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The Townsmen

A hide town was a primitive village. There were probably no doctors or lawyers, but maybe an indian chief. There were few stores... maybe one or two, and a few trades active in such a small place; such as a blacksmith, a livery stable, a bunch of saloons, and perhaps an office for the hide trader.******** There were no railroads, no banks, no lumber yards, no churches or hardware stores. But sometimes a town like this might have a dozen saloons, some of which featured brothels upstairs, and maybe a dance hall, where men could have some kind of social life, and actually see and talk to a female. Even if she was paid to be friendly. The females are pretty much covered on a different page, so this page is about the male tradesmen who made the wheel of the hide town turn.

The most important fellow in town was the blacksmith. And if he was any good, he put shoes on the horses and mules, repaired wagon wheels and other wagon parts, made tent stakes, meat hooks, fat-burning lamps, andirons and other fireplace and campfire tools, and fabricated custom hardware for whatever businesses needed a handle or a hanger or a boot scraper. In other words, the blacksmith was the frontier Walmart. He was truly an artist, a sculptor who made functional wrought-iron products; an agricultural engineer who solved problems, and who designed and even invented whatever was called for... and he usually did it within a few days. If a fellow rode into town with a horse who needed a new shoe, and there was no blacksmith, chances are good that a local farmer had a forge and could help him get back on the road. But that was about the extent of the farmer's iron-working expertise. People on the frontier were accustomed to "making do." Many of them had grown up on a farm or near one, and knew how to improvise to get things done. To survive.

One of the other important businesses in a hide town was the livery stable. This was where you could rent a horse or a buggy by the hour or by the day. Here you could find water and "room and board" for your horse, or get your saddle repaired if need be, and a place to park your wagon if you were riding one. Livery employees would unsaddle, water and brush and feed your horse right when you brought him in. The person running such a place had to be very reliable, as the horse was the traveler's most important possession. Horses may all look alike to some people, but they do not to their owners, who were sometimes as emotionally attached to their horse as a person today might be to their favorite dog- or even a wife. A horse was the western equivalent of a car and a tractor and companion, all in one. Some were "blooded," meaning they were the result of careful breeding, and were worth a great deal. A mix-up of horses, of perhaps accidently renting out someone's prized horse, would be a disaster. People in these times were hung by a rope until dead, sometimes without a proper trial, just for horse theft. The livery stable was where all of these issues were considered and taken care of- without a second thought.

There was usually an family-run inn, or a bar with a tavern, or maybe a hotel, where travelers could stay overnight. These places would not be considered acceptable lodging today. The rooms were limited and tiny, the beds were tiny, and had to be shared with other people... even strangers, with sometimes three or four persons to a bed. They were not well heated or ventilated, so they were cold in the winter and hot in the summer. There were no indoor bathrooms, no showers or even running water. There were sometimes baths available, for a price, in small tubs, and not-so-fresh water... but these were only used by a few of the travelers. many men hardly ever bathed in the winter months, and a few times a month in the summer. ******* If you were staying in one of these places, and had to make a bowel movement, you used a community metal bucket... called a chamber pot, but not to worry, it had a lid... and a "chamber maid" would dump it at least once a day... Men stepped "out back" to urinate. There was no "Continental breakfast" made available in the lobby the next morning... sometimes there was no lobby. The inn was just a place to throw yourself on a mattress and pass out from a hard day's ride. Sometimes they had one meal a day... usually a supper. There was little privacy, no sheets on the bed, and sometimes fleas or bedbugs everywhere. You slept in your clothes and flopped down at night, and tried to get some sleep among a bunch of snoring men. They called such places "flop houses." It was not near as pleasant during the spring or fall as sleeping out in the open prairie under the stars. And the coyotes usually only yelped and hollered a little before moving on. But when a blizzard came down from the north, and they often did, these crowded rooms were a salvation.

Saloons may not have been essential in a town, but they were essential in keeping men in one. If there was no saloon, then there would be few visitors and even fewer staying overnight. Saloons were where you got drunk enough to go to sleep in a filthy room with a half-dozen stinking, snoring buffalo hunters. And saloons were where you could gamble... and gambling was the national pastime. You would find bartenders there ready to serve... watered-down booz, or beer... and gamblers there ready to entertain you in your choice of games, and maybe a teasing, swaggering saloon girl or two to make you drink more than you should. These were the kind of women who often looked even worse at closing time, no matter how much you consumed. You could play poker, or faro, or numerous other ways of gambling... and if you got drunk, and gambled away your money, and got in a fight, you might get a free room in the county jail. But don't immediately picture Andy Taylor's jail in Mayberry.

Unfortunately, a hide town rarely had a jail. They usually only had a sheriff's deputy to "keep the peace"... they were rarely equipped to fight crime. Troublemakers were either beaten and banished, or really bad ones were beaten and chained to a tree or post until they could be transported to the nearest jail... which might just be a steel cage out in the open, twenty miles away. If you were lucky it was a windowless stone hut with a roof. But hide towns had a way of dealing with chronically troublesome individuals, so lawmen and jails and such were only used in rare circumstances. A loud or obnoxious drunk would just be lured outside into an alley by saloon regulars, where he would be stabbed or knocked in the head and robbed, and left to freeze or bleed to death. When it came to the "Law," you might say that hide towns were self-enforcing.

If you broke a tooth during a fight, or had a toothache, which people often did, there usually was no dentist available. If there was local barber, (sometimes a local man would set up a barber shop on Saturdays...) he might have the tools needed to pull a tooth. Most of the time men just drank more whiskey to kill the pain and sterilize their gums. A bad tooth will sometimes work its way out on its own. But many a poor fellow was driven nearly insane from absessed tooth pain, and even to suicide to end it. If you had a wound from a bullet or an indian arrow, or just a gash from an accident, somebody might volunteer to dress it or remove a bullet, but few people had that kind of training. It was best you stop the bleeding, and hurried to the next town where there might be a doctor. But it was recommended that you make out your Will immediately, just in case, before gangrene set in. Amazingly, most people survived such things. But without antibiotics, many died from infections days or weeks later.

Every hide town had hide buyers who represented large tanning operations and who were planted there to attract the buffalo hunters and bargain with them. They would purchase the hides by the bundle, and hire teamsters to haul the hides by wagon to Dodge City, Kansas or beyond, where they could be loaded on train cars and taken to tanneries for processing. Sometimes the hides would pile up in Hidetown, and even though they had been salted, they would make quite a stench. The whole town celebrated when another shipment had been made, because the hunters now had money to spend and the smell was going away. Well, at least the smell of the hides.

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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...