"The other day, in company with some vacationing friends from back East, my wife and I visited the Madison Buffalo Jump State Park outside Logan, Montana, about 20 miles west of here. When we arrived, there were only two other people there. It wasn't hard to see why.

"Beware of Rattlesnakes," warned a sign at the parking lot, which was enough to persuade the ladies to stay in the car.

And though there were no rattlesnakes in sight, there wasn't much else in sight either, other than Montana's proverbial Big Sky, a lovely landscape, and a small but precipitous butte across the way. From time immemorial, explained the historical markers, Native Americans had herded buffalo to their deaths by running up behind nearby herds and stampeding them over the edge of the butte.

Such "pedestrian hunting" was an efficient system for a horseless, gun-less people, but the stampedes necessarily provided far more meat and hides than the Indians could use at any given time. Far from treading lightly on the planet, in other words, Native Americans � like any other peoples � did what they had to do to survive. And once they had horses and guns, they only grew more efficient at the killing: Serious historians have concluded that bison populations in the Great Plains already were in marked decline by the time the white hunter came along to (nearly) finish them off."

Get the Story:
Thomas Bray: Where the Bison Roam (The New York Sun 7/19)

Relevant Links:
The Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative - http://www.intertribalbison.org
Buffalo Field Campaign - http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org
Yellowstone National Park - http://www.nps.gov/yell

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