American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  A shedding bull buffalo near Yellowstone National Park.

  AS I’M WALKING DOWN the buffalo trail, I notice that the spruce limbs hanging over the trail hold strands of tangled and bleached buffalo wool. The tufts look like someone dragged a brownish cotton ball across the bristles of a wire brush. Some of the tufts are as high as my own head, and the individual strands are several inches long. Those tufts probably came from the humps of big bulls shedding their winter coats. Travelers on the Great Plains reported walking through cottonwood groves where the ground was covered ankle deep in shed buffalo hair. Settlers who crossed the Great Plains without seeing a single buffalo would still find enough wool hanging on sagebrush and hawthorn bushes to experiment with weaving it. I was thinking about this as I walked along, and I worked a few tufts of wool into a twisted piece of thread about two inches long. The thread felt nice in my fingers, and I started grabbing whatever tufts of hair I passed. My hand was nearly full by the time the trail climbed out of the spruce forest and entered a large network of meadows punctuated by thin stands of aspen. In areas that now contain buffalo, researchers have found that one-third of all nesting birds use buffalo wool to line their nests. The wool is also hoarded by rodents such as mice and voles. I think about this, then wad the wool into a small ball and hang it from a low stem on an aspen tree.

  I come to a hill, and I guess that it’s the backside of the ridge paralleling the Chetaslina valley. As it gets steeper and steeper, I start switchbacking my way up. When I’m a quarter of the way up the hill, I start to feel intensely hot. I drop my pack and pull off my hat and jacket just in time for a wave of nausea that forces me to sit down. I haven’t felt right all day long, but this is ridiculous. My head’s pounding. I feel under my shirt, and my skin feels like the inside of a wet plastic bag full of mushrooms.

  “Damn,” I say aloud. I go through the events of the last few days in my mind, trying to pick out moments when I might have drunk contaminated river water and picked up some kind of waterborne parasite such as giardia or cryptosporidium. I’ve had beaver fever twice, once in Colorado and once in Michigan, and each time it started out with uncontrollable pants messing followed by a nasty load of flu-like symptoms. But I can’t think of when I might have drunk bad water without treating it first, either with iodine, boiling, or filtering. Plus, I don’t have any diarrhea going on. If it’s not beaver fever, I don’t know what’s happening. It must be some other kind of fever. Is there such a thing as buffalo fever?

  I’m still hotter than hell, so I pull off my outer shirt. Then I strip off another layer. I finally start to cool down, and I lie back against the slope of the hill. It feels good. I close my eyes and place my hat across my lids to block out the light. I start to doze, but then I jerk myself to an upright position. Grizzly bears can be scary and having buffalo fever would suck, but neither of those things will kill you as smoothly as hypothermia. An average of 689 people die from hypothermia every year in the United States, in all fifty states and during every month. The annual incidence rate for hypothermia fluctuates between 2 and 4 deaths per million citizens, and it seems perfectly intuitive that Alaska is the nation’s hypothermia capital. Here, there are over 4 annual deaths per 100,000 citizens. That’s over ten times the national average and twice the rate of the state’s nearest two competitors, Montana and Wyoming, which average 1.58 and 1.57 per 100,000 people, respectively.

  The really spooky thing about hypothermia is the phenomenon called “paradoxical undressing.” People suffering from hypothermia often shed their clothes. The reasons for this are somewhat murky, but it probably has to do with the behavior of blood vessels. When your body gets really cold, the blood vessels near the skin contract to prevent the flow of blood to the body’s surface. This keeps more blood near the body’s core, where it can stay warm. But the blood vessels don’t want to be contracted, and it takes a lot of energy to keep them that way. Eventually they tire out and dilate. The warm blood rushes back to the surface, and you get a sensation of intense heat.

  I look around at my discarded clothing, and I think of those news descriptions you see whenever someone dies of hypothermia out in the woods. In 2003, the dead and hypothermic body of a thirty-five-year-old Alaskan hiker was “not clothed from the waist up and was missing a shoe.” In 2004, when a hypothermia victim’s body was recovered in northwestern New Mexico, “his jacket and neck chain were recovered a short distance away.” In 2005, a man in Wyoming was found “partially dressed in a pullover, T-shirt, pants, and one sock.” I envision an article about my own death, and think about how the police will never realize that I had undressed because of buffalo fever. My buddies would read the article and say, “What an idiot! Steve should’ve known better than to paradoxically undress. The dumb ass!”

