Head Smashed In

...it's a buffalo jump.  Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump. And as the story goes these cliffs were named in the 1800s when a First Nations boy placed himself under the cliff to watch the buffalo jump over its edge. As the bodies of the animals piled up he was crushed against the wall of the cliff. When his people later found him they named the cliff as Head Smashed In to mark his death.

Dodging the rain and cold, we made a day-trip to this historic site from Waterton. The jump is a UNESCO Heritage Site and sits on the prairie about 30 minutes outside of Fort McLeod. The interpretive center is well laid out, deeply informative and managed by First Nations people who live in the area. There are three floors all with elaborate displays of site artifacts and excellent writings on how the site was used. This particular site is nearly 6,000 years old. Archeological digs have unearthed large piles of bones and tools all around the kill site.

There are two jumps here. The Plains People would wait until the fall of the year when the buffalo are at their highest weight, then build long runs from the prairie to the edge of the jump. These run-ways were marked with stone cairns and tall branches and acted as corrals for the buffalo to run down and eventually leap to their deaths over the cliff. A young man took John and I out to the jump site and told us of his family and a bit of his history. I had been puzzled why the people would kill an entire herd of a few hundred animals this way, thinking that this would jepoeardize their food supply.

He smiled at me gently and said, "Well, there were over 60 million buffalo on these plains at that time, so taking one herd was not a problem."

60 million.  For a moment I was overcome with emotion and had no idea what to say to him. We looked out across the prairie, at the fescue and the yellow grass, the sage and saskatoon. Beautiful and bare. The charcoal clouds rolling in. What this must have looked like only a couple of hundred years ago. We humans can certainly make short work of nature's grand and ancient systems.  Bruce Cockburn says, "we create what destroys"....and looking over these grasslands I have to think he's right.

And a  link to a few of John's photos for the day....
http://picasaweb.google.ca/lh/sredir?uname=johnsampsonphoto&target=ALBUM&id=5515692189966208017&authkey=Gv1sRgCPmw8sWL5MbN7wE&feat=email


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