Blackfoot

The Blackfoots are a tribe originating from the Grand Canyon, who have the dubious distinction of being the foundation of the Caesar's Legion.

Background
Unrelated to the actual Blackfoot, this particular tribe originated from a military group led by Captain John Bloch, stranded in the badlands of Arizona after the Great War deprived them of headquarters and transport. Skilled as gunmen, but without any skills that would allow them to survive on their own, Bloch's men took to raiding to sustain themselves - eventually forming an alliance with a local group of ranchers that effectively returned them. In return for protection, they would receive money and access to equipment, food, and liquor. Over the decades, the two groups became intermingled and merged with small groups of Native Americans who abandoned the reservations they were forced into. However, it all ended when a great fire destroyed much of their settlement. Abandoning the ruins, they relocated towards the Grand Canyon. As the knowledge of firearms and technology faded, they became like the Kaibabs and Fredonians, engaged in a constant deadly dance with each other - a little raid here, a little raid there, some kidnapping and rape. They forgot war.

They would eventually receive a crash course in warfare, when the Followers sent the young Edward Sallow east towards the Grand Canyon, on his first expedition in 2246. Accompanied by a physician named Bill Calhoun, he was tasked with learning the dialects of the tribes inhabiting the region. On the way to the Canyon, he and his companion happened upon a cache of historical books, including The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Commentarii de Bello Gallico by Gaius Julius Caesar. He studied the books rigorously for two weeks, not yet aware of their coming significance.Fallout: New Vegas Official Game Guide Collector's Edition p.459: "Rebirth of the Son of Mars The adolescence and young adulthood of the man who calls himself Caesar were spent as a scribe of the Followers of the Apocalypse. While this boy had a quick mind, he made for a scribe of uneven ability, for his success in academics was equal to his interest in the subject assigned. Nor was he a favorite among his fellows. Though athletic and handsome, petulance held him back. He never felt that he belonged among the Followers, and blamed them for it. Their rigorous devotion to scholarship was stifling, their mission to ensure that humanity would never repeat the mistakes of the Great War was ridiculously naive. The boy longed for something more. ''When the time came for the boy to leave the Boneyard and trek the wastes as part of a nine-person expedition, wanderlust soon curdled into disappointment. The primitive conditions of the tribes the expedition encountered disgusted him. Inferior people all, wretched in their squalor. Still, he seemed to discern, amid the chaos of their petty struggles and everyday atrocities, the true order of the wastes-and it was one of anonymous, amoral liberty. The wastes called to the boy as a blank slate upon which a man of will could write his own destiny.'' ''During the same period of the time that the boy was coming to these insights, the expedition uncovered a cache of well-preserved historical texts. Among with adventure fiction and comic books, history had always been his favorite subject, and so the task of cataloguing [sic] and studying the texts fell to him. Though the boy had long been aware of basic facts concerning many ancient empires, these new texts filled in many previously obscure details. Reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire rendered him a veritable hermit for two weeks. But even that could not have prepared him for the Commentarii, the account of the military campaigns of Gaius Julius Caesar, written by the man himself. Reading Commentarii changed the boy's life. Unfortunately, it was destined to change the lives of thousands more, and for the worse.'' ''In Gaius Julius Caesar the boy found a man who seamed to have fulfilled the full measure of potential greatness allotted to him by fate, a man whose career spanned political accomplishment and military achievement in equal measure. Such adventure! And intrigue! And cool uniforms! The boy's frustrations with his lot in life gained sharp focus. In reading about Caesar, he was like an ant scurrying about the feet of a regal statue. He resolved that he would go to any lengths necessary to change the course of his life. The Commentarii would be his blueprint. In an illiterate, benighted world, who would ever know that Caesar was not his original creation?'' ''That night, Caesar offered a different sort of assistance to a tribe his expedition had contacted recently: weapons, medical supplies, and tactical expertise. He led several tribal accomplices back to the expedition's camp and through its defenses, and there oversaw the murder of his eight fellows. Within a week he was leading the tribe on ever more ambitious raids against neighboring bands of raiders and tribals.''" Prior to their arrival in the Grand Canyon, they met with a Mormon missionary, Joshua Graham. Already an accomplished scholar of dialects, Graham was supposed to teach Sallow about the local languages. But before that could take place, the Blackfoot tribe captured the three scholars for ransom.

The foundation
The tribe was a sorry sight for the future Caesar, weak and insignificant. Worse for the hostages, they were at war with seven other tribes, outnumbered and bound to lose. Unwilling to sink with them, Sallow decided to take certain steps. Objections from Calhoun went unheard. Sallow taught the tribe how to properly maintain their firearms, how to properly shoot targets, and how to reload ammunition. The next step was teaching them how to make explosives and drilling in small unit tactics. All was based on books Caesar read as a young boy. Once they were ready, Sallow led them against the Ridgers, their weakest enemy. When the tribe refused to surrender, he ordered every man, woman, and child killed. No exceptions were made. The Blackfoot moved on under Caesar's lead, surrounding the Kaibabs tribe. Upon their refusal to surrender, Sallow took their envoy to the ruins of the Ridgers' village. The piles of corpses were a shocking sight to a tribesman who only knew tribal strife, with the occasional raid, raping, and pillaging, but what Sallow had led was total warfare.

The Kaibabs surrendered. Then the Fredonians. Then all the remaining Grand Canyon tribes. Caesar was acutely aware that the root cause of all the problems were tribal identities, leading to internecine conflict and preventing any substantial recovery. He knew what had to be done. He had to erase all traces of tribal identities, and substitute a single, monolithic culture in their place. The tribes Caesar fought against and assimilated were primitive even by the standards of the post-nuclear world, with nothing even remotely comparable to what existed out west: No towns, no roads, no meaningful industry. They fell to the superior forces marshaled by Sallow and Joshua Graham. While the Blackfoots were assimilated and their history destroyed, those who belonged to the tribe bear no ill will towards Caesar. They consider it an uplifting, a gift from a God. In fact, they are proud of being once Blackfoot, as the first tribe that Caesar led in battle.

Appearances
The Blackfoots were to appear in Van Buren, the canceled Fallout 3 by Black Isle Studios. They were mentioned in Fallout: New Vegas.