When Buffalo Ran

This is the story of a Blackfoot boy named Wikis, born on the Great Plains in the final years before the old world ended. George Bird Grinnell, an ethnographer who lived among the Blackfeet, knew this world firsthand, and his account carries the weight of something precious and disappearing. The boy Wikis learns life's lessons not from textbooks but from the buffalo, the deer, the wolves, and the rhythms of a landscape that sustained his people for generations. The narrative follows Wikis from childhood through the great hunts and the changing seasons of a year in camp, capturing a way of life that was already vanishing when Grinnell set these true incidents down. This is not a tale of the frontier told from the outside. It is a window into a world that was being lost, written by a man who saw it and loved it enough to remember.