Buffalo Robes for Beads Trading Activity

Girl making necklace from beads

NPS/D. Ocheltree

Robes for Beads Trading Activity

Background: Bent’s Old Fort, a trading post in southeastern Colorado territory from 1833-1849, brought together many communities from different backgrounds. This strategic location in the southwestern Borderlands served as an early American international economic powerhouse.

Activity Summary: Simulate the process of trading a buffalo robe for trade beads. Make a necklace or bracelet with new trade beads.

Objectives: Experience how economy functioned before paper or coin currency. Practice negotiation and cooperation skills. Observe how supply and demand affects consumers and merchants.

History Content: Great Plains geography, buffalo robe market, multicultural languages, and international commerce

Materials (click on links to download where applicable):

• Brown felt, fake fur, or copies of buffalo robe graphic image
• 1830s map of the Santa Fe Trail, U.S./Mexico political map, and map of Native American territories
• Plastic beads or other similar string-able object such as donut-shaped cereals or candies, dyed noodles, or colored straws cut in small sections
• Containers for beads separated by color
• Leather string, nylon cord, or yarn to use as necklace or bracelet
• Deck of playing cards
• Candy, sticker, or other reward of your choice
• Narrative texts

Hook: (optional) Deal one card to each individual at random. Tell group you will be awarding a piece of candy (or other reward) based on the card they are holding. from the cards that remain in your deck, select one blindly. Then give out a reward to the person(s) whose card matches the same face.

Next, tell group they will play another round, but invite them to trade cards if they wish. Pull another card out of the deck and award accordingly.

In the next rounds, make the game collaborative and give the game an objective. Have participants groups themselves into teams of 3 or 4. Choose the goal ahead of time, but do not reveal what it is. For example, the goal could be to reach the lowest sum of all cards, the most diamonds, the most black suits, an average given value, to name a few. Before starting each round and without revealing the goal, invite group to trade their card with anyone else they wish. Reveal the goal and award accordingly.

In the final round, tell group the goal ahead of time: to achieve the greatest sum of all cards in your group. Give participants an opportunity to trade. Take notice of interactions; i.e. the unlikelihood of anyone trading for a card of lower value. After trading, award accordingly.

Procedure:

1. Read “Geography.” Ask participants to consider what trade item was most important at Bent’s Fort given its location and the people who lived in these Borderlands. (Answer: buffalo robes). Next, ask whether being a single trader (the holder of one card) or belonging to a group of traders (team of players) would bring about the best chance of making a profit/winning.
2. Read “Buffalo Robes.” Ask participants to consider how supply and demand ruined the beaver fur trade and also how it affected the trade of buffalo robes from year to year. Relate this to the hook activity with the unknown card drawn by the leader. Sometimes buffalo were more prevalent and easily hunted increasing the numbers that could be traded and other times the number of people who wanted them or could afford them changed. There were no guarantees.
3. Pass out one sample of “buffalo robe” to each participant. If using a copied image, have participants cut out the robe portion or pre-cut them beforehand.
4. Set up your “trade room” space with “beads.” Place beads grouped by color on a table or counter. To increase trade among participants and to demonstrate the principle of supply and demand, limit the supply of some colors over others.
5. Ask participants “What do you want?” in another language. For example, you could say “cosa vuoi” pronounced “co-sah voy”in Italian. Ask group to name as many languages they think would have been spoken at Bent’s Fort. Accept all reasonable answers including Plains sign language. Read “Languages.”
6. Restate the multicultural aspect of the fur trade era and the trader nationalities involved: America, Mexico, Canada, unorganized territories, Native American homelands. Ask the group where they think trade beads or trade blankets offered at the fort came from. Accept all reasonable answers. Read “International Trade Goods.”
7. Invite individuals to trade. Call “traders” in the order you choose – by their location, group, alpha order, or playing card suit from lesson intro.
8. Traders will bring their buffalo robe to the counter and select 10-20 beads. The merchant at the counter decides how much the beads are worth. They could all be the same value: 12 beads of any color = 1 buffalo robe or something different. One blue bead could be worth twice as much as red, for example. Once the merchant has made the trader aware of the values, they begin conducting the trade. The merchant can decide whether or not the buffalo robe is of high or low quality and negotiate accordingly. At the end of the exchange, both parties will say “good trade” or “bad trade” in English, Spanish (“buen negocio” for good trade and “mal negocio” for bad trade), or another language of their choice.
9. When all traders have traded their robes for beads, they may begin assembling their necklace or bracelet.
10. Invite a second round of trading between participants. For example, a trader who wanted pink beads had to settle for orange, but another trader is happy to use more orange beads and has extra pink ones to trade. *Note, trading does not have to be 1:1 unless you specify. Use this time to circulate among group and note cooperation, negotiation, and problem-solving skills.
11. As participants finish, recap the following main points: location of fur trading routes, Native American hunting, processing, and trading of buffalo robes, multicultural participation, negotiation process, and international commerce.
12. Conclude by relaying your observations of the trading process among the group. Ask students what traits and skills would a successful trader have? Lead them to understand that mutual respect, knowledge of languages, fairness, negotiation, patience, perseverance, and compromise would have increased the chances of a trader doing well in business. Invite participants to share what problems a trader might have faced on a regular basis and how best to solve them.