  I force myself to get up and put my hat and shirt back on. If I’m going to take a nap, I’ll have to do it in my sleeping bag. To get back to camp, I have to reach the crest of the ridge, or else I’ll have to traipse back through the spruce bottom. I take a few steps, feeling totally nauseous, and then rest a moment. I take a few more steps, get nauseous again, then rest again. I do this a few more times, wondering all the while whether or not grizzlies are attracted to the smell of human vomit. I’ll bet they are; they’d probably love it. I start picking my way down the ridgeline. I make it back to my camp before dark. I get a fire going and boil some pasta, but I can only get a couple of bites down. I put the food back in the box and rig the lid shut with straps. Then I put some pebbles in the cooking pot and set that on the lid so it’ll make a noise if a bear messes with it. It’s below freezing and I can hear slush flowing in the Chetaslina. I chamber a round in my rifle and place it next to my sleeping bag. I’m shivering as I undress and climb in. Danny left behind an extra sleeping bag, and I pull it over my own. Sleep comes folding over me before I can zip it up.

  10

  JUDITH COOPER, a graduate student in anthropology at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas, does not immediately come across as the sort of person who’d spend a lot of time hanging around in places where Indians once killed massive amounts of buffalo by chasing them off cliffs. She is slight and shy, with intelligent eyes, and on the day I met her, she was dressed in stylish jeans and black boots and had on makeup. When asked how she ended up in her line of work, though, she was quick and certain with her answer. “Every kid is interested in archaeology,” she told me. “For me, that interest never went away.” With that, we spent a couple of hours talking about the business of falling buffalo.

  The Blackfoot term for a buffalo jump is pishkun, which translates roughly to “deep blood kettle.” Most known buffalo jumps—they number in the hundreds—are located along major river valleys on the northern Great Plains. At the Vore Buffalo Jump, near Sundance, Wyoming, volumetric calculations taken from a bone bed that is a hundred feet in diameter and twenty-five feet deep suggest that perhaps twenty thousand buffalo were killed there over a great many years. The pile of buffalo bones beneath the Ulm Pishkun Buffalo Jump, outside of Great Falls, Montana, is one mile long. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada, has a bone bed that is thirty feet thick—or well over half as deep as the cliff is tall. The great mass of buffalo bones at these jump sites attests to their productive tenures, but it also opens up a small mystery. As anyone with experience moving sheep or cattle can verify, it’s a real pain in the ass to get large animals moving in a direction that they don’t want to go, especially when the animals have to put their hooves down on unfamiliar surfaces. Since buffalo can’t fly, open air certainly qualifies as just such a surface. So what would compel a buffalo to commit suicide? I was hoping that Judith could help explain.

  In 2005, Judith co-authored a paper in American Antiquity that included a detailed assessment of the topography surrounding Bonfire Shelter, the southernmost (and perhaps oldest) buffalo jump in the United States. The site is at the head of Mile Canyon, a Rio Grande tributary near the T
exas-Mexico border. The cliff’s face is eighty-five feet high. At that elevation, the buffalo would be falling at forty-seven miles per hour when they smacked the ground. (It seems that hunters didn’t like their cliffs to be much taller than that, probably because the buffalo would be too smashed up to do any good.) There is a conspicuous V-shaped notch eroded into the cliff’s rim; it looks like a pour spout on a water pitcher. Beneath the notch is a fifteen-foot-tall cone-shaped mound of rubble that contains several distinct layers of buffalo bones along with human artifacts. The uppermost layer has the remains of at least eight hundred buffalo; during decomposition, the carcasses built up gases and burst into an inferno that turned most of the bone to ash. That’s how Bonfire Shelter got its name.

  The ground at the top of the cliff at Bonfire Shelter is typical of most buffalo jumps, with ample grassland and nearby access to water. These features were probably reliable attractants to buffalo, but evidence from other buffalo jumps suggests that Indians sometimes sweetened the deal for buffalo, so to speak, by luring them into position. There are historical accounts describing hunters who were so skilled in the ways of buffalo that they could dress up in a buffalo hide and lead a curious herd into the region of the trap.* At the Madison Buffalo Jump, in western Montana, archaeological evidence suggests that groups of as many as one hundred hunters may have gently herded the buffalo to the plain above the precipice.

