It is an ordinary summer day on Montana’s Hi-Line. The sun is oven-hot. On the outskirts of Havre, pop. 9,621, business is slow at the Holiday Village Mall. A space vacated by Bi-Mart has left Herberger’s the only anchor tenant. The parking lot behind the mall is bordered by chain link fence and three strands of barbed wire, which guard a small trailer and tipi. Beyond them, an arid river valley stretches across to barren bluffs.
It is 12:15 p.m. This is the third time I’ve tried to visit the Wahkpa Chu’gn Buffalo Jump. It was closed on my previous tries. Now the gate is open, but a sign on the trailer door says the guide will return at 12:35. I wait. I take pictures. I return to my car for a hat and long sleeves to protect me from the sun.
Carrying a fast-food sack, a young woman in a T-shirt and shorts crosses the mall parking lot. The guide. She says the next tour won’t begin until 1 p.m., after her lunch break. I look at my watch and think about the six-hour drive back to Missoula. I decide to wait. In the air-conditioned, Glade-scented trailer, I browse among pseudo-Native American trinkets. I buy a $5 bracelet hand-braided with an Indian nickel and blue plastic beads. The guide tells me she made it. She will start art school in Seattle soon.
At 12:49 p.m., my guide finishes her lunch and announces we can start the tour early. We walk down wooden stairs built into the mountainside. Below us are five sheds connected by hot asphalt. We climb into a beige golf cart and putt down the path. The cart makes me feel weak, cosseted.
At the first red-painted shed, my guide unlocks the padlocked door, revealing a square pit dug into the hillside. Layered with heavy soil are more bones than I have ever seen in one place. On this ordinary day, I am startled enough to gasp.
Beginning 2,000 years ago — when Jesus walked the earth, she points out — humans drove bison to their deaths off the cliffs here. Buffalo jumps are common across the Plains states, but the Wahkpa Chu’gn (walk-pa-chew-gun, the Assinniboine name for the nearby Milk River) is one of the largest and best-preserved. This bison kill was used at different times by three distinct cultures: the Besant, Avonlea and Saddle Butte.
They herded 30 or 40 bison at a time over the cliffs. Animals not killed in the tumble were dispatched by atlatl. Meat was only part of what made the bison precious to Native Americans; its skin, organs, fat and bones were used for everything from clothing and cooking utensils to soap and tools. The remnants now lie up to 20 feet deep in layers of soil and bones.
The layers tell stories. Here, fetal bones speak of an early spring hunt. There, buffalo blood remains as red soil. Here, a black stripe from a grassfire 600 years ago.
Each time my guide opens the padlocked doors of what look like backyard sheds, I can’t help but ooh and ah in wonderment. Two-thousand years of bones remind me that what looks like ordinary on the surface might be anything but. Life, death. How extraordinary.
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