CHAPTER 7
Cooking Up the Spoils

The extensive flatlands that stretch to the north, south, and east from the base of the slope beneath the cliff at Head-Smashed-In have been called by archaeologists the processing site. This is the place where the painstaking butchering of bison was conducted. It is not called the “butchering site” because much more than simply cutting up the animals transpired on this section of prairie. It was quite literally a processing of the entire buffalo carcass, one after the other, no doubt employing the labour of hundreds of people spanning days of time. The events that transpired at the processing site lacked the adrenalin rush of the kill event, but they were just as critical to the survival of the people, for you could successfully kill dozens of bison and the effort would all have been in vain if you didn’t process the remains of the kill in a timely and efficient manner.

To be sure, the work settled into a more relaxed mode compared with the frantic, chaotic pace of the kill event. But it could hardly be called leisurely. Time was of the essence. Spoilage of the meat, fat, and hides began the minute the animals died, and many critical steps had to be taken to ensure the maximum amount of food was saved. The whole point of the great expenditure of labour and skill had not been so that the hunters could settle down to a two-day feast. Rather, it was to leave Head-Smashed-In with a huge quantity of food and hide that would help the people make it through the strenuous months ahead. Travelling among the Plains Indians, Colonel Richard Dodge noted that the great communal hunts of the fall were “made for the purpose of killing sufficient animals … to furnish dried meat for the next winter’s supply.” The pace may have slowed, and, in comparison to what had come before, the work became monotonous, but it was no less urgent.

The Processing Site

The requirements of a landscape suitable for a successful buffalo jump don’t end when a mound of carcasses lie at the base of the cliff. Processing the animals also has certain demands that must be met. For one thing, people need room to work. They must be able to pull the carcasses away from the heap and have space to spread them out and cut them up. There must be some adjacent land that can be used for butchering, and owing to the great weight of the animals (even the cut up parts) it can’t be far away. Ideally, it should be on ground that is level to the jump or somewhat downslope, so as to avoid having to drag carcass parts uphill.^†

From the base of the cliff at Head-Smashed-In, a moderately steep slope angles down toward the prairie below. After a distance of about one hundred metres, the slope levels off and the land becomes relatively flat. This gently rolling plain extends for several kilometres to the north and south, paralleling the trend of the bedrock outcrop.

To the east, heading away from the cliff, the level prairie only persists for a few hundred metres before it again drops gently to a lower and much more extensive flatland that covers the entire region east of the Porcupine Hills. Processing the spoils from Head-Smashed-In took place on the flats below the cliff. Everywhere the land is roughly level we find the archaeological remains of bison carcasses and butchering activity. Where the land starts to slope, the soil is devoid of artifacts; you wouldn’t camp and work on sloping ground when there is plenty of level terrain nearby. The extent of the processing site is massive, covering at least a kilometre from north to south and hundreds of metres to the east until the land begins to slope down toward the lower prairie.

Along with the requirement for space, buffalo jumps required water. Water was not only vital for the people to survive. It also played a key role in many of the food processing activities. The hunters were committed to spending at least several days in hard labour at the processing site, probably working around the clock. Writing in the 1850s, Schoolcraft said that butchering buffalo provoked an “inordinate thirst” that when neglected, “the suffering is almost intolerable.” When no water was available, Schoolcraft observed, “the means taken in some measure to assuage thirst, is to chew leaves, or even the cartilaginous portion of the nostril of the slain buffalo.” Referring more to solitary kills, Daniel Harmon records, “When there is no water to be found, they at times kill a buffaloe, and drink his blood, or the water which they find in his paunch.”

Water located a considerable distance from the kill placed a great burden on people to make constant return trips, hauling heavy water in hide containers and diminishing the size of the work force available for butchering.^† There are a few buffalo jumps located a long way from water, but they are very rare. Almost every known jump is situated immediately at a water source or very close by. Another reason that jumps are near water is that bison, too, need to drink (typically once a day), so the prospect of finding herds to drive will almost always be greater near water sources.

A visitor today to Head-Smashed-In would think that there was no water to be had for a considerable distance. The Oldman River valley is located some five kilometres to the south. I once had an awkward moment when a Native elder who was unfamiliar with the specifics of Head-Smashed-In visited the site and, after surveying the area, informed me that we had made a mistake – this was not a buffalo jump; it could not be, for there was no nearby source of water. The old man was drawing on his knowledge that buffalo jumps were only located close to water. But there is water right at the site; in fact it flows from directly beneath the bedrock cliff right at the main kill location. There is a natural spring of pure, fresh water that seeps out from under the sandstone, and it has obviously done this for quite some time as there is a prominent spring channel cutting through the middle of the processing area.^† This channel is now dry, but in the memory of the local residents it was a dependable source and was even dammed at one point and used to water cattle. When Boyd Wettlaufer excavated at Head-Smashed-In in 1949, his crew used to bathe and swim in this waterhole, and it was where he found the nine thousand year-old Scottsbluff spear point mentioned earlier. Water still flows from beneath the cliff; its path has just moved slightly below the surface. Take a shovel and dig a hole near the head of the spring channel and within a depth of fifty centimetres you will have water seeping into the pit.

We can presume that water was always available from this spring at Head-Smashed-In, and it formed a vital part of the story of processing the carcasses. It provided drink to the hundreds of people who slaved away at rendering down the carcasses, and, as we will see below, it was used in many ways in washing and cooking the parts of the buffalo. Without this natural spring, it’s quite likely that Head-Smashed-In would never have been used as a buffalo jump. Early hunters would have turned instead to one of the other cliffs and embankments that border a permanent water source.

Day Fades to Night

Some of the events that transpired in the huge camp on the flats beneath the cliff can be documented with archaeological and historical evidence. Others can only be guessed at. Earlier I noted that archaeologists have devoted a great deal of effort to studying bison kill sites and very little to the remains that document how the drive took place. In like manner, historic observers have left us with gripping written descriptions of the tumultuous events that transpired at the kills; after all, this was the exciting part of the story. In the aftermath of the kill, as the mundane and tedious days of butchering set in, many European eyewitnesses moved on. The written record of these events is paltry in comparison to those of the kill.^† Archaeologists, likewise drawn to the excitement of the kill, have focussed their work on the rich bonebeds beneath the cliff, paying only cursory attention to the processing areas of communal bison kill sites. Yet by combining all sources, a reasonable picture of these ancient activities emerges.

We can be assured that the place would have been a beehive of activity: hundreds of people sitting, standing, or moving over an area of many hectares. It was a camp of sorts, at least in a temporary sense, but not in the usual sense of a place where people selected to live. It was an industrial site; it existed for the span of a few days, dedicated to a single purpose, and was then abandoned. I spent a good portion of my professional life digging into the soil of the Head-Smashed-In processing site, and as you can imagine I have often thought about what that busy place might have looked like.

Slowly, in the hours after the completion of the kill, the heavy carcass portions made their way down the slope from the cliff to the expansive prairie below. Hunks of bloody meat and slippery bone were probably heaped onto fresh bison hides and dragged by several people. The hides acted as skids, making the work much easier and helping to keep the food free of dirt. For a sizable kill, this task of transporting may have lasted several days. I imagine people worked long hours, from first light to late evening, not wanting to have any of the meat spoil or to have scavengers help themselves. A night-time view from the cliff out toward the eastern prairie would have certainly been a spectacular sight. Yellow-orange flames from dozens of campfires would have sparkled across the flats like stars. A few conical skin tents, being nearly opaque, would have caught and reflected the light like strange cones piercing the night sky. All around, shadowy figures moved between the flickering flames of the fires, talking, laughing, and groaning with the continuing load of work, maybe occasionally breaking into a low, rhythmic chant.

To be sure, there would have been celebrations in progress, but probably not in the way we conventionally think. I doubt that everyone knocked off work and joined as one in a massive feast and ceremony.^† There was simply too much work to be done, and for the sake of survival it had to be done quickly. Also, people would have been exhausted. Some, like the buffalo runners, had been at work since before sunrise or even longer. Instead, I suspect that celebrations were brief and spontaneous and probably sprang up among family groups centred at different tents and fires, perhaps prompted by the cooking of a massive roast or nutritious soupy stew. Frequent consumption of high energy foods would have certainly been required to keep people supplied with the nutrition they needed to continue slogging away at what must have seemed like an eternity of bison butchering. No doubt people took turns slipping into tents to catch a few hours sleep, although given the great number of people present, many may have simply lay down on the grass using old tanned bison robes as blankets. Children, spared the most strenuous work, must have had a glorious time, running between the fires, grabbing snacks, playing games with toy bows and arrows, and occasionally getting collared to settle down and do something useful.

