Buffalo jams and jumps: We ran with the bulls

Bison surrounded our car, eyeing us carefully, perhaps assessing whether we posed a danger. As our car ran slowly along the road, they trotted beside us, so close we could have reached an arm out the window to touch them.

We were in a Yellowstone National Park buffalo jam – like a traffic jam, but big shaggy bison enveloped us rather than other cars. We shot them with our cameras, rather than bows and arrows or guns of yesteryear. I enthusiastically swivelled from one window to the other, taking photos; but really, I could have calmed down – it took some time to extricate ourselves from the jam.

I urged Bill to quickly raise his window if any woolly beasts ventured too close. They’re known to be unpredictable, and those horns could cause damage. The thrills and potential danger were heady; we ran with the bulls! And the cows!

‘Bison’ is the proper term. ‘Buffalo’ is a nickname, thought to have come from the French who called them ‘boeufs.’ The Lakota tribe uses the word ‘tatanka.’

Just before the buffalo jam, we had pulled off the road to see a bison herd in the distance, and that was exciting enough. Through my binoculars, I watched several dozen rolling in the dirt, butting heads, eating grass, lying down, doing their business, and just ambling around. The littlest ones romped amongst their parents.

Not long after the first buffalo jam, Bill braked for a lone male sauntering across the road in front of us, and shortly after that, we were into another jam. Perhaps they too prefer a nicely paved road to clomping through the underbrush? We had to slow down many other times because bison were so close to the road, they could have suddenly veered in front of us.

I felt safer observing these potentially dangerous animals from the car rather than meeting one on a hiking path. Their horns (both sexes have them) vary in length, curvature and pointiness. When we ventured onto a few trails, we carried bear spray and kept our eyes peeled for bison. Their hoofprints and dung were everywhere. Dried dung used to be burned for heat and cooking, a vital fuel source on the prairies where wood was scarce. Apparently, it didn’t smell.

Bison nearly disappeared from Earth after hunters killed millions in the 1800s, according to information in the Yellowstone visitor center. Photos showed mounds of bison skulls piled 30 feet high with people posing on top. By 1901, Yellowstone had only 25. But the next year, the American government funded a bison restoration program; 21 bison bought from private owners were moved to Yellowstone, where they were protected. By 1915, the bison roamed more freely and intermingled with the wild herd. Today, Yellowstone’s bison numbers range from 2,500 to 4,500 – the largest remaining wild herd.

It struck me later that bison numbers reflect roughly how settlers have treated Indigenous folks over the centuries: nearly wiped off the map, but then slowly recovering. And when you look at dates, settlers and governments took steps to protect bison long before they helped Indigenous people.

Of course, Yellowstone has an uncountable number of other spectacular features. We also saw hundreds of elk, many mule deer, and a small herd of pronghorns (not true antelopes but often called so), which are the fastest North American mammal. We could honestly sing “Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play…”

We learned about Yellowstone’s volcanic past, examined petrified trees, saw several waterfalls and the stone Roosevelt Arch – original gateway to the park. We saw Fort Yellowstone (the U.S. Army ran the park from 1886 to 1918 to guard against poachers, developers, and souvenir hunters). And we followed boardwalks around the intriguing Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces. What an astounding area: caves spewing steam, intriguing lacey sculptures, lunar-like landscapes. As the 73-degree-Celsius water bubbles down the hillsides, travertine terraces form, with some appearing almost like undersea coral. It’s endlessly fascinating to study close-up and from afar.

Limestone underlies one of the best-protected travertine-depositing hot springs in the world.

And that was just at the northern end of Yellowstone – the only part open in early April. Clearly, we must return one day to experience more.

We had encountered bison earlier on this road trip – first at Waterton Lakes National Park, at the southwest corner of Alberta near the U.S. border. Late March isn’t the best time to go. Nothing in the little town of Waterton, within the park, was open. Restaurants, gift shops, rental shops and the visitor centre were literally boarded up. But we visited Cameron Falls, saw the Prince of Wales Hotel (opened in 1927; a National Historic Site), read that the park includes the site of Western Canada’s first oil well, and walked around the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, established in 1932 to celebrate peace and friendship between Canada and the U.S.

A posse of bighorn sheep led us out of town. Near the park exit, we stopped at the Bison Paddock – a huge, fenced area – and managed to spot six bison way off in the distance. I was thrilled with my first sighting, not knowing I’d soon be overwhelmed by them in Yellowstone.

We learned about bison hunting at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, also in southern Alberta.

The first questions most people ask are: What’s a buffalo jump? And why is it called ‘Head-Smashed-In’?

A buffalo jump is a cliff where bison are driven off the edge to their death. It’s a way to hunt. And the story goes that a young brave stood under a ledge to see the bison plunging over the cliff. The animals piled up so high that he was trapped against the cliff, and his people found him with his head crushed under the bisons’ weight.

Head-Smashed-In was used for at least 5,700 years, making it the oldest, largest and best-preserved buffalo jump anywhere.

The interpretation centre itself is intriguing – built on seven levels that follow the hillside down. We took the elevator up to the top and walked along the upper trail first, following the cliff to the spot where the bison stampeded over the edge. The Blackfoot people erected small stone cairns topped with shrub branches in two lines (called drive lanes) for several kilometres, helping funnel the bison to the cliff. One person dressed in a bison-calf skin to lead them the right way, while others dressed in wolf skins and chased them to get them to stampede.

We stood at the viewpoint atop the cliff, considering the factors that made this an ideal buffalo jump: bison were attracted by the rolling hills that offered shelter, grass and creek water; people needed the water when processing the meat; and the sandstone cliffs had eroded into the perfect shape, with a slight rise just before the drop-off so the bison wouldn’t see the drop-off until it was too late.

