First Peoples Buffalo Jump: A Mile of Cliff

Ten miles south of Great Falls, a limestone cliff stretches for approximately one mile along the edge of a high plateau, dropping thirty to fifty feet to the valley floor below. It does not look, at first, like much. But the bone bed at its base tells a different story: six thousand bison died here, their remains accumulating to a depth of thirteen feet over more than a thousand years.

This is First Peoples Buffalo Jump, and it is considered among the largest sites of its kind in North America. Archaeological evidence places the earliest intensive use around nine hundred years into the common era, continuing until approximately seventeen hundred, when the spread of horses transformed bison hunting entirely. Some evidence suggests sporadic use reaching back many centuries earlier.

Seven tribes carry oral histories connected to this place: the Aaninin, Assiniboine, Cree, Kalispel, Piegan Blackfeet, Salish, and Shoshoni. Each called it by their own name. For all of them, it was a communal hunting operation requiring extraordinary coordination across miles of open ground.

Hunters would encircle a bison herd far out on the prairie and begin walking it slowly toward the cliff using drive lines: walls of stacked rock and braided vines stretching for miles. As the herd reached the rim, runners wearing wolf hides would leap from concealment, stampeding the animals over the edge. Below, other hunters waited.

A successful run could feed and clothe a band through an entire winter. Nothing was wasted. The jump was a calendar, a logistics operation, and an act of collective survival, repeated season after season for centuries on this same mile of cliff.