Work was indeed the order of the day, and of the days and nights to come. Remember, the equivalent mass of twenty-five pickup trucks lay mounded beneath the cliff waiting to be converted into usable, storable food. With the exception of kills made in mid-winter (where cold temperatures helped chill and preserve the food), fresh bison meat and fat would only last for a matter of days before it started to spoil. Over thousands of years of dealing with the yield of bison kills, Plains hunters developed a number of clever ways to convert the fresh food into a commodity that could be stored, carried, and consumed for the months to come.

Dried Goods

Some meat was eaten fresh, but the bison hunt was primarily undertaken to provide a store of dried flesh. – Turney-High, on the Kootenai, 1941

About 65 per cent of the weight of bison meat is made up of water, so you can imagine that drying the meat would make the bounty from the kill far lighter and easier to carry. Of course, if you have no plans to travel anywhere, making the fruits of your hunting efforts light and portable would be irrelevant. But Head-Smashed-In wasn’t a place where people would want to camp for long periods of time. Other than the mound of bison carcasses, there were no other significant food resources at the site, and water was limited to the small spring that flows from the bedrock cliff, a source that probably ceased as winter set in. More importantly, Head-Smashed-In is open to the fierce winds of the high Plains, had no local supply of wood, and would have been completely unsuitable for winter camping. If, as we suspect, autumn was the main season for buffalo jumping, then the coming of winter was a strong inducement for quickly moving to more favourable camping places. Reducing the weight of tens of thousands of kilograms of meat, fat, and hide became a critical matter. Drying food was the primary means of cutting down on weight.^†

Huge chunks of meat, such as sides of ribs or the hams (from the upper legs), are too big to dry out. Only the outer surface of the meat would lose its moisture, turning to a hardened crust that actually serves to protect the bulk of the water remaining inside. Getting rid of the majority of moisture requires food to be cut into thin strips, thus exposing a great deal of the surface area to the drying effects of the sun and air. Days were spent using sharp stone tools to cut meat and fat into thin segments and then hanging them on simple wooden racks that were probably erected in the campsite on the plains below the cliff. No archaeological evidence of these wood racks has been found, but we can presume that they must have existed, as John McDougall witnessed:

[Meat was] cut into broad wide flakes, not more than a quarter of an inch in thickness. These flakes in turn were hung on stagings made of clean poles, and the wind and sun allowed free work at them. When dry on one side they were turned, and kept turned every hour or so during the day … Thus in two or three days, according to the weather, the first lot would be ready for sorting … Though only air and sun were utilized in the curing, still this was sweet and perfect in its effect, and the meat would keep for years.

Hung out like socks on a laundry line, the strips of meat and fat were desiccated by the warming rays of the sun and the incessant winds of Head-Smashed-In. Evaporation of the water content by simple air-drying could reduce the weight of the food by as much as half, a massive difference in the load that people had to carry away from the jump.

Drying meat and fat not only makes it lighter, it helps preserve it. We are all familiar with beef jerky, flat strips of relatively hard meat that pulls apart in shreds as you eat it. You might see it lying in trays at the butcher shop or wrapped in plastic and hanging by the grocery checkout. It may not have occurred to you to ask why this particular kind of meat can sit in trays or plastic bags, unrefrigerated for weeks or months, without spoiling. Although the beef jerky we purchase today is treated with salts and chemicals, it doesn’t have to be. Simply drying meat in very thin sheets converts it to a state that retards the process of decay. Meat spoils because of bacteria that take hold on the surface. Bacteria need water to survive. Drying meat leaves it with a dry, tough, outer crust that is inhospitable to bacteria. This is critical to preventing spoilage through insect infestation. Flies are attracted to fresh, moist meat and will happily lay their eggs on the soft surface, which leads to rapid spoilage. The hard crust produced by drying deprives flies and other insects of a suitable surface on which larvae can live and hatch.

Native hunters air-dried much of their meat and fat, but they also occasionally helped the drying process using heat and smoke from fires. Smoking helps to dry meat in two ways. First, heat from a smoky fire acts to drive off even more moisture from the food. Second, wood smoke is itself a preservative. Repeated experiments with meat and fish have shown wood smoke to be highly effective at preventing spoilage. The chemicals in smoke, primarily phenols, are both antioxidants, which help retard animal fats from becoming rancid, and antimicrobials, which slow the process of bacterial growth. Wood smoke does not impregnate the meat; rather, it forms a protective coating on it. Hides were (and still are) tanned and thus preserved by hanging them over a smoky fire. Many kinds of fish are also smoked, giving them not only a pleasing taste but also a much longer shelf life.

It would be difficult to smoke meat over an open fire on the Plains surrounding Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. The wind would simply blow the smoke into the far distance. Smoking could be better accomplished in some kind of enclosed structure where food could be suspended over a smoky fire, with the smoke lingering around the meat for a considerable period of time. We don’t know much about the kinds of structures that hunters used for this purpose, but we know from early historic interviews that smoking of meat was common.^† Tipis were probably used for this purpose, as were small hide structures, possibly consisting of no more than a hide thrown over a small wooden frame with a fire in the centre. The fire would have been kept intentionally smoky, rather than hot, by feeding it damp wood and grass and by cutting down on air with the hide covering.

Plain dried meat isn’t the tastiest food. Here’s why. Unfortunately for the Native people, drying meat didn’t just remove water. It also removed a certain amount of fat. Most people think of fat as a thick rind that surrounds some of our favourite cuts of meat. This of course can be cut off and saved separately, discarded as waste, or for Native hunters to savour as a delicacy. But fat is also found within meat tissue itself. This is called intramuscular fat and is what gives meat its marbled appearance (which is the source of the juice and much of the flavour). Unless you are on an ultra low-fat diet, you don’t want to lose this fat. Yet any drying of meat that involves heat (sun and fire) will cause the fat to liquefy and drip from the surface. The net result is that dried meat tastes pretty much like the name implies. And, as we have already seen, meat without fat is of little nutritional value. Native hunters got around this problem in part by saving all other kinds of fat to add later to the dried meat, making it both tasty and nutritious.^† Many kinds of fat were also dried, with sun and smoke, making them both lighter and longer lasting.

The dried meat and fat were stored in simple hide containers called parfleches. These were stiff, untanned hide satchels that folded closed, much like the brown banker’s envelopes we use today. Food was tightly packed in the parfleches to keep out as much air as possible, thus reducing spoilage. Edwin James wrote, “The meat, in its dried state, is closely condensed together into quadrangular packages, each of a suitable size.” Schoolcraft reported that the meat packages were about “sixty or seventy pounds weight” (about twenty-seven to thirty-two kilograms).

Properly cured and packaged dried meat could last for months and even years, depending in part on the weather (damp, warm weather would be bad for preservation; cool, dry weather would be good), and on how dry the food was when it was first stored. Fat is harder to dry than meat and couldn’t usually be stored for as long a time. Thus, the future use of much of the stored dried meat depended on continuing to procure fresh fat to add to it. If the people were able to keep killing fresh animals, then of course there was no problem with a continuous supply of fat. But what if winter set in and hunting became difficult if not impossible? Was there a reservoir of fat that people could turn to in times of stress? There was, and it lies buried deep in the bones of the buffalo.

Grease is the Word

The large bones of the hind legs are thrown upon the glowing coals, or hidden under the hot embers, then cracked between two stones, and the rich, delicious marrow sucked in quantities sufficient to ruin a white stomach forever. – Colonel Richard Dodge, 1860s and 1870s

Most people know that a fresh bone from just about any animal carcass is greasy to the touch. Fat is found throughout most bones in the body, and the best known fat is marrow, which occurs in hollow cavities inside many bones, especially the long bones of the legs. Marrow, in a healthy animal, is almost 100 per cent fat and, accordingly, was one of the most prized parts of the buffalo carcass. During the laborious butchering process, big marrow bones were smashed with heavy stone hammers to extract the tasty and nutritious marrow, thus replenishing the energy of the workers. Marrow bones could also be saved for later use, although fat in the cavities of the bones would, within a relatively short time, start to putrefy.

Marrow was universally regarded as one of the tastiest and most nutritious parts of the buffalo. Edwin James called it “a most delicious repast … a treat whose value must for ever remain unknown to those who have not tried the adventurous life of the hunter.” Immediately following the kill, Natives and non-Natives alike often indulged in one of the most esteemed dishes. As Buffalo Bird Woman described it to Gilbert Wilson, “We cut the tough outer flesh … leaving the more tender flesh still clinging to the bone, and this was laid near the fire, the two ends resting on two stones. When the meat was roasted and had been cut off, the bone was cracked open and the marrow pried out with a chokecherry stick and eaten with the meat.” Thomas Farnham referred to marrow as “trapper’s butter” and described how it was added to a pot of boiling water, mixed with buffalo blood, then stirred “till the mass became of the consistency of rice soup … It was a fine dish; too rich, perhaps, for some of my esteemed acquaintances, whose digestive organs partake of the general laziness of their habits; but to us … It was excellent, most excellent.”

