What Really Happened During an Ancient Buffalo Jump Hunt

A buffalo jump is a hunting strategy employed by the Plains Indian tribes of North America for generations to kill large numbers of plains bison in a single hunt by utilizing features of the landscape to push bison off cliffs.

Whilst it’s likely this occurred across the American West, some of the most notable archaeological sites where this has been recorded include the aptly named Head-Smashed-in buffalo jump in Southern Alberta and the Madison buffalo jump in Montana. At both sites, researchers have found hundreds of buffalo bones piled up at the base of 30-foot cliffs, indicating that these hunts were highly successful.

But the reality is that pulling off such a hunt is much easier said than done. It would have often required 50 or more hunters to coordinate closely together to successfully pull it off. In general, there were usually four stages to the hunt, each requiring people to perform a distinct task in order to push the buffalo in exactly the right direction.

The first and arguably the most essential part of the hunt is circling the herd and pushing them toward the cliff. Often, this wasn’t over a short distance. At the Head-Smashed-In buffalo jump in Alberta, evidence shows that the hunt actually started around 1.9 miles away in the Porcupine hills, where large herds of bison would gather to graze, meaning that hunters had to push hundreds of animals the whole way there. To do this, the hunters had to capitalize on the herding nature of bison, by frightening them into a moving ball of animals and pushing them in the desired direction.

And to do this, indigenous hunters had some ingenious techniques. Firstly, the “runners” would circle the herd from the back whilst draped in wolf, buffalo, or antelope skin to conceal themselves.

To confuse the herds further, a lead runner draped in buffalo skin and mimicking the herds’ behavior would lead the herd in the direction they wanted. They’d even make distressed calf calls to bring the lead herd cows in their direction. This decoy position was an honored position and typically only appointed to the fastest runner of the tribe.

Once the bison were moving in the right direction, the next task was to keep them flowing and ensure that they were moving too fast to deviate from their path. To do this, tribal hunters would use two techniques.

At the back of the herd, some of the runners who originally encircled the buffalo would begin running at full speed, dressed in wolf skins, to scare the animals into a stampede. Though bison are much faster than people, they can’t maintain top speeds for miles at a time, so the endurance runners could always keep up with the back of the herd, hurtling spears and arrows to scare the bison.

The next technique helped to direct the now thundering herd right over the cliffs themselves. Prior to the hunt occurring, tribal members would construct large stone towers called cairns, placing sometimes hundreds of them to construct “drive lanes” for the bison to run down. As an animal of the wide-open plains, buffalo would instinctually avoid the towers and funnel themselves towards the top of the cliff, despite the fact that they could actually quite easily bowl down the towers and escape at any time.

The third aspect of the hunt is the most dramatic, and it is the part that most people know about this hunting technique. Once hundreds of bison are on the move, stampeding at full speed towards their ultimate death, nothing, not even the bison themselves, can stop them.

It’s likely that the leading animals of the herd would see the approaching cliff and would have tried to slow down, but with that much mass moving at that speed, there is little chance of a swift turn at the last minute. And even if it was possible, the charging herd behind them would have pushed them over the edge anyway.

In many jumps, there’s evidence that tribes often pushed hundreds of animals off a cliff all at once. At the Vore Buffalo Jump, located about halfway between Sundance, Wyoming, and Spearfish, South Dakota, archeologists estimate that over 4,000 bison were killed during a 250-year period. One can only imagine the magnificent sight of that many animals barrelling over a cliff edge and falling to their inevitable deaths.

Though leaping off a 30-foot drop is almost certain death for a nearly one-ton animal, it’s likely that they didn’t all die peacefully. The first few fell instantly to their deaths, but as the animals began to pile up on each other, any surviving animal would be crushed by the weight of their herd members falling on top of them. The last few animals would likely receive serious injuries from their fall but would have been still alive by the time the hunters arrived at the bottom of the cliff.

This is when the cleanup crew would arrive and finish off any of the survivors with spears and clubs. By the end of the hunt, a massive tangle of dead buffalo, sometimes hundreds of individuals, would be left at the bottom of the cliff. There was often so much food produced by these hunts that they could pick and choose just the most select cuts of the animals on the edges of the pile, leaving those in the center almost completely untouched.

Cuts that contained the most fat and micronutrients were prioritized first, including the tongue, heart, liver, rump, and ribs, over cuts that modern hunters would consider prime, such as the backstraps, tenderloins, or leg steaks.

To process all of these animals, it’s likely that the entire tribe would move their camp for a few days, processing and drying as much meat as possible before it spoiled. If the hunt was performed during the depths of winter, then the tribe might have close to a week to preserve what they can, whilst, in summer, it would likely only last a day or two.

These buffalo jumps were not only a feast for indigenous hunters but also for the plethora of scavengers out on the great plains. Species such as Great Plains wolves (a slightly smaller and lighter-colored subspecies of the modern grey wolf), grizzly bears, coyotes, foxes, ravens, and vultures would converge on the dead carcasses for days after the initial kill. In fact, it’s highly likely that such mass kills of buffalo would have been an essential food source for grizzlies on the Great Plains and perhaps one of their main food sources in lean times.

Whilst it may seem brutal to some, buffalo jumps were an essential part of subsisting on the landscape for the First Nations people of America. They produced an abundance of protein that would have helped feed the tribe for months at a time. After the introduction of the horse as a far more efficient hunting tool, this hunting technique slowly faded away with time but definitely hasn’t been forgotten.

Featured art via Tanner Streeter.