JUMPING BUFFALO

Fattened in autumn for the lean winter ahead, a lone buffalo, or bison, can yield as much as 800 pounds of edible meat, enough to feed a family for weeks. The meat gathered from a buffalo jump—a cliff over which Plains Indians historically drove bison en masse to their deaths—was enough to sustain an empire. A single stampede of 200 animals yielded some 160,000 pounds of meat, ranking buffalo jumps among history’s most productive means of slaughter. New research at such sites across North America suggests these communal hunts were not only about food—they also enabled tribal leaders to amass “buffalo wealth” and rise to prominence.

According to Blackfeet (known as Blackfoot in Canada) tradition, when the first people asked their creator, Napi (“Old Man”), what they would eat, he shaped buffalo from clay and brought them to life. “These are your food,” he told them. When the people asked how they were to slaughter the buffalo, Napi directed them to run the animals over a cliff and harvest the meat. Several hundred ancient buffalo jump sites span the grasslands. The granddaddy of all known sites is Head-Smashed-In, a 1,000-foot-wide ridge in the Porcupine Hills of southwest Alberta, Canada, roughly an hour’s drive north of the Montana border. At the base of its sandstone cliffs lay more than 30 vertical feet of accumulated buffalo bones. Researchers estimate that over some six millennia Plains Indians slaughtered upward of 125,000 animals at Head-Smashed-In.

The precipice at the heart of a buffalo jump—which the Blackfeet referred to as a piskun (loosely translated as “deep blood kettle”)—represented the endpoint of months of preparation and thousands of square miles of human manipulation. How did tribes manage such large-scale hunting efforts? As with a hearty meal of roasted buffalo tongue (a Plains Indian delicacy), they began with fire. Months in advance of the hunt they would burn grassland “gathering basins” to encourage the lush growth that attracted big herds. The gathering basin just west of Head-Smashed-In encompasses some 15 square miles bordered by flowing water (adult bison eat more than 20 pounds of grass and drink 8 gallons of water a day—requirements satisfied within reasonable stampeding distance from the cliffs).

Working in tandem, hunters dressed in wolf skins and buffalo hides would approach a grazing herd, employing a combination of fear and attraction to drive them into converging rows of stone cairns, or rock piles. Such drive lanes capitalized on big mammal behavioral ecology and their propensity to run when confused. “Their hunt worked,” wrote Dale Lott, a biologist who spent his life observing buffalo in western Montana’s National Bison Range, “because they had eavesdropped on the whispers from the bison’s phylogenic history and turned those whispers to their advantage.” To be specific, the Plains Indians had conceived a hunting tactic based on their quarry’s evolutionary response to predation from wolves, the buffalo’s onetime leading predator. The hunters’ lanes of stacked stones, sticks, dung and flapping ribbons, spaced 5 to 10 yards apart, were enough to spook a herd of cows and calves, sending them careening down the lanes like shaggy bowling balls to a cliff edge. Thousands of such cairns, comprising some 6 miles of drive lanes, radiate in toward the cliffs at Head-Smashed-In.

Another component of buffalo jumps that exploits bison biology involves the animal’s poor eyesight. As at several other buffalo jumps across North America, Head-Smashed-In presented an optical illusion to running animals: As they raced down the lanes, it appeared the prairie extended to the horizonthat is, until the drop suddenly materialized underfoot. Even if animals at the head of a large stampede were able to stop in time to avoid the fall, the many tons of galloping momentum behind them inevitably spelled doom for the herd.

When executed properly, buffalo jumps were unrivaled means of food production. In 1792 Peter Fidler of the Hudson’s Bay Co. observed that while the hunts often failed, successful jumps killed hundreds of animals at a time on the northern Plains of what would become Alberta and Montana. He described one such Creek Indian jump, over which whole herds had broken their legs, necks and other parts in the fall: “Vast quantities of bones was laying there that had been drove before the rock.” In the early 1800s Captain Meriwether Lewis of Corps of Discovery fame noted that Indian hunters along the Missouri River had also destroyed entire herds at a stroke. Aside from these accounts, there are few written records of buffalo jumps, let alone specifics about their role in Indian culture. Historians and archaeologists had long assumed buffalo jumps were purely subsistence enterprises, prehistoric food factories that represented the advent of commercialized meat acquisition on the prairies. But anthropology professor María Nieves Zedeño of the University of Arizona and her team of archaeologists and historians are illuminating a social dimension of these cooperative hunting events.

