The Diner….

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It’s an earlyish start for me; I need to collect Michael and head off to get a “rush” fitting of my suit for the wedding … and to think I managed to get through six decades without ever realising that one of my arms is longer than the other. That little surprise out of the way, it’s back to the ‘burbs just in time to witness Troy trying to set fire to the kitchen. Our Airbnb house is great, and has everything that opens and shuts …. well almost everything. It seems the one exception is a toaster, and apparently cooking toast in the oven wasn’t quite as straightforward as Troy might have hoped. Oh well. At least we now know where the fire extinguisher is.

Issy’s decided on a day off from touring, and Emma and Michael are going to a wedding (not theirs this time), so us boys head off to visit the fort at the town of Fort Macleod, some fifty kilometres or so west of Lethbridge. We read that the town grew around the fort which was established here in 1874 as the barracks of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP). It then became the force’s main headquarters after another fort, Fort Livingstone, was abandoned in 1876. The NWMP was established in 1870, mostly in response to lawlessness associated with American traders illegally selling whiskey to local indigenous tribes, and fears that the American military might intervene and use it as an excuse to annex the territory. The fort and associated museum are moderately interesting, but perhaps slightly underwhelming.

We’re hungry so we head into one of the town’s diners. This feels like a true North American experience. We’re seated in booths just like the ones we’ve seen in the movies. We only really want snacks, so we order sandwiches, which it seems come with a side of fries …. or more like very large plates of fries with an afterthought of sandwiches. We remember from coming to Canada and the States previously that meal portions here are generally obscenely large, and clearly nothing’s changed.

Next stop is the iconic Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump, which is about twenty kilometres or so further west. When Michael first mentioned this place to us when we were here last year we assumed he was making stuff up … well the name at least … but no, it’s a real thing .… well either that or the signs are a very elaborate ruse. I hope we don’t end up like the buffalo.

We learn that Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump is one of several sites in this neck of the woods where the local indigenous tribes lured herds of stampeding buffalo over cliffs to their deaths, thus generating a vast supply of food to get them through the winter. It’s clearly very significant; we read that it’s one of Canada’s twenty UNSECO World Heritage Sites. The museum attached to the site is excellent. It’s on half a dozen levels and has been built into the hillside so as to have minimal visual impact. I’d thought that it was the buffalo that got their heads smashed in, and whilst that’s probably true, it seems that that’s not the source of the name. We read that one young local brave was a bit overly keen on getting a close up view of the action from the bottom of the cliff, which didn’t end well for him. When he was eventually found under a pile of dead and wounded buffalo, it was his skull that was unfortunately very much smashed in. The site is believed to have been in use for nearly 6,000 years, and this only stopped when the Europeans first turned up here in the 1800s.

It seems that getting the buffalo to stampede over the cliff was no easy task. The first step was to find the right sort of cliff, ideally one with a high enough drop to kill or seriously injure the buffalo, and with a small rise near the top so that it wasn’t obvious to the herd that there was a cliff in front of them. It seems buffalo have an excellent sense of smell, so the wind had to be blowing from the right direction on the day otherwise they’d smell trouble and run away. The tribespeople had to construct a funnel shaped barrier made of rocks and piles of vegetation on the approach to the cliff to herd the buffalo into. It seems that buffalo have very poor eyesight, so this was enough to fool them into thinking there was only one way for them to go. Some of the tribesmen then dressed up as wolves to assist in chasing the herd into and then through the funnel, and others hid behind the rocks and vegetation yelling and screaming to further scare them into stampeding. Any buffalo that weren’t killed in the fall were slaughtered afterwards, as it was thought that if any escaped they might warn other herds about the dangers of this whole exercise, which wouldn’t be good for future food supply. The museum includes a fifteen minute video showing a very graphic depiction of the whole event.

Back in Lethbridge Troy’s picked out an Italian eatery that just happens to be attached to the hotel that Issy and I stayed in on our two previous visits here. The food was excellent then and nothing’s changed.

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Photos

Fort Macleod museum
No wonder the buffalo numbers have declined so much