Dan Flores

But as quickly following the war's end as he could make it happen, in the absolute dead of winter of December, January 1919 and 1920, Rice took the Great Northern Railroad west to Montana.

As soon as he stepped off the train, the Germans spotted a group of blanket-draped Indians.

And to the profound shock of the group, strolled up to them, clapped one on the back, held up his hand, and in a recreation of scenes in Carl May novels, blurted out, Howl!

Lucky for Vinole Rice, lucky for all of us, the Blackfeet by this time in their history had learned to be amused and tolerant of the unfathomable antics of white people.

Maybe the innocence of Howe was downright endearing in 1919.

So recognizing a fallible fellow human when he saw one, one of the Blackfeet men, whose name was Turtled, motioned for his friends to choke off their laughter and to welcome this strange individual, as the Blackfeet had done with empathetic whites for decades.

The Blackfeet had experiences with artists and photographers that went back at least 20 years.

And after a few minutes of translated but good-spirited conversation, some of the group Rice approached with Howe agreed to sit for him.

Rice had taken the first big step.

He was on his way to a long and celebrated career as one of the best 20th century portraitists of American Indians.

A few years ago, I toured a first-rate Blackfoot exhibit in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the tribal name in Canada is rendered Blackfoot, that had been assembled and interpreted by the elders of the Canadian Blackfoot bands and the Southern Pagans, the Montana Blackfeet.

What caught my attention were panels claiming the Blackfoot and Southern Pagan people remembered the artists and photographers from a century ago as people they especially liked and admired.

One exhibit panel put it this way, "...these artists had a profound respect for us as human beings.

Their respect shows in the images they created."

Adjacent to those very words were several portraits of their ancestors done in brilliantly colored pastels by Wienold Reiss.

Rice became the most successful of all the Great Northern Railroad's finds as a painter-promoter of Glacier National Park and the railroad's ticket sales to Western tourists.

Just as the Southwestern Railroads had done with the art of the Southwest, the Great Northern, led by Louis Hill, son of founder James J. Hill, hoped to use artists to help establish Glacier

as a premier American vacation destination.

Urged on by George Byrd Grinnell, in 1910 Congress had created Glacier out of pieces of the Flathead National Forest and the Blackfeet Reservation.

For the next half century, the National Park acted like some deep space singularity that bent the railroad around it.