Tension built up in the disputed valleys until the Blackfeet decided to join with the Gros Ventres to kill off or drive out all the interlopers on their claimed land. The spark that set off the prolonged fighting, and that made the Gros Ventres willing allies, was one of the classics of the western fur trade, the fight at Pierre's Hole in Idaho in 1832. Several villages of Gros Ventres had been south into Colorado to visit their kinsmen, the Arapahoes, and one Gros Ventre party, trying to avoid the Crow country, went west into the Snake River country. Just inside the Idaho border they collided with a body of mountain men gathering for the rendezvous. After some heavy fighting, the Gros Ventres slipped away, eastward across the rugged mountains, only to be discovered by the Crows and wiped out.
By the middle of October 1832 the Blackfeet and Gros Ventres were ready to start trouble. They ambushed Henry Vanderburgh, an American Fur Company agent, near Alder Gulch, later famous for its gold. Then they went around shooting up camps, stealing horses, and wiping out strays from parties under Bridger, Carson, Nathaniel Wyeth, Captain Benjamin de Bonneville, Andrew Drips, and Sublette. In between these activities they picked a fight with any Shoshoni or Flathead camp they could find.
One camp of Shoshoni and Bannocks, on Big Lost River, proved to be larger and tougher than the Blackfeet had expected. When the raiders retreated before superior forces and took shelter in a willow thicket, a fire chased them out to be slaughtered. Forty of the Blackfoot fighting men, and five women along to do the cooking and mend the moccasins, lost their scalps.
And so it went all through the winter and well into the spring, with the Blackfeet winning a few, losing a few, and causing plenty of trouble all around. Once they managed to surround and wipe out a hunting party of forty Flatheads, but suffered severe losses at the hands of those skilled fighters. Finally, with their ammunition running low, the Blackfeet and Gros Ventres went back to Sun River country and down to Fort McKenzie to replenish their supplies. Although they continued to fight in the upper Missouri country for the next four years, their attacks were never again so strong or so well sustained.
During this same period, 1820-37, the Blackfeet were busy in other fields. They fought against the Crows every year, with the fighting zone anywhere between the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, with an occasional Crow raid as far west as the Sun River. Although the two tribes were bitter enemies for about a hundred years, they had occasional truces for trading purposes, for the Crow women tanned the finest buffalo robes in all the plains and the Crow warriors made the best war bonnets.
Adventurous war parties traveled far to the south, reaching New Mexico on at least one occasion, and being reported along the Cimarron in Texas in the 1820's. This seems to mark the high point of Blackfoot expansion. After their fights in the 1830's they gave up such travels.
The Blackfeet justified their attempts to keep the trappers from the Montana mountains by claiming they wanted to do all that trapping themselves, yet they were indifferent trappers, reluctant to work in the cold water to take beaver, and they did not properly care for pelts they did secure. Their yearly catch of furs could pay for only a small portion of the goods they wanted to buy at the trading post.
The Hudson's Bay Company, with trading posts in the Blackfoot country in Alberta, had never been interested in taking buffalo robes in trade. They were bulky and heavy, and worth very little by the pound compared to other furs. Transporting the robes from Alberta to the coast by canoe ate up all the profit. But the American Fur Company, from its Fort McKenzie post on the Missouri, could send its furs down the river by boat, with no portages, and could afford to buy any quantity of buffalo robes the Indians chose to bring them. The Blackfeet, in order to pay for their increased wants, soon had their women tanning thousands of extra robes each year.
Good buffalo robes were made from the hides of young cows killed in the late autumn when the new winter coat was short and thick, like plush. The fresh skins were pegged flesh side up to dry, then each one was carefully chipped with an adze-like tool until it was uniformly thin. A highly skilled Crow woman could produce a robe with the skin nearly as thin as cloth. The Blackfeet were less skillful, but their robes were of acceptable quality. The thin chips of dried skin from this process were saved and boiled for breakfast food.
The chipped skin was rubbed with brains, or a mixture of brains and liver, making it permanently soft and pliable if it did not get wet. Then the skin was carefully trimmed to remove the tags and the peg holes around the edge and was ready for use. Special skins might have some art work on the smooth, white surface, or a skin might be smoked to keep it soft and pliable even after wetting.
The finished robe weighted about ten pounds, and with reasonable care would last ten years or more. The amount of back-breaking toil involved in preparing a robe was tremendous, yet each Piegan or Blood woman was expected to prepare eight or ten each year for the trader, in addition to several for her family.
The robes were rolled up tightly in bundles of ten for transporting. The cheapest downriver freight was by a mackinaw boat with a crew of four men. This was a flat-bottomed craft with both ends pointed, about twelve feet wide by forty feet long. It was built by the workmen at the post from boards whipsawed from timber cut in the river bottom. A large sweep at each end of the boat, each sweep handled by two men, served to steer the craft, and the river current provided the motive power to carry it downstream. A mackinaw boat could carry 3,000 buffalo robes at a cost of about $2 a day, or $600 at the most for the whole voyage, 20 cents a robe. At the end of the voyage the boat was sold cheaply or was broken up for lumber.
When robes could be hauled at a profit from Fort McKenzie, 2,400 miles upstream from St. Louis, it is obvious that all the other trading posts along the Missouri could also profit from buying robes. Lewis and Clark listed about fifteen tribes that were trading robes by 1804, and some of them were also supplying buffalo tallow. The Yankton, Brulé, and Teton Sioux and the Cheyenne and Kiowa also traded dressed and smoked skins.
Buffalo fat, often called grease, oil, or tallow, found a ready market at St. Louis. In the days before petroleum wells and kerosene lamps, each family needed a large amount of tallow for candles, and a great deal more for soap, in addition to any used in cooking. Fat for candles and soap did not have to be handled too carefully or be kept as clean as cooking fats. Even its flavor was unimportant. Hence no one worried about a lack of sanitation among the Indian tribes that prepared the buffalo fat.
Along the Missouri much of the tallow was brought down the river by dugout canoes. First the canoe was emptied, cleaned, and dried. Then it was filled to the brim with melted tallow, which soon cooled and hardened, and the top covered tightly. The canoe was then towed down the river. It could not leak, nor could the cargo spill or spoil even if the rig overturned in a rapid.
The Missouri traffic in robes and dressed skins became much more important when beaver fur went out of fashion in European court circles in the 1830's, much of this fur being replaced in the manufacture of hats with silk from China. A marked increase in robes handled at St. Louis closely followed the slump in beaver handled in that market. In 1840 the American Fur Company alone shipped 67,000 buffalo robes to market, and by 1848 this number had grown to 110,000. For a few years in the 1840's the market was glutted by the enormous increase in this commodity.
In addition to the traffic in buffalo tallow, there was active trading in buffalo tongues on the Missouri. These were brined and shipped in kegs and made quite an addition to the yearly trade. In 1848 the St. Louis market reported the receipt of 25,000 tongues. Tongues were easy to harvest, and the easiest part of the buffalo to ship for food. Old buffalo bulls, which were of very little value for anything else, provided large tongues that pickled readily.