The Vore Buffalo Jump: Twenty Thousand Animals in a Hole

In nineteen sixty-nine, a survey crew was marking the route for Interstate Ninety through northeastern Wyoming. Their instruments told them a sinkhole lay directly in the path of the proposed road. Standard procedure was to drill test holes to check the stability of the ground. When the engineers drilled, they found bones. A great many bones.

The University of Wyoming was called in. Archaeologists confirmed what the bones suggested: the sinkhole was a buffalo jump, a natural trap used by Plains Indian peoples for hunting bison on a massive scale. The road was shifted to the south. The site was named the Vore Buffalo Jump, after the family whose land it sat on.

The sinkhole was formed when gypsum bedrock dissolved and the ground above it collapsed, leaving a steep-sided pit about forty feet deep and two hundred feet across. It sits right at the edge of the Black Hills, where the hills meet the northern Great Plains, a place where large bison herds moved through predictable corridors.

Hunters would position themselves to stampede a herd toward the sinkhole. Animals at the front of the run could not stop when the ground disappeared; they fell in and were killed by the fall or disabled by injuries, then butchered by the people waiting below. The Vore site was used this way from roughly fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred, a span of three hundred years. Analysis of the bone layers shows evidence of Kiowa, Apache, Shoshone, Hidatsa, Crow, and Cheyenne peoples using the site across those centuries.

Archaeologists have excavated about five percent of the site. That five percent contained tens of thousands of bones and projectile points preserved in discrete layers. The estimated total: remains of twenty thousand buffalo, the most well-preserved accumulation of its kind in the Northern Hemisphere.

You are passing within a short distance of it right now.