Among The Blackfeet: Walter McClintock and Mary Roberts Rinehart

Abstract

Abstract George Bird Grinnell was not the only yale offspring to find his way to the Blackfeet of Montana at the close of the nineteenth century. Ten years after Grinnell’s interest in these Indians was ignited, Walter McClintock entered their world. The son of a wealthy Pittsburgh carpetmaker, McClintock graduated from Yale in 1891. Like Grinnell, McClintock returned home to take a place in the family business, but a severe bout of typhoid fever allowed him to escape the humdrum commercial world of his father and go west. In 1895, McClintock visited Eaton’s Cattle Ranch in North Dakota, the first dude ranch in the American West. It is a sign of the quickly changing times that a dude ranch even existed for such a comparatively tame option was unavailable to Grinnell in the 1870s. The trip apparently did the trick. McClintock recuperated but he traded one malady for another. He became addicted to the West.