Calgary & Southern Alberta

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

The ancient communal hunting methods of driving bison over cliffs or into specially constructed corrals were highly effective. However, they required many days of preparation, large numbers of hunters, and the presence of special topographical features. As tribes on the plains began to acquire large numbers of horses, these old hunting techniques gradually gave way to the mounted buffalo hunt. The Blackfoot, Plains Cree and Plains Assiniboine did not receive horses until the 1730s. The severity of southern Alberta's climate, moreover, made winter buffalo chases difficult. When Europeans first arrived in southern Alberta, local hunters were, therefore, still conducting communal bison hunts on foot. In many other areas of the plains, however, the mounted chase had entirely supplanted traditional bison drive techniques by the eighteenth century.

Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection 

Like the older methods of hunting bison, the new technique demanded great hunting skill and extensive knowledge of bison behaviour. The chief advantage of the chase was that with specially trained horses called "buffalo runners", a few hunters could dispatch large numbers of bison wherever the men encountered a grazing herd. While it did not require as many direct participants as the traditional communal buffalo drive, conducting a successful mounted hunt was still contingent on the co-operation of everyone in an encampment. The three Blackfoot tribes, the Plains Cree, Plains Assiniboine and the Sarcee (Tsuu T'ina) all maintained warrior societies or fraternities whose members were charged with regulating community activities. These policing duties were particularly critical when hunters prepared for a mounted bison chase. In the 1840s, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet recorded that the Assiniboine warrior society

... hinder[ed] the hunters from leaving camp, either alone or in detached groups, lest the bisons be disturbed [too soon], and thus be driven away from the encampment. The law against this was extremely severe; not only all the Indians of the camp must conform to it, but it reaches to all travellers, even when they ... do not know that there is a hunt in contemplation. Should they frighten the animals, they are also punishable; however, those of the camp are more rigorously chastised in case they transgress the regulation. Their guns, their bows, and arrows are broken, their lodges cut in pieces, their dogs killed, all their provisions and their hides are taken from them. If they are bold enough to resist this penalty, they are beaten with bows, sticks, and clubs, and this torment frequently terminates in the death of the unhappy transgressor. Anyone who should set fire to the prairie by accident or imprudence, or in any way frighten off the herd, would be sure to be well beaten.