Hunting and Processing Bison Robes

Native woman processing a buffalo robe.

After a sketch by Theodore Davis.  Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January, 1869.

The thousands of buffalo robes traded at Bent’s Fort and many other trading posts in the Far West were eventually made into lap robes for use in carriages and sleighs during the winter months in both the United States and Europe; some robes were fabricated into heavy outer garments such as coats, mittens, and hats. The only robes suitable for such cold-weather items were those taken from November to March. Theodore Davis reported that “November and December are the months during which to find the buffalo wearing the most expensive clothes.” Charles Augustus Murray, writing thirty years earlier, claimed that the October robes were best because “the hair is then young, fine,and soft.” All authorities agree, however, that the summer robes were virtually worthless as far as the robe trade was concerned – the hair or “wool” was far too thin and short at this time of year. Also worthless were the robes of buffalo bulls; only the robes of cows and calves were bartered in the robe trade.

One often misunderstood aspect of this trade is that all the robes obtained from natives came fully tanned or processed, as opposed to the raw or “green” hides that were the rule during the era of the white buffalo hunters of the 1870s and 80s. And the work of tanning these robes fell entirely upon Native women. Lewis Garrard, who observed Cheyenne women preparing buffalo robes during the fall and winter of 1846-47, later described the tanning process: a robe “is stretched to its utmost, on the ground (the hair side down) as soon as it is brought in from the hunt, by means of wooden pegs. When it dries, the squaws take the adze-shaped instrument, fitted to the angle of an elk’s horn [a hide scraper]...and, with repeated blows, chip off small shavings of the raw hide, until it is the requisite thinness.” To make the robe even more pliable, a soup-like mixture of the animal’s brains, liver, and bone marrow together with soap weeds was rubbed into the flesh side of the robe, a process which was repeated for several days. The last step was to expose the flesh side to heavy smoke. One robe trader complained that those robes the women intended for their own use “were dressed as soft and white as possible, while very little pains was taken with the skins intended for the traders.” According to Theodore Davis, it could take a woman one to two weeks to tan one robe, perhaps longer, but he estimated the average at ten days. John F. A. Sanford of the American Fur Company, writing around 1845, stated that “it is seldom that a lodge trades more than twenty skins a year.”

The robes were either brought to Bent’s Fort for barter or company traders were sent out to Tribal camps to trade for robes as they became available. The latter seems to have been the preferred method. Because the season for tradable robes was so short, to require Natives to leave the buffalo range (which could at times be several days’ travel away) simply to transfer their robes at a trading post was a waste of time and energy that could better be used in taking and processing more robes. William Bent appears to have often spent the winter months trading in the Cheyenne villages. The 1844 trading season found him at the “Big Timbers,” a favorite wintering ground of the plains tribes some forty miles below Bent’s Fort (near present-day Lamar, Colorado). Bent had obviously enjoyed the trading advantages of Big Timbers for some time, for, a few years earlier, he is said to have built a couple of “double log cabins...at the upper end of the bottom” where he could stay, if need be, and store the robes acquired in trade. In January of 1846, Bent is known to have been with the Cheyenne hunting bands in the vicinity of the Santa Fe Trail crossing of the Arkansas River, approximately 140 miles east of Bent’s Fort. Another advantage to being in the Native camps during the trading season was that it allowed one to ward off competition from small, independent traders, who seem to have been constantly wandering throughout the region. One of Bent, St. Vrain & Co.’s traders, John Smith, had such influence with the Cheyennes that he was able to exact tribute from New Mexicans wishing to trade with “his” village. “The trader is treated with much respect by the Indians,” Garrard explains, “and is considered a chief – a great man.”

The principals of Bent, St. Vrain & Co. could not handle the immense Native American trade of the region by themselves, nor did they intend to. The firm employed several traders each year to conduct trade at various outlying camps and villages as well as at the fort. George Bird Grinnell states that “Each of these traders had especially friendly relations with some particular tribe of Indians, and each was naturally sent to the tribe that he knew best. Besides this, often when villages of Indians came and camped somewhere near the post, the chiefs would ask that a particular man be sent to their village to trade with them.” Frequently these “friendly relations” stemmed from the fact that the trader was married to a woman of that specific tribe. A perfect example of the benefits of such relationships is none other than William Bent, whose prominent marriage within the Cheyenne tribe about 1835 cemented not only a union between himself and Owl Woman, but one between the Cheyennes and Bent’s Fort as well.

