Well, here you go with this week's column:
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.
Yeah. You read that correctly. I said, “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.”
This park is no tame “Crowder’s Mountain” or “South Mountains State Park.” This is Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site, a thirty-foot cliff in Canada hunters used to run buffalos off.
Because hey, if you’ve ever had to run up to a buffalo an poke a spear in him, you’d be looking to make the hunting process a little more user-friendly too.
The idea was pretty simple: run the buffalo off a cliff, let Newton and his pesky gravity do their thing, and eat the conveniently dead buffalo - much better than chewing on a live buffalo.
And if you want to see a moving computer graphic of an endless stream of buffalos leaping off an imaginary cliff, go to the website: www.head-smashed-in.com (I couldn’t make this stuff up).
By the way, I’ve heard lemmings don’t actually do that. Apparently the Disney film crew making the 1958 documentary that inspired the leaping-lemming myth induced them to jump (some reports say threw them) for the sake of some good footage. I don’t know if they then ate the lemmings.
And lemmings weren’t even indigenous to the area the film was made, according to the website I’m looking at. They had to be imported and were put on a snow covered turntable to film the migration sequence.
Anyway, Head-Smashed-In.com says, “Thanks to their excellent understanding of topography and of bison behavior, [hunters] killed bison by chasing them over a precipice and subsequently carving up the carcasses in the camp below.”
Not to crack on their knowledge of geography or mammalian biology, but how many times did someone have to run off a cliff before they figured out it could be fatal? This is hardly plate tectonics, quantum physics or molecular cell biology.
Now before I start seeming all educated about buffalos cascading off cliffs, I have to say that Dave Barry thought it up first. Or at least I found out about it from one of his books, “Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need.”
He describes Head-Smashed-In, just north of Shelby, Montana, in the section on touring Canada (Canadia? Canadae? How do I conjugate this?), which was in the chapter on touring the USA. Hmmm.
“When we called it up, a person answered the phone as follows: “Head Smashed In, may I help you?” This was probably the highlight of our entire life,” Barry writes.
The receptionist answered the phone the same way for me, much to the glee of surrounding college students.
Try it for yourself: 1-403-553-2731.
What do you mean you don’t conjugate Canadai? I bet you do in German.
Anyway, according to the website, natives have continuously used the site (one of 150 in Alberta - this was apparently quite popular) since 5,500 B.C., though it’s unclear if they still do, or if it’s just drunk college kids these days.
Over the millennia we got dumber with time and gave Head-Smashed-In its name.
According to legend, or at least the Internet, just about 150 years ago a young man (these stories always involve an adolescent male, don’t they?) wasn’t content with watching hundreds of large ungulates fly off a cliff from a safe, un-head-smashing distance.
He had to have a better view.
He’d have made a good photographer.
Crazy Canadaianses.