The great plains of eastern Montana was home to thousands of buffalo before Euro-American hunters nearly wiped them out in the early 1800’s. The animals were central to the Indian lifeway. In the dog days, hunters herded buffalo into corrals where they were killed. They also stampeded the shaggy beasts over cliffs, called pishkuns. With the arrival of the horse in the 1700s, hunting methods changed. As much a sport as a necessity, hunting buffalo with bows and arrows on horseback was dangerous and exciting. A fat cow buffalo was the choice for meat. Women preserved the meat by making jerky and pemmican. Pemmican was dried and pulverized meat mixed with bone marrow and fat. Wild berries gave it flavor; the ascorbic acid in the fruit acted as a preservative. Pemmican, packed away in skin bags, kept indefinitely. Indians used tanned buffalo robes and rawhide for clothes, teepees, bedding, tools and utensils. Buffalo figured prominently in religious practices, and disputes over prime hunting grounds frequently caused intertribal conflicts.