The year is 1863 and the prairies are swarming with war parties from enemy tribes. The two boys must travel far and fight hard to keep their scalps and count coups

"TOWARD the close of a warm spring day on April, 1867, luminous spots appeared both on the north and on the south of the setting sun. I noticed them as I returned to our lodge, after watering Is-spai-u and picketing him upon a patch of new sprouting buffalo grass close in front of camp.

With the Indians in the Rockies" is a biography of James Willard Schultz's close friend Thomas Fox. Based on Fox's stories told by the evening camp-fire and before the comfortable fireplaces of various posts. Two boys, one a Blackfoot Indian named Pitimakan and a white boy named Thomas are trapped in the Rockies for the winter, having nothing but the clothing on their backs, they manage to fashion bows and arrows, the makings for creating a fire and the materials for building a shelter to protect then from the six feet deep snow. This a tale of survival, ingenuity and friendship.

I did not, of course, get Apauk’s story of his life in the sequence in which it is here laid down. On consecutive evenings he would relate incidents far apart in time, and only by later questionings would I be able to fill in the gaps. But at last I got together the whole of it, to my own satisfaction, and I hope the listener may get as much pleasure from the story as I did in the hearing of it.

Black Otter, the son of Lone Bull, a Pikuni, Blackfoot Indian cast out from his tribe for breaking the hunting rules and forced to wander the wilderness in search of redemption, retells his remarkable story to James Willard Schultz and uncovers the harsh life that faced him and his family during their time in the wilderness.