The meat was dried in the sun to make a kind of jerky, preserved in fat, or pounded into a meal and mixed with berries to make pemmican. Because it would not keep, the liver was eaten raw immediately after the kill; the intestines were made into sausage. Buffalo tongue was considered a delicacy. The brain was used in a tanning process; the women rubbed it into skins to create a soft, supple leather. Even the sinews could be used for lacings and bindings.
The Indians made soap from the fat; they fashioned bones into all manner of useful objects, from hoes to beads; they stretched sinew into thread and wove hair into rope; they used horns for spoons, cups, and ladles; they cooked and carried water in stomach paunches; they swatted flies away with buffalo tails; and they burned the dung for fuel.
Indian children played lacrosse with rawhide hoops and slid down snowy hills on sleds with runners made of rib bones. Buffalo horns, decorated with quills, beads, and feathers, became ceremonial headdresses. The skull became the altar around which dancers circled, shaking rattles made of rawhide and hooves.
From the time a child was born and carried in a buffalo hide cradle, to the time a body was laid to rest in a buffalo skin shroud, the Plains Indians were dependent on the great buffalo herds. It is not surprising that the buffalo was so revered.
It is unknown just how long Indians have lived on the plains, or in the rest of the Americas for that matter. The origin story of some tribes does include migrations, but for many other tribes the people emerged from the earth or were created from the land where they lived. A number of tribal spokespeople today are adamant about this point and are offended by a Western scientific interpretation. Indian fundamentalism doesn't include evolution any more than Christian fundamentalism does.
Archaeology tells a different story. For many decades the predominant hypothesis has been that people crossed the Bering Strait land bridge at the end of the Ice Age. Much of the world's water was contained in the glaciers that covered the northern region of the earth, leaving dry land between Siberia and the Americas. It was theorized that the ancestors of American Indians migrated across this land bridge, most likely following game. Archaeologists call these peoples "Paleo-Indians," and many sites in North America, including bison kills from the Great Plains, show evidence of being 9,500 to 11,000 years old.
A curious thing about science, though, is that new data and new techniques often change the old truths, and archaeology is no exception. Over the last decade or so, some exciting new archaeological sites have been found in South America that date to more than twenty thousand years ago, based on radiocarbon analysis. The new information has not been readily accepted by the archaeological community, and the scientists who discovered these sites continue their critical study of the area to determine whether they are as old as the initial tests indicate. If so, these sites will revolutionize American archaeology and the interpretation of when and how various peoples came to the Americas.
Regardless of migration patterns or origin stories, wherever people settled, they adapted to their particular environment. Archaeologists have excavated artifacts of these early people, and many of the items reveal a connection to the natural world. Delicately carved stone pipes with images of ravens, raccoons, ducks, and other woodland animals have been recovered from ancient burial mounds in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, as well as ceramic bowls decorated with pictures of the roseate spoonbill, a bird long extinct in the Midwest. The tribes of the Pacific Northwest left behind totems and stone carvings of whales, fishes, and sea mammals. Desert tribes revered the coyote, the bighorn sheep, and the snake images of which they etched onto canyon walls. For the Indians of the Great Plains the buffalo defined the universe.
Early Plains Indians stayed mostly on the periphery of the vast, semiarid grasslands. During the cold and harsh months, they camped in the shelter of wooded river bottoms. Winters were lean times, and the Indians were lucky if a herd of buffalo wandered close to camp. More likely they would find stragglers, and with loud shouts and arms waving, the hunters would scare the animals into snowdrifts, trapping them there for the kill. Buffalo harvested in winter were valued for their thick coats of fur, which made the best robes; autumn kills provided the best meat, after the animals had fattened up over the summer.
During the summer months, the nomadic tribes ventured farther into the interior of the Great Plains, following the herds on their yearly migrations. For hunting purposes, the tribes split into smaller bands, perhaps twenty to thirty people in a family group, often related by blood. Disguised in wolf or coyote skins, the hunters would creep up on hands and knees to stalk the buffalo, which might stand more than six feet tall at the hump and weigh more than a ton. Once they were within close range, the hunters used spears or bows and arrows to kill their prey. It was a dangerous method of hunting.
There were safer and more efficient ways. One of these was the buffalo "jump." Waving robes in the air, shouting, and making a commotion, the Indians would cause the herd to stampede to the edge of a steep cliff, sending the animals plunging over the side to be killed by the fall. Large numbers of animals were harvested in this way, and the Indians often killed more than they could use.
Another ambush technique was the "surround," which was a sturdy corral built at the bottom of a
sloping cliff. In summer, the slope might be covered with dung mixed with water to make it slippery; in winter, water would be poured on the slope to form an ice sheet. Shouting and waving, the Indians drove the buffalo down the slope. Even if the animals in front tried to stop, they would be pushed down the slippery incline by the ones behind them. The animals trapped in the corral were killed by hunters waiting at the bottom.
Herding animals into corrals for the kill has roots in ancient hunting practices. One of the many incredible cave paintings discovered in Lascaux, France, depicts a skillfully drawn corral with a series of black dots that form a lane leading into it. At the Spanish site of Bojadillas, there are also numerous
Stone Age hunting scenes, including one of a corral with a doe inside. Outside the corral are figures of men with bows. Is the doe bait, and are the men waiting for their quarry?
The animals drawn by the ancients were probably sources of food, such as bison, horses, musk ox, and mammoths, as well as dangerous adversaries, such as cave lions and the woolly rhinoceros. Bison are among the most commonly pictured animals in the prehistoric caves of Europe. These paintings offer revealing insights into the lives of Paleolithic peoples. Especially intriguing are the half-bison/half-human figures.
The walls of the Chauvet Cave in the Ardeche region of southern France show an image of a bison head with human legs, most likely a man wearing a buffalo cape. Based on radiocarbon dating, the paintings in this cave are approximately thirty thousand years old. A similar painting, even more clearly a man wearing a bison hide, complete with the animal's hump and the tail trailing behind, can be seen in the Gabillou Cave, also in southern France. We can only speculate as to the meanings of these images. Are they young men being initiated as hunters? Are they hunters reliving a successful hunt? Or are these half-bison/half-human figures shamans invoking hunting magic?