recorded politics From the journal of Henry Kelsey , we get the first glimpse of alliances in the wider region. He reports that the emerging Iron Confederacy (Cree and Assiniboine) were on friendly terms with the Blackfoot Confederacy (Peigan, Kainai, and Siksika) and allied with them against a list of other groups whose identity is not known, the "Eagle Birch Indians, Mountain Poets, and Nayanwattame Poets". Another early account comes from Saukamappe (a Cree later adopted into the Peigan), who was 75 years old when he recounted his early years to explorer David Thompson in the 1780s. French explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye made it as far west as the upper Missouri River in 1738, and his sons were also explorers of the West. Based on these and other sources it is possible to derive a rough picture of the political map of the northern Great Plains during the eighteenth century. The Eastern Shoshone were able to acquire horses from their southern linguistic cousins at an early stage, and therefore became dominant on the northern Plains. By the early 1700s their hunting range extended from the North Saskatchewan River in the north (present-day Alberta) to the Platte River in the south (Wyoming) and all along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains and out onto the Plains to the east. The Shoshone became extremely feared for constantly launching raids in order to capture more war prisoners. This earned them the hatred of all of their neighbours, and resulted in a temporary alliance between the Blackfoot Confederacy, Sarsis, Plains Crees, Assiniboines, and Gros Ventres in order to resist the Shoshone. The Shoshone could not keep a monopoly on the horses, however, and soon the Blackfoot had their own, obtained through trade from the Crow, captured in raids, or bred by the Blackfoot themselves. At the same time the Blackfoot began to acquire firearms from the British Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) to the northeast, often via Cree and Assiniboine middlemen. The Piegans (and other Blackfoot) were then able to begin to push the Shoshone south of the Red Deer River by 1780. The 1780-1782 smallpox outbreak devastated both the Shoshone and Blackfoot, however the Blackfoot used their newly acquired military superiority to launch raids on the Shoshone in which they captured large numbers of women and children, who were then forcibly assimilated into Blackfoot culture thereby increasing their