Historical Marker
Buffalo Country
Big Horn County · Montana
The board ends the herds in the 1880s; on this reservation the Crow herd was rebuilt with federal help. On April 7, 1972, the Interior Department announced it would give the tribe 35 bison from the Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park herd at Medora, and Commerce a $300,000 grant to fence a 10,000-acre range on Big Horn Mountain, with the Park Service helping toward a model herd of 250. Tourism listings now give it as about 300 head. This board was photographed in 2016, before the rest area was rebuilt in 2024 and 2025.
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 corrals where they were killed. They also stampeded the shaggy beasts over cliffs, called pishkuns. With the arrival of the horse in the 1700s, hunting methods changed. As much a sport as a necessity, hunting buffalo with bows and arrows on horseback was dangerous and exciting. A fat cow buffalo was the choice for meat. Women preserved the meat by making jerky and pemmican. Pemmican was dried and pulverized meat mixed with bone marrow and fat. Wild berries gave it flavor; the ascorbic acid in the fruit acted as a preservative. Pemmican, packed away in skin bags, kept indefinitely. Indians used tanned buffalo 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
45.78252, -108.00305 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Pictograph Cave State Park — 21 miThree sandstone shelters outside Billings whose 1937 dig gave the northern plains its timeline, and whose paintings are fading.