads. In the summer, they followed the buffalo and hunted them for most of their food. They traveled in small bands of just a few families. If people weren't getting along, they just changed their band.
In the long, cold winter (almost half the year), people settled down in winter camps and didn't move again until spring.
The Blackfoot were always fighting wars to defend their
own land or to get more of somebody else's land. They fought often with
the Cree and the Sioux.
These wars, combined with frequent epidemics of smallpox
beginning in 1780, killed many people by the late 1800's.

In the summer, the whole Blackfoot nation got together
for the Sun Dance ceremony, which brought them together as a people. Then
in the fall there were big buffalo hunts to get enough meat to last, dried
or made into pemmican, for the winter.
Because the Blackfoot were so far away from where the
Spanish, English, and French invaders were, they were able to keep on living
their normal lives, hunting the buffalo,
until the 1880's AD. But as with the Sioux,
the horses ate the food that the buffalo needed in the long cold northern
winters, and the more horses the Blackfoot had, the fewer buffalo survived.
By 1881, European settlers and the United States and Canadian armies worked together to deliberately kill most of the remaining buffalo in order to
force the Blackfoot people onto reservations.
The United States army forced the Blackfoot people who
were in Montana to move on to a reservation. The Canadian army forced the
Blackfoot people who were in Canada to move on to reservations in southern
Alberta. Many people died during the late 1800's and early 1900's of diseases
like measles and smallpox
that they caught from the Europeans. They struggled to figure out how to
live without the buffalo. Eventually most people turned to either farming
or ranching (raising cattle),
and there started to be more Blackfoot people again.