  The next step was to get the buffalo moving. Indians used a variety of techniques to instigate the stampede, and then to control the motion and energy of it once it started. They let the wind carry their human odor to the buffalo; they lit wildfires; they waved torches; they hid in depressions in the ground and jumped up just in time; they built rock cairns in the shapes of humans; and they simply chased after the buffalo while waving their arms. But still, there’s the burning question: How would you scare a buffalo herd so much that it would stampede off a cliff rather than turning to face an inferior number of adversaries that each weighed less than a tenth of an individual buffalo’s weight?

  To be fair, the word “jump” is not particularly suitable for describing how buffalo jumps worked. The animals did not plunge off the cliffs in a suicidal flight, like so many versions of Thelma and Louise. Rather, as Judith explained, they were the victims of subterfuge, or a sort of grassland hall of mirrors. Working with colleagues, Judith used GIS, or geographic information systems, to create a digital, three-dimensional topographical map of Bonfire Shelter. Judith described the creation of the Bonfire maps as “taking a systematic approach to something that is very mundane” (a description of the actual process includes the phrase “inverse distance weighted spatial interpolation”), but the outcome is extraordinary. The map is capable of yielding a buffalo’s-eye view of the animal’s own impending death—all on compact disc.

  There is no archaeological evidence of man-made obstacles in the area of Bonfire Shelter, and Judith believes that the natural landscape offered all the essential physical components for an effective stampede. The routes, or “drive lines,” had an obvious termination, the V-shaped wedge, but could have begun just about anywhere on the surrounding prairie. To select a theoretical route for a stampeding herd, the researchers chose sixteen arbitrary points along a circle radiating two and a half miles from the jump-off point. They rated each of these routes based on a number of factors, such as the loss and gain of elevation, physical obstacles, and visibility. From there, they narrowed it down to five possible routes that the hunters could have feasibly utilized to deliver the buffalo to the location of their death. Of those, drive line No. 4 seemed the best candidate.

  Judith turned on her laptop. The screen was filled with what looked like a video game. I was standing on a rolling plain beneath the big Texas sky. “Your eyes are 1.7 meters off the ground,” Judith said, “and you’ll be running at almost top speed for a bison—we calculated fifty kilometers per hour.” She clicked the computer’s mouse, and suddenly I was running away from some unseen threat, traveling at a buffalo’s speed and seeing the ground from a buffalo’s level. Everything looked all right. All I saw was ground, rolling ahead of me. A distant horizon, swells of land, slight rises and drops in elevation. I sought out paths of least resistance as I was channeled by the landscape. My decisions seemed logical. Knowing what was supposedly behind me—a bunch of guys with sharp sticks—I continued to run toward what seemed like an unbroken expanse of open ground. But then, suddenly, something happened. The land that looked continuous was in fact an optical illusion; the plain was interrupted by a deep chasm. At my height, it wasn’t possible for me to see the chasm until I was seventy-six feet away. Traveling at thirty miles per hour, I crossed that expanse of ground in less than two seconds. To stop would be like slamming down your car brakes on an L.A. freeway with a line of Mack trucks riding your bumper—just because you stop doesn’t mean you’re going to stop.

  Anyone whose sensitivities are disturbed by modern slaughterhouse practices would be utterly repulsed by the mayhem at the foot of a buffalo jump. In the fall, buffalo suffered compound fractures. Splintered femurs were driven far enough into bodies to puncture stomachs and spill contents. Buffalo landed on other buffalo. Their horns and hooves ripped into each other’s hides and flesh. The backs of the buffalo’s eyes turned red with blood. Unhurt animals were trapped under the weight of their herd members. Calves wandered about in a daze, bellowing for their mothers. Severely injured buffalo regurgitated food and choked on their tongues. Animals with rib-punctured lungs drowned in their own blood.

