Buffalo Country

The panel's early 1880's can be counted in a buyer's ledger. For Hornaday's 1889 report, the Minneapolis fur dealer J. N. Davis estimated that Northern Pacific stations between Miles City and Mandan shipped about 50,000 hides and robes in 1881, the first season white hunters' robes went out, about 200,000 in 1882 and 40,000 in 1883. In 1884 Davis shipped from Dickinson the only carload of robes that went east that year, and it was the last ever. Many of the hunters went on believing the herd had only gone north.

What the plaque says

Buffalo Country The Great Plains of eastern Montana was home to thousands of buffalo before Euro-American hunters nearly wiped them out in the early 1880's. The animals were central to the Indian lifeway. In the dog days, hunters herded buffalo into a corral where they killed them. They also stampeded the shaggy beasts over cliffs, called pishkuns. With the arrival of the horse in the 1700's, hunting methods changed. As much a sport as a necessity, hunting buffalo with bows and arrows on horseback was dangerous and exciting. Fat buffalo cow was the choice meat. Women preserved the meat by making jerky and pemmican. They made pemmican of dried and pulverized meat mixed with marrow bone grease and oil. Wild berries gave it flavor; the ascorbic acid in the fruit acted as a preservative. Pemmican, packed away in skin bags, kept indefinitely. In food value, one pound of pemmican equaled ten pounds of fresh meat. This staple sustained the tribes through many long winters when fresh meat was unavailable. Indians used tanned robes and rawhide for clothes, tepees, bedding, tools and utensils. Buffalo figured prominently in religious practices and disputes over prime hunting grounds frequently caused intertribal conflicts.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Peck Theatre — 22 mi
  A movie house the Corps of Engineers threw up in nine months for the dam crews, meant to come down when the dam was done.

More markers nearby

• The Old Milk River Bridge and Tampico — 5.8 mi
• The Ice Ages — 7.4 mi
• Liquid Gold — 7.4 mi
• Old Fort Peck — 22 mi