Calgary & Southern Alberta

Bison Hunting in Fish Creek Park

A Buffalo Pound
Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection

Calgarians strolling today through Fish Creek Park cannot fail to notice the Richardson's ground squirrel holes that pock mark the area's grasslands and wooded slopes. In the mounds of dirt that surround these holes, bison bone fragments can be seen, providing mute evidence that bison were once abundant in the park. The 46 archaeological sites in the park, which date to before and after the time of contact between Aboriginal and European people, include bison drives and bison processing locales. These sites speak eloquently of the close link that existed between southern Alberta's indigenous residents and the plains buffalo.

Archaeological residue left at one of these locales, hidden in the aspen groves of the park's southern escarpment, indicates that hunters used the area some 5,500 years ago. Over the succeeding centuries, people frequented the same site on at least four separate occasions.

Sometime between CE 200 and CE 700, people who were possibly the direct ancestors of the present-day Blackfoot camped here. During the mid- to late-1700s, sometime during the late fall or winter, another group of hunters, probably Peigan, conducted a series of bison drives here.

The kills were small in scale. The hunters drove little groups of cows and calves into a small grove of trees from the level grazing land behind the small escarpment. Below the escarpment, the hunters had probably built a corral, using techniques much like those recorded historically. Early European visitors to the West frequently witnessed Aboriginal people making corrals or pounds by "... falling small trees, and interweaving them with brush, and leav[ing] an opening ... " into which they directed their prey. (Quoted in T. F. Kehoe's The Gull Lake Site: A Prehistoric Bison Drive in Southwestern Saskatchewan, Milwaukee Public Museum Publications in Anthropology and History, No. 1, 1973, p. 173)

In contrast to many of the plains hunters who conducted bison kills, the 18th century people who dispatched bison at the southern escarpment of what is now Fish Creek Park were apparently interested primarily in obtaining buffalo hides. They clearly had access, moreover, to European trade goods. The archaeological evidence suggests that they slaughtered the entrapped animals with bows and arrows, skinned the carcasses, and, using metal tools for the operation, removed only the choicest cuts of bison meat (tongues, hump meat and hind quarters).