When Americans took over the western fur trade, the number of robes and hides brought to the St. Louis market increased rapidly as the traders competed with one another along the Missouri. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, with the population of Europe increasing rapidly and the United States expanding, the traders had a greater potential market, which they were quick to exploit.
The supply of buffalo robes coming to market increased again when the market for beaver declined in the 1830's, the traders turning to robes to make up for their losses in beaver. At the same time the Blackfoot country on the upper Missouri was opened to American traders.
Steamboats ran upriver to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone, and keelboats and mackinaw boats could be used on both the Missouri and the Yellowstone above that point. With this kind of transportation, the traders could handle all the robes the tribes could produce, and sell them at a profit.
With the Blackfeet supplying from 15,000 to 20,000 robes each year, and the Crow, Gros Ventre, and Assiniboin combined adding a like number, the shipments from the Montana country through Fort Union totaled about half the entire number reaching market. The Hidatsa, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Pawnee brought in the rest, except for a few thousand from the Osage and Wichita. Until the railroads were built into the buffalo country, almost the entire supply of robes, as many as 100,000 a year, came from the Missouri River country, from the northern half of the buffalo range, a pattern determined largely by the presence of good water transportation.
The 100,000 robes a year represented about as many as the Plains Indian women could possibly produce in addition to the robes and hides needed for their own families, for each robe represented many hours of back-breaking work. When the railroads came to Kansas, the Indians could not bring in any more robes even if the traders wanted them, but large quantities of buffalo meat and tongues were available, and these shipments increased rapidly. Any dramatic increase in buffalo hides had to wait on some new tanning process. This came from Germany, and its effect was soon felt in Kansas. A young man from Vermont was an important factor in developing the new market.
In the fall of 1870 young Josiah Wright Mooar arrived in Hays City, Kansas. He and a partner cut firewood on contract for the military post at Fort Hays that winter, but in the spring he was ready for more interesting work. He secured a small outfit and began to hunt buffalo, selling the meat locally or shipping it out on the railroad. In butchering his animals he placed the carcass prone, split it down the middle, and took the saddle and hindquarters with the hide still on them. The rest was left on the prairie. This meat found a ready market in Kansas City and St. Louis, and was distributed to local butcher shops and restaurants, usually as buffalo, but quite often as beef.
In this kind of hunting the waste of hides was appalling, but there was no market for them. Buffalo hides tanned by the usual commercial process produced a soft, spongy leather with a rather limited use. Then a bundle of hides shipped to Germany inspired a tannery to try some new methods, which soon produced a better grade of leather. As word of the new leather-tanning process spread, other tanners borrowed it or developed similar ones. By the spring of 1871 the demand for dried hides had grown to the point that one buyer in Kansas City offered to buy any number brought to him.
That fall a buyer in Leavenworth received an order from an English firm for 500 hides. He turned to Hays City for the hides, and young Wright Mooar helped fill the contract. After delivery was made, Mooar found himself with fifty-seven good hides on his hands. These he shipped to his older brother John in New York City to sell for him.
John Mooar knew something about advertising. He loaded the hides onto an open wagon and hauled them up Broadway on the way to the storage shed. One of the spectators, a tanner from Pennsylvania, promptly bought the lot at $3.50 each, as he wanted to experiment with them. The results were so satisfactory that he sent an order for 2,000 hides to John Mooar, who promptly left New York to become a hide dealer in Kansas.
Once the tanners found they could handle buffalo hides at a profit, orders poured into Kansas from all over the east and from England. Competing buyers showed up at every railroad shipping point near the buffalo country, most of them ready to pay cash on the spot for hides as they were hauled into town, and piling their purchases along the railroad sidings until they could be shipped.
All these dried hides were shipped with the hair on. Those taken in the fall and early winter had fine, thick coats and could be made into robes, but most of the late winter hides and all the summer ones were tanned into leather. Thus the nearly bare "summer" skins, once of little value, were now in great demand, and the hide hunter was able to work the year around for greater profits. Hides were easier to secure and deliver in the summer months, but none of the fresh meat could be marketed, so it was left on the carcasses.
At first Hays City was the center of the hide trade, but as the railroads pushed west and the Kansas and Pacific line was extended, new shipping points, such as Dodge City, were established. After two years, when the supply of hides dwindled, some of the buyers went out to the hunting camps and took delivery of the hides there.
With a single hide worth a week's wages for a laboring man, the rush of new hunters to the Kansas plains resembled the stampede to a new gold strike. Wild-eyed fortune hunters were all over the place, for yonder were millions of buffalo, each with a valuable hide waiting to be harvested. Why, with a little luck a man could make $20 or $30 or even $50 a day, and be rich in no time. So in they came in 1871 and 1872, buying up all the wagons, teams, and supplies, and heading out in all directions. In the fall of 1872 when the construction crews for the Santa Fe Railroad were laid off for the season, hundreds of them joined the rush for easy money. That winter marked the all-time high for the number of hides brought in, and the number of hunters out, an estimated total of 10,000 to 20,000 men of all classeshunters, skinners, drivers, cooks, and helpersin the field at one time.
The usual outfit consisted of a hunter with two to four helpers, makeshift gear, vague plans, and a vast ignorance about how to kill buffalo and process the hides. They carried any kind of a gun that would shoot, whether it could kill a buffalo or not, and drove any kind of rig with wheels, drawn by any kind of animal that could be found quickly. These men were inefficient in their skinning and careless in their handling of the hides afterward, but in the aggregate they managed to bring in enough hides to swamp the market and drive prices as low as 25 cents a hide, hardly enough to pay for the bullets used to kill the buffalo that had worn it. Thousands of the men went broke and drifted on to other fields. The price of hides rebounded by the next summer, and several thousand hunters remained to continue the slaughter until the herds were wiped out.
For fifty years artists depicting western scenes had favored action pictures of Plains Indians dashing into the buffalo herds and attacking the galloping beasts with lances and arrows. In the late 1860's Buffalo Bill was usually shown as running the buffalo, although most of those he killed for the construction crews were shot from a distance. From all these pictures most Americans concluded that the best way to kill buffalo was from the back of a fast horse. The new hunters expected that they too would make their kills in this exciting manner.