lingo, Milo knows the country, and you and I know how to shoot. Hellfire, I’ll look after your sister myself, her personal bodyguard, with your say-so, of course. I’ll vouch for her safety, on my honor as an officer and a gentleman.” He winked, then continued more seriously. “If anything happens to her, you can lift my own hair and I won’t even whimper.”
Otto laughed and shook his head. “No, thanks. Some redskin will lift it first.”
He rose and stretched. “But you’re right, there’s no money to be made hereabouts. And we’re here to make money. Okay, let’s do it. Tomorrow we’ll find someone to take our hides back to Dodge, or failing that, we’ll cache ‘em. Then on to the Yarner it is.”
8
T HE WAGONS ROLLED at noon. They hauled the hides over to Wright Mooar’s camp a mile or so to the west and left them with that trustworthy Vermonter. Mooar said he thought that Charlie Rath might be down to the Cimarron soon with a wagon train to buy hides on the spot and agreed to sell theirs to the trader along with his own. “Soon as Charlie shows and I sell our hides,” Mooar said, “I’ll be headin’ down Texas way myself. Probably a few other outfits will come along. Ayuh. More of us the better.”
From the way Tom and Raleigh spoke of him, Jenny had expected Mooar to be a crusty, grizzled old-timer. Instead, she saw a young, blond-bearded, sour-mouthed fellow with close-set, pale-blue eyes, stingy with his speech, a veteran of the Buffalo Range though only in his twenties. Not much older than Tom. He never even looked at Jenny.
“Mooar wandered West in the late sixties like so many of us,” Otto told her as they headed down to the Cimarron crossing. “Worked the wheat harvest in Illinois at first, carpentered a bit, I guess, later chopped firewood in Kansas over by Walnut Creek, south of Hays. He and his partner sold to the Army for two dollars a cord, about what I got up in Omaha. Then they switched to buffalo, shooting meat for the Eastern market at three cents a pound.”
He laughed.
“Doesn’t sound like much, does it?” he said. “But I did it, too, on a smaller scale. It adds up. There’s lots of meat on a buffalo—a big bull will weigh nearly a ton, a cow about six or seven hundred pounds. Cows taste better, more tender. The saddles alone, hump and tenderloins, weigh up to two hundred pounds apiece. We were earning $90 or $100 a day, when you average it out. Hell of a lot more than for firewood, and a lot less work.”
There was no market for the raw, untanned hides back then, Otto said, though some fellows traded with the Indians for their soft, brain-tanned robes, laboriously scrubbed and thumped and worked up by squaws. These elegant robes brought from eight to sixteen dollars apiece in the cities back East. The Indians would trade a dozen robes for a pint or two of rotgut whiskey. This whiskey, of course, had been diluted by half with creek water, then fired up with ample doses of paregoric and red pepper.
“The tanneries back East said raw buffalo hide was too thick and spongy to make good leather. So we usually left the skins on the prairie, or sold the butchered meat unskinned to middlemen at the railheads. We’d chop a buff in half lengthwise after gutting it, sling the halves on the train just that way, hair and all. But market hunting’s a seasonal trade. In the spring and summer the buff are out of condition and the meat tastes awful.
“All that changed in the spring of ‘71. A hide dealer in Kansas City named DuBois sent out circulars all across the range, offering to buy flint hides for good money, any time of the year. He’d found some tanners in Germany who had a process for making good leather out of them. Lobenstein in Leavenworth jumped on the bandwagon right away, along with a slew of other dealers, and the big-time killing began. Wright Mooar sent some hides to his brother John, in New York, and he found takers, too. Suddenly everyone wanted
Otto laughed and shook his head. “No, thanks. Some redskin will lift it first.”
He rose and stretched. “But you’re right, there’s no money to be made hereabouts. And we’re here to make money. Okay, let’s do it. Tomorrow we’ll find someone to take our hides back to Dodge, or failing that, we’ll cache ‘em. Then on to the Yarner it is.”
8
T HE WAGONS ROLLED at noon. They hauled the hides over to Wright Mooar’s camp a mile or so to the west and left them with that trustworthy Vermonter. Mooar said he thought that Charlie Rath might be down to the Cimarron soon with a wagon train to buy hides on the spot and agreed to sell theirs to the trader along with his own. “Soon as Charlie shows and I sell our hides,” Mooar said, “I’ll be headin’ down Texas way myself. Probably a few other outfits will come along. Ayuh. More of us the better.”
From the way Tom and Raleigh spoke of him, Jenny had expected Mooar to be a crusty, grizzled old-timer. Instead, she saw a young, blond-bearded, sour-mouthed fellow with close-set, pale-blue eyes, stingy with his speech, a veteran of the Buffalo Range though only in his twenties. Not much older than Tom. He never even looked at Jenny.
“Mooar wandered West in the late sixties like so many of us,” Otto told her as they headed down to the Cimarron crossing. “Worked the wheat harvest in Illinois at first, carpentered a bit, I guess, later chopped firewood in Kansas over by Walnut Creek, south of Hays. He and his partner sold to the Army for two dollars a cord, about what I got up in Omaha. Then they switched to buffalo, shooting meat for the Eastern market at three cents a pound.”
He laughed.
“Doesn’t sound like much, does it?” he said. “But I did it, too, on a smaller scale. It adds up. There’s lots of meat on a buffalo—a big bull will weigh nearly a ton, a cow about six or seven hundred pounds. Cows taste better, more tender. The saddles alone, hump and tenderloins, weigh up to two hundred pounds apiece. We were earning $90 or $100 a day, when you average it out. Hell of a lot more than for firewood, and a lot less work.”
There was no market for the raw, untanned hides back then, Otto said, though some fellows traded with the Indians for their soft, brain-tanned robes, laboriously scrubbed and thumped and worked up by squaws. These elegant robes brought from eight to sixteen dollars apiece in the cities back East. The Indians would trade a dozen robes for a pint or two of rotgut whiskey. This whiskey, of course, had been diluted by half with creek water, then fired up with ample doses of paregoric and red pepper.
“The tanneries back East said raw buffalo hide was too thick and spongy to make good leather. So we usually left the skins on the prairie, or sold the butchered meat unskinned to middlemen at the railheads. We’d chop a buff in half lengthwise after gutting it, sling the halves on the train just that way, hair and all. But market hunting’s a seasonal trade. In the spring and summer the buff are out of condition and the meat tastes awful.
“All that changed in the spring of ‘71. A hide dealer in Kansas City named DuBois sent out circulars all across the range, offering to buy flint hides for good money, any time of the year. He’d found some tanners in Germany who had a process for making good leather out of them. Lobenstein in Leavenworth jumped on the bandwagon right away, along with a slew of other dealers, and the big-time killing began. Wright Mooar sent some hides to his brother John, in New York, and he found takers, too. Suddenly everyone wanted
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