When the indians and everybody else were moving out west and taking hundreds of buffalo each day. How did they prepare the hides for transport and sale at a later date?

Sombody has to know how they cared for them and cured them for long term use or storage or even trade or sale.

One of my favorite books is "Sons of a Trackless Forest". Now that deals with the long hunters of the colonial period, but I'm betting, based on what I've read about all periods, that they did pretty much the same thing up to the late 1800s (say 1885 and later).

Kill, skin, flesh, salt, fold, ship. Tanners did the rest. It was very much a commercial operation.

If you want to know what the natives did, there are a number of people who have written books on the primitive lifestyle. This is a topic that has been dealt with repeatedly.

As an aside, the number of deer hides a single hunter would bring in in a year was truly astonishing considering that every hide had been dressed to some degree or another. Venison was not even a favorite... Worth reading even if you aren't interested in their use of wild game.

Here in the Catskill mountains of NY there used to be a very extensive tanning industry in towns like Tannersville . Hides were shipped from as far away as south america to be tanned using bark from the bark of the abundant hemlock trees.

My Grandmother lived in Gloversville for a time...

What about using the brains...I'm sure I've read that somewhere....clean, scrape, salt(???), I presume....then smear the brains on the skin...then what I forgot, but I'm sure brains have been used in the past.

Frans
Terra Incognita North America
www.terrahunt.com

Embalmer,

With regard to buffalo, this process was surely a nightmare! Have you ever tried to lift a wet buffalo hide. I was in Custer State Park last week and talking to the herd manager there. He told me that before they got the brucellosis out of the herd (and when the numbers were higher), they had hired hunters to take 8 bison PER DAY out of there, process them, and sell the meat. They were kind enough to let me use their rail, saws, etc to take care of a cow I culled from their herd and let me tell you that ONE buffalo is a real mission much less several per day.

Best,

JohnTheGreek

The indians had used brains and ashes from thier fire pits to tan hides. They used urin(piss) as well. Hides were smoked to water proof them.

Daryl

Check the "Articles" section out on this site for:

http://www.braintan.com/

I've read accounts of the operations of the buffalo hunters, and from what I remember, hides were fleshed and dried like Hobie mentioned. I don't remember that salt was used. It's not entirely necessary for the process of preserving a hide for transport, and I just can't picture buffalo hunters taking that much salt with them in the first place... and then, considering the time period, wasting it on a hide.

Trappers use the same method today. A properly dried hide will keep for years under ideal temperature conditions.