It doesn’t happen very often that a large lakebed largely dries out. Yet that is what happened at Devils Lake. North Dakota’s biggest natural lake was full of water when the town of Devils Lake was founded in 1882, with the lake sitting at 1,439.08 feet above sea level. But after that, the water level dropped, decade after decade, until Devils Lake reached its lowest point in recorded history, resting at 1,401 feet in 1940. The lake had fallen 38 feet in 40 years! The always-brackish, salty water got worse and worse, and fish could no longer live in it.
At this time of low water, in 1935, the Eugene Palmer family found a strange wonder from the distant past. It was in August when three members of the Palmer family were crossing a portion of the dried-up lakebed near their home when they “saw a gleaming white object protruding from” the dried-up lake bottom.
Puzzled, they stooped and examined it, then dug it up with a spade. It was a buffalo skull. Excitedly, they uncovered more and more skulls nearby until they had unearthed more than 100 buffalo skulls. Eugene Palmer had found a “buffalo graveyard” that had formerly been hidden underwater.
On this day in 1935, the Bismarck Tribune headline told of the “Legend of the Buffalo Graveyard.” Speculation about the origins of the accumulation of 100 buffalo skulls in one location abounded.
Maybe a band of Native American hunters had stampeded a buffalo herd onto the lake during a season when the ice was precarious. The “pounding hoofs” of the “snorting beasts” combined with a “terrific crackling din” as the ice broke under the weight of the massive herd. “Hundreds of bison plummeted” into the icy waters, lost to pitiless drowning.
It might have been that hunters had discarded bison carcasses in Devils Lake after butchering the animals. Maybe a buffalo herd had wandered onto thin ice in late winter and fallen through into a death trap.
The “buffalo graveyard” was a mystery that was never solved.
As for Devils Lake, its waters began rising in 1941 and kept rising, falling, and rising again through 2011, when the lake peaked at 1,454 feet—15 feet higher than its original historically known level. Indeed, the former 1883 level was reached around 1995. The rising waters covered all traces of the baffling tale of the Devils Lake “buffalo graveyard.”
Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck
Sources:
- “Legend Of The Buffalo Graveyard,” Bismarck Tribune, September 7, 1935, p. 3.
- “Receding Waters Unfold Bleak Bison Tragedy,” Fargo Forum, September 8, 1935, p. 10.
- “Devils Lake History,” Devils Lake Basin Joint Water Resource Board, dlbasin.com/devils-lake-timeline, accessed August 12, 2026.
- “Section 1: Devils Lake,” ndstudies.gov/. . . content/unit . . . devils-lake, accessed August 12, 2026
