With the exception of the Kootenais, few Indians ventured into the fastness of the park mountains before the coming of the white men. Yet so frequently did a large number of tribes use its trails for hunting and warfare, or camp in midsummer along its lakes and streams on the edge of the plains, that the park has an Indian story intertwined with its own that is unsurpassed in interest. Except for a few plateau Indians who had strong plains' characteristics because they once lived on the plains, all tribes were of that most interesting of Indian types, the plains Indian.

The earliest peoples inhabiting the northern Montana plains of which we have any record were apparently Snake Indians of Shoshonean stock. Later Nez Perces, Flatheads, and Kootenais pushed eastward through passes from the headwaters of the Columbia River system. Then came horses and firearms, and the whites themselves to set up an entirely different state of affairs in their hitherto relatively peaceful existence. First, a growing and expounding Siouan race, pressed forward also by an expanding irresistible Algonkian stock, occupied the high plains and pushed back its peoples behind the wall of mountains. These were the Crows from the south, the Assiniboins to the east. Lastly, armed with strategy and Hudson's Bay Co. firearms, and given speed and range with horses, the dauntless Blackfeet came forth from their forests to become the terror of the north. They grew strong on the abundance of food and game on the Great Plains, and pushed the Crows beyond the Yellowstone River, until met by the forces of white soldiery and the tide of civilization.

Today the Blackfeet on the reservation adjoining the park on the east remain a pitiful but picturesque remnant of their former pride and glory. They have laid aside their former intense hostility to the whites and have reconciled themselves to the fate of irrepressible civilization. Dressed in colorful native costume, a few families of braves greet the park visitor at Glacier Park Station and Hotel. Here they sing, dance, and tell stories of their former greatness. In these are reflected in a measure the dignity, the nobility, the haughtiness, and the savagery of one of the highest and most interesting of aboriginal American peoples.