The Ceded Strip: A Sale the Blackfeet Never Agreed To

In the fall of eighteen ninety-five, a three-man federal commission rode into Browning, Montana, to negotiate with the Blackfeet. The bison were gone. The great herds that had sustained the Blackfeet for centuries had collapsed under commercial hunting pressure in less than a decade, and by the early eighteen nineties the people were facing starvation. The commission knew this. So did the Blackfeet leaders who came to the table.

The federal government wanted the eastern mountain territory, a strip of roughly eight hundred thousand acres pressed against the Continental Divide, where surveyors had suggested mineral wealth might lie beneath the rock. The Blackfeet needed food and cash to survive another winter. What resulted from those negotiations, conducted in a context of profound economic desperation, was a document that the two sides read very differently.

The federal government understood the transaction as a permanent land sale: eight hundred thousand acres for one and a half million dollars, approximately one dollar and eighty-seven cents per acre. The Blackfeet oral tradition, preserved and maintained by tribal members and the Browning Pikuni Cultural Society, holds that their leaders understood it as a temporary cession, a lease of roughly fifty years, not a permanent transfer. The land, in their understanding, would return.

It did not return. In nineteen ten, President William Howard Taft signed the legislation establishing Glacier National Park. The mountains the Blackfeet had used as summer hunting grounds, the terrain their grandparents had known in detail, became a federally administered wilderness area from which they were largely excluded. When the mining that had justified the purchase proved disappointing, the land was reconceived as a park. The Blackfeet were not party to that reconception.

The gap between those two readings of the eighteen ninety-five document, a sale or a fifty-year lease, has never been legally resolved. The eastern side of Glacier National Park sits on what the Blackfeet call the Ceded Strip. The mountains you are looking at, and the boundary between the reservation and the park, are the physical shape of that unresolved argument. Every trailhead on the east side begins in contested territory.