Wahkpa Chu'gn Buffalo Jump

In the fall of 1961 a fourteen-year-old Havre boy named John Brumley, hunting rabbits in the Milk River breaks, found bison bone, a stone knife, arrow points and scrapers weathering out of a bluff at the west edge of town. He had gone looking on purpose. The newly formed Milk River Archaeological Society wanted a kill site, and he meant to prove himself to them by finding one. The society dug through the 1960s and 1970s. Brumley studied archaeology, worked in Canada, and came home to run the site with his wife, Anna, for twenty-three years before they retired in 2017. He died in 2020.

What he found is a kill site used for about two thousand years by three successive peoples whom archaeologists name for their tools and camps: the Besant, who hunted with the atlatl, the Avonlea, who used the place more briefly, and the Old Women's or Saddle Butte people, who were still driving bison here about six hundred years ago. Bone lies in layers up to twenty feet deep. The digs exposed the remains of a wooden corral with bison skulls built into it, and pits for roasting meat and for boiling it with heated stones.

Unlike most excavated sites, this one was left open. Tours walk down to the pits, where the bone and the artifacts lie as they were found, and finish with a turn at throwing an atlatl. The site sits on the bluff right behind the Holiday Village Mall on U.S. 2, and it is on the National Register under the name Too Close for Comfort Site. The H. Earl Clack Museum runs daily tours from Memorial Day through Labor Day, and by arrangement off season.