Marrow was also boiled or melted out of buffalo bones and the rich liquid fat saved to make other foods tastier. Indeed, there was a great deal of bone boiling going on at Head-Smashed-In and other bison kills. Some of it was for the purpose of extracting the rich marrow, but marrow was more easily acquired by smashing the massive buffalo bones in two and pulling out an entire plug of marrow fat.

Though bone looks to be solid, it is really more of a latticework of twisted strands of bone tissue interspersed with tiny spaces. This structure makes bone far stronger, better able to support weight, movement, and stress, than it would be if it were solid. The tiny spaces interlaced with tissue aren’t empty; they are filled with small globules of fat. Called bone grease, it is a fat separate from marrow in that it is located within the bone structure itself, not the marrow cavity. Archaeologists may be just about the only group of scientists in the world interested in the question of how much grease there is inside the cellular structure of bone. Why anyone would care about this must seem like a pretty reasonable question. Wildlife biologists are very concerned with how much marrow there is in the cavities of big leg bones, such as the femur and tibia, because this tells you much about the overall health of the animal (marrow is one of the last fat reserves to be mobilized in times of nutritional stress, so an animal with low levels of fat in the marrow is a very sick animal).

But biologists draw the line at the contents of the marrow cavities. The fat contained in the actual bone that surrounds the cavities is essentially of interest to carrion bugs, wolves, coyotes, and archaeologists. The first three enjoy feeding on the bones, and since fat is tasty and good for you, these critters care a great deal about which bones have an abundance of fat and which are relatively lean.^† Archaeologists care about this subject because ancient hunters also wanted to get all the fat they could from bison carcasses, and they too sorted through the bones in the body carefully and deliberately, selecting those with the greatest amount of fat. These bones could be processed to remove the bone grease right away after the kill, but the technique is very laborious compared with simply removing the other huge fat deposits of the body and the marrow. Also, the total amount of fat that can be recovered from within the bones is very small compared with the great amount of fat that comes from the rest of the carcass.

You wouldn’t expect, then, people to try to render grease from bison bones unless they really needed additional fat. Logic dictates too, that, faced with massive food supplies in the aftermath of a successful bison drive, they did not. We might anticipate that prime grease-rich bones were saved for later processing, but sometimes evidence defies logic. Our excavations at Head-Smashed-In pointed to an astonishing amount of bone boiling going on at the site. During our years of work at the site, in the mid 1980s, little was known about how bone grease was extracted from the structure of the bone. We dug deeper into this cooking process.

High Plains Cooking

They make marrow fat, by cutting the joints of the bones, which they boil for a considerable time, and then skim off the top, which is excellent to eat with their dried meat. – Daniel Harmon, 1800–19

Lacking pots, pans, and stove tops, how did Aboriginal people cook their food? Pottery vessels did eventually make their way into the culture of the northern Plains groups, but only about two thousand years ago and only as fairly small pots unsuitable for cooking large amounts of food. If you can’t cook by placing a big pot over a fire, the clever solution was to bring the fire to the inside of the container. From written descriptions, we know that Plains Indians had several methods for cooking up soups and stews, the most important of which was using pits dug into the ground.^† Bowl-shaped pits, dug into the hard earth, were made watertight by pushing a fresh buffalo hide (fleshy side up) into the bottom of the pit. Water from the spring that flows from beneath the cliff at Head-Smashed-In was carried to the cooking pits. Once the hide-lined pits were filled, the water was heated by placing super hot rocks into the pits. Large, heavy cobbles were heated in a nearby fire and carried with a forked stick to the pit. As these rocks steamed, hissed, and lost their heat, another batch was being made ready in the fire. By continuously replacing the rocks, the water in the pits slowly got hot and food was added and cooked.

The process certainly sounds somewhat bizarre, but does it really work? My crew and I thought we would give it a try. First we needed the basic supplies for the experiments: pits, water, hide, rocks, and fire. We decided to do these experiments in our camp rather than at the buffalo jump so as not to create features at the site that might confuse future generations of archaeologists. Our camp was a beautiful spot near the Belly River, so rocks and water were in endless supply. Pits were easily dug to the approximate dimensions of the ones we were finding in our excavations at the buffalo jump. Fresh buffalo hides were hard to come by (and expensive), but cowhide seemed a reasonable alternative and readily available in cattle country. For the fire we gathered wood in the Belly River valley, but we also wanted to have fires like the ones of the Plains people, using that ubiquitous supply of fuel that dotted the prairies for thousands of years: dried patties of buffalo dung. In the largely treeless prairies, dung, or chips, had been a universal source of fuel for both Native people and early European explorers. Getting dried buffalo chips for our experiments was going to be a little tricky.

Dried dung from cattle might be much the same as that from bison, but we thought we’d first try for the real thing. (Besides, un-like hide, how expensive could bison chips be?) A captive bison herd existed nearby in Waterton National Park. In what must have been a startling request, Milt Wright (one of my long-time colleagues) showed up at Waterton and asked the park ranger if we could collect a Suburban full of dried buffalo chips. It turns out collecting anything from a national park, including poop, requires a permit. Rather than filling out the required forms in triplicate and shipping them off for the long wait to Ottawa, Milt headed for a private bison ranch. The owner was only too happy (and no doubt amused) to part with half a tonne of dried dung. To this day I get a smile picturing Milt and his helper, Caroline Hudecek-Cuffe, streaking back toward camp with a Sub full of aromatic brown chips, wondering what the police officer would have said had they been pulled over.^†

We now had everything we needed to make replicas of Native cooking pits, but we needed something to cook. Since our interest focussed not on cooking meat but rather on getting fat out of bones, we wanted bones to boil up in our pits. Bones from freshly killed bison were hard to come by, so again we settled for cattle. Loads of fresh, greasy cattle bones were hauled into camp and dumped onto the sun-baked prairie. We were poised to learn a lot about what a mess it is to deal with fresh bones.

Another thing we knew about how Plains people cooked their food was that bones were thoroughly smashed up before they were boiled. The reason is simple. Hot water acts to melt the globules of fat that reside in the tiny cavities of bone structure, sending fat into the water where it rises to the surface. If you have ever boiled a soup bone on the stove you have seen the glistening skim of grease that forms on top of the water. However, to be effective, to remove the majority of the fat, the hot water has to circulate around as much of the bone surface as possible. Tossing a whole bone into boiling water exposes only a very limited amount of the surface of the bone to the hot water and would extract only a tiny fraction of the total fat content. Smashing bones into small fragments allows hot water to circulate around much more of the bone structure, driving out a much greater percentage of the total grease content. A mound of fresh, slimy bones lay in our campsite, needing to be smashed up and boiled. For this seemingly ugly and thankless job we recruited one of the Blackfoot people whom we had hired that summer, a wonderful woman named Hazel Big Smoke.

Hazel Gets Slimed

Hazel Big Smoke was a middle-aged woman from the Piikani reserve, the boundary of which lies just a kilometre south of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. I always made a point of hiring Blackfoot people on my crews. I felt it was appropriate to offer employment to the local people whose ancestors had used the great buffalo jump. It helped them get in touch with their traditional culture, and it helped me and other non-Native members of my crew begin to understand a Native perspective of the world. It was immensely beneficial in both ways. But field archaeology is a science aimed at the young of heart and body. It is strenuous, back-breaking work, which at Head-Smashed-In was almost always conducted in ferocious winds and relentless sun. Typically, the crew I hired for this work included mainly people in their late teens or early twenties.

One year, after I had placed an ad for employment in the Band office of the Piikani Nation, I went down to conduct interviews. Among the respondents was a large, slightly heavy woman, probably in her late forties. I was a little shocked when she entered the room. I don’t think anyone over the age of twenty-five had ever applied for one of my jobs before. I didn’t quite know what to do with a clearly older, shy, demure woman who said she wanted to work on a dig. I did my best to discourage her, elaborating on the daily hardships: the wind-driven dust that packed every pore of your body, the aching of knees and back, the boredom of scraping away at baked earth, the sweltering sun, the minimal pay. Nothing worked. She wanted the job and was willing to start.

Hazel was a genuine person, honest, very shy yet strong willed, with an infectious smile (her standard answer to my endless reports of workplace atrocities was “Oh, geezze”). I was smitten, and so was everyone else who worked with Hazel Big Smoke. Besides, as we teasingly reminded her, she seemed to have the perfect last name for working with fires and cooking. By the end of the summer a grateful Hazel Big Smoke presented Milt with a beautiful pair of moccasins, me with a stunning pair of fur-lined winter mitts that I wear to this day, and many other members of the crew with handmade key chains and other gifts. Sometimes the world unfolds the way it should.