  There were many survivors, wounded but alive. Near Emigrant, Montana, over fifteen hundred arrowheads have come out of the ground beneath a buffalo jump, suggesting that such kills required a lot of mop-up. The Indians usually constructed obstacles to help contain the wounded animals. Using buffalo ribs and broken mandibles, they’d dig postholes for juniper posts that they cut down to size with fire. The posts supported the walls of sturdy corrals. They’d sharpen sticks on both ends and drive them into the ground, angled toward the fall zone like some medieval defense mechanism. Or they’d build fences out of sticks and brush covered with hides, or latticeworks of lodgepoles, or leg bones left over from older kills, or even whole frozen carcasses.

  When it was all said and done, a successful buffalo jump must have been a thing of beauty. I like to think about the breathless Indians who wandered among the raw carnage, knives drawn and ready for the work ahead. I suspect that they experienced feelings of awe, gratitude, happiness, relief, and accomplishment. To understand their emotions, imagine that everything you’ve owned and worked for—house, clothes, furniture, jewelry, artwork, luggage, cookware, bedding, food—was thrown off a cliff and dashed to smithereens. If that happened, you would lose all of the things that the Indians gained from the smashed-up buffalo at the foot of the cliff. Their entire lives were contained within the steaming pile of blood, meat, and fur; all they had to do was pick out the parts, rearrange them, and put them back together again in useful ways.

  INDIAN HUNTERS had many clever ways of killing buffalo. They’d dress in wolf hides and crawl up close enough to sink projectile points into the rib cages of the unsuspecting grazers. A hunter might kill several buffalo this way before the herd took flight. Early in the spring, buffalo calves were so dependent on their mothers that they wouldn’t run off even when the mother fell dead. Indians would snatch these calves by the back legs and bring them home so that their children could practice archery and spear throwing on live targets. Then the hunter could skin the calf and climb into its fresh hide and waddle back into another buffalo herd to make a kill.

  In the wintertime, Indians would herd buffalo into snowdrifts; while the animals floundered on their spindly legs, the hunters would walk across the drifts on snowshoes and kill the animals with knives. If the ice on a lake was slick, Indians would chase buffalo out there and spear the animals when they fell down. On the Missouri River in the winter of 1805–6, the fur trader Charles McKenzie watched the Mandan I
ndians use another trick to kill buffalo on the ice. They would drive herds “to the banks of the Missouri and, by gradual approaches, confine them into a narrow space where the ice was weakened, until, by their weight and pressure, large squares of ice … would give way and vast numbers of animals were plunged into the river and carried by the current under the solid ice to a ‘mare’ a little below, where they again emerged, floated and were received by crowds of women and children.”

  In the summer and fall months they’d kill buffalo with fire and water. Along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, Indians would torch vast tracts of land next to the river and then wait for the buffalo to jump into the water to escape. While swimming, the animals were so slow that hunters could grab on to their hair and slit their throats while they swam. The explorer and missionary Father Louis Hennepin described how the Indians would set large fires that encircled entire herds “except some passage which they leave on purpose, and where they take post with their bows and arrows. The buffalo … are thus compelled to pass near these Indians, who sometimes kill as many as a hundred and twenty in a day.” Sometimes Indians would use nothing beyond their own bodies to corral buffalo. A group of hunters would surround small buffalo herds and then close in until the animals were contained in a circle. The Indians would kill the buffalo as they tried to escape, often so close that the hunter could pluck out his used arrow from the side of the animal before it fell over and broke it.

  Despite the ingenuity of these methods, anthropologists seem to be most interested in the large-scale, industrial slaughter of buffalo that is typified by the use of buffalo jumps. While it seems as though buffalo jumps were in isolated, scattered usage for much of the time since the end of the Pleistocene, they came into their heyday at about the time of Christ. Their widespread usage marks the advent of large tribal alliances that gathered together on a seasonal basis to trade, socialize, and conduct religious practices. Feeding these big groups of people required large-scale buffalo hunting; likewise, large-scale buffalo hunting required big groups of people. The use of buffalo jumps dropped off precipitously with the introduction of the horse; with beasts of burden, the Indians could kill just as many buffalo without having to rely on luck to put the animals in the proper position. From then on, the most common hunting method was the one that we know from movies: bare-chested, brightly painted Indians who daringly rode into running buffalo herds while firing arrows and bullets into the animals at point-blank range.