Sacrifice Cliff

　Northwest of Pryor, bordering the town of Billings, Montana, rises an arid, rock-ribbed expanse called the Rims.　 There was something inside the old weathered fortress that beckoned. You’d end up spending day after day hiking on its ledges and exploring its caves. If your eyes lacked the sight to hear the wild, racing hoofs pounding on the valley floor, they surely could hear a muscular, humpbacked buffalo or two snorting in the boulders here and there.  And if you climbed to the top ledge and listened to the howling of the wind through the pile of rocks just east of the Devil’s Kitchen cave, you believed the stories were true- that Indians haunted the Rims. Arrowheads were embedded in the earth. Indian carvings were on the rocks. And on the eastern edge of the Rims, there rose Sacrifice Cliff, every inch of which was inhabited by ghosts of warriors past.

The following poem is an account of an actual event that took place near Billings around 1854. Up to about the 1970s, the site of this event was deemed to be in northeast Billings, just north of the Midland Empire Fairgrounds; and located there, was a large marker that gave the history of this event. Since then it has been determined that the actual site is southeast of Billings; and the marker has been moved.　

The Lookout by Charles M. Russell (1901)

Sacrifice Cliff

It was the Moon Of Heat Waves
　and all the creeks were dry.
　Big black birds were gliding,　
riding downdrafts in the sky.　
　The warriors rode toward the cliff─
　the children of the long-beaked bird─　
　　in Indian tongue, the Apsaalookes; 　
　　Crow, the white man's word. 　

The Sun God soon, would ride off west, 　
packing up his golden light; 　
but they’d be dead before the dog-star 　
climbed into the dusky night. 　
Every breeze brought whiffs of pine 　
and pungent scents of gray-green sage. 　
None of it could ease their pain, 　
or stem their bitter rage.

Prairie dogs and sage hens 　
still scrambled wildly on the range; 　
but miles and piles of buffalo skulls 　
spoke loudly of the chilling change. 　
No medicine could conjure back 　
the herds of buffalo, 　
that always had provided food 　
and clothes and shelter for the Crow. 　

Their hunting days were over
and the life they knew was done.
The Crow would have to start anew.
A new day had begun.
The Crows could fight the soldiers
and the bullets they possessed,
but they couldn’t fight the pox-fire
the white men brought out west.

Their village had been scourged by pox
and nearly half had died.
Montana had been washed by blood.
Grief had swept the country side.
Blood had seeped into the soil
where now the sagebrush grew;
and blood had stained the memory
of every lodge they knew.
　
There was blood upon the prairie; 　
and blood upon the sun. 　
Tears flowed deep inside them, 　
but their ride was almost done. 　
The One Who Had Made Everything 　
was angry with the Crow. 　
The tribe owed him a sacrifice　 　
before He’d ease their woes. 　

The warriors gathered on the Rims 　
around a rocky bluff. 　
Perhaps the sacrifice they’d give 　
that day, would be enough. 　
With blindfolds on their ponies 　
down off the cliff they plunged,
their sacrifice completed 　
and their tribal debt expunged.
　
* * * * * *
The long-beaked birds were clustered 　
near the cliff on scraggly trees, 　
gliding, riding downdrafts,　
cutting circles in the breeze. 　
It was The Moon Of Heat Waves. 　
The grass was brown and dried. 　
But the grass turned black　 　
　with long-beaked birds, 　
the day the warriors died.