Impacts of the Bison Robe Trade

A bison stands in a prairie landscape.

NPS/WICA

The effects of the bison robe trade, both on the Plains Tribes and Bent’s Fort, were many. Robe trader’s manufactured goods proved irresistible to the Plains Tribes, to the point that they lost a margin of former self-sufficiency, becoming dependent upon traders for necessities such as iron for making arrow points, skinning knives, fire steels, sewing awls, firearms, powder, and lead. For a few months each year, the tribes devoted themselves almost entirely to harvesting and processing robes; the Indian men and women may not have been factory laborers, but they were certainly workers in a capitalistic market economy, nonetheless. And it was a global market controlled by others, from European fur buyers to the robe traders on the high plains. Indeed, it is significant that white men became visible fixtures in the villages during the robe season, some of whom, as noted above, came to exert considerable influence over particular bands. Bent’s Fort became not only a draw for certain tribes but a sort of hub around which the political, economic, and even social affairs of the Southern Cheyennes and others were often played out. In other words, the robe trade gave Bent’s Fort and Bent, St. Vrain & Co. a prominent role in the world of the Southern Plains tribes, a role that had not existed before the 1830s.

The demand for robes for trading purposes led to a noticeable increase in the practice of polygyny within various tribes. Because the women performed all the work of tanning a robe, the more wives to a lodge, the more robes that could be processed. This situation encouraged raiding between tribes in an effort to acquire additional females to bolster this important labor force. The robe trade also subjected Native American women to a much heavier workload, particularly as hunters strived for larger harvests in order to have more robes at trading time. The increased emphasis on robe taking created a greater demand for horses, for the horse was integral to the hunt for bison. William Bent’s son George tells us that Native American men used “their best horses...to chase buffalo” and used “old plugs” to pack the hides. To keep their running horses fresh, the hunters rode the plugs and lead the better horses until reaching the hunting area. A good hunter, according to Bent, took two or three pack horses along in addition to his running horses. Horses also enabled the bands to cover a large territory in search of the buffalo herds and provided them transportation to and from trading posts on the Arkansas and South Platte. Large horse herds, however, were a strain on natural resources – even more so during times of drought – reducing critical forage, both grasses and timber, in traditional camping areas.

The greatest impact of the robe trade was a frightening decrease in bison numbers and a noticeable reduction of the animal’s range. As noted above, thousands of robes annually came into Bent’s Fort. Thousands also were acquired yearly by posts on the North and South Platte and the Upper Missouri. Then there was the trade of many small, independent traders and the thousands of robes acquired each year by New Mexican ciboleros. Josiah Gregg estimated in 1844 that about 100,000 robes were annually exported from the western prairies. John F. A. Sanford, writing about that same time, put the figure at 90,000. The 1850 industrial census for St. Louis calculated the number of robes handled annually by two St. Louis fur traders, Pierre Chouteau Jr. & Co. and R. & W. Campbell, at 98,000. All of the above figures, however, do not take into account the bison killed by Native Americans year round for their own use or those taken by sport hunters, adventurers, and emigrants on western trails. In 1860, the St. Louis Democrat claimed that “Probably not over a tenth of those [buffalo] slaughtered furnish us robes.” Thus, while that season would see 80,000 robes harvested for trade, some 800,000 buffalo might be killed. The Democrat, reflecting the common thinking of the time, casually added that these animals would “scarcely be missed out of the immense herds that yearly roam over the vast plains of the Missouri river.” But just how immense were those herds?

Recent scholarship has placed the total number of bison on the plains much lower than the wild figures tossed about in the nineteenth century. And it is most important to remember that the robe trade centered on the robes of cows and, to a lesser extent, calves. Killing off thousands of breeding females and potential breeding females every year could not help but have serious consequences for the bison population. Extensive market hunting combined with the effects of climate extremes, such as drought or severe winter, disease, and competition with wild and tame horses for forage would certainly have produced warning signs of impending ecological disaster. There were more than a few who recognized these signs. Josiah Gregg commented that the bison of the high plains had “sensibly decreased within the last ten years.” The great slaughter by Native American hunters, travelers, and trappers, he wrote, “must ultimately effect their total annihilation from the continent.” Cheyenne leader Yellow Wolf shared Gregg’s beliefs, informing Lt. James Abert in 1846 of the “decrease of the once abundant buffalo” and predicting “that in a few years they will become extinct.” Bison were becoming so difficult to find for the Southern Cheyennes that in 1845 they were “suffering from hunger, not having seen any buffalo, except now and then a single bull.” The amount of robes collected at Bent’s Fort that same year was reported to be only a third of what had been received in previous seasons. In January of 1846, the Cheyennes were having little success finding buffalo as far as 140 miles east of the post. Alexander Barclay saw the warning signs, too. He wrote his brother George in 1845 that the

buffalo robe business is becoming limited every year from the decrease of the animal itself which is now becoming such a rarity with us even at the foot of the mountains that we have frequently to go one and two hundred miles to get the first sight of one. The Indians who keep following the herds from place to point say they are satisfied that their children [will] have to raise corn for an existence.

This receding of the buffalo herds eastward would contribute greatly to William Bent’s decision to abandon Bent’s Fort in 1849 and move his trading operations down the Arkansas River. That the decrease in the bison herds was so measurable after the sixteen-year operation of Bent’s Old Fort on the Arkansas was an ill omen for the slaughter to come in the next generation.

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