American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella

Author:Steven Rinella [Rinella, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Environment, Nature, Animals, Science
ISBN: 9780385526852
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-01T13:00:00+00:00

10

JUDITH COOPER, a graduate student in anthropology at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas, does not immediately come across as the sort of person who’d spend a lot of time hanging around in places where Indians once killed massive amounts of buffalo by chasing them off cliffs. She is slight and shy, with intelligent eyes, and on the day I met her, she was dressed in stylish jeans and black boots and had on makeup. When asked how she ended up in her line of work, though, she was quick and certain with her answer. “Every kid is interested in archaeology,” she told me. “For me, that interest never went away.” With that, we spent a couple of hours talking about the business of falling buffalo.

The Blackfoot term for a buffalo jump is pishkun, which translates roughly to “deep blood kettle.” Most known buffalo jumps—they number in the hundreds—are located along major river valleys on the northern Great Plains. At the Vore Buffalo Jump, near Sundance, Wyoming, volumetric calculations taken from a bone bed that is a hundred feet in diameter and twenty-five feet deep suggest that perhaps twenty thousand buffalo were killed there over a great many years. The pile of buffalo bones beneath the Ulm Pishkun Buffalo Jump, outside of Great Falls, Montana, is one mile long. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada, has a bone bed that is thirty feet thick—or well over half as deep as the cliff is tall. The great mass of buffalo bones at these jump sites attests to their productive tenures, but it also opens up a small mystery. As anyone with experience moving sheep or cattle can verify, it’s a real pain in the ass to get large animals moving in a direction that they don’t want to go, especially when the animals have to put their hooves down on unfamiliar surfaces. Since buffalo can’t fly, open air certainly qualifies as just such a surface. So what would compel a buffalo to commit suicide? I was hoping that Judith could help explain.

In 2005, Judith co-authored a paper in American Antiquity that included a detailed assessment of the topography surrounding Bonfire Shelter, the southernmost (and perhaps oldest) buffalo jump in the United States. The site is at the head of Mile Canyon, a Rio Grande tributary near the Texas-Mexico border. The cliff’s face is eighty-five feet high. At that elevation, the buffalo would be falling at forty-seven miles per hour when they smacked the ground. (It seems that hunters didn’t like their cliffs to be much taller than that, probably because the buffalo would be too smashed up to do any good.) There is a conspicuous V-shaped notch eroded into the cliff’s rim; it looks like a pour spout on a water pitcher. Beneath the notch is a fifteen-foot-tall cone-shaped mound of rubble that contains several distinct layers of buffalo bones along with human artifacts. The uppermost layer has the remains of at least

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.