HAYNES (AP) - Bushy Bluff, a wooded hill rising from the grassy floor of Hiddenwood Creek Valley, was prized for years as a good picnic spot.

Until recently, its primary claim to historical significance was the fact that George Armstrong Custer camped at its base in 1874, when he led an expedition that discovered gold in the Black Hills.

But Bushy Bluff and Hiddenwood Creek have another story to tell - the story of one of the last great buffalo hunts involving the Lakota Sioux, in days when the bison were on the brink of extinction.

That long-overlooked chapter of 1880s Dakota Territory history recently was resurrected by communities with connections to the hunts. Hettinger, a few miles from the Hiddenwood Creek site, promotes the hunt as an attraction to visitors.

The fledgling historic preservation movement coincides with a renewed effort by conservation groups to increase the number of buffalo in the wild, since only a fraction of the estimated 500,000 bison today can roam large grassland preserves.

When the last remnants of the great northern buffalo herd wandered into western Dakota Territory in the early 1880s, word spread quickly to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation south of Bismarck.

The Standing Rock Sioux, who were struggling to adapt to a life of confinement on the reservation, believed the buffalo had come back to sacrifice themselves for the tribes' benefit.

It was an epic plains safari. Six-hundred hunters mounted on horseback, most carrying repeating rifles but some wielding bow and arrows, downed 5,000 buffalo in a matter of days, decimating a herd estimated at 50,000.

"The slaughter had been awful but not wanton, and I was impressed with the fact then that the Indian displays more restraint in hunting, even though his desire to kill makes his blood boil, than the white man," James McLaughlin, the Standing Rock agent and member of the hunting party, wrote later.

The hunts were largely forgotten, said Francie Berg of Hettinger, an amateur historian who happened upon McLaughlin's account years ago.

"This happened right on the border between North Dakota and South Dakota," Berg said. "I think it fell through the cracks."

Berg, who has written a booklet about the hunts, is working with others to resurrect the history of the "last great buffalo hunts" as a way to draw tourists to the remote area of southwest North Dakota.

Along southwest North Dakota's U.S. Highway 12, which skirts wheat fields and pasture that fan out from the base of Bushy Bluff - actually Hiddenwood Bluff - tourism boosters, with help from the state Historical Society, have put up interpretive signs commemorating the buffalo hunts.

Tepee rings still can be found in a nearby pasture, a testament to the site's popularity as a camping area to generations of Plains Indians. Cattle have replaced the buffalo, except for one small herd 45 miles away.

One of the more exotic artifacts from Bruce Colgrove's boyhood was an old hunting rifle tucked away in a bedroom closet of his parents' home in Mott.

The Sharps, so heavy that it required its own tripod, was used by his pioneer great-grandfather, Levi Colgrove, in a hunt that took place months after the one at Hiddenwood Creek.

As a boy, Bruce Colgrove would admire the big gun once used by his ancestor, who was the first white settler in Hettinger County. A painted mural of Levi Colgrove and one of his son's hunting buffalo hangs in the courthouse lobby.

The hunt took place in October 1883 southwest of Mott, less than 30 miles from Haynes, when the buffaloes' fall coats would make thick robes.

Once again, several hundred Sioux took part, including Sitting Bull, according to the memoirs of Yellowstone Vic Smith, a frontiersman and former scout, who was one of several white hunters who joined the hunt.

By then the buffalo, which once populated the Great Plains in seemingly endless herds numbering in the millions, were scarce.

So scarce that Theodore Roosevelt, who'd hopped off the train a month earlier in the Badlands intent on bagging a buffalo, had a hard time finding one to shoot.

But better fortunes awaited Levi Colgrove, Vic Smith and the others. A herd of 10,000 buffalo was foraging between the Black Hills and Bismarck, and some of them were roaming near the Cannonball River.

By fall 1883, their number in Cannonball country had dwindled to 1,200. Once discovered by the hunters, however, that bunch was quickly reduced to hides and steaks.

A remorseful Smith, regarded as a champion buffalo hunter of his day, recalled years later, "When we got through the hunt there was not a hoof left." He once told an interviewer, "I wish now that my aim hadn't been so good."

Bruce Colgrove, who retired in Mott four years ago after a career as a computer programmer in the Minneapolis area, is one of a group of local history buffs who are working to do more to commemorate the historic hunt. There's talk of cooperating with boosters in Hettinger to draw visitors with an interest in the hunts.