At the base of one Montana cliff, archaeologists found eighteen feet of compacted bison bones. The hunters who put them there never used a horse, never fired a gun, and sometimes died doing it.

For thousands of years, before Europeans brought horses to the plains, Indigenous tribes in Montana hunted bison by sending a single young man into a thundering herd of two-thousand-pound animals. After purifying himself in a sweat lodge, the "runner" would drape a bison calf skin over his shoulders and slip among the herd, mimicking the cries of a calf in distress to draw the matriarch's attention. Other runners, hidden in wolf skins, closed in from behind.

In 1776, a fur trader named Alexander Henry watched one of these drives and could only marvel: "The Indians' gestures so closely resembled those of the animals that if I had not been in the secret, I would have been as deceived as the buffalo."

At the cliff's edge, the runner had a single chance to leap aside or drop to a hidden ledge as the herd thundered over. He didn't always make it.

Roughly 300 buffalo jump sites still exist in Montana. Three are protected and open to visitors: First Peoples near Great Falls (the largest in North America), Wahkpa Chu'gn outside Havre (where a 20-foot wall of bone is preserved exactly as it was uncovered), and Madison Buffalo Jump south of Logan.

Photos by Holly Matkin

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