There is a simple explanation for the absence of buffalo bones: The animals were large, and had heavy bones. When one was killed, the meat was stripped from the bones and carried to the village, usually quite a distance away. From one adult animal the meat would weigh from 400 to 900 pounds, and there would also be the heavy green hide to carry, another 75 to 150 pounds. With this large load of desirable parts, no one wanted to carry home the heavy, rather useless bones, unless a skull might be needed for some religious rite or a new shoulder-blade hoe was wanted for the garden patch. When buffalo bones are found in a village, they are usually either a skull or a shoulder blade, neither of which would be carried home for the meat on it.
Bones of small animals are more plentiful in the old villages since their entire carcasses could be carried quite easily. Even a horse, deer, or antelope could be cut into two or three parts for easy handling. Thus their bones might be much more common in the village excavation than buffalo bones, but the villagers probably ate a hundred pounds of buffalo meat to one pound of smaller game.
It is a mistake to picture these early hunters on the plains wandering in small nomadic bands, entire families carrying all their belongings and trailing the buffalo herds 365 days a year, with a large train of dogs carrying the extra packs. This picture has come down to us from the early European visitors to the plains, who usually met the wandering bands in late summer or fall when the people did indeed follow the herds. However, Pedro de Castañeda, with Coronado's expedition in 1541 in the Texas Panhandle, who left the earliest written account of these plains people, mentions that the buffalo hunters were "dressing skins to take to the pueblos to sell since they go to spend the winter there."
Tough and hardy as these people were, they had to seek shelter when the blizzards blew in from the north with their driving snow and bitter cold. The small skin tipis and few scant robes the people could carry would not keep them from freezing to death on the open plains. Even the larger tipis of later times, with their inner linings and floors covered with robes, needed to be pitched in a sheltered spot during a storm. If a band could not visit a farming village for the winter, it would settle in a canyon or deep valley where there was some protection from the storms and timber for firewood.
In the late summer, wild plums, seeds, nuts, rose hips, and a variety of berriesbuffalo berries, service berries, and choke cherrieswere ripe for harvest. Young rabbits and fat prairie dogs were plentiful along the draws and on the flats. In this time of plenty the hunters learned to feast on the fresh fruit and small game, hoarding the seeds, nuts, and rose hips against the "starving time" of winter. Because these hoards would not be needed for months, and the heavily burdened people did not want to carry all that extra weight each time they moved camp during the fall hunt, they stored the food reserves in caches near a good spot for a winter camp, sheltered from the sweep of the north wind, perhaps in a thicket near a stream. In later times, when the women learned to pound the berries, form them into small cakes, and dry them in the sun, these too were added to the winter stores.
When the food caches were opened in the winter, the seeds were placed on large, flat stones and ground fine by rubbing them with smooth river stones from the gravel beds. The numerous grinding stones found at the various camp sites indicate that many bushels of seeds were ground in this way, for the stones have the patina that comes only from hundreds of hours of being rubbed on hard-coated seeds.
Once the harvest was gathered and stored, the band turned to the serious task of killing a large number of buffalo, at least one for each person, and more if the hunting went well. For the big fall hunts they either surrounded small groups of buffalo and attacked them with spears or used fire to drive a herd over a cliff or into a ravine. While the fire was more deadly, often herds would not be found in the right position for such a drive. The "surround" was easier to stage, but more dangerous and less dependable. It also provided better robes, unsinged and not battered by a fall onto rocks.
In either case, a successful drive produced a large number of carcasses, often more than could be used before the meat spoiled. The dead buffalo had to be skinned and cut up quickly into large chunks so that the meat could chill in the night air. The next day it was cut into thin strips or slabs and placed on wooden frameworks to keep it out of reach of the dogs. The dry air rapidly sucked out the moisture while a small smoldering fire furnished smoke for a preservative and a little heat to hasten the drying. At a large kill much of the meat spoiled before it could be processed.
A successful hunt provided about a hundred pounds of dried meat for each man, woman, and child in the band, and one new hide for each. The hide still weighed thirty pounds or so after being dried for several days. It was physically impossible for the people to carry all this weight in addition to their regular camp gear, even with the help of many dogs. The dogs, of course, ate the same kind of food the people ate, so their number had to be limited. Hence it made sense to cache the dried meat and the new hides near the seed caches until winter set in.
Once the hunters had established a permanent site for a winter camp they were no longer true nomads, for they now had a fixed abode, a lodge or a cave, where they lived for some months each year. Their lodges were round, built of timber and covered with a layer of grass and reeds, then a layer of dirt for warmth. Such shelters would last for several years, and their sites are still recognizable after a few thousand years. The outer circle, with decayed wood in the post holes, and a fire pit with some charcoal are the most obvious signs of these ancient structures.
The hunters gradually learned how to raise a few crops, perhaps borrowing farming methods from their neighbors in the woodland fringe to the east or from the Pueblos along the rivers in New Mexico to the southwest. They planted small patches of corn and beans, and later, squash and sunflowers. The corn, beans, and sunflower seeds were easily stored for winter use and served as a valuable food supplement during the hungry months when game was scarce.
In the spring the leafy new plants were attractive to deer, rabbits, prairie dogs, and other animals, and had to be protected until they were about half grown and became less appetizing to the foragers.
Then they might be left untended for two or three weeks with little danger until they began to ripenand the animals reappeared. After they were harvested, the crops were put into the caches, leaving the villagers free to roam the plains on the trail of buffalo until the snows came. The fall hunt might last as long as three months.
The yearly routine of the seminomadic buffalo hunters from one spring to the next began with small bands searching for buffalo as soon as the snows melted. They needed some fresh meat even though they might still have some stored foods. At this time of year only the buffalo bulls were fit for food, and they were in poor condition after the long winter. Better meat could be found along the streams when carcasses came down on the spring floods.
In the warm spring sunshine the villagers dug up their little garden patches in the soft alluvial soil near the streams. With dibble sticks and buffalo-shoulder-blade hoes they prepared many small circles, about two feet across, for the seeds, leaving all the rest untilled. Then the hunters packed up and left for the plains, to be gone a month or so on the early summer hunt, leaving the very young, the very old, and the invalids to care for the crops, with the hardest work being done by a few sturdy women. The rest of the women went on the hunt.
By early summer when the hunters moved out to the plains the new grass was high. The buffalo cows were still lean and scrawny from nursing their new calves, but the bulls were again sleek and fat. Over most of the plains the warm weather and frequent rain made it difficult to dry meat. The bull hides were practically bare of wool, and of no use for robes. The hunters lived on fresh meat while they stripped the hides of hair and tanned them for leather, or left them untanned as rawhide, to be made into thongs, moccasin soles, and parfleches (the so-called "Indian suitcases," made by folding damp rawhide into container shape and allowing it to dry).