Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

What kind of name is that for a World Heritage Site?  Well after years of thinking the Indians snuck up on a herd of buffalo and either shot them with arrows or speared them, we found out how some really did it.

For over 5,000 years the plains Indians have been tracking & herding buffalo on the plains of Alberta, specifically Blackfoot.  The Blackfoot were able to survive the harsh Canadian winter by have a good harvest of buffalo in the late Fall.  

Here’s a quick explanation.  The Blackfoot would ensure the buffaloes had abundant grass to grain on on the high ground near Old Man River.  Having a true understanding of the buffalo they would use warriors dressed in wolves' skins to slowly cull 300-350 buffalo from the larger herds.  The buffalo numbers were thought to be in the tens of millions.  They would carefully direct the buffalo to what the buffalo thought was a nice valley to eat & spend the night.

The tribe would then make a false wall of bushes & hides that tended to keep the herd close together.  Then another warrior dressed in the hide of a young buffalo would start calling out a distress sound just as the sun was rising.  The herd, of mostly female buffalo had a natural instinct to help and would start going towards the “distressed” calf.  The warriors dressed as wolves then would start approaching the herd from the rear.  

The herd would start picking up speed running in the lanes made by the tribe, picking up speed & nearing a panic would have a full-fledged stampede.  They would be running up a crest in the valley, looking directly into the sunrise.  Unbeknownst to them, also approaching a 300-foot cliff. The warrior pretending to be a distressed calf would escape the “lane at the last minute.  The entire herd would blindly run off the cliff to their death.  Any stragglers would be chased off the cliff by the “wolves”. No buffalo was allowed to survive.

Our guide, Donovan pointing out the actual cliff

What the buffalo would have seen if the sunrise wasn’t blinding them

Looking down to the bottom

A display in the museum of the cliff

The entire tribe would be at the base of the cliff, and they would ensure that every buffalo at the base of the cliff was dead.  Then the tribe would harvest EVERY part of the buffalo.  Hides, meat, organs, ligaments, horns, everything was used.  They would then preserve the meat in various ways so they could survive the winter.

Our tour guide, Donovan Strikeswithgun, was very respectful of the heritage & legacy of his tribe.  The Indians were very aware of their relationship with the Creator & his bounty. We asked about the large numbers of buffalo being harvested, but he pointed out it 300 out of 20-30 million buffalo.

But the name???   In Blackfoot, the name for the site is Estipah-skikikini-kots. According to legend, a young Blackfoot wanted to watch the buffalo plunge off the cliff from below but was buried underneath the falling animals. He was later found dead under the pile of carcasses, where he had his head smashed in.  Hence the name.

After we were finished at the site, we did a Geocache near the cliff, just to aggravate Jackie, who still doesn’t have a Canada find.