The Press: Word from Weasel Necklace

"Wishie Weasel Head got mixed up with an old lady at Heart Butte," read the item in the weekly Browning, Mont. Glacier Reporter (circ. 1,200). "So the old woman pick up a jug of Gallo and whack him over the head and was soaked in wine. He was hospitalized for several days so don't bother an old lady."

Over the last four years, Reporter readers have learned to expect such gamy fare from the paper's correspondent in Heart Butte, a tiny Indian community (pop. 250) hunkered in the hills of Montana's vast Blackfeet Reservation. The Heart Butte correspondent, 65-year-old Weasel Necklace, never lets them down. Writing under his other name, John Tatsey, he produces a column so lively, if ungrammatical, that it is widely reprinted. Sample Tatseyisms:

¶ "Old Uncle Frank was coming out of the Tribal Store with a bag of meat and bread when a young lady came and took the bag and told him that she would go home with him and cook and feed him. She walked so fast he could not keep up."

¶ "Levi Aims Back was picked up Sunday night back of George Wippert Place where he was hung up by one leg on a barbed wire fence. More fences would help the police."

¶ "Last week Chief Big Eagle went out one morning with two buckets after water. He never came back so one of his daughters went down to see what happened. The buckets were there but no Big Eagle. He was already in Valier he went after some thing stronger than whitetail water."

Milo K. Fields, editor-publisher of the Glacier Reporter, used to worry that Tatsey's pungent reporting might draw libel suits. He worries no more. Most of Tatsey's neighbors—Mrs. Maggie Chief All Over, Francis B. (for Bull) Shoe, George Running Wolf Jr. and Sr.—complain only when they are ignored in his column. And the few who do mind Correspondent Tatsey's frank exposures get nowhere with Weasel Necklace, who doubles as a policeman on the 1,252,000-acre reservation. "I just tell them what's what," says Columnist-Cop Tatsey. "And that's all."