Making Leather

On 23 January 1806 Lewis reported:

The men of the garison are still busily employed in dessing Elk‘s skins for cloathing.” Regrettably, he was compelled to add that “they find great difficulty for the want of branes [brains]     we have not soap to supply the deficiency, nor can we procure ashes to make the lye; none of the pines which we use for fuel affords any ashes; extrawdinary as it may seem, the greene wood is consoomed without leaving the residium of a particle of ashes.–

Making leather became a constant during the last two years of the journey. It was needed to make rope, a shell for the iron boat, shelter, and coverings. The process used during the Fort Clatsop winter is described here.

Bucking and Scraping

There are a number of different ways of tanning or preparing hides for use in making clothing. The one that traditionally had been used by a majority of North American Indians for countless generations was the one the Corps’ leaders had in mind, judging from Captain Lewis’s plaint. It involved “bucking” and “wet scraping,” followed by “brain tanning.” The first step in tanning the integument, or hide of a large quadruped such as a deer or an elk, was—and still is—to soak it in a caustic solution of lye (potassium hydroxide), which would normally be concocted of water and wood-ash. That process is called “bucking”—hence “bucked skin” or “buckskin.”^[1]The definition of the compound noun “buckskin” in the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) erroneously states that buckskin is “leather made from the skin of a buck,” obviously on … Continue reading It sterilizes the hide, preventing bacteria from producing an obnoxious odor. Next, three layers of the hide had to be scraped off while they were still wet. They were, 1) the outermost layer, called the epidermis; 2) the papillary or “grain layer,” which holds the hairs’ follicles; and 3) the very thin inner membrane that separates the fibrous layer from the animal’s flesh. After the scraping was finished, the remaining fibrous layer had to be rinsed to remove all traces of the caustic bucking. It was a painfully taxing, tedious process.

Braining

Then the clean layer, described above, had to be soaked for several hours in a thick, soupy mixture of the animal’s brain tissues in water, then wrung out and stretched by hand to allow the naturally emulsified brain oils to separate and soften the fibers, thus assuring permanent pliability of the leather. Braining might have to be repeated two or more times in order to make certain that every part of the fiber network has received all the brain solution it can hold. The historic recipe was based on the premise that a deer or an elk has enough brains to tan its own hide, so the men’s frustration over insufficient brains can only be explained by the necessity to butcher their kills so far from the Fort that if extracted from the skull and carried back along with the meat, brain tissues, which are more susceptible to decay than meat, would be useless on arrival. But if they were left in the skull, the weight of the head would be more than the hunters could handle, given the urgency of getting the best meat to the smokehouse. Soap mixed with an emulsified oil could have been used in place of brains, but as Lewis said, their soap supply was exhausted. Brain tanned leather is not waterproof, but if the fibers of the leather were not thoroughly treated with brain oil, and were subjected to an intensive soaking such as Clark experienced on his six-day hunting trip in mid-February, especially that night when circumstances compelled him to stay out all night in a violent rainstorm clad only in his leather shirt and overalls (see his journal entry for 11 February 1806), the insufficiently oiled fibers would assume the stiff texture of rawhide when they dried out.

Making Ash

None of the journalists revealed whether they ever found a firewood that would leave ashes that could be used to make lye. Douglas-fir would have served their needs better than most other available species in terms of heat, smoke, and ash residue. It is possible, even likely, that their good friend Coboway, a headman of the Clatsops, or someone from his village, provided them with either material assistance or helpful advice, for he and many of his tribesmen would have learned their own foolproof way of tanning their families’ clothing.

It is conceivable that the Americans could have made pearl ash soap by mixing lye with potassium bitartrate (see “Cream of Tartar” in Chemical Drugs), one of the medicines Lewis ordered in Philadelphia. But they only had two pounds of it, which wouldn’t have made enough to cure all the hides they needed.

In their medicine kit they carried some Castile soap, but the exact amount is unknown. In Philadelphia Lewis bought 17½ pounds of it from Israel Whelen on 28 May 1803, but the ultimate “Recapitulation of Purchases by the Purveyor for Capt. Lewis” lists only 12 pounds (see Lewis’s Medicinal Purchases). Since the price, $1.68, was the same in both lists, one of the poundage figures must have been incorrect. Castile was a “vegetable” soap made of lye (sodium hydroxide), which most likely would have been imported from the vicinity of Castile, Spain.^[2]The recipe for Castile soap, which uses olive oil rather than animal fat as its base, enhanced with palliative laurel-berry oil (from the bay tree, Laurus nobilis), originated in the city of Aleppo, … Continue reading It would have been unthinkable to waste it on curing leather.^[3]Pursuant to Army regulations requiring soldiers to keep themselves clean, they had begun their journey with what was no doubt expected to be a sufficient supply of soap to last the entire trip: … Continue reading On 7 March 1806 Lewis relieved Private Bratton’s severe back pain with a liniment he concocted of wine, camphor, castile soap and laudanum.

338 Pairs of Moccasins

At any rate, by 13 March 1806, Sgt. Gass was able to report, as they began packing to leave Fort Clatsop, that they had managed to make 338 pairs of “mockasons” for their homeward journey. “This stock,” he pointed out, “was not provided without great labour,” as most of them are made of the skins of elk. Each man has also a sufficient quantity of patch-leather,” presumably to trim to size and place or stitch inside a moccasin as it began to wear thin in spots. What undoubtedly made the cutting and sewing of the leather “great labor” is that elk skin is thicker and stronger than deer hide. For that reason it is also less prone to stretching—which is the main reason it was used to braid ropes for lining their boats and canoes after the fiber ropes wore out.