Even with such a clever trap it required some luck to get the buffalo herd into position above the corral. Once it was in position, all the village turned out and crept into place behind the piles of roots along the wings. Then a line of men approached the herd upwind to start the animals running in the right direction.
Many things could go wrong, any one of which could send the quarry dashing off in the wrong direction. At times the village went on short rations for two or three weeks as attempt after attempt failed. But in time some more animals were corraled and everyone feasted again.
According to Blackfoot tradition, the first piskin was built after one of the men accidentally found out that he could ''call" the buffalo to follow him. One hot summer day he was on a grassy ridge where the flies were bad, with the buffalo feeding a few hundred yards away. When the man began flapping his robe to drive off the flies, a few of the buffalo cows began walking toward him. He ducked down and ran to the next ridge and flapped his robe again. Soon the cows came running toward him, followed by the rest of the herd. He barely escaped being crushed under the hooves of the rushing animals as he crouched behind a small boulder for protection.
When he told his friends about this, they decided to build a piskin for him to fill with buffalo. When the corral was ready, he went out and called in a herd, while the rest of the people helped along the wings. The drive was so successful that this type of hunting became the common practice of the village, and soon spread throughout the tribe. This is an interesting tradition, but it is more probable that the process evolved slowly, with much trial and error.
Eventually the tribe came to regard buffalo calling as an art, and only a few gifted persons who had received the right visions following a period of fasting and prayer dared to class themselves as buffalo callers. Some of them worked on foot, wearing a light robe and imitating the antics of a buffalo calf. In later times the callers rode, using a large buffalo robe to cover both horse and rider, with the rider being the "hump" of the imitation.
After a kill, the whole area soon became a stinking place as the offal and blood decayed. The dogs helped clean up the mess, and in winter snow soon covered the place, making it suitable for another drive, but in the summer the buffalo could smell the place of a kill for a mile or so, until the sun and rains and wind had time to purify it.
To build a large corral and to supply the large number of people to man the wings and later take care of the meat, several small hunting groups had to combine their efforts. Their mutual interdependence and related success welded them into permanent bands of twenty to forty families, with one hunter and four or five dependents being the usual number to a family. Such a band required more cooperation, more social control, and a leader to make decisions. This adjustment to the larger group and its restrictions was agreed on by the people when they found it gave them more security from their enemies as well as more food.
With an increased meat supply, families raised more children and the small bands grew larger. From a weak, scattered people the Blackfeet grew into three large related tribes, the Piegans, Bloods, and the Blackfeet proper, all friendly toward one another. They moved farther out onto the plains in search of more buffalo, and fought with other tribes for the new hunting grounds.
Out on the open plains there were few places where enough timber could be found for constructing good piskins. The new surroundings called for new hunting methods, and the Blackfeet adopted a method that had been used on the plains for several thousand years: they found sheer cliffs at the edge of a grassy plateau and drove the buffalo over. Such places are commonly called buffalo jumps in the west, but the Blackfeet called them piskins although there was no corral at the place.
Grassy plains stretch from the Front Range of the Rockies far to the east, their gently rolling surface underlaid by soft horizontal rock strata that form rimrock cliffs where the streams from the mountains have cut valleys across the plains. At the foot of a rimrock cliff the soft ground slopes steeply to the valley floor. Although the sheer face of the cliff may be no more than twenty feet high, a buffalo plunging down from the plain above would land on his front legs and sink to his knees in the soft soil. The momentum of his body would then tip him forward in a somersault, breaking his legs and leaving him helpless.
At a good buffalo jump the kill could be quite large, a hundred or more animals in one drive, but about fifty furnished a better kill, for the meat and hides could be saved with less waste when the carcasses were not heaped too high. The effectiveness of a good buffalo jump can be seen on the south slope of the Sun River Valley west of Great Falls, Montana. Here bones and debris cover five acres to a depth of several feet, the animal residue being estimated at 25,000 tons. This jump was used for hundreds of years before the Blackfeet moved so far south.
The Sun River jump was one of the best. To the south several thousand acres of good pasture lie just beyond the rimrock, and slope gently toward the rim. A wide, shallow draw seemingly offers a safe passageway to the valley below. The draw gradually narrows and becomes deeper as it approaches the rim. The usual breeze here in the summer is from the southwest, which enabled the hunters to approach downwind and start the herd moving down the draw.
At the end of a successful drive the herd dashed over the cliff in a brown flood and ended in a mass of dead and crippled beasts at the foot of the slope. Then the people climbed down from their places along the wings of the drive and moved their camp to the bank of the Sun River just north of the kill. This was a hectic time, for the meat had to be stripped from the carcasses at once and put on the drying racks in thin slices before it could spoil. Any meat not cut off the bodies by nightfall would have spoiled before morning.
At dusk the tired, happy people rested around the cooking fires, feasting on tidbits after the tons of meat were sliced and spread out for the dry air to suck out the moisture, aided by the blazing sun during the day. Just one good drive, although it worked the people to the point of exhaustion, could supply each family with fresh meat for several days, a large reserve of dried meat, and one or two skins to tan. As soon as the meat was dried, the camp moved away, the offal was left to the scavengers and the wind and sun, and in two or three months the buffalo jump could be used again. If the drive was made using fire, as happened at times, no other drive was possible at that place until the grass grew up the next summer.
While more animals would be killed at a good buffalo jump than with the piskin and, from the nature of its surroundings, the buffalo jump could be used more frequently, it required a large number of people to stage the drive and handle the meat. As the bands increased in size by natural growth, with a good buffalo jump and some other hunting the men could still secure enough meat for everyone, but in the larger community it was necessary to make more rules of conduct and appoint authorities to enforce them. The most important rule, probably borrowed from the Sioux, prohibited any individual hunting when a big drive was being planned. An organized group of young warriors served as the police to enforce this rule.
As the Blackfeet prospered on the plains they tried to push southward against the Shoshoni, who resisted successfully for many years. During the eighteenth century the line of separation between the two tribes was the south bank of the Red Deer Fork of the Saskatchewan River. Here about 1730 the Shoshoni rode out boldly on their newly acquired horses, expecting to overwhelm the Blackfeet with this new weapon, but the Blackfeet soon had new weapons of their own: guns secured from the Crees, who were buying them from the French traders. In a few more years the Blackfeet had horses too, supplied by the Flatheads, who held the foothills at the eastern entrance to Marias Pass. For a time there was a stalemate between the two hostile forces. The Shoshoni had many more horses, but they had no place to buy guns and so were forced on the defensive.