Bison Jump Site

The dig at Hall’s Cave that contained a 1/4 million bats had been tiring and odoriferous!

Ernie Lundelius and Mike Collins, the PIs for the dig, decided to give us a break and take us for an outing into the countryside for some clean, fresh air - a site visit.

The outing was near Langtry, Texas a few hours drive north and west from our excavation.

The site we visited is quite famous: The Bonfire Bison Jump/Kill site.

Paleo-indians and then archaic-indians drove Bison-bison (now extinct) off a cliff into a narrow canyon.

One episode, it is believed, more than 800 bison were driven off the cliff - more meat than the band could butcher or eat. What was not taken was left to rot. It has been postulated spontaneous combustion set the great rotting mound on fire thus giving the site its name.

As I said, the location is down a narrow canyon with walls about 40 feet tall, craggy and sheer.

Ernie was walking along one such wall and called out to us, “Hey, come see this.”

He was standing over a very small mound of bones. The bones were about 12 inches long and very thin. Nothing compared to the great 20 foot mound of huge Bison-bison bones we had just viewed.

We were unimpressed until he said, “These are bat bones! Look up!”

We did and saw about 6 HUGE bats hanging from a small crevice. These bats were about 12 inches long!

Ernie said these big bats were from Mexico and should not be this far north.

Illegal Immigrants!