That was the best way, although a wasteful way, to feed the tribe before the tribes all acquired the horse and the familiar Plains Horse Culture began. Otherwise it was really a challenge to hunt them since bison would easily destroy a man on foot with nothing but a bow or spear in his hands.
Some of the buffalo jumps contained so many individual buffalo piled atop one another they Indians couldn’t possibly extricate and butcher them all before the corpses below rotted. So they took the best parts and camped nearby gorging themselves and preserving what they could until it was an intolerable mess fit only for prairie wolf, coyote, bear, and birds of prey.
The stereotypical plains culture of hunting bison from horseback didn’t come about until the Spanish introduced the horse and the tribes like the Nez Pierce leaned to break and ride them.
I have always understood that Plains Indians could do a pretty good job of killing a bison while on foot, it was just more fun and machismo to use a horse.
The indians learned to ride and break horses from the Spaniards?