We tried to imagine hundreds of bison stampeding over the edge. But our only stand-in was a yellow-bellied marmot sunning himself on a boulder. The strong wind ruffled his fur that blended perfectly with the rocks and grass. No doubt his ancestors witnessed many a bison hunt.

Back inside, we examined the extensive displays, learning that:

• Sometimes it took days to guide the bison into the drive lanes.
• Buffalo jumps were not used every year. Sometimes generations passed between uses when all the conditions weren’t right (winds blowing towards the cliff, herds gathered in the right places).
• About 4,200 years ago, it was abandoned for about 1,000 years, with use resuming 3,200 years ago; scientists don’t know why.
• Bison hunts were usually in the fall when cooler weather helped preserve the meat longer.
• Everyone helped butcher and process the bison. Every part was used; nothing wasted. Some dried meat was beaten into a powder, then mixed with saskatoon berries, choke cherries and fat to make pemmican.

Finally, we followed the one-kilometre trail along the cliff bottom. When the site was first used 5,700 years ago, the cliff was about 20 metres high. But over the millennia, layers of bone, tools, rock rubble and soil built up so that the cliffs are just 10 metres high today.

At Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park in southern Alberta, we learned more about buffalo jumps and their connection to spirituality and medicine wheels, as well as how the early Blackfoot lived on the prairies before settlers arrived.

I had read about Iniskim Umaapi – a 5,000-year-old medicine wheel (the oldest-known in the world) that some call Canada’s Stonehenge – and its obscure location somewhere near the historical park. Medicine wheels are built of stones in a wagon-wheel pattern on windswept prairie rises. Iniskim are small sacred stones shaped like bison. And Iniskim Umaapi means “buffalo calling stones sacred site.” When honoured during a ceremony, iniskim help locate the bison.

No one really knows how medicine wheels began or why. Were they memorials, markers for spirits in the sky to look down upon the people, calendars, ceremonial spaces, sacred bison sites, spiritual sanctuaries, or territorial markers? I longed to visit Iniskim Umaapi, but no one at the historical park could, or would, give us directions.

Instead, we enjoyed a tour by Gerald Sitting Eagle, a gentle, softspoken man with an undercurrent of strength. He survived St. Joseph’s Residential School, which finally closed in 1969 and was demolished. He told us about the nuns beating him, how he figured that’s just how you raised children, and later discovered that that wasn’t right.

Today, the Blackfoot people manage their own education, from daycare and pre-school up to community college, and natural resources on their land include oil, gas, sand and gravel, coal and water.

Since our visit, I watch for stones shaped like bison, contemplating the concept of sacredness in different cultures. As a Christian, I’d keep a cross-shaped stone if I found one.

After Yellowstone, we drove east and south, marvelling at the Ten Sleep Canyon and Cloud Peak Skyway before passing through Buffalo, Wyoming, and on towards the Black Hills of South Dakota. We chanced upon an excellent exhibit about bison history at the Crazy Horse Memorial (an enormous monument being carved into a mountain near Mount Rushmore). Buried in the basement of an outbuilding where we were the only visitors, the exhibit recounted the bisons’ former numbers (an estimated 30 to 60 million), their decline and comeback.

As the railroad pushed westward, non-Indigenous people shot bison from trains for sport. Others hunted them, cut out their tongues (a delicacy) and left the carcasses to rot. There was “a deliberate effort by the U.S. Government to eliminate the bison in order subdue the Native people that relied so heavily upon them,” said the World Wildlife Fund. Even Indigenous people shot bison to supply meat to forts, military posts and railroad construction crews. Everyone knew the bison numbers were declining. By 1879, they had all but disappeared.

Between 1888 and 1919 the American government established eight herds, including in Yellowstone. President Theodore Roosevelt, known as the conservation president, also set up the first bison preserves, in Oklahoma, Montana, and South Dakota. He was honorary chairman of the American Bison Society, founded in 1905 to raise awareness and funding to move bison into the preserves. The society dissolved in 1935 but was re-launched in 2005 with the same goal to protect bison.

Several ranchers also established private herds, but their wives were the driving force behind their good deeds. Mary Ann Goodnight, Good Elk Woman, and Sally-Larabee Phillip urged their husbands to rescue orphaned calves and protect the ensuing herds.

Indigenous tribes had attempted to re-establish bison herds and their bison-based culture over the years, but finally had success in 1991 when they formed the InterTribal Bison Cooperative. Now, 56 tribes in 19 states have a collective herd of 15,000 bison.

The National Bison Association puts overall current bison numbers at about 362,406 in North America, including wild and commercially raised. Many conservation groups, such as the Buffalo Field Campaign, take issue with the official designation of “near threatened,” arguing that wild bison are endangered.

I concluded that buffalo jams are deceptive; bison may appear to be populous, but the underlying conservation issues are disguised.

We did encounter commercial bison, in the form of buffalo chili and bison burgers on several restaurant menus. I tried both and found the meat milder than beef and not gamey. Bison meat is leaner, with a third fewer calories and about half the fat of beef.

The last bison we saw on our trip were hanging out right at the entrance sign to Badlands National Park.  They trotted along, parallel to the road, while one stopped to roll in the dirt. Once the road dipped from prairie level down into the buttes, craggy cliffs, striated spires, and layered jagged land, we spotted two bighorn sheep, but no other wild bison.

And no more buffalo jams. Or iniskim…so far.

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We encountered bison in late March and early April 2022. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.