The Sacred Stones of Phillips County:

A History of the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock

Section One: Geology and Landscape

In the northeastern corner of Montana, where the short-grass prairie stretches flat and unbroken toward the Canadian border, two boulders of gray granite once occupied a wind-abraded ridgeline overlooking the Milk River. Their presence on that ridge was not incidental. Glacial processes during the late Pleistocene deposited granite erratics across the northern plains as retreating ice sheets released material carried hundreds of miles from source outcrops to the north. The National Park Service describes glacial erratics as rocks plucked from bedrock and transported over long distances before being deposited far from their point of origin, often conspicuously out of place in the surrounding geology. The boulders near Cree Crossing in Phillips County fit that description precisely: large, isolated formations of granite sitting atop a landscape of sedimentary prairie.

The larger of the two boulders, eventually known as Medicine Rock, bears an extensive array of incised symbols and geometric designs that attest to prolonged human engagement. The smaller, called Sleeping Buffalo or Buffalo Rock, was modified prehistorically to accentuate its resemblance to a bison at rest, its legs folded beneath its body, its chin low to the ground. Carved markings define the animal’s horns, eyes, backbone, and ribs, transforming a naturally suggestive form into an intentional representation. Together, the two boulders formed part of a granite outcrop whose profile, viewed from a distance, recalled a herd of bison resting on the ridge.

Their position near Cree Crossing was not accidental in cultural terms either. The Milk River, which drains a vast basin across northern Montana and southern Alberta, offered one of the more reliable crossing points at this location, making the site a node of travel, trade, and gathering for the mobile peoples of the northern plains across many centuries.

Section Two: Indigenous Significance and Oral Traditions

The cultural significance of the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock predates written documentation by an indeterminate span. The Montana State Historic Preservation Office, whose records accompany the site’s National Register nomination, notes that the rocks were revered since late prehistoric times by a wide range of Northern Plains peoples, and that oral traditions linking them to specific tribal nations have been passed from generation to generation. Among the nations documented as having recognized the rocks’ spiritual significance are the Cree, Chippewa, Assiniboine, Sioux, and Gros Ventre, as well as the more geographically distant Blackfeet, Crow, and Northern Cheyenne. The breadth of that network indicates not a purely local significance but a regional one, consistent with the rocks’ position along a known travel corridor (Historic Montana, historicmt.org/items/show/15, accessed 5 May 2026).

The Assiniboine relationship with the boulders is particularly well documented in the scholarly literature. In a 2018 article in the journal Native American and Indigenous Studies, historian Joshua Horowitz examined the rocks’ history through the lens of Assiniboine cultural practice and colonial disruption. In Nakoda, the Assiniboine language, the Sleeping Buffalo is known as Tatanga Ishtima, meaning “sleeping buffalo,” and the Medicine Rock as Iya Waka, a term connoting sacred stone or medicine rock. Horowitz documented that for the Assiniboine, physical places of spiritual significance operated within a broader network of sacred geography, and that the displacement of such objects carried implications not simply for the objects themselves but for the communities whose ceremonial and cosmological lives were organized around them. The article establishes that before European settlement reorganized the region, the rocks were visited regularly and offerings were left at the site by travelers crossing the Milk River (Horowitz, Joshua. “Tatanga Ishtima hinkna Iya Waka: Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock and Assiniboine Dislocation and Persistence.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2018, pp. 123-145).

Oral traditions across multiple nations also preserve accounts of the boulders’ supernatural agency. The granite outcrop of which the Sleeping Buffalo was the most prominent feature was said to have fooled more than one hunting party into mistaking it for an actual herd of resting bison. Among the Assiniboine and other communities, the rocks were understood not as passive landmarks but as animate presences capable of communication. A Chippewa-Cree elder’s statement, preserved in the interpretive materials erected by the Montana Department of Transportation, captures this understanding directly: “These rocks are sacred, just like our old people” (Montana Department of Transportation historical marker, Junction of US Highway 2 and Montana Highway 243, Phillips County).

Section Three: Early Euro-American Encounter and the 1922 Oil Discovery

The arrival of Euro-American settlers in the Milk River country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not immediately disrupt the rocks’ ritual function, but it set in motion the economic pressures and land-use priorities that would eventually lead to their removal. Phillips County, created in 1915 and named for Benjamin D. Phillips, developed as part of the Hi-Line agricultural corridor that the Great Northern Railway had helped populate with homesteaders from across the continent. The high benchlands north of the Milk River attracted both ranchers and dryland farmers, though the region’s rainfall patterns made large-scale cropping a precarious enterprise.

