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James Willard Schulz (1859-1947) was an author, explorer, Glacier National Park guide who named many of its prominent features, fur trader and historian of the Blackfeet Indians. He was born into a well-to-do family in Boonville, NY, and learned outdoor skills during camping and hunting trips in his youth, becoming an experienced shooter from a young age. In 1877 he moved to Fort Conrad, Montana, establishing a trading post there in 1880 and living among the Pikuni tribe who gave him the name Apikuni ('Spotted Robe' in Blackfeet). In 1879 he married Natahki, a Piegan Blackfeet who was a survivor of the Baker massacre of 1870, with whom he had a son named Hart Merriam, or Lone Wolf, born in 1882. By the mid-1880s he began spending more time in the region that is now the Glacier National Park, guiding and outfitting local hunters, and he was also contributing articles to Forest and Stream magazine. Natahki died in 1903 and by 1907 he had moved to Los Angeles where he was literary editor of the Los Angeles Times and published the first of his many books, My Life as an Indian. Here he married Celia Hawkins, later resuming his life with the Indians. Celia left Schulz in 1928 and they were divorced in 1930 but the period of their marriage was his most productive as a writer, with the majority of his books being written during this time. He was later married for a third time - to Jessica Louise Donaldson, a lifelong advocate for Northern Plains Indian culture who arranged to publish some of Schulz's works posthumously. Guiding in the rugged Glacier area had taken its toll on Schulz physically and he suffered ill health for most of his last 30 years, falling victim to incapacitating lung and heart infections, and injuries from various falls. After moving to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming to be close to the Native American tribes he grew up with, he suffered a fatal heart attack in June 1947 and was buried on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in the old burial ground of his first wife's family. In his book With the Indians in the Rockies (1912) Schulz retells the adventure stories of fellow trader Thomas Fox's youth. He first befriended in the 1870s and had often urged him to write down these gripping yarns of his early days among the Indians but Fox died before he could commit them to paper. With six full-page illustrations reproduced from drawings by George Varian (1865-1923).

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