Oops, my mind wandered into the current century.
But cattle ranching was becoming big business in the Old West. For a one-off thing, yes, it might be faster to ride out and shoot an elk, but overall you’re going to produce a lot more cattle, with less effort, than picking off wild animals one at a time. A bit more lead time, to be sure, but then you’ve got dozens or hundreds of cattle to process.
The rancher doesn’t want to sell one cow to a local butcher. He wants to sell a thousand cattle to a meat packer in Chicago. People who raise livestock for sale often prefer to eat other species than the one they raise.
Also feathers from birds for cushions, bedding, mattresses, quilts, arrows, quills. Although quills would have started to fall out of use in favor of nib pens, quills were still commonplace during the civil war.
~Max
Including decorative feathers, AKA plumes.
I don’t know if that would have reached the western frontier by 1875, the wiki says the plume craze began around 1870 and the feathers were mostly sourced from Florida egrets.
~Max
How about whale oil? Peak usage was at more like 1850, but in 1875 it was still widespread. Whalers operated out of San Francisco and elsewhere on the California coast.
Probably not any more, but whale oil was used until relatively recently because it doesn’t get as gummy as petroleum oils do – important for watches. I had a 1/4-oz bottle fifty years ago.
T-bone again?
Beaver fur value was tremendous at times. To say “would be more valuable” than elk is an understatement.
Rendered bear fat had tons of value.
Wild animals taste very different from domesticated animals and certain things were considered a delicacy. At the height of the excess of bison killing, pickled tongues were valuable, and a lot of the meat was not so much.
Bison and other animals are also a danger for railroads. They might have wanted someone to clear them out.
Lumber jacks in northern Finland had a strike in late 1800 because of too much salmon. They got a contract that stipulated that salmon can be served only three times in a week. I’d say that was good contract.
As well as whale oil, baleen (‘whalebone’) was a very desired product in your time period with all sorts of uses ranging from parasol ribs to collar stiffeners and paper folders. If you were lucky your giant dead whale would also barf up a lump of ambergris which was worth its weight in really expensive whale puke*.
And while I’m at it, tortoiseshell is effectively a natural plastic and tortoi were harvested in vast numbers.
And another one - dugongs were harvested for their oil which had medicinal properties.
[*self-correction - ambergris comes exclusively from sperm whales, the non-whalebone sort of whale. Also, ambergis is shat out]
Not in 1875 around Deadwood which is where I mentioned, wild game was still a staple. Deadwood was the frontier and did not have railroad or cattle ranches at the time. While they did have access to cattle and pigs they were relatively expensive so they also ate whatever walked, swum or crawled.
Well none of that gave much of a value to a wild animals carcass out in the wild west.
The only way to literally sell it directly as food to hungry people who were there in your area, but tommorrow they would be out hunting food for themselves ?
But the californian goldrush might have created a market for wild animal carcasses… too many people so a high price for food…
Not in the west, but oysters were big business in the east. They’d be shelled and packed in barrels for shipment all over the country.
No, there was a big business in oysters in the west, too. See Oysterville WA for example. Also, oyster shells were made into buttons. As were mussel shells, which were a fairly big business in the south.