Hazel slaved away with the rest of the crew that summer, doing all the monotonous work the younger ones did (minus the back talk). As the summer progressed, we continued to excavate more and more evidence of the smashing and cooking of bones in pits sunk into the ground. Milt, Bob Dawe (my other crew chief), and I became more interested in the whole question of how and why people might once have tried to get the grease out of the bones of bison. We knew that there were some relevant ideas floating around in the anthropological literature, but there were few details or specifics to help us understand what might have gone on in the days and months after the great buffalo drives. If you really want to know what might have gone on in the past, there is no alternative to trying something yourself. With our experiments we hoped to fill in some of the missing details of the bewildering process of cooking in a hide-lined pit. Knowing that it would be both ugly and fun, we enlisted Hazel.

Cow bones are much the same size and shape as bison bones; breaking up either is not as easy as it sounds. It’s not just that they are very thick, dense, and large. It’s that they are greasy, especially when they sit outside in the sun, which of course is why we, and Native hunters before us, were interested in them. Pick them up and your hands are immediately coated in a fine layer of oil, as are other objects you then pick up, such as the handles of the axes we used to smash the bones. Pretty soon everything gets a splattering of grease on it, including, most disgustingly, the people involved.

Starting our experiment, Hazel put the ends of bones on stone anvils, leaving the middle suspended in air, this midpoint being the target for first breaking the bone in half. That was the end of the easy part. After that, smaller pieces of bone had to be placed on top of flat stones and smashed with hatchets and hammers (to be really authentic we should have used stone hammers tied to wood handles, but we found that we were plenty inept with our own tools and decided to forego rigorous authenticity). Hitting curved, slippery chunks of bone is akin to grabbing hold of Jell–O. Half the time a blow was delivered, the fragments flew off the anvils in all directions. Hazel would let out an “Oh, geeze” and shield her eyes. Worse than the flying fragments was the splattering grease. Because we were working in the warmest part of summer, the bones were positively oozing. With each blow of Hazel’s hammer, grease, albeit tiny amounts, would fly into the air. It landed on her hair, on her clothes, on her glasses, on everything. Because it was only a small amount each time, it took a while to notice it. Eventually you couldn’t miss it. It was then that Hazel uttered one of my favourite lines of the summer.

Fed up and disgusted with the seemingly stupid experiments of a couple of white scientists, Hazel threw down her hammer and announced, “My ancestors never did this!” and retired to a nearby lawn chair. The rest of us rolled with laughter. We joked with her about how her ancestors simply went to the grocery store and got all the meat and fat they wanted, as opposed to the ignorant enemies of the Blackfoot who probably sat breaking bones on rocks and getting covered in grease. Not only was Hazel priceless to work with, she was probably right. The precious fat we were trying to recover was being lost on hands, rocks, tools, in the air, and on the ground. Bone chips were zinging around camp getting filthy. Our results were so unproductive that it seemed there must be a better way.

What we knew for sure was that the Native people who used Head-Smashed-In did indeed smash bones and boil them in earthen pits. Our excavation of literally millions of small bone fragments, stones used for boiling, along with the outlines of ancient pits and many fireplaces, confirmed these facts. But as we shared Hazel’s frustrations in trying to replicate this activity, we knew we must be missing something. Although we never fully solved the mystery, it seemed likely that bones must have been spread over one or more bison hides to help catch the flying pieces. Perhaps the bones were even wrapped in hide before they were pounded, thus enabling capture of both errant pieces and the grease they contained. Working in cooler fall weather also would have improved results considerably.

Despite the nagging feeling that ancient hunters who used the buffalo jump must have had superior methods to ours for breaking up bones, we pressed on with our experiments. With the bones eventually broken into thumbnail-sized pieces, we were ready to cook them up. Time to drag Hazel out of her lawn chair and into the next pleasant part of the task, firing up the buffalo chips. It is worth recording that all the staff coaxed into taking part in the bone-smashing activity were allocated a special privilege. The crew’s regular cleaning up after a hot, dusty day digging at the site was to splash in the nearby Belly River. But grease-splattered staff needed heavy duty cleaning and were allowed to take the vehicle into the nearest town for a long shower with actual hot water.

Buffalo Chips

Since leaving Pembina River … the plains were plentifully strewn with dry buffalo dung, which by also using as fuel we greatly economized the wood we took with us. This buffalo dung, the glow from which somewhat resembles that from coals, is a great acquisition to a camp fire. – Capt. John Palliser, 1857–60

For thousands of years, Aboriginal hunters used buffalo feces to cook up buffalo feasts. Dried buffalo dung was the standard fuel for all who resided on the prairies. Wood was the preferred fuel but was in short supply on the treeless Plains. Buffalo chips had the advantage of being everywhere; as John Audubon noted, chips were “so abundant that one meets these deposits at every few feet and in all directions.” Of course, burning dung comes with certain baggage.^† Schoolcraft commented that it “produces an ardent but transient flame, sufficient for cooking our daily food; but it evolves a smoke which, to the nasal organs of a stranger, is far from being agreeable.” As expected, authors of the historic literature had some fun with the odor of the ordure. Yet there was consensus that, as Turnbull said in 1852, it “makes a grand fire.”

At least it does as long as it is dry. All travellers on the Plains noted this important trait. “In dry weather it is an excellent substitute for wood,” Josiah Gregg wrote, “but when moistened by rain, the smouldering pile will smoke for hours before it condescends to burn, if it does at all.” Tixier experienced what must have been a frequent occurrence, the inability to cook when the weather turned sour: “we had to use dried bison dung to make a fire. When the rain had soaked this fuel, we had to eat dried meat raw.”

Our own experience was much the same. Patties of dried buffalo dung aren’t as bad to work with as it sounds – just make sure they are really dry. The smell is mostly gone (except when you pile hundreds of them into a closed Suburban). You can stack them like poker chips, fling them around like Frisbees, all without feeling too slimed. But not Hazel. She wasn’t interested in having much to do with chips of animal dung. Since this isn’t the kind of thing you force on someone (after all, I had omitted this part from the job interview), Milt took over the experiment with Hazel as a keen observer.

It turns out that buffalo chips burn really well, and burn hot, as long as you meet a couple of criteria. First, it’s hard to get chips burning from scratch. They are not like kerosene-soaked briquettes that burst into flame at the touch of a match. You have to get a small wood fire going first and then add the chips. Second, you need a breeze. In dead calm, chips simply smoulder, smoke, and give off little heat. They require fanning from a stiff wind to burn with a steady flame and generate a reasonable amount of heat. Trying to cook on a calm night, Maximilian discovered the same: “We endeavoured to kindle a fire of buffalo dung in this place of general rendezvous; the wind was bleak, and we could not make our fire burn bright.” Incidentally, a spin-off piece of knowledge gained from these experiments was the realization that buffalo chips would have made poor winter fuel, during a time when people were confined to living inside skin tipis. The lack of a breeze inside a dwelling would have rendered chips relatively useless and helps explain why winter camps were located in places like valley bottoms and wooded hills where wood was in abundance.

To our surprise, comparing the temperature of wood and chip fires, built side by side in the open air, showed very little difference. As long as the breeze was steady, chips burned just as hot as wood, sometimes hotter. One hundred and fifty years before us, Josiah Gregg proclaimed the same, saying that buffalo dung “even makes a hotter fire” than wood. Suddenly Hazel seemed a little more proud of the ingenuity of her ancestors for finding such a practical and valuable use for a renewable and abundant fuel nature had given to her people. With the fires glowing hot, it was time to add the rocks.

Hot Rocks

An old method of preparing food … entailed digging a pit which was lined with a green hide pegged to the ground around its rim. Meat and water were placed in the pocket and brought to a boil by adding hot stones. – David Mandelbaum, for the Plains Cree, 1979

The topsoil that blankets the prairie surrounding Head-Smashed-In has been blown in by the wind. All the archaeological materials that we excavated were contained within this windblown soil. Wind, no matter how strong, carries only small-sized particles such as silt and tiny grains of sand. Rocks can’t be carried by any wind. Thus, all the rocks found in our excavation pits must have been carried in, and we found tonnes of rocks. Millions more remain buried in unexcavated portions of the site. Furthermore, of the literally hundreds of thousands of rocks we excavated, every single one of them was broken, after ten seasons of digging at Head-Smashed-In we found not a single complete rock or cobble. What’s going on here? How do we explain an almost solid layer of fractured rock packed into the topsoil on the prairie beneath the buffalo jump? Rocks, it turns out, are mute testimony to the enormous amount of cooking that went on at the site.

