American History - Buckskin

Beginning in 1709, a fun little disease called rinderpest spread across Europe, ravaging the cattle herds of many nations and creating a leather shortage that would persist throughout the eighteenth century.  In total three major outbreaks of the disease occurred between 1709 and 1786, which wasn’t all that great given leather was a rather important product at the time, being used for shoes, harnesses, saddles, book binding, hats, gloves, upholstery, and a shit ton of other things you don’t really think much about until there’s a shortage of them.  As a result, demand skyrocketed for alternative sources for leather, and as was common at the time, the New World quickly became the primary source for said alternatives. 

Now while most European powers of the time tended to get the most hot and bothered about the trade for beaver pelts when thinking about North America, trade for other types of pelts existed as well, such as fox, rabbit, mink, and deer just to name a few.  The most prominent of these other pelt markets was the deerskin market, also called buckskins, because they could be made into a soft leather perfect for clothing, gloves, and bookbinding.  First established in the 1680s, the buckskin trade was particularly prominent in what was to become the southeastern United States, an area that had lots of deer and few to any beavers, though it was somewhat secondary to the more profitable market of Native American enslavement.  However, that all changed thanks to rinderpest, which quickly made the buckskin trade pretty damn important, to the point that we still refer to money as bucks to this day.

Anyways, the sudden demand for deer pelts completely upturned the social order of the various native tribes who engaged in it, which had been upturned pretty significantly up to this point already.  In the northeast, groups like the Iroquois, who found themselves increasingly disengaged from the westward moving beaver trade, cutting them off from easy access to valuable and now essential European trade goods, found themselves with a new product to sell, which they began selling with a gusto, returning to the portions of the Ohio Country which they had depopulated a few centuries earlier, only to depopulate again as they fought rivals like the Shawnee for dominance over valuable hunting grounds.  Meanwhile, in the southeast, the buckskin trade sparked a veritable battle royale which lasted for the better part of the century, pitting various tribes and nations against each other in a bloodbath that did nothing but weaken all of them.  The only good thing to come out of it was that Europeans came to see them as being more valuable as hunters rather than slaves, though this was less than great for Africa given the colonists just began importing more slaves from that continent to meet there needs.

Things only got worse as time moved on.  The demand for buckskins was so great that the colonists themselves began to get in on the act.  Arriving new immigrants, many of them Scot-Irish, arriving to find most of the good farmland along the Atlantic coast already taken, began mounting hunting expeditions into the Appalachian Mountains and beyond, which in turn led to them starting to carve out farms in what they viewed as a largely uninhabited wilderness, drawing even more people with the promise of new opportunities.  This of course put them in conflict with the natives who already controlled those territories and valuable hunting grounds, sparking a never-ending tit for tat of incursions, kidnappings, and killings beyond the control of the colonial governments.

By the middle of the century, many of the once rich hunting grounds in the area of the Appalachian Mountains were completely depleted of deer, putting many native tribes in a bit of a bad position.  Since individuals were allowed to buy European goods on credit which could then be paid off by the next autumn’s deer hunt, they were forced to either travel further west to hunt, putting them in conflict with other tribes, or increasingly sell their lands to colonists to pay their debts.  The near extinction of the deer in many areas also caused the near extinction of the predators who depended upon them, which in turn caused a ridiculously large explosion in the squirrel population, which had devastating affects on the farms of colonists and natives alike.  Though the buckskin trade began to decline by the end of the eighteenth century, as cattle supplies returned to levels able to meet demand and deer populations plummeted, it continued into the early nineteenth century.