Vore Buffalo Jump

The Vore site is not a cliff but a sinkhole, a pit some sixty feet deep that opened where water dissolved the gypsum under the prairie at the western edge of the Black Hills. For roughly 250 years, from the 1500s to around 1800, hunters drove bison over its rim, butchered them in the hole and hauled the meat and hides up and out to carry their people through the winter. Sediment washing in buried the bones and tools quickly and kept the layers apart: about twenty layers of bone, each the remains of one hunt, separated by thin yearly bands of silt that can be counted like tree rings. Archaeologists estimate that at least four thousand bison died here. The site lies between the open plains and the shelter of the Hills, country many nations contested, and the foundation that keeps it counts the Shoshone, Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Kiowa-Apache among its likely users.

Highway surveyors found it in the path of Interstate 90 around 1970. Drilling brought up bison bone, University of Wyoming archaeologists were called, and the interstate was moved south. Only a small part of the site has been dug. The Vore family gave the land first to the university and then to the Vore Buffalo Jump Foundation, which keeps a building over the excavation and gives tours in summer. It sits between I-90 and old US-14 near Beulah.