Ancient Heritage Alberta’s Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Offers A View Of Culture And History That Reaches Back Thousands Of Years

Imagine a fall morning here about 5,000 years ago.

Bands of Indians from across the Great Plains had gathered for a bison hunt.

Swift, young runners were dispatched before dawn to surround a herd 10 miles north of the encampment. On a signal, the men dashed toward the bison, shouting and waving blankets to drive the animals toward a cliff where they would tumble to their deaths.

And then there were prayers of thanks.

“The buffalo again has given us many gifts,” an elder said.

It happened like this more than 500 years before the first pyramids were built in Egypt.

The place is Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a communal hunting site in southwestern Alberta. Scientists say Plains Indians and their forebears stampeded bison over a high sandstone cliff here during a period that stretched from about 3700 B.C. into the early 19th century.

Archaeologists have fixed the time through radiocarbon dating of bison bones and stone tools piled under the cliff.

“We can reconstruct exactly how the hunting was done,” says Murray Small Legs, a guide at the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre.

The Alberta government’s $9.8 million center is a clever piece of architecture - a seven-tiered building cut into a hillside and textured to blend into surrounding rock outcrops.

Visitors walk an outdoor trail from the top level of the center to the killing cliff, a jagged, 900-foot-wide shelf with a drop of about 30 feet.

The fall for the bison was more like 60 feet during those long-ago hunts. The pit under the cliff still is heaped with 30 feet or so of bison bones.

“This is how the people survived,” says Murray Small Legs, a Blackfoot Indian.

“Buffalo provided most of the basic necessities back then - meat for food, clothing from hides, tools from bones, glue from the hooves, even spoons shaped from the horns.”

There were many such buffalo cliffs, scattered from Alberta down to northern Texas.

But Head-Smashed-In - about 100 miles south of Calgary - is prized as one of the oldest and best-preserved of the “buffalo-jump” sites.

“The archaeological evidence has remained largely undisturbed,” says Murray Small Legs. “Thus we have a complete cultural chronology.”

The United Nations in 1981 designated Head-Smashed-In as a world heritage site, placing it in company with such treasures as India’s Taj Mahal and Egypt’s pyramids.

Head-Smashed-In - how did it get its name?

By way of “a very old story,” says Leo Pard, a Blackfoot elder.

The legend goes like this:

A young Indian here wanted to witness the plunge of the bison as his people drove them over the cliff. Then, somehow, the brave was trapped in the cascade of bison carcasses.

“Later the people found the boy with his head bashed in by a buffalo hoof,” Pard says. And so they named this place “Head-Smashed-In.”

Tall tale or true?

“That’s the truth,” Pard says.

Buffalo? Bison?

Plains bison is the proper name for the species that was hunted here. Scholars say that early European visitors mistakenly called the local bison “buffalo,” and the name stuck.

Now buffalo (bison) are celebrated in the lyrics of western songs and even on coins such as America’s buffalo nickel. The official name of this hunting place remains Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.

Nobody knows for sure how many bison roamed the plains at the time of the first European contact in the 18th century. The best guess is about 60 million.

But by the late 1800s - with the white man’s introduction of horses and rifles for hunting - only about 1,000 bison remained.

“There was terrible waste,” Murray Small Legs says of the slaughter.

In contrast, the ancient hunters of Head-Smashed-In took only what they needed for survival - and with what now are regarded as sophisticated hunting techniques.

Aboriginal hunters had only spears for weapons. Bows and arrows followed much later. Starvation was a constant threat.

Time was measured by seasons. Each fall bison would migrate to the Head-Smashed-In area to feed on abundant grasses that today sustain Alberta’s great herds of beef cattle.

At some point, scientists say, the hunters decided to organize for communal harvests - using the terrain to stampede the bison over cliffs such as Head-Smashed-In.

Sometimes the hunters would disguise themselves inside wolf pelts to frighten and “steer” the bison. They also built “drive lanes” of stone cairns (some of which still remain here) that guided the animals toward the cliffs.

A good harvest at Head-Smashed-In would have been 200 to 300 head as families prepared dried meat and hides for winter.

“Sometimes as many as 1,000 people would come to participate in the event,” says Murray Small Legs.

The gathering is recalled here each July with a Buffalo Days Pow Wow that includes native-dance competitions, drumming, singing and feasting. A village of Indian tepees is spread for visitors on the plains below the interpretive center, down by the Oldman River.

Murray Small Legs never tires of telling visitors about Head-Smashed-In and traditions of the Plains Indians.

But there is one question he hopes never to hear again:

“What time do the buffalo jump?”

Murray smiles and says: “It happens. Seriously.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO General Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is in southwestern Alberta, about 100 miles south of Calgary and 11 miles northwest of Fort Macleod. Highway 2 connects Calgary and Fort Macleod. Highway 785, a secondary highway, links the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Interpretive Centre with Fort Macleod, an early-day outpost of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Hours 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. from May 15 to Labor Day; 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. the rest of the year.

Admission $6.50 Canadian for adults; $5.50 for seniors (age 65 or more), $3 for children ages 7-17, $15 for families.

Additional information Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Box 1977, Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada T0L 0Z0. Phone 403-553-2731; fax 403-553-3141.

Other area attractions The Remington-Alberta Carriage Centre, in Cardston, about 45 minutes south of HeadSmashed-In. The carriage museum houses more than 200 horse-drawn vehicles, ranging from farm wagons to elegant carriages. Details: Remington-Alberta Carriage Centre, P.O. Box 1649, Cardston, Alberta, Canada T0K 0K0. Phone 403-653-5139; fax 403-653-5160. Frank Slide, scene of tragedy in 1903, when most of the sleeping town of Frank, in Crowsnest Pass, was buried by a giant rock slide. About 70 persons died. The Alberta government opened an interpretive center on the site in 1985. The center is a drive of about 45 minutes west of HeadSmashed-In Buffalo Jump. Details: Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, Box 959 Blairmore, Crowsnest Pass, Alberta T0K 0E0. Phone 403-562-7388; fax 403-562-8635. Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park - which straddles the Canada-United States border and blends into Glacier National Park in Montana - is about 25 miles west of Cardston.

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