Boiling in earthen pits requires a huge amount of rock. In part this is because rocks have to be continuously heated so as to replace those put into the cooking pits. In addition, the rocks in use break into small pieces as a result of repeated heating and cooling. When you get a rock super hot and then plunge it into a bath of much cooler water, there are tremendous expansion and contraction forces at work. Cracks ripple through the body of the rock, and eventually the rock breaks along these crack lines. A typical rock used in boiling might be softball size to begin with. After a couple heatings these rocks might break into two or three baseball-sized pieces. If these are again reheated, they might end up being golf ball-sized chunks. We have reached the point of diminishing returns. The smaller the piece of rock, the less heat it is able to transfer into the pit of water. By the time rocks reached about golf ball size, they were regarded as essentially useless for boiling water and were abandoned.

Repeat this thousands of times over and you have an awful lot of rock scattered across the prairie surface at Head-Smashed-In. Our limited excavation of a small portion of the camp and processing area allows us to compute an estimate for how much rock would be recovered if the entire site were to be excavated. Based on this analysis, we figure that about four million kilograms of heating stones drape the soils at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. When nearly every one of these is golf ball size or smaller, that’s a lot of rocks. Every single one has been intentionally brought out to the prairie for the purpose of cooking food. It’s rather mind boggling to try to imagine the amount of human labour that must have gone into finding, transporting, and using all this rock. But clearly it did happen. The evidence reverberates up your leg bones every time you try to kick a shovel into the ground. Yet the most astounding thing is not the sheer amount of rock but what kind of rock it is and where it comes from.

As any photograph of the site reveals, the sandstone escarpment that forms the jump off at Head-Smashed-In is a massive feature of rock. For the hundreds of people who were busy butchering up the remains of bison carcasses, there was no shortage of immediately available rock. Yet they hardly used it or, rather, they used it for one highly specific purpose. Of the hundreds of thousands of rocks we excavated from the Head-Smashed-In camp and processing area, the overwhelming majority were not the local sandstone bedrock. Rather, they were fragments of quartzite cobbles – hard, dense, rounded stones that occur in limitless numbers in the creeks and rivers of Alberta. Deeper down in the soils around Head-Smashed-In, quartzite cobbles are found in great abundance, because they were dragged around and dropped by glaciers during the Ice Age. But you would have to dig for them, and in ancient times, with only simple digging sticks as tools, this would have been a great deal of work. Far easier would be to simply collect them from places where they are found on the surface, and for that you have to travel to the valley bottom of the Oldman River, about five kilometres away. Clearly this is what the ancient users of the jump did, and they did it in amounts and numbers that stagger the imagination.

Remember that the users of the jump had at their disposal only their own labour and that of their dogs. Try to picture, then, sinuous lines of humans and dogs tracing their way from Head-Smashed-In south to the Oldman, loading up with as many rocks as a person and dog could carry, and then retracing their path – uphill this time – back to the jump. This is not a precious cargo of bison meat for food or hides for winter blankets. This is people expending a huge amount of effort to simply move natural, round rocks from the river to the prairie beneath the jump. It was done in spite of the fact that millions of tonnes of sandstone bedrock lay right at the spot where the bison had been killed. Why on earth would people purposefully haul millions of kilograms of one type of rock over an uphill distance of several kilometres when an inexhaustible supply of another type of rock lay perched at their feet?

There was a pattern – the overwhelmingly dominant use of im-ported rocks as opposed to using the local bedrock – but we didn’t know what caused the discrepancy. Clearly, there had to be powerful reasons to compel people to physically gather and transport distant rocks, and the only way to understand this seemed to be to replicate what they did with the stones. So when Hazel and the rest of us finally finished busting up the greasy bison bones as best we could, we began to cook them up in hide-lined pits of water. To bring the water to a boil we decided to use two types of rock, chunks of the local sandstone bedrock from Head-Smashed-In and rounded quartzite cobbles gathered from the Oldman River valley.

We heated both types of rocks in fires at our campsite and placed them in separate earthen pits filled with water and smashed bone. The results were dramatic and striking. Initially, both types of rocks heated up just fine. But as the experiments progressed, some glaring differences surfaced. Sandstone is a porous rock, full of spaces that form between the cemented individual sand grains. On first heating, sandstone gets extremely hot and thus transfers a lot of heat to the water when the rocks are first quenched. It would seem to be an effective heating agent. But these rocks lose their heat quickly in cool water and must be removed and replaced, and here’s where problems start to develop for sandstone. When submerged in the cooking pits, the porous rock absorbs a lot of water in the spaces between the sand grains. When you move it back to the fire for reheating you also bring back a lot of water with the rock. We noted that sandstone rocks returned to the fire hissed as they were reheated as the internal water was driven off by the heat from the fire. Introducing water-saturated rocks into the fire acted to cool the fire, requiring more fuel and increasing the time it took to reheat the rocks. But there’s a third problem; sandstone is, curiously enough, sandy.

Repeated heating and cooling breaks down the bonds between grains of sand in the rocks, causing sand to shed from the rock surface. This process is exacerbated by the bumping around rocks go through as you drop them into and then try to fetch them out of pits of murky water. Sand grains end up piled in the bottom of the pit, in the same place the food you are trying to cook is located. If you are cooking meat, as in a stew, or boiling the grease out of smashed bison bones, you end up with the rather undesirable result of some very gritty food. It seems that there were three good reasons why the local sandstone bedrock was not a great choice for use in boiling water: it absorbs water and so takes longer to reheat, it cools down your fire, and it puts a lot of grit in your food. These factors must have been extremely important, for they led people to ignore millions of tonnes of sandstone at Head-Smashed-In and venture several kilometres away to haul by hand vast quantities of another type of rock, quartzite, uphill to the flats beneath the jump.

Quartzite is very different from sandstone. It is an extremely hard rock, very dense, and made up of extremely fine particles of quartz fused together. It doesn’t have the loose grains of sandstone. In my early years as an archaeologist in Alberta, I worked exclusively in the Rocky Mountains where it can be cold at night (and even snow) in any of the summer months. A trick we all soon learned was to heat quartzite cobbles by the side of the campfire at night, wrap them in a towel, and place them in the bottom of our sleeping bags. It was a clever and successful way to drive some of the cold out of your bag and keep your feet toasty warm. The same properties that kept our feet warm made quartzite an ideal stone for Plains people to use when cooking food.

To be sure, quartzite also breaks up as you heat and cool it. There is no rock that would not. But it does so in a much more favourable fashion. Quartzite cobbles are so dense that they absorb a great deal of heat from the fire, giving them more heat to transfer to the water-filled pits. Their greater density also means that they do not absorb any water from the pits to bring back to the fire when being reheated. When immersed in cool water they of course also suffer great pangs of contraction and are typically riddled with cracks that radiate through the rock. After a couple cycles between the fire and water, the rocks split along these cracks, but when they break they fracture cleanly. No sand is left in the bottom of the container. The users of Head-Smashed-In had a very clear idea of what size of rock was still useful and what was considered expended. Of the hundreds of thousands of quartzite rocks we recovered from our digs, about 95 per cent of them were golf ball size or smaller. This was clearly the discard size, too small to warrant further heating and transfer to the fire because of the diminished amount of heat such small stones could hold.

It should be obvious why we didn’t find a single large quartzite cobble in ten years of excavation. With an enormous expense of labour, every one of these rocks had been purposively carried from the Oldman River valley to Head-Smashed-In to be used in stone boiling. They had thus achieved the status of a precious commodity. To get more of them meant an arduous return journey, something no one could have looked forward to. So they were diligently used to the point of exhaustion, abandoned only when there was no more use left in them. We discovered vast clusters of shattered quartzite stones, all less than about ten centimetres in size, piled off to the side of the excavated boiling pits and fireplaces. They were clearly the discard piles of exhausted stones. In our early years of digging, before the pattern became apparent to us, we used these rocks to scare gophers away from our lunches and for backfilling excavations. On closer inspection, they revealed a remarkable story of intelligent recognition of the different properties of rock for cooking and the extent to which ancient people were willing to go to obtain the precise materials they deemed necessary to process the spoils of the kill.

Time for a Roast

The Indian is a great epicure; knows the choicest titbits of every animal, and just how to cook it to suit his taste. – Colonel Richard Dodge, 1860s and 1870s

Over the days that men, women, and children spent butchering the carcasses of the buffalo, they no doubt craved a succulent piece of cooked meat. Boiling up stews and fat from bones provided one variety of nourishment, but clearly some delicately cooked hunks of meat would have been a welcome change of diet. I say clearly, because archaeological digs at Head-Smashed-In have turned up unequivocal evidence of a unique and largely forgotten method of roasting parts of the bison carcass. First, let me note a method of cooking meat that just as certainly was used at the buffalo jump. It just didn’t leave any trace in the archaeological record.