In 1922, the Bowdoin Oil and Gas Company drilled on land approximately four miles north of U.S. Highway 2 on those same benchlands, exploring for petroleum. What the wildcatters encountered instead was a massive artesian flow of hot mineral water at a depth of 3,200 feet, estimated at the time at 24,000 barrels per day. The oilmen had no use for hot water and ultimately abandoned the effort, but the accidental discovery drew the attention of local residents. As Carroll Van West documents in the Montana Historic Landscape project, local citizens in Phillips County recognized the geothermal resource as a potential asset for a county that struggled against drought and declining agricultural returns. A Saco-area rancher whose son was afflicted with polio reportedly used the mineral water therapeutically, and word of its properties spread (Van West, Carroll. “Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs.” Montana’s Historic Landscapes, montanahistoriclandscape.com, 13 June 2014, accessed 5 May 2026).

The economic distress of the 1920s and 1930s accelerated local interest in the hot springs. In the early 1930s, a partnership involving the Soil Conservation Service and the Phillips County American Legion, with support from the New Deal’s Work Projects Administration, developed the site as a public health and recreation facility. Stone buildings were constructed, some reportedly using rock quarried from the same sources as Fort Peck Dam, and the facility was opened as the Saco Health Plunge. As historian Micah Chang noted in a 2022 article in Montana: The Magazine of Western History, the hot springs project reflected a broader pattern of Depression-era communities across the northern plains seeking to substitute tourism for failing agricultural economies, and the Phillips County effort represented a genuine, if modest, success in that strategy (Alt, Bernie, and others. “Montana’s Oasis on the Hi-Line: Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs, 1923-2022.” Published via Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/pub/549/article/914456, accessed 5 May 2026).

Section Four: The Removal of the Sleeping Buffalo Rock

It was against this backdrop of economic need and community mobilization that the Sleeping Buffalo was displaced from its original site in 1932. The circumstances of the removal reflect a pattern familiar across the American West in the early twentieth century, when Indigenous sacred objects and sites were treated by non-Native authorities as curiosities, tourist attractions, or public amenities rather than as active components of living cultural systems.

In 1932, the Sleeping Buffalo boulder was separated from the ridgeline group near Cree Crossing and relocated to the City Park in Malta, the Phillips County seat. The decision appears to have been made by local civic interests eager to capitalize on the rock’s novelty value. Native communities, including Assiniboine and Gros Ventre people from the nearby Fort Belknap Reservation, objected to the removal. Their opposition was not recorded in the official civic record of the time with the same weight given to boosterist arguments, but it is well-attested in subsequent oral histories and in the scholarship of Horowitz, who frames the removal as an act of dispossession consistent with the broader settler colonial reorganization of Indigenous sacred landscapes in the region.

The rock’s behavior during its Malta years became a subject of local narrative. Accounts circulating among both Native and non-Native residents held that the Sleeping Buffalo was restless in its new location, that it shifted position inexplicably, and that bellowing sounds were heard from the City Park at night. Whether understood literally or metaphorically, these accounts expressed a widely shared sense that the boulder was out of place. In 1967, the Montana Highway Department relocated the Sleeping Buffalo a second time, placing it at the junction of U.S. Highway 2 and Montana Highway 243, near the entrance to what had by then been renamed the Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs resort. The Sleeping Buffalo Recreation Association, formed in 1965, had adopted the boulder as the symbolic anchor of the resort’s identity, lending the rock a commercial dimension it had never previously carried (Sleeping Buffalo Resort brochure, reprinted in Ultimate Montana, ultimatemontana.com, accessed 5 May 2026).

Medicine Rock, the larger of the two boulders from Cree Crossing, remained in a separate and unprotected location along old Highway 2 for decades following the Sleeping Buffalo’s removal. In 1987, the owners of the hot springs petitioned the highway department to bring Medicine Rock to the same shelter site, and the two boulders were finally reunited, though in a location and context entirely unlike their original ridgeline setting. The Montana History Portal, maintained by the Montana Historical Society, lists images of the site recorded by photographer Judy Hoy in 1969 and by Curtis Starr in 1994, both held in the official records of the Montana State Historic Preservation Office (Montana History Portal, “Sleeping Buffalo Rock,” mtmemory.org/nodes/view/127891, accessed 5 May 2026).

Section Five: National Register Designation and Ongoing Concerns

In 1996, the Sleeping Buffalo Rock was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with a National Register Information System identification number of 96000548. The National Park Service’s NPGallery records classify the site under the area of significance as Religion, with periods of significance extending from prehistoric times through the year 2000. The resource type is listed as Object, reflecting the boulders’ nature as moveable cultural artifacts rather than fixed architectural or archaeological features (National Park Service, NPGallery, “Sleeping Buffalo Rock,” npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/96000548, accessed 5 May 2026).