Zedeño asserts that Plains Indians in the Alberta and Montana foothills (which collectively contain more than 200 recorded buffalo jumps) coordinated mass labor to erect monumental-scale drive lanes and processing camps that not only managed the movement of buffalo but controlled “the flow of friend and foe through prime hunting grounds.” Her team’s use of emerging technologies to map drive lanes, ceremonial features (like rock art panels and vision quest sites) and the jumps themselves reveals the communal buffalo hunts to be far more socially complex than previously imagined. Buffalo jumps marked the boundaries of protected territories and were organized by tribal leaders to maintain hunting grounds, consolidate power and suppress subordinates. Placing them in global context, in an era when the Egyptian pharaohs proclaimed their immortality with newly built pyramids and Chinese emperors advertised their prestige in lavish ivory and jade, the roaming prairie elite measured their might in meat. They used both fresh and dried bison (pemmican) as a trade commodity, to form bonds with allies and in payment for future labor.

The ability and knowledge to conduct successful buffalo jumps solidified a group’s dominance over a region and were highly esteemed traits in that time and place, much as they were for the modern-era Blackfeet/Blackfoot of Montana and Alberta.

Jack Brink, curator emeritus of the Royal Alberta Museum and author of the 2008 book Imagining Head-Smashed-In, estimates that over the nearly 6,000 years the site was in use, the resident Indians employed some 7,300 fire pits and 6 million pounds of fire-cracked rock (heated in fires and then dropped into water-filled boiling pits) to prepare close to 100 million pounds of buffalo. Only the politically savvy could muster that kind of labor and distribute the meat. With surplus food in hand, such leaders extended their control over the northern prairies—a theory supported archaeologically by the recovery in Alberta of exotic stone from the Dakotas for making tools, seashells from both coasts and other raw materials indicative of widespread trading networks and shifting alliances among nomadic empires.

Canada established Head-Smashed-In as a national historic site in 1968, and UNESCO named it a world heritage site in 1981. A seven-tiered interpretive center opened in 1987 to relate the history of the buffalo jump. Assistant professor Shabnam Dailoo, who studies cultural landscapes at Alberta’s Athabasca University, praises the center and historic remains at Head-Smashed-In for interweaving the region’s natural and cultural history and preserving it for future generations like a photograph that anchors a memory. More than 2 million people have visited the site to hear the evolving history and ongoing story of the buffalo, human hunters and the landscape.

Professor Zedeño suggests storytellers and listeners alike look beyond the artifacts and bones to appreciate the cultural landscapes at buffalo jumps. In use until the widespread extermination of buffalo in the 1870s, such sites were not only food factories but also places where people met to build social alliances and exchange information, pouring them onto a landscape like blood on the rocks. Head-Smashed-In is a sacred site where culture and nature blended and influenced each other over more than 200 human generations. It’s a place where great nomadic empires rose and fell.

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Buffalo Hunting over the Ages

Buffalo have successfully fled from predatory species on the prairies for millennia. The trick for human hunters was to impede their movement long enough to kill them. Large-scale communal buffalo hunting often relied on natural features of one sort or another. Among the earliest such landforms they employed were arroyos, steep-sided gullies into which they drove and penned small herds. Oklahoma boasts some arroyo traps dating back 11,000 years. In that era Plains Indians from Wyoming to Alberta also used sand dunes to corral bison.

The Indians erected corrals, or pounds, typically at the end of a long natural or artificial pathway that gradually restricted the lateral movement and pace of running herds. Such pounds were in use some 9,000 years ago and reportedly remained the most common buffalo trap when Europeans arrived on the prairies. In 1858 Canadian geologist and explorer Henry Youle Hind described the shocking sight of a 200-foot-wide circular timber pound in southern Alberta amid which lay the corpses of more than 200 bison: “From old bulls to calves of 3 months old, animals of every age were huddled together in all the forced attitudes of violent death. Some lay on their backs, with eyes starting from their heads and tongue thrust out through clotted gore.”

Some three millennia ago the use of buffalo jumps escalated to industrial proportions. Jumping peaked about 1,000 years ago, providing bison meat and hides to an interlinked commercial network that reportedly spanned the continent. With the reintroduction of the horse from Europe, buffalo drives became even more efficient. Legend has it Blackfeet buffalo caller Many Tail Feathers suspended the use of pounds and jumps in the late 19th century after dreaming that horses rendered such methods too destructive.

Finally, in the late 19th century commercial hunters swept down on the prairies in search of meat and hides for the fur trade and industrial use. In 1840 one Métis party scouring the prairie between present-day Manitoba and the Dakotas comprised 1,630 members, including 400 mounted hunters who killed more than 1,000 bison in a single day’s outing. In the three centuries following European contact commercial hunters reduced the estimated 30 million buffalo on the plains to a few hundred animals. Thanks to farming efforts, the American and Canadian bison populations have since rebounded to 150,000 and 125,000 animals, respectively, spread across all 50 states and 10 provinces.

By Todd Kristensen in "Wild West", USA, volume 30, n. 6, April 2018, excerpts pp. 38-45. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.