Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

Today we are going to the best preserved buffalo jump in North America. Long before the Europeans brought horses to North America, the native Indians hunted buffalo by foot. They studied and watched the behaviors of buffalo and devised a way to hunt many buffalo at one time. In the fall, when the  buffalo were fattened up for the winter, selected members of the tribe would go off to the hunting grounds.                                                                                        See the Prairie dog looking at the hunting grounds in the center.                          They gathered rocks and branches and would bundle the rocks together using them as a stand for the branches to form a lane. The lane would be wide at one end narrowing to a cliffs edge. Some of the hunters would wear wolf skins and come up from behind the heard making the heard uneasy, slowly driving the heard in the direction they wanted them to go. Another hunter would wear a buffalo hide and act as a calf in distress. If a calf was in distress, the heard would rally around the calf to protect it from danger. When the time was right, the hunters in wolf skins would run toward the heard, starting a stampede. The hunter in the buffalo skin would run a head of the heard leading them toward the cliff.  Just before the cliffs edge the hunter would jump out of the way. Since the buffalo had poor eye sight they would think the branches and rock, that were lined up in a row on either side of them, was a wall. They would continue down the carin, a shoot if you will, until they ran off the cliff.                                                                                                       This is the cliff the buffalo ran off of.                

The Indians would process the meat, and if the hunt was good, it would feed the tribe for the whole winter. According to one of the Blackfoot oral traditions, a young boy wanted to witness the plunge of the buffalo as they were driven off the cliff. He stood under the cliffs ledge and watched the  animals fall. It was an unusually good hunt that day and the boy became trapped. When his people came to do the butchering they found the boy with his skull smashed by the weight of the carcasses. Hence the name Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.