If you had to try to kill a wild bison with a spear, how would you do it? That’s 2,500 pounds of muscle, horn and hoof vs. you.
That’s is a pretty remote scenario these days, but for thousands of years it was a day-to-day situation. Northern Plains Indians would have to know how to kill a buffalo like we know how to drive a car or swipe a Visa to pay for our Starbucks.
They came up with an easy method (at least easier than toe-to-toe with a buffalo), and their idea really stood the test of time — the buffalo jump. All they needed was a cliff and a bunch of noisy, agile teenagers.
They would find a herd of buffalo and set their teenagers loose to torment them into a stampede, which the older, wiser hunters would then funnel to the edge of a mesa and off the cliff. The fall would kill most of the buffalo and render any survivors easy pickings.
There is a buffalo jump in Montana near where the Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson rivers join to become the mighty Missouri River. This buffalo jump at the Missouri headwaters was such a good location that it was used by various tribes and peoples for 2,000 years. Archaeologists have unearthed tons of buffalo bones near the base of the cliff, and some of the oldest were dated to around 500 B.C.
One of the groups that used that Madison River buffalo jump was the Blackfeet. They were originally from Canada but were displaced southwestward by European fur traders.
By the late 1600s the Blackfeet had spread out through southern Alberta, all of Montana and parts of South Dakota. When Americans got around to seriously exploring and settling the Northern Plains, the Blackfeet were a force to be reckoned with.
Take for example, the story of infamous mountain man John Colter. Colter had been a member of Lewis & Clark’s expedition in 1806, so he had good knowledge of the area when a buddy of his by the name of John Potts wanted to go trapping beaver three years later.
Colter knew this place where three rivers meet (the Missouri Headwaters, now known as Three Forks, Mont.) that was like heaven for beavers. The only problem was that it was also ground zero for the Blackfoot nation.
Undeterred by good sense, Colter and Potts made their way to the Missouri headwaters, where they would set their traps at dusk and collect them at dawn, then lie low during the day to try to avoid the Blackfeet.
It didn’t work. They got captured, and Potts was killed right away. Seeking to make an example of Colter and have some fun at the same time, the Indians stripped him naked and encouraged him to try to escape across the plains. They gave him a head start, then set a group of young braves on his track.
Running for his life barefoot through brambles, grass and cactus, Colter managed to lose all but one of them, then turned and killed that one.
When the rest of the Indians discovered he’d killed their buddy, they set out after him with renewed fury.
Colter ran about five miles until a blood vessel in his nose burst, but by then he’d come to the confluence. He found a beaver lodge in the river and crawled inside the frigid, watery place to hide. After the Blackfeet pursuers gave up, he walked naked for 11 days to a fort on the Little Bighorn river.
Now, both the buffalo jump and the confluence of rivers are state parks. You can visit Missouri Headwaters State Park and read commemorative signage about Colter’s Run, and you can hike around Madison Buffalo Jump State Park (about 12 miles away) to see how the Blackfeet and generations of their predecessors made their living by slaughtering buffalo en masse.