No doubt fresh chunks of bison meat were grilled over the many fires that would have dotted the level plain beneath the jump. How this was done is conjecture. Most likely, moderate-sized pieces of meat were skewered on sticks and angled into the flames. After turning or moving a couple of times, the sizzling steaks were ready to eat. Alternatively, chunks of meat may have been simply laid on hot rocks placed in or near the flames or placed on grids of fresh sticks laid down on a bed of coals. But a thousand or more years later, there is nothing for the archaeologist to find confirming this type of cooking. More recent hunters certainly enjoyed food cooked this way. In 1840 Victor Tixier, armed with meat from a fresh kill, describes how “spits were put up everywhere; the short-ribs, the cuds, ribs, loins, the humps were being roasted over all the fires.”

As tasty as a fresh-grilled steak is, there is a significant drawback to cooking meat this way, especially if you savour all the fats and juices that meat contains. All of us have grilled over an open flame (our barbeques), and so we know that the flame sizzles and roars to life as the juice and fat drips from the heated meat. This is inevitable when various fats contained in meat are heated to the melting point, and we don’t mind so much because we are intending to cut off most of the fat anyway. But Aboriginal hunters minded. The fats and juices were life-giving sources of energy and nutrition for them. Grilling meat on a spit over an open flame was easy, quick, and took almost no preparation. No doubt it was done on a large scale at Head-Smashed-In. However, to the Native hunters it was an inferior method of cooking that resulted in the loss of much of what makes meat so great to eat. As you might expect, over the vast time they processed up the remains of bison, they developed a sophisticated way to cook their meat and keep in all the essential fats. They roasted it in the ground.

This is something my crews and I never did try, but I met a number of ranchers who did and who attested to the supreme delicacy of the meat (it is not surprising that ranchers, surrounded by cattle, have explored many ways to cook meat, as did Native people). The method is decidedly laborious and time consuming. That it was done at all is evidence that the end result is a stunningly good feed.

It began with yet another pit dug into the earth on the prairie that skirted the buffalo jump. These pits were deeper and steeper sided than the boiling pits, averaging about seventy-five centimetres across and the same in depth. These had to be excavated into hard-packed soils with simple digging tools, such as antler tines or pointed sticks, so the labour investment was considerable. Then rocks were gathered to be used to line the bottom of the pit. While we knew this much from detailed historic accounts of how Plains people roasted food in earthen pits, when we actually found and excavated some of these features we were in for a surprise.

I have just finished describing the enormous effort that the users of the jump went to in order to obtain vast quantities of a particular type of stone, quartzite, from the Oldman River valley, with which to boil their water-filled pits. In the process, they ignored an endless supply of immediately available rock, the local sandstone bedrock. But as we began to discover and excavate additional pits identified as ones used to roast meat, we discovered that they contained almost exclusively sandstone rocks and hardly a single piece of quartzite.

Hard, dense, rounded quartzite cobbles were ideal for transferring heat from a fire into a pit filled with water, but the heating requirements of a roasting pit are entirely different. There is no heat being transferred. Rather, it is being reflected. The pit acted exactly like an earth oven, baking the food as it lay buried in the ground. The heat needed to be contained in the pit and reflected back to the meat that lay inside. Sandstone, made up of cemented sand grains, essentially pure silica, is highly reflective. If you need proof of this, work alongside a south-facing cliff of sandstone on a sunny day; you feel the heat radiating off the rock surface like an oven. I have painful personal experience. Working along a hot, sunny sandstone cliff in Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, I discovered the power of both modern sun block lotions and of the reflective power of sandstone. My face, neck, and arms, lathered with a high SPF sunscreen, were well protected, while to my dismay I was sunburned through my clothes.

The towering cliffs of Porcupine Hills sandstone, of little use in boiling food, were ideally suited for the purpose of baking food in the ground. Furthermore, because the local bedrock was laid down millions of years ago in a marine environment, it has bedding planes, which cause the rock to break into relatively flat sheets. Flat slabs, not rounded cobbles, were precisely what were needed to form a reflective floor at the bottom of a roasting pit. Rounded rocks would have space between them where heat could escape into the lower soil; flat slabs of rock could be fitted together to form a nearly solid layer of basal stone. It was a perfect surface for radiating heat back to what lies above – large bundles of meat.

From historic accounts we know that when meat was roasted in the ground, a pit, shaped like an inverted bell, was lined on the bottom with a layer of rocks. Sometimes these rocks were heated before they were placed in the pit; sometimes a fire was built over the bottom layer of rocks to get them red hot. With the hot rocks in place, the meat was added to the pit. Usually, it was wrapped in a blanket of either hide or local vegetation (small branches of local willow, Saskatoon bushes, or conifers would have been ideal) to keep the meat from getting covered in dirt. Dirt was then piled on top of the protected meat and a fire was built over the pit. This fire was kept burning for many hours; some accounts say up to a full day or more. The long-burning surface fire sent heat into the earth below, through the meat, that was reflected back up again by the slabs of underlying sandstone. Finally, the ashes were pushed aside and the packaged meat was excavated from within the pit. From all accounts, both ancient and those of modern ranchers, meat cooked in this way is the most succulent, finest tasting you will ever have. Accounts of this type of cooking are rare, but Edwin James furnished us with a fine summary:

Cooked for dinner the entire hump of a bison, after the manner of the Indians; this favourite part of the animal was dissected from the vertebræ, after which the spinous processes were taken out, and the denuded part was covered with skin, which was firmly sewed to that of the back and sides of the hump; the hair was burned and pulled off, and the whole mass exhibiting something of a fusiform shape, was last evening placed in a hole dug in the earth for its reception, which had been previously heated by means of a strong fire in and upon it. It was now covered with cinders and earth, to the depth of about one foot, and a strong fire was made over it. In this situation it remained until it was taken up for the table to-day, when it was found to be excellent food.

From Mandelbaum’s study of the Plains Cree we know that sometimes these roasting pits were made inside the tipi, dug into the floor, with the tipi fire providing the heat. Sometimes whole bison fetuses, plucked from their mother’s bellies, were roasted in this way. So too were huge racks of ribs, and cuts from the massive hams of the rear legs. Meat, slowly roasted in deep, rock-lined pits, was literally baked in its own fat and juices, accounting for its delicious taste.

The original pits used by the Native cooks would nearly always be emptied of their contents by families eager to devour the fruits of their labours, and so we don’t know what parts of the animal were placed in any one pit. But occasionally, for reasons lost to history (perhaps the appearance of enemies, the onset of a severe storm, or sheer forgetfulness), roasting pits were left with their contents intact. We discovered one such pit at the Head-Smashed-In processing site. The bones of what appeared to be nearly an entire fetus, or very young calf, were found tightly clustered in a pit and lying above a layer of sandstone slabs.

Since we discovered a number of these roasting pits during our years of excavating at Head-Smashed-In, it is clear that the ancient hunters were willing to go to the time and trouble of constructing and operating these impressive cooking features. Encountering the remains of a roasting pit is simple luck; there is no surface sign today of where they once were placed. Our discovery of a dozen or so, after having excavated only a tiny fraction of the entire site (much less than 1 per cent), suggests that hundreds if not thousands of roasting pits were used over the entire time that people processed the remains of bison at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. They are testimony to the great labour that ancient people were willing to expend to prepare food in the manner desired and to the recognition of the intrinsic properties of materials and circumstances (in this case, a sandstone-lined roasting pit to retain fat and juices) most suited to achieve their purpose.

Where Are the Skulls?

Round an isolated tree in the prairie I observed a circle of holes in the ground, in which thick poles had stood. A number of buffalo skulls were piled up there; and we were told that this was a medicine, or charm, contrived by the Indians in order to entice the herds of buffaloes. – Maximilian, Prince of Wied, 1832–34

One of the many really boring things that archaeologists do is count bones. We look for discrepancies in the counts that might guide us toward some greater understanding of what people were doing with the game they killed. One thing you can be sure of at any mass game kill is that bones will not be recovered in direct correspondence to the number of each bone in the body. That is, Aboriginal people were making very conscious decisions about what parts of the carcass they valued most. Thousands of years later, these decisions are still reflected in the widely divergent counts of different bones at bison kill and processing sites.

An inordinately high count of small lower leg bones at the kill site, for example, might indicate that these relatively worthless bones, with little meat or fat on them, were discarded immediately. Conversely, the ribs and the great spines of the thoracic vertebrae, known to be associated with some of the most favoured cuts of the animal, might have very low counts at the kill site, suggesting that they were nearly always taken away for consumption. Patterns in counts of bones recovered from the processing area are often a mirror image of the kill site: bones associated with the choicest cuts of meat should be recovered in great numbers (because they were moved from the kill to the butchering area), while bones linked to relatively poor parts of the carcass might be nearly absent (because they were abandoned at the kill).

