So where are these hundreds of thousand pelts paleface rubbed out? Does anyone have an antique rug or wall hanging? I can’t recall seeing any in museums, much less offered by dealers.
IIRC, most of the buffalo that were killed by the white man wer just left to rot. Unlike the Indians that killed them for food, clothing, shelter, and other purposes, the white man was simply interested in killing.
What, you think they were carefully preserved? Chemically tanned? Did they spend a few days making sure they were supple enough to last a while? Heck, the dang things probably weighed a few pounds, too - how many do you think people brought home? Images from Dances With Wolves notwithstanding, they didn’t go out and skin them all and load the hides on a wagon bound for home.
Even the well preserved ones don’t last real long. I recall seeing one back in Colorado that was about 40-50 years old, and falling apart (cracked leather, bald patches, etc). And that’s not to mention the wild buffalo scent. I had a traditionally tanned cashmere-goat-skin coat from China - it lasted about four years before cracking, and man, you’d better only wear it when it was really cold, because even with the washing they gave it, it still smelled like goat.
Basically, the same thing happens to all furs that aren’t carefully preserved. They shed, the leather hardens and cracks, bugs eat them, and they get worn spots. People toss them, because they are too big, smelly, and (eventually) ugly to keep. A good wool blanket is cheaper, less heavy, less likely to shed, less smelly, and doesn’t attract nearly so many critters. You can find a few taxidermy versions, I’d bet (carefully preserved), but they’d be mighty pricey.
Might I add that in no way am I in the market for one. I was flipping through channels and caught the part of Dances with Wolves of the skinned bison left laying around. Leather goods seem to last forever so I wondered if any of those skins still were around. A friend of mine has a mounted mountaingoat that must be fifty years old and it probably looks just as good/bad as it did the day it was stuffed.
Boy, today must be stuyguy-supplies-the-word day. (See the manual transmission thread for other evidence of my handiwork.)
FWIW, the preferred term for a buffalo/bison skin isn’t “pelt,” it’s "robe."
Not entirely true. The extermination of the buffalo was to control the Indians. It was meant to deprive the First Nations of their traditional food and make them dependent on handouts from the white man. Worked too.
It was also meant to make room for cattle.
Where did the bones go? Into bone china . . .
Tisiphone
Millions of buffalo were indeed killed only for their hides or robes. They were skinned, shipped back east and turned into leather goods. Many of the bones were later collected and used for fertilizer.
My father, who joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1950, was issued a buffalo coat when he joined. They were withdrawn from service by the mid-50’s and replaced with a more modern cloth coat, which was in turn replaced by the nylon “storm coat” in the early 60s. He said that all the recruits hated them; they weighed a ton dry, twice as much wet, and of course the smell of a wet buffalo coat was awful. He thought that the coats they were issued were probably 30-40 years old at the time.
You see them for sale here in Canada from time to time, and they are quite collectible, not least because of the Mounties connection. The last one I saw here in town was about $800 Canadian.
I remember learning in school in Saskatchewan that the city of Regina was originally known as “Wascana,” an adapation of the Cree word meaning “pile of bones.”
Buffalo bones being shipped c. 1885:
http://www.glenbow.org/libhtm/bbones.htm
An RNWMP or RCMP buffalo coat:
http://collections.ic.gc.ca/steele/nwmp/n_story4.htm