Grinnell provides additional details about the robe trade at Bent’s Fort that bear repeating here:

When it was determined that a trader should go out, he and the chief clerk talked over the trip. The trader enumerated the goods required, and these were laid out, charged to him, and then packed for transportation to the Indian camp. If the journey was to be over fairly level prairie, the goods were carried in wagons, but if through rough country, pack mules were used. If on arrival at the camp the trader found that trade was likely to be large and that he would require more goods, he sent back to the fort a wagon or some of his pack animals for additional supplies. When he returned from his trip and turned in his robes he was credited with these and with any other articles he had traded for.

Just such a transaction between trader and clerk as described by Grinnell is found in the “memorandum” of Robert Newell, a Bent, St. Vrain & Co. employee from 1836 to 1837. Newell’s slim notebook contains a carefully itemized account of the goods taken by trader William New to “Trade on platte River” in the spring of 1837. When William New completed his trading, Newell listed the robes and meat turned over by New, as well as the trade goods that were returned.

William M. Boggs, who was with William Bent during the trading season of 1844, wrote that the Bent, St. Vrain & Co. traders were

perfectly reliable and devoted to the interest of the Company. The Company would entrust them with thousands of dollars worth of goods, and send them to distant tribes of Indians to barter robes, furs and peltries, with pack animals, to carry the outfit. The trader thus outfitted would remain away for months, or until the season for trade was over, and then would return to the Fort with the robes and peltries that he had accumulated, and I never heard of one of those men accused of abusing the confidence placed in them by their employers.

Once the trader arrived at the village or camp, it was not uncommon for the Tribal leader or chief to offer space in either his own lodge or another lodge for storage of the trader’s goods; here the actual trading would take place, or just outside. Sometimes a crier would go through the village announcing the arrival of the trader, but before actual trading commenced, an exchange of gifts, a feast (provided by the trader), or both, was customary. Lewis Garrard, who assisted the Bent, St. Vrain & Co. traders with the robe trade during the winter of 1846, wrote that “To secure the good will and robes of the sensitive men, we had to offer our dear-bought Java at meal time – the period of greatest congregation.” The men carefully examined the individual trade goods and made their selections, a process that took time. Garrard writes that their customers would “look at and handle a blanket, or other commodity, an hour, before concluding a bargain. We would have to praise, and feel, and talk of the article in question, and seal the trade, by passing the long pipe, as a balm to their fastidious tastes.” Disregarding Garrard’s condescending tone, on one level his comments tell us that the act of trading held great significance for the Cheyennes, but they also reveal the Cheyennes as very discriminating consumers. This is confirmed by William Gordon, an old acquaintance of Charles Bent, who stated in 1831, “The Indians are good judges of the articles in which they deal.” An even more illuminating observation comes from Ramsay Crooks of the American Fur Company in an 1837 letter written to James Henry at the Bolton Gun Works concerning a shipment of guns for the Native trade: “We have opened one box of each sort & find the scroll guard as good as ever, but the outside of the Barrels of the Lancaster pattern have so many flaws as will injure their sale; for the Indians cannot be persuaded that such external imperfection does not extend to the interior of the Rifle” [emphasis added].

According to both William M. Boggs and Garrard, the Native women physically brought the robes to the trader – one or more at a time – and exchanged them for the goods their men had selected. Boggs later described the trade goods offered by Bent, St. Vrain & Co. as “red cloth, beads, tobacco, brass wire for bracelets, hoop iron for arrow points, butcher knives, small axes or tomahawks, vermilion, powder and bullets. The beads were of three different colors, red, white, and blue. The white kind were prized the most highly by all the different Tribes, the blue next and the red least.” Of the thousands of common beads found during the archeology at Bent’s Fort in the 1960s, over half were white and 35 percent were blue. Only 2 percent were red. Boggs also listed abalone shell, “prized very highly for ornaments,” and Navajo blankets, “procured from the Navajoes at great expense by the Company.” These striped, handwoven textiles, known today as First Phase Navajo Chief’s Blankets, are strikingly evident in watercolor sketches made at Bent’s Fort in 1845 by Lieut. James W. Abert. We can easily supplement Boggs’s abbreviated list by looking at the surviving Bent, St. Vrain & Co. invoices with Pierre Chouteau Jr. & Co. of St. Louis. There are 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; brass kettles; oval fire steels; hair plates; gun flints; and much more. In other words, a very complete assortment.

---

Content adapted from Mark L. Gardner's 2004 NPS Historic Resource Study: "Bent's Old Fort on the Arkansas."