Geography Narrative
Bent’s Fort, also known as Fort William, was a trading post situated along the Santa Fe Trail. In the 1830s, there were no Anglo settlements along the route between Independence, Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The region was inhabited by dozens of Native American tribal communities and had been for hundreds of years. Compare map of North America today with a map from the1830s. Notice the national boundaries changes for America and Mexico. Now look at the map of historic tribal lands. What do you think happened to change these boundaries? Land was often fought over and claimed by other nations. At Bent’s Fort, the Arkansas River was the boundary between the United States and Mexico when it started doing business in 1833. But by 1849, the border with Mexico moved south by hundreds of miles.The landscape surrounding the Santa Fe Trail and Bent’s Fort is largely short-grass prairie. It leads to mountainous and desert regions in the southwest. The prairie grasses near Bent’s Fort provided forage for the animals which people depended on for survival. Buffalo, deer, horses, mules, and oxen were all essential to a trader’s life in the region. Whether you lived in a Native American encampment, on a trading post, or traveling through as a merchant on the Santa Fe Trail, the land, its plants, and its animals enabled you to stay alive and conduct business.

Buffalo Robes Narrative
When people learn about the fur trade era, they generally learn about how trappers harvested beaver and how beaver furs and pelts became fashionable across the globe. However, Bent’s Fort did not deal much in the beaver trade because by then beaver had been overharvested to the point of near extinction. A buffalo robe is a stretched, scraped, tanned, and softened hide that still has its fur intact. Female buffalo produced the softest robes, so it was the female buffalo which were hunted most. Who do you think hunted the buffalo and turned them into robes? Since Bent’s Fort was built on Cheyenne and Arapaho homelands and the Cheyenne and Arapaho people were skilled at hunting buffalo, the Bent, St. Vrain, & Company partnered with these tribes to supply robes for trade. While the Native American men did most of the hunting, it was the women who did the processing. It took about ten days of hard work to complete one buffalo robe. Some years they shipped as many as 15,000 robes. Most of these robes went to markets in the northeastern United States. They kept travelers on carriages warm in chilly weather.

Languages Narrative
You already know that Cheyenne and Arapaho languages would have been spoken at Bent’s Fort. William Bent, who managed the trading post spoke English. Yet none of those languages were the primary ones used for trade on the Santa Fe Trail. Which language do you think it was?Not only did Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes who lived close by trade here, but also the Comanche, Kiowa, Plains Apache, Jicarilla Apache, Lakota, and many more. In addition, people who either worked or traded at Bent’s Fort would have spoken French, German, and Polish among others as well. However, none of the languages mentioned so far were the main language spoken. Fifty percent of the traders along the Santa Fe Trail were citizens of Mexico, so the main language of trade was Spanish. Not only did Mexican traders flow in and out of the fort, but workers did as well. In fact, Mexican adobe masons constructed and maintained the building itself. Owing to the history of the southwest before American independence, Native American tribes were often more familiar with the Spanish language than English.

International Trade Goods

About Beads: We know that the Cheyenne and Arapaho hunted and processed buffalo robes as part of their significant lifeways. When Bent’s Fort began as a trading post, they also harvested additional robes so that they could trade for other items. What items did they want to trade for? Beads were one of the major items in demand. If you observe the traditional clothing styles of Plains Indians, you’ll notice the colorful and symmetrical patterns and designs sewn into deerskin shirts, leggings, and dresses. At one time these designs were made by collecting and dying porcupine quills, but when trade beads became available, design choices increased, and the work became easier. However, in 1833, the United States did not manufacture these beads. Instead, they were imported from overseas.Brass beads came from France. Italian glass blowers made blue and white striped pillow tick beads. A dark blue bead called Russian blue came from Czechoslovakia. Crow beads and seed beads of different colors and blue and white Padre beads came from China.

Other Trade Items:
Blankets were another major item of trade. England’s sheep industry produced a great deal of wool for the manufacture of cloth. The popular 3-point blanket from England provided a great deal of warmth, was durable, and available in bright colors. Blankets like these could be adorned with bead designs and other embellishments to be used for other purposes as well. As trade networks increased, the Navajo blanket from New Mexico with its wide colorful stripes was an expensive and highly sought after trade item. Both practical and luxury items were available at Bent’s Fort. Coffee, tea, sugar, flour, and salt were often must-haves among those traveling the trail. So were cooking utensils such as knives, cups, and kettles. For Native American communities on the southern Great Plains, everyday life changed dramatically. A knife whittled out of jasper could easily get dull or break. A kettle made out of buffalo stomach only lasted so long. Trade goods like steel knives and brass kettles far outperformed and outlasted these earlier tools.Trade items at Bent’s Fort came from all over the world. Various countries in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America were all part of a vast international trade network. Trade conducted at Bent’s Fort wasn’t just important to the local populations, but to the entire nation. Its connection to global trade shows how the international economic network began early in American history and reminds us how important those connections remain throughout the world today.

 

Buffalo robe stretched out flat on floor inside Bent's Old Fort council room

NPS/D. Ocheltree