Simple counting of buffalo bones from Head-Smashed-In reveals a very curious fact. There is a distinct shortage of skulls. Given that tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of animals were killed there over nearly six thousand years, there are not nearly as many skulls, or fragments of them, as one would expect, neither from the kill site nor the processing area. They are certainly not entirely absent from the site, but they are very much underrepresented in relation to all the other bones of the body.

Archaeologists always have to look at a wide array of factors to account for simple discrepancies in such things as bone counts. Some bones are much softer than others and will degrade more easily in the soil; thus you can expect harder bones (such as leg bones that had to support the great weight of the beast) to be better preserved and hence have higher counts. Some bones are more favoured by carnivores and scavengers (such as ones with more fat and marrow), so they might be preferentially dragged away and consumed by wolves, coyotes, rodents, and birds. Certain bones (like those from the hoof) are small, round, and easily rolled away by wind and running water. Others, like the pelvis, are massive and angular and so resist almost any kind of movement. Even when all these factors are considered, skulls are very rare at Head-Smashed-In. Many of the great communal bison kills from the northern Plains show the same shortage of skulls.

There is not much meat or fat connected with the head of the bison. It’s mostly a thick mat of hair and skin drawn over massive bone. Probably, the noses, eyeballs, and tongues were taken from every animal. There is little other food value associated with the head, so we can’t explain their scarcity on the basis of people taking away a valued food source. And they are big and very heavy. You don’t drag off something as massive as a bison skull unless you have a good reason.

Of course, skulls were the source of one very practical and necessary part of converting dead bison to useful products; they were the source of brains used in tanning hides. It just so happens that the chemical mixture of brains is almost exactly what is needed to tan animal hides effectively so that they don’t rot. We know from both archaeological evidence and historic writings that skulls were routinely smashed (right in the centre of the head) and the brains were removed and saved for hide-tanning purposes. As a result, many of the skulls that are found show a distinctive crushing of the cranium. Even factoring these skulls into the equation, however, there is an inordinate shortage of skulls at the great communal kills. Something else was going on.

The answer may lie in the historic literature. Scouring the writings left by those who first studied the Plains Indians, it quickly becomes apparent that skulls figured into a wide variety of very special activities and beliefs, ones that did not pertain to other bones from the skeleton. Skulls, it seems, somehow represented, or embodied, the animal itself. It’s as if skulls could stand in for the animals, serving as powerful icons that had the ability to mediate between real people and real buffalo. Perhaps most importantly, skulls could call other buffalo.

Studying the Teton Sioux, Francis Densmore told how a medicine man painted a buffalo skull with red and blue stripes. Then he filled his pipe and put both the pipe and the skull on a bed of prairie sage. “It was believed,” Densmore reported, “that ‘the skull turned into a real buffalo and called others.’” Pounds built by the Cree had a wooden ramp that the animals had to dash across before they plunged into the corral. A number of nations placed offerings underneath this ramp, presumably as gifts to the spirit world, in an attempt to ensure the success of the hunt. The Cree placed a buffalo skull under the ramp, hoping it would serve to call others of its kind. Maximilian, travelling through the Plains in the 1830s, observed the Assiniboine practice of building tall piles of stone “on the top of which is placed a buffalo skull, which we were told the Indians place there to attract the herds of buffaloes, and thereby to ensure a successful hunt.”

In addition to rituals associated with calling the bison, skulls played a prominent role in many other ceremonies held by the people who subsisted on this animal. Bradbury, on the Plains from 1809 to 1811, encountered skulls that had been ceremonially decorated and was told that “it was an honour conferred by the Indians on the buffaloes which they had killed, in order to appease their spirits.” In 1839 Thomas Farnham described an Arapahoe lodge in which the people “hang a fresh buffalo’s head inside, near the top of the lodge … and the skin of a white buffalo, as offerings to the Great Spirit.” Maximilian provides a wonderfully evocative description of how skulls were revered and cared for through the ages:

The buffalo skulls … are preserved in their huts, where they are everywhere to be seen, to be handed down from the father to the children. Many such heads are looked upon by them as medicine; they are kept in the huts, and sometimes the Indians stroke them over the nose, and set food before them. In general, the buffalo is a medicine animal, and more or less sacred.

In a previous chapter I made mention of how buffalo skulls were used in a piercing ceremony, attached by sinew to bone needles skewered through the skin of people making a pledge to the Great Spirit. The supplicants “are obliged to drag this heavy weight about,” Maximilian observed, “with much pain.” Such is their symbolic power that buffalo skulls also formed part of complex communication systems. In the early 1800s, Edwin James came across “a semicircular row of sixteen bison skulls, with their noses pointing down the river. Near the centre of the circle which this row would describe, if continued, was another skull marked with a number of red lines.” Puzzled by this discovery, James inquired as to its meaning:

Our interpreter informed us that this arrangement of skulls and other marks here discovered, were designed to communicate the following information, namely, that the camp had been occupied by a war party of the … Pawnee Loup Indians, who had lately come from an excursion against the Cumancias, Ietans, or some of the western tribes. The number of red lines traced on the painted skull indicated the number of the party to have been thirty-six; the position in which the skulls were placed, that they were on their return to their own country. Two small rods stuck in the ground, with a few hairs tied in two parcels to the end of each, signified that four scalps had been taken.

Perhaps these records help explain why skulls are relatively rare at Head-Smashed-In and many other mass kill sites. The head of the buffalo was infused with power not shared by other skeletal elements. There is an important lesson here for archaeologists. We have a tendency to ascribe people’s actions to straightforward, rational action, behaviour that is rooted in our notion of a common sense use of the resources that permeated their world. Certainly, much of my description of killing and butchering bison reflects this practical interpretation. For the most part, I have advanced a scenario whereby ancient Aboriginal people used the carcass of the buffalo in ways that maximized their return of nutritious, energy-rich food. The lesson of the skull serves to remind us that life is seldom that simple. In other cultures, people might refrain from eating meat on Fridays, avoid pork altogether, or even place a chicken “wishbone” on a shelf to dry so we can vie to be the one holding the greater part after snapping it. Cultures around the world have imparted deeply held beliefs to the foods that keep them alive; few, if any, do so more so than the Plains people did with the buffalo.

Packing Up, Among the Bears

We had not left the fort more than five or six miles behind us, when we fell in with an enormous grizzly bear, but François would not fire at him … A younger man than he, who had his character to make, might have been foolish enough to have run the risk, for the sake of the standing it would have given him amongst his companions; but François … would not risk attacking so formidable an animal with only two men. In fact, their enormous strength, agility, and wonderful tenacity of life, make them shunned even by large numbers, and few are killed, except by young men, for the sake of proudly wearing the claws. – Paul Kane, 1847

This pretty well covers the range of food processing activities that we know went on at Head-Smashed-In. Many parts of the story of what transpired at the processing site simply leave no archaeological trace and, except through speculation and the memories of elders, will remain unknown to us – the feasting, the prayers and ceremonies, the sending out of scouts to alert nearby groups of relatives to come to the jump, the daily exchange of conversation. But it would be a mistake to think that all the extraordinary hard work had come to an end. The killing of a hundred or more bison at the jump put in motion a host of longer term processing responsibilities. Some of these we believe took place after hunters left the kill site, at the next camp spot.

There were a number of compelling reasons to depart from the buffalo jump: the lack of protection, absence of wood, the unsuitability of the place for long-term camping. But there was another reason – the smell. Upwards of several hundred buffalo had been killed and butchered at the site. Blood, guts, stomach contents, and stray bits of fat, meat, and bone must have been spread everywhere. In the days following the kill, this mess began to rot. The stench must have been overpowering. We can’t impose our own values on the ancient hunters and assume that they found the smell repulsive. They may have been much more accustomed to such situations than we could ever be. But we can assume that the smell had another unwelcome consequence; it brought in an array of bothersome visitors.

The wind-borne scent of the kill must have made its way to the noses of a host of other animals that would have found it quite enticing. Wolves and coyotes, virtually the constant companions of buffalo herds, would have wanted to get at their fair share of the booty and were probably a constant nuisance. Great flocks of carrion-eating birds no doubt circled above the stinking mass, swooping down to pick at the pieces. More ominously, the wafting smell might have attracted the animal most feared by Native people, the grizzly bear.

