In virtually all cultures that have depended on hunting, people have tried to influence the hunt through ritual. In Plains Indian cultures, "buffalo callers" performed ceremonies to attract the animals to the buffalo jumps and surrounds. These shamans had special knowledge of how to bring buffalo to the people, especially in times of hunger. The caller might dress in an animal skin, though not necessarily a buffalo hide, and dance back and forth until the herd began to follow him as he moved toward the jump or the surround. Other members of the tribe men, women, and children would fall in behind the herd, driving the buffalo faster and faster toward the jump. The caller would leap out of the animals' way at the last minute, and the buffalo would tumble over the cliff or slide down the slope into the surround.
A caller might have used a buffalo stone in his ritual. The stone would be carried in the shaman's medicine bundle along with other sacred objects used to invoke hunting magic. Unwrapping the bundle, the caller would sing and pray over the objects, calling for the return of the buffalo. The Blackfeet called these stones iniskim, and they favored ammonites that they found on the plains. The Indians thought that these fossilized seashells looked like sleeping buffalo. According to Blackfoot legend, the first buffalo stone revealed itself to a young woman who was out gathering firewood during a time of famine. The stone told her of a ritual that would call the buffalo to her. She and her husband performed the ritual as they had been instructed and the buffalo came. From that time on, people performed the same ritual whenever they needed to attract buffalo.
Archaeologists have examined buffalo kill sites throughout the plains. At the Jones-Miller site near Wray, Colorado, a team led by Dr. Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution recovered more than forty thousand bison bones. They estimated that the bones represented at least 250 buffalo and that they were probably about ten thousand years old. The bones were found in a corral-type impoundment along with stone points and butchering tools.
Little evidence of ceremonial artifacts at the kill sites has been excavated to date. Within this particular impoundment, however, the archaeologists found a deep posthole. Because it was located in the middle of the enclosure, it evidently wasn't part of the fence that contained the buffalo. Next to the posthole was a miniature Hell's Gap point, what appeared to be a bone flute, and the butchered remains of a dog. Could this have been where the shaman performed his ritual to call the buffalo to the surround? Did he play the flute and sacrifice the dog as part of the hunting magic? Did the miniature arrowhead symbolize the kill to take place? Did the posthole hold a flag aloft, showing the people where to drive the buffalo? These are intriguing questions; the answers may never be known.
Plains Indians adopted new methods of hunting as they absorbed influences from other cultures. Before the introduction of the horse, they had hunted and traveled on foot, using domesticated dogs as pack animals. When Coronado and other Spanish explorers entered the Southwest in the mid-1500s, they rode on horseback. Through raiding and trading, Indians obtained the horse as well, and within the course of two hundred years, tribes throughout the plains had adopted this method of travel. The horse brought revolutionary changes to the Plains culture.
Horses were specially trained for hunting buffalo, as agility and speed were needed to avoid being gored during the hunt. A buffalo horse was a prized possession. If it was suspected that a horse raiding party from another tribe was nearby, a hunter would bring his buffalo horse into the tipi for the night, forcing family members to sleep outside. The horse became a standard of wealth and prestige. A wealthy man not only had many horses, he might also have many wives, for the more successful he was at hunting, the more wives he needed to tan the buffalo hides.
On horseback the Plains Indians could travel farther and faster. A domesticated dog trailing a travois was very limited in how much weight it could transport. With horses, Indians could carry more belongings, such as larger tipis, and they could haul more meat and hides from buffalo kill sites. They had more mobility and ventured far onto the open plains to follow the migrating herds, and they traveled greater distances to trade with other tribes. With the horse, the Indian culture of the Great Plains flourished, reaching its zenith in the mid-1800s.
Another influence was the gun, and again Indians adapted to it quickly. Explorers, frontiersmen, and traders from the east brought the rifle to the plains, exchanging guns for buffalo hides at the trading posts that sprang up along the major westward routes. With the gun, the Indian became even more efficient at hunting buffalo, swooping in close to the herd and quickly killing off animals along the outer edges. Indians continued to use buffalo jumps and surrounds for slaughtering large numbers of buffalo, for the robes were a measure of exchange for the white man's goods. One buffalo robe could be bartered for a gallon kettle or a yard and a half of calico. Four buffalo robes would buy a Hudson Bay blanket, and eight buffalo robes could be traded for an ordinary riding horse or one gun with a hundred rounds of ammunition. The Indians no longer hunted only for sustenance; they now hunted for commerce as well.
The Plains Indians were very observant and highly adaptive, but there was one thing to which they could not adapt: the foreign civilization encroaching on their lands. Following the explorers, trappers, and traders came the multitudes: wagon trains of pioneers heading west to settle the frontier; forty-niners looking to strike it rich in the gold fields of California; the railroad pushing across the plains, building towns along the rights-of-way granted them by a government looking to people a continent. With the Homestead Act of 1862, free land became available to anyone who could work it.
"Our nation is melting away like the snow on the sides of the hills where the sun is warm, while your people are like the blades of grass in spring when the summer is coming," Red Cloud, the great Sioux chief, told government officials in 1870. As the traditional hunting grounds of the Plains Indians were shrinking, so too were the herds.
A number of factors led to the decimation of the buffalo. The Indians themselves were hunting more animals for trade. Buffalo runners, hired by the railroad to procure food for the crews laying track across the prairie, became highly proficient at downing large numbers of animals quickly. William Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, boasted that he had killed forty-eight buffalo in less than an hour. Professional hide hunters killed off massive numbers, often just skinning the animals and leaving the meat to rot on the prairie. Policy makers in Washington decided that the best way to eliminate "the Indian problem" was to eliminate their source of food, and the government encouraged the slaughter of the remaining buffalo herds. By the end of the nineteenth century, fewer than a thousand buffalo were left, a staggering reduction from the estimated 40 to 70 million that had once roamed the Great Plains.