Stone Carving Of Bison

From card: "Carved of limestone, this is a very good likeness of a bison [buffalo], except that the legs are present only as very short stumps; color is variegated brown; much striated, but well polished, and can not have been long underground or exposed to weathering; steel file marks visible on edges of belly. Probably a fairly recent piece and possibly, as J.C. Ewers suggests, a Crow Indian "rock medicine".
Object mount is located in 1106C00804, the drawer immediately to the left of the drawer with the stone carving.
Buffalo effigy is illustrated and described pp. 41 - 42, Figure 13, pp. 123 - 124, and Color plate 1, p. 18 in Ewers, John C. 1986. Plains Indian sculpture: a traditional art from America's heartland. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Ewers identifies it as probably Crow and possibly hunting medicine. He indicates it " ... was found by Glenn M. Staley, a geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey, in the course of field work in central Wyoming in 1911. It was partially exposed in the wall of a dry wash emptying into the Wind River about sixty miles northwest of Riverton, Wyoming. ... Marks visible on the right side of the buffalo's belly may indicate that it was carved with metal tools, which probably did not reach the Indians of this interior region before the eighteenth century."