🇺🇲Houseki💔🌲

What were buffalo jumps? Buffalo jumps were one way Plains tribes hunted bison before horses, not the only way. They also used smaller group hunts, ambushes, and later horseback methods once horses spread across the plains. Jumps were the big communal events when the conditions lined up for a large kill. They drove herds over cliffs or into steep drops. The Blackfoot called these jumps pishkun (pih-SKUN), meaning deep blood kettle. Hunters built long lines of stone cairns and brush to funnel the animals. Young runners, sometimes wearing wolf or bison skins, led the herd toward the edge. Once the stampede started, the animals in back pushed the ones in front over. People waiting below finished off anything still alive with spears and clubs. William R. Leigh painted Buffalo Drive in 1947 and it shows the chaos of one of these drives. Runners on foot and horseback are pushing the herd right at the cliff while animals start going over. Down below you can see people ready to start butchering. It is romanticized and the action is compressed, but it gets the scale across. Alfred Jacob Miller did a watercolor around 1837 called Driving Herds of Buffalo over a Precipice. He worked from stories rather than seeing one himself. Mounted hunters are driving a packed herd toward the drop and some bison are already falling. He exaggerated the numbers the way a lot of those early sketches did. The actual places look quieter now. A photo of Head-Smashed-In (Estipah-skikikini-kots) in Alberta shows the layered cliff rising out of the prairie with a trail running along it. The drop is not that high by today’s standards, but it was enough to break legs and stop the animals. An aerial shot of the same site shows the long escarpment, the open basin where they gathered the herd, and the area below where the processing camps sat. Bone deposits there go many meters deep from centuries of use. After the jump the whole group worked on whatever they could reach. They took the high-fat parts first, tongue, heart, liver, hump, dried the meat into pemmican, boiled bones for grease, and worked the hides. A big kill could be more than they could finish before the meat spoiled, especially if it was warm. Animals buried deep in the pile were hard to get to. At some sites you still find articulated skeletons, which shows not everything got used. They usually killed the whole group that came over so none got away and made the next drive harder. It was one of the highest-yield methods people figured out before modern times, but it was not everyday hunting. It took real knowledge of the land and how bison moved, and the limits of how many people you had, how fast the meat spoiled, and how much you could carry meant they did not use every part of every animal every time.