Hides and deerskins: the Atlantic leather trade

Where did deerskins come from around 1715?

White-tailed deer lived in huge numbers in the forests of the American South, and the people who hunted them were Native Americans. Carolina’s trade with Native nations began in 1674, when Westo traders brought skins to the young colony. By 1715 the skins came from a wide web of nations: the Yamasee near the coast, the Creek, or Muscogee, towns to the west, the Cherokee in the mountains, the Catawba to the north, and the Chickasaw and Choctaw further west.

The Muscogee were not one tribe but an alliance of towns speaking several languages, including Muskogee, Alabama and Hitchiti. By 1715 the English called them “Creeks”, and they numbered about 10,000 people. The French traded for skins too, from Mobile and later New Orleans; the Choctaw generally favoured the French, the Chickasaw the English.

How did the deerskin trade work?

Native buyers knew what they wanted. They asked for guns, gunpowder and shot, hatchets, knives, hoes, brass kettles, blankets, calico cloth, hats and vermilion, a bright red paint. Prices were counted in deerskins, and traders often gave goods on credit, to be paid back in skins after the autumn hunt.

Some communities chose to move closer to the trade: the Ochese Creek moved their towns to the Ocmulgee River, near today’s Macon, Georgia, to be nearer English traders. Many traders lived in Native towns, and over the 1700s many married Muscogee women.

From the towns, skins were carried to Charles Town on long, costly trains of pack horses. There they were packed in barrels and shipped to England.

From 1699 to 1715 Carolina shipped an average of about 54,000 deerskins a year, and 121,355 in its record year, 1707. In those years deerskins brought in at least half of the colony’s export earnings. More on the town is in Charles Town.

How was the deerskin trade tied to slavery?

From the start, Carolina’s traders bought people as well as skins. Traders sold guns to Native allies and asked to be paid in captives. Armed groups raided neighbours who had no guns, and those neighbours then needed guns to protect themselves. The historian Robbie Ethridge calls it a cycle of dependency.

Westo raiders terrorised the region until 1681. Later, Yamasee, Shawnee and Creek raiders attacked the Spanish mission towns of Florida. By 1704 the Apalachee missions had been destroyed. Most captives were women and children, sold to sugar islands in the Caribbean and to plantations on the mainland. The historian Alan Gallay estimates that between 24,000 and 51,000 Native people were sold through Carolina’s trade. After 1715 this trade shrank, and Carolina relied more and more on enslaved Africans to grow its rice.

What caused the Yamasee War of 1715?

The Yamasee had been Carolina’s closest Native allies for thirty years. By 1715 the deer near their towns were hunted out, and traders had let their debts grow, hoping to force them to give up land. One estimate put the debt at two years’ work or more for every Yamasee man. Traders also cheated and abused people, and settlers moved onto Yamasee land.

On Good Friday, 15 April 1715, at the town of Pocotaligo, the Yamasee killed the colony’s agents, among them Thomas Nairne, who had tried to reform the trade. Across the South, other nations killed the traders living among them; by June about nine in ten were dead. The Ochese Creek were probably leaders of the rising as much as the Yamasee, and the Catawba, Apalachee and others joined in. Ethridge calls it a revolt against the slave trade and an effort to reform the trade.

How did the Yamasee War end?

About 400 settlers were killed, and country families crowded into Charles Town. The Catawba made peace by July 1715. The Cherokee were divided, until in January 1716 Cherokee at Tugaloo killed a party of Creek envoys, in events still not fully understood, and the Cherokee joined Carolina against the Creeks. That turned the war.

The Yamasee lost about a quarter of their people in the first year. Many survivors moved south to Spanish St. Augustine. The Lower Creek moved their towns west to the Chattahoochee River in 1716 and made peace in late 1717.

Carolina changed its rules. In 1716 the colony took over the trade itself, sending paid agents called factors in place of private traders. The deerskin trade did not get back to its old size until 1722.

What were deerskins used for in Europe?

Deerskin makes soft, strong, stretchy leather. Many skins were dressed, or cleaned and softened, before they were traded. Leather-makers of the time often finished deerskin with oil, giving a supple leather like chamois. It was ideal for clothes that had to bend and move: breeches, the knee-length trousers men wore, and gloves. Carolina’s skins mostly fed Britain’s growing clothing trade.

Where did cattle hides come from, and what does it have to do with buccaneers?

Spanish settlers brought cattle to the Caribbean and South America, and many ran wild. Hides were an early export: in 1563 the English slave trader John Hawkins sold captive Africans on Hispaniola and took home a cargo of hides.

On Hispaniola, the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, herds of wild cattle and pigs roamed free in the north and west. From about 1620 French, English and other hunters lived rough there, killing the animals for hides and meat and selling them to passing ships. They smoked the meat on a wooden frame called a boucan, a word Europeans learned from Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and South America. The French called the hunters boucaniers, and in English they became “buccaneers”. Many later turned to raiding Spanish ships, and the word came to mean sea raider. See Tortuga.

Alexandre Exquemelin, who lived among them, wrote in 1678 that the Spanish side of the island yielded “vast numbers of skins and hides”, some 11 to 13 feet long. In the 1600s, Cuban towns such as Trinidad lived on cattle, tobacco and smuggling. Around Buenos Aires in the 1600s and 1700s, hunters killed wild cattle on the plains for leather and tallow, and much of the trade went through smugglers.