'Gory' gingerbread buffalo jump celebrates Plains hunting culture

At 2 a.m. one morning in December, Mariah Gladstone asked herself: "Did I really just make a little gory buffalo butcher scene out of Sour Patch Kids and fruit leather?"

She did. 

In fact, Gladstone, who is Blackfeet and Cherokee, spent hours making her own interpretation of a traditional buffalo jump out of gingerbread. 

Gladstone, who is also the owner of Indigikitchen, a cooking website, says a business just outside of the Blackfeet reservation in Montana was holding a gingerbread decorating contest last week so she signed up. 

She told her mom about her idea.

"She said, 'That sounds really elaborate and hard. Maybe you should just make a gingerbread teepee village,'" Gladstone said. 

Her mother may have been right since it took about 11 hours for Gladstone to finish her scene. 

There's a cliff for the jump with a village below. It even features a collection of Sour Patch Kids harvesting meat from a fallen buffalo. 

She says she tried to incorporate as many accurate details as possible.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a UNESCO world heritage site in southern Alberta, helps educate the public on how the group hunting strategy could unfold.

A runner would start the buffalo herd's drive toward a cliff by tricking the herd into following him by imitating the call of a calf, according to information on Head-Smashed-In's website. 

It says buffalo have a great sense of smell but poor vision, making them cautious around unfamiliar objects. 

Plains hunters exploited this and the animal's natural herding instincts by having hunters surround the herd from behind and scare them, it says. Some of those hunters could be wearing wolf or coyote skins to trick the buffalo.

The sheer momentum of the frightened herd would force it over the cliff. 

Like in the scene created by Gladstone, hunters would camp at the bottom of the cliff and harvest the fallen buffalo, hanging the meat to dry on racks. 

She used a wide variety of materials to create the scene including taffy, icing, sugar, chocolate, pretzels and, of course, gingerbread.

Only one item in the entire scene — the toothpicks she used for drumsticks held by a group of Sour Patch drummers — is inedible. 

"I made a little 'water feature,' but I made it out of corn syrup and sugar and water and basically made a hard candy that I poured into the shape of a river and used little chocolate rocks to kind of create this little river," she said.

She used fruit leather and red icing to create the look of the meat. 

She had planned to use a cardboard box and cover it with gingerbread to create the 26 centimetre cliff. In the initial plans, Gladstone also thought she would use dowels to stage the buffalo going over the cliff. 

"I was finally using my engineering degree from college," she said. 

But she ultimately decided she could create a strong and tall enough structure using edible materials. 

Instead of the typical royal icing used in most gingerbread houses, she went with boiled sugar and corn syrup — the same material she used to make the water feature. 

"It was molten, and so I poured that and used that as the glue to stick things together."

By the next morning everything had firmly set, which was good news since winds were blowing over 120 km/h as she and her mom carried it to the car. 

While she finished third overall in the gingerbread competition, she did end up winning the People's Choice award. 

She said she's not sure what to do with the scene now that the competition is over, but thinks she may donate it to one of her local buffalo jump spots.