The listing brought formal federal recognition of the site’s historical and cultural significance, but it did not resolve the underlying concerns that Native communities had raised since 1932. The rocks remain housed in a wooden shelter beside U.S. Highway 2, a location chosen for its proximity to the hot springs resort and accessibility to automobile traffic rather than for any proximity to the original site or alignment with Indigenous preferences. Native visitors continue to leave offerings at the shelter, including tobacco and prayer cloths, maintaining a ceremonial relationship with the boulders even in their displaced condition. Non-Native visitors have also left offerings, a development that reflects genuine, if sometimes uninformed, respect for the site’s spiritual reputation.

The highway location has, however, created persistent problems of vandalism and environmental exposure. Archaeological bloggers and tribal preservation officers who visited the site in the early 2010s documented litter scattered around the shelter, graffiti, and the general vulnerability of sacred objects exposed to high-volume highway traffic. The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine people consulted during those visits expressed a clear preference for the rocks’ return to a location closer to their original site, or at minimum their removal from the roadside environment, positions that remain consistent with the initial tribal opposition to the 1932 relocation.

Section Six: Context and Meaning

The history of the Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock belongs to a wider category of disputes over the control and meaning of Indigenous sacred places in the American West. The rocks did not lose their significance when they were moved; they carried it with them, as evidenced by the continued practice of ceremonial offerings at each of their successive locations. What changed was the institutional context surrounding them, as administrative decisions made by county governments, highway departments, and resort operators came to govern objects that had previously been embedded in the ceremonial life of nomadic nations crossing the Milk River.

The rocks also illuminate the layered history of Phillips County in the twentieth century. The economic anxieties that drove communities to exploit the hot springs, to rename the resort, and to deploy the Sleeping Buffalo as a roadside landmark were real. The same Depression-era conditions that generated the New Deal experiments documented by historian Joseph Kinsey Howard – who noted in 1946 that so many federal agencies had inserted themselves into Phillips County affairs that project officials themselves could not keep track – shaped local attitudes toward the boulders (Howard quoted in Van West, Carroll. “Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs.” Montana’s Historic Landscapes, montanahistoriclandscape.com, 13 June 2014, accessed 5 May 2026).

What the Phillips County civic record did not adequately reckon with in 1932, and has not fully reckoned with since, is the degree to which the removal of the Sleeping Buffalo represented a harm to communities who had no formal standing in the county’s civic institutions. The Assiniboine of Fort Belknap, whose reservation lies roughly sixty miles southwest of the original site, and the Chippewa-Cree, whose Rocky Boy’s Reservation lies to the west, had been confined to fixed reservation boundaries precisely during the period when their ancestral sacred sites were being incorporated into Euro-American infrastructure and commerce.

The National Register listing represents a partial institutional acknowledgment of the boulders’ significance, but the site’s management remains a subject of unresolved negotiation between state highway authorities, the hot springs resort, and Native nations with cultural claims to the objects. As of the mid-2020s, the rocks continue to receive visitors, ceremonial attention, and debate, occupying a roadside shelter that is simultaneously a tourism waypoint and an active place of Indigenous prayer.

Works Cited

Chang, Micah. “Montana’s Oasis on the Hi-Line: Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs, 1923-2022.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, vol. 72, no. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 58-74. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/pub/549/article/914456. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Historic Montana. “Sleeping Buffalo Rock.” The Montana National Register Sign Program, Montana State Historic Preservation Office, historicmt.org/items/show/15. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Horowitz, Joshua. “Tatanga Ishtima hinkna Iya Waka: Sleeping Buffalo and Medicine Rock and Assiniboine Dislocation and Persistence.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2018, pp. 123-145. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/article/721568.

Montana Department of Transportation. Historical Marker: Sleeping Buffalo Rock. Junction of US Highway 2 and Montana Highway 243, Phillips County, Montana. Reproduced at Historical Marker Database, hmdb.org/m.asp?m=142885. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Montana History Portal. “Sleeping Buffalo Rock.” Montana Historical Society, mtmemory.org/nodes/view/127891. Accessed 5 May 2026.

National Park Service. “Sleeping Buffalo Rock.” NPGallery Digital Asset Management System, National Register of Historic Places, NRIS ID 96000548, npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/96000548. Accessed 5 May 2026.

National Park Service. “Glacial Erratics.” nps.gov/articles/erratics.htm. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Sleeping Buffalo Resort. History of the Sleeping Buffalo. Reprinted by Ultimate Montana, ultimatemontana.com/region-info/havre-area/roy?view=article&id=525:history-of-the-sleeping-buffalo&catid=34. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Van West, Carroll. “Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs.” Montana’s Historic Landscapes, montanahistoriclandscape.com/tag/sleeping-buffalo-hot-springs/. 13 June 2014. Accessed 5 May 2026.