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HIDETOWN- Orientation

Hidetown? A "hidetown" was a spontaneous formation of a village in the wilderness providing a trading place for trappers, hunters and Native Americans, often very near a U. S. Army fort. These frontier outposts attracted many criminal opportunists (gamblers, grifters, prostitutes and robbers) who came to fleece the soldiers within; young men who were isolated, hundreds of miles from civilzation. Usually there was little or no law enforcement, and that was the main attraction. These places had many nicknames, and none of them were complimentary, and most of them the equivalent of "Helltown."

After the Civil War many young men struck out to escape the poverty and depression of the many places scarred by the war, and sought the wholesome freedom of Nature and "living off of the land." Buffalo hunting provided a way to make a living while doing it. Only a few considered the consequences of thousands of free souls and "nature lovers" converging on the plains and slaughtering all of the buffalo without any restraints. Most of these regions were still the domain of the Cheyenne, the Comanche or the Kiowa or the Sioux. To them, it was the equivalent of everybody from Little Rock raiding and destroying all the Walmarts in ten western states, and just for plunder.

Never the less, Western Civilation found great, perhaps essential use for the resources provided by the buffalo hunters. Entrepreneurs like W.M.D. Lee (below) were the middlemen for the massive exchange of raw goods from the Great Plains to the Eastern processors. For around ten years these grizzly, uncouth frontiersmen "harvested" an incredible amount of buffalo leather which was made into boots, coats and giant leather belts used to turn the steam-powered wheels of the Industrial Revolution. Millions of pounds of buffalo bones were freighted east as well, to fertilize the farms in Iowa and Illinois and Ohio. Much of the Buffalo leather ended up as equipment for the British Army. And yes, they ate some of the meat.

Very few places which began with this infamous industry claim any kinship with it today. People would rather forget about it. Today we speak of these times as an ecological nightmare, where the American Bison was almost eradicated by "Free Enterprise." It was ugly and thoughtless and selfish and helped in the near extermination of the Native Americans. Critics often point to "a Christian Nation" as the culprits who committed these "atrocities." But if you were to visit one of these hide towns, you would not find a church, or a preacher, or even a city marshal. The hide industry, based on waste and greed, was the total opposite of Christianity, which is built on gratitude to God and sacrificial service to mankind.

Many cities on the Great Plains started out as hide towns... and fittingly most are ghost towns today. There were at least four "Hidetowns"; places which were actually known by that name, in frontier northwest Texas in the 1870's and one in Nebraska. There was even one in North Carolina, but probably not because of the bison hide trade. The most famous was next to Ft. Elliot, in the Panhandle of Texas, on Sweetwater Creek, and was soon dubbed Mobeetie, (the Comanche word for sweet water). The outskirts of Ft. Griffin (north central Texas) were also sometimes called "Hidetown" or "the Flats." Snyder, Texas also wore the name in its earliest years, as did another town nearby, later known as Rath City (named after a prominant bison hunter and hide merchant)... Wichita, Leavenworth and Dodge City, Kansas; Miles City and Missoula, Montana; and Ft Laramie, Wyoming were blessed with real names, but were hide towns in their beginnings. Hundreds of smaller, lesser known "greasy grass" spots in Texas such as Belton, Waco, Weatherford and Bowie dotted the extremes of westward expansion, and provided shipping terminals for freighters hauling hides in from parts unknown. Worth about $2.00 each, everywhere the hides went, they brought commerce, opportiunity and no small amount of trouble.

Any place on the plains where buffalo hunters gathered to trade or fight was likely to be called Hidetown. The word was probably a pejorative, and as civilization evolved and prevailed the name was forgotten. ******* Still, it well describes the wide open, wild west, before women and churches and government tamed the land. So the stories here are about the people who were the vanguard of "Manifest Destiny," as understood by most of us, as the inevitable migration of an exploding population into a vast, basically unpopulated, unsettled wilderness. And that expansion was led by society's most desperate demograpohic; Young, unskilled, war-hardened men and their female counterparts. Just like today, the good people tried to get along, and the bad people chose crime and violence. And the Hidetowns were notoriously loaded with the bad people, or to a larger degree, the ones who had not decided yet. There were the young outlaws who would later switch sides and become lawmen, and there were the lawmen who would give up and become outlaws. In many ways, the western hide towns were excellent models of man's tendancy towards selfish and sometimes ruthless behavior... Baptists like to call it sin. But the men and women on these pages would have called it their method of survival.

Strangely, this struggle for survival, which was a personal choice of each participant, was rife with racism, sexism, wanton killing and rampant lawlesssness, but was perceived by writers and artists as some kind of romantic adventure, and became the national obsession and fantasy.******* These days we watch "reality TV." In those days much of the Western civilzation read Wild West pulp fiction which relayed the juiciest lawlessness writers could imagine.

It took Americans over 100 years to look at the "Old West" without the bias of childhood affection. Early television shows flooded the American psyche for decades with pure myth presented as heritage, until the facts no longer mattered. Every little boy wanted to be a cowboy. Hollywood has tried to right its irresponsible proliferation of Westerns which made heroes out of questionable characters, while it ignored the real stories, which actually had many life lessons to teach. But the stories are instructive and deserve telling... So here is a sampling of the real West. Hidetown is one place where the facts matter, where no publisher or advertiser will censor the truth, and the reader will find American Western history still worth telling.

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About the Blogger...

I grew up in Texas, in a home where the Old West shaped our culture and our perspective on the world. For many school days I spent my after...