We think of the grizzly as a reclusive animal confined to the wild back areas of the Rocky Mountains, but before the development and settlement of the West, they were much more numerous and lived out on the open Great Plains. These fearsome beasts hunted and killed anything and everything they wished. That they brought down huge bison, including bulls, at full gallop is well documented. In 1859, near the fork of the Bow and Red Deer rivers, Palliser told of a companion of his who watched a band of buffalo emerge from a river and ascend the opposite bank “when he saw a bear (previously concealed in a deep rut) spring up and dash the foremost bull to the ground, ploughing his sides with his monstrous claws and rending his heart and vitals by a succession of tremendous blows.” Edwin James also attests to the enormous strength of the Plains grizzly, recounting how a companion of his shot a bison, “and leaving the carcass to obtain assistance to butcher it, he was surprised on his return to find that it had been dragged entire, to a considerable distance, by one of these bears, and was now lodged in a concavity of the earth, which the animal had scooped out for its reception.”

John Audubon was told of a starving Indian family that had sought refuge on the gravel bar of a river. Desperate for food, the man spied a bison carcass:

The soldiers saw him walk to the body of a dead Buffalo lying on the shore of the island, with the evident intention of procuring some of it for food. As he stooped to cut off a portion, to his utter horror he saw a small Grizzly Bear crawl out from the carcass. It attacked him fiercely, and so suddenly that he was unable to defend himself; the Bear lacerated his face, arms, and the upper part of his body in a frightful manner.

More frighteningly, grizzlies hunted humans. James referred to the animal as, “without doubt, the most daring and truly formidable animal that exists in the United States,” and he asserted that the grizzly “frequently pursues and attacks hunters.” Thomas Woolsey, trekking across Alberta in the mid-1800s, recorded a female grizzly “nearly dragged one of the hunters from off his horse.” But the most harrowing historical account of an attack on humans by a grizzly bear must go to David Thompson. Camped with the Peigan in southern Alberta, Thompson records how the silence of camp was broken by “the death cry.” It came from a young man who had just returned with “one of his thighs torn by a grizled bear.” It seems that three young men had come across the bear and decided to hunt him for the value of his hide and the highly prized claws. They had two arrows each, hardly an arsenal against a grizzly, and had the bad luck of having their arrows hit bones and non-vulnerable parts of the animal. Enraged, the bear “sprung on the first, and with one of his dreadful fore paws tore out his bowels and three of his ribs; the second he seized in his paws, and almost crushed him to death, threw him down, when the third Indian hearing their cries came to their assistance and sent an arrow which only wounded [the bear] in the neck, for which the Bear chased him, and slightly tore one of his thighs.” Arming themselves, men from the camp headed out with the wounded hunter in search of the bear: “They found him devouring one of the dead … The first poor fellow was still alive and knew his parents, in whose arms he expired.” When the bear was eventually killed, the wounded man asked to keep the enormous foreclaws but was denied.^† The carcass of the bear was burned “until nothing but ashes remained.”

Native inhabitants of the Plains were pretty much the lords of the land, the top of the food chain; they could and did kill virtually everything that roamed the prairies. But the grizzly bear was the one animal that hunted them (a pack of wolves may have taken the occasional solitary hunter, but this was probably very rare). Grizzly bears, being ferocious predators, were deeply feared but deeply respected by Native people. So strong was this respect that a number of Native groups were said to refuse to eat the flesh of the bear. While grizzly bears may have preferred fresh kills, they were not averse to scavenging carcasses. Lewis and Clark came across the largest grizzly they had ever seen, “devouring a dead buffaloe on a sandbar.” The fear that the smell of rotting buffalo carcasses would attract grizzly bears provided a powerful incentive for people to vacate Head-Smashed-In as quickly as possible.

Thus, for a whole host of reasons, we suspect that the hundreds of people who had gathered at the jump were anxious to depart. They would head for a camp that was safe, secure, and more comfortable. They would leave behind a hillside and prairie flats stinking with blood, spilled guts, and scraps of discarded food and bones – fodder for a plethora of scavengers, from bugs, birds, coyotes, and wolves to grizzly bears. Quite possibly, they set fire to the site before departing to clean it up and discourage scavengers.

Leaving Head-Smashed-In was probably not a single event. That is, it is very unlikely that at some point all the work was completed and the groups as a whole gathered up the spoils and quit the site. For one thing, there was simply too much stuff for everyone to carry. Departing the site was something that went on over a period of time, even as the butchering was still going on. Going home was a process, not an event.

† There is, however, a spectacular buffalo jump in Wyoming, the Vore site, where bison were driven and killed in a huge sinkhole in the prairie and then had to be dragged upslope for processing. You can still see the trails where hunters schlepped the carcass parts up the sides of the sinkhole.

† Availability of water governed much of Plains life. Searching out suitable campsites, Palliser said, “It is always water that determines the choice.” Natives did transport water, using buffalo stomachs and skins from the heart, but it was a heavy burden and a temporary solution.

† There is a pattern to this. Seeps and springs emanate from many bedrock escarpments. Desperate with thirst on the Plains, Edwin James followed bison trails hoping they would lead to water. He recounts how the trails “converge from all directions to the places where water is to be found, and by following their guidance were soon led to a spot where was found a small spring dripping from the side of a cliff of sandstone.”

† The same applies to historic artwork. There are dozens of fabulous images of bison hunting that capture the thrill, danger, and excitement of the chase. But the great Western artists – Catlin, Kane, Bodmer, Miller, and others – moved on when the kill was over. There are almost no historical paintings or sketches of bison butchering.

† Although the men may have knocked off. There is ample reporting of butchering being mostly women’s work. “At the time of the ‘great fall hunt,’ there was no rest nor excuse for her,” Colonel Dodge observed. “She must work at any and all hours … When the buffalo was dead the man’s work was done. It was woman’s work to skin and cut up the dead animal … The women were obliged to work hard and fast, all night long before their task was finished.” John McDougall, a witness to buffalo kills in the 1860s, said, “The life of an Indian woman in those early days was, indeed, an extremely busy one … cooking, cutting up, drying and pounding meat, rendering grease, chopping bones to get out the marrow fat, making pemmican, stretching, scraping and dressing buffalo hides to make robes or leather – a long, tedious process.” George Catlin witnessed a bison kill, “The throng of women and children … had been assembled, and all of whom seemed busily at work.”

† It’s probably fair to assume that some of the meat from just about all large-scale bison kills was dried. Interviewing the Coeur d’Alêne people, James Teit reported, “Meat intended for winter use or to be carried a long way was invariably dried either by the fire or in the sun, or both, assisted by wind and smoke.”

† McDougall described meat being dried in a depression: “We made a fire and across the top of it placed willows, whereon we spread the meat.” Referring to buffalo processing, Edwin James reported, “The meat, with the exception of that of the shoulders, or hump, as it is called, is then dissected with much skill into large thin slices, and dried in the sun, or jerked over a slow fire on a low scaffold.”

† As Mandelbaum reports, they also sometimes tried to catch the melting grease: “Fat from shoulder and rump was placed before a fire and as it melted dripped into a hide container. This was called sasıpmanpimı· (frying grease).”

† These scavengers know their subject well. I once did a study of precisely how much grease there was in major bison bones. I then looked at the literature on scavenger selection of bones from carcasses. There was almost a perfect one-to-one correlation. If you scatter bones from a carcass in front of carnivores, they will quickly sniff among the total sample and then pick out the very greasiest ones to eat first.

† Another method of boiling water was to make an above-ground cauldron by suspending a buffalo stomach or piece of hide over a wooden tripod. The basin was then filled with water, and the water was heated by adding hot rocks. This method was not as effective in windy areas because the wind sapped the heat from the sides of the hide container.

† Clearly this was a character building exercise: Milt went on to be a director in government; Caroline now holds a PhD in anthropology. I like to think my assignment left them well suited (and was perhaps even responsible) for their future career advancement.

† Josiah Gregg commented that it “is amusing to witness the bustle which generally takes place in collecting this offal.” Edward Harris said he had a good laugh wondering what their friends back home would say if they could see him and the great naturalist Audubon carrying buffalo chips stacked up to their chins.

† The front claws of the grizzly bear (being much larger than the hind claws) were, as Paul Kane noted, “one of the most esteemed ornaments to an Indian chief.” Edwin James tells how Native hunting parties went in search of the bears specifically to obtain the claws. They were, James records, “highly esteemed, and dignify the fortunate individual who obtains them. We saw, on the necks of many of their warriors, necklaces, composed of the long fore-claws separated from the foot, tastefully arranged in a radiating manner.” I once recovered a complete set of grizzly bear foreclaws from an archaeological site in southern Alberta. Each claw had a drill hole for stringing, and each bore faint traces of red ochre paint. That the claws dated to 2,700 years ago attests to the great time depth of the Aboriginal belief in the power of the bear.