The Buffalo Robe Trade at Bent's Fort: Who Tanned the Robes, and How They Were Traded

The thousands of buffalo robes traded at Bent's Fort and other posts in the Far West ended up as lap robes for carriages and sleighs in winter, in the United States and Europe; some became coats, mittens and hats. This is part of the National Park Service's series The Business of Bison, adapted from Mark L. Gardner's Bent's Old Fort on the Arkansas (2004).

A Native woman processing a buffalo robe, after a sketch by Theodore Davis. Harper's New Monthly Magazine, January 1869.

Which robes counted

• Season: only robes taken from November to March were good enough for winter goods. Theodore Davis wrote that "November and December are the months during which to find the buffalo wearing the most expensive clothes"; Charles Augustus Murray, thirty years earlier, preferred October, when "the hair is then young, fine, and soft." Summer robes, with thin short hair, were nearly worthless.
• Animal: only robes of cows and calves were traded; bulls' were worthless.

Tanned by Native women

Often misunderstood: robes from Native people came fully tanned, unlike the raw "green" hides of the white hunters of the 1870s and 80s — and all the tanning was done by Native women.

Lewis Garrard, who watched Cheyenne women at work in 1846–47, described it:

1. The fresh hide was pegged out on the ground, hair side down, stretched as far as it would go.
2. Once dry, the women chipped away thin shavings with an adze-shaped scraper set on an elk-horn handle, blow after blow, until it was thin enough.
3. To make it supple, a soupy mix of the animal's brains, liver and bone marrow, with soap weeds, was rubbed into the flesh side — repeated for several days.
4. Finally the flesh side was exposed to heavy smoke.

One trader grumbled that robes the women kept for themselves were dressed as soft and white as possible, while those meant for traders got little care. Davis reckoned a robe took one to two weeks, perhaps more — ten days on average — and John F. A. Sanford of the American Fur Company wrote around 1845 that "it is seldom that a lodge trades more than twenty skins a year."

Trading in the camps

Robes were brought to the fort, or — the preferred way — company traders went out to the Tribal camps. The robe season was short, and making people leave the buffalo range, sometimes days away, just to trade at a post wasted time better spent hunting and tanning.

• William Bent often wintered in Cheyenne villages. In 1844 he was at the "Big Timbers", a favorite wintering ground about forty miles below the fort (near present-day Lamar, Colorado), where he had built log cabins to stay in and store robes. In January 1846 he was with Cheyenne hunting bands near the Santa Fe Trail crossing of the Arkansas River, about 140 miles east of the fort.
• Being in the camps also kept out small independent traders. One Bent, St. Vrain & Co. trader, John Smith, had such standing with the Cheyennes that he charged New Mexican traders tribute to deal with "his" village; Garrard notes that a trader was "considered a chief – a great man."
• The firm hired several traders a year. George Bird Grinnell explained that each had especially friendly relations with a particular tribe and was sent to the one he knew best — often because he had married into it. William Bent himself married Owl Woman of the Cheyennes around 1835, binding the tribe and the fort together.

How a trip worked, per Grinnell: the trader and the chief clerk agreed the goods, which were charged to him and packed — in wagons over level prairie, on pack mules through rough country. If trade was brisk, he sent back for more; on his return he was credited with the robes and anything else he brought in. The memorandum of Robert Newell, a Bent, St. Vrain & Co. employee from 1836 to 1837, records just such an account: the goods trader William New took to "Trade on platte River" in spring 1837, and the robes and meat he returned. William M. Boggs, with Bent in 1844, recalled that the traders were trusted with thousands of dollars of goods and away for months, and he never heard of one abusing that trust.

At the trade

In camp, a chief often lent lodge space to store the goods and trade in. A crier might announce the trader, and trading began with gifts, a feast given by the trader, or both. Garrard, helping in 1846, found that serving coffee at mealtimes won goodwill. His customers could handle a blanket for an hour before deciding, while the traders praised it and passed the pipe to seal the deal. His tone is condescending, but it shows that trading mattered to the Cheyennes — and that they were discriminating buyers. William Gordon wrote in 1831 that "The Indians are good judges of the articles in which they deal," and Ramsay Crooks of the American Fur Company complained in 1837 that flawed-looking rifle barrels would not sell, since Native buyers could not be persuaded the flaws stopped on the outside.

The women brought the robes to the trader, one or more at a time, and exchanged them for the goods their men had chosen.

What was traded

Boggs listed red cloth, beads, tobacco, brass wire for bracelets, hoop iron for arrow points, butcher knives, small axes or tomahawks, vermilion, powder and bullets, prized abalone shell, and Navajo blankets bought at great expense — the striped First Phase Navajo Chief's Blankets seen in Lieut. James W. Abert's 1845 watercolors of the fort. Beads came in white (most prized), blue and red (least) — and of the thousands of common beads found in the fort's 1960s excavations, over half were white, 35 percent blue and only 2 percent red.

Invoices from Pierre Chouteau Jr. & Co. of St. Louis add Northwest guns, wool point blankets in blue, green, scarlet and white, scarlet chief's coats, gorgets, arm and wrist bands, looking glasses, awls, brass rings and kettles, fire steels, hair plates, gun flints and more — a very complete assortment.

Next in the series: Packing Bison Hides for Trade.

Sources

Based on "Hunting and Processing Bison Robes," The Business of Bison, National Park Service, adapted from Mark L. Gardner's NPS Historic Resource Study Bent's Old Fort on the Arkansas (2004), which quotes Theodore Davis, Charles Augustus Murray, Lewis Garrard, John F. A. Sanford, George Bird Grinnell, William M. Boggs, William Gordon and Ramsay Crooks; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words.