Buffalo Stories on La Rivierre GrandeRecently we gathered a small group around my kitchen table—a few people interested in what we can do with all our buffalo information. Informally we call ourselves Brainstormers. We had just finished a successful tour of our historic buffalo sites here at home that we had arranged with the BSC Bison Symposium. When Bismarck State College decided to put on a Bison Symposium led by their retiring director Dr. Larry Skogen, we got involved. In fact we may have helped inspire the whole thing. After all, Larry grew up in Hettinger, where his parents ran a hardware store. He knew something of our buffalo history. By this time we had uncovered several even more interesting facts about buffalo living on these lands. It wasn’t just the 3 last great buffalo hunts that happened here. There were more stories. One by one, they began revealing themselves. Marvelous stories. Word of mouth heroics, problems and successes. Survival stories. It was like peeling an...

My interest in buffalo began when I rode the buttes and badlands of our ranch east of Miles City, MT as a kid.  One time my younger sister Anne and I found a buffalo skull. The snow melted early that spring, sending rushing waters to flush out dry creek beds. Riding the higher reaches of our range we were looking for a lost heifer. In a glint of bright sunlight we saw something peeking out from under a sagebrush that had been partly torn loose from a sandy bank.  “What’s that?” Anne circled her horse across the gravel creek bed.  “Looks like a bone—a horn.” Sliding off our horses we scrambled up the bank for a closer look.  Yes! Not just a horn—but a horn solidly attached to the rest of the head. As we freed it from the scraggly sagebrush tangle, out came a nearly perfect skull with stout curved horns—gleaming white in the sun. We hefted the weight of it, bigger and bulkier than any skull we had ever seen.  A relic of long ago—a buffalo skull. The black horn caps had loosened...

In 1845, Father G. A. Belcourt went on a bison hunt with the Métis (MEH tee or MEH tees) people of the parish where he had established a mission 13 years earlier. Soon after the hunt, Belcourt wrote to a friend in Quebec (Canada) and described the hunt in great detail.