Monday, May 14, 2007

post 29, Jim Riggs Smoking Buckskin

Jim Riggs smoking buckskin, l976. I don't know if he had already written "Blue Mountain Buckskin", his famous bible on dry scrape brain tanning, by then or not.

He had dug sort of a posthole in the ground and started a low fire smoldering in it. (You don't want to use white fir--it imparts a urine odor to the hide.) Then he arranged the hide as kind of a teepee over the fire to smoke it. Any skin is composed of protein that turns into a high-grade wood glue if you de-hair and shred the raw hide and then simmer the shreds in a little water long enough (like 24 hours or more).

You normally want leather to be soft and pliable, but because of this inherent glue nature a raw hide glues up and gets stiff as a board every time it gets wet and then dries out. Smoking, the last stage of brain tanning, evidently coats the protein fibers with smoke chemicals that reduce this tendency for them to glue together and the tanned buckskin will still be fairly soft and flexible after it has become wet and then dried.

The general procedure for brain tanning any hide is to first scrape every bit of flesh and fat off of the freshly skinned hide. You can then spread the hide out to dry thoroughly and put it in storage for later work, or you can proceed with the brain tanning immediately, even while the hide is still wet.

Deer hair is brittle and breaks off easily so the hair is almost never left on a tanned deer hide as you might do for a sheepskin. To make it easier to remove the hair cleanly, you can sprinkle wet wood ashes on the hair, roll the wet hide up tightly, and bury it in damp soil beside the creek for a couple of days. The wood ashes have caustic alkaline chemicals (grocery store chemicals also work--but use caution--they are much more concentrated) that weaken the grain or hide coating that retains the hair. Just soaking the hide, without ashes, in the warm water of a pond or warm spring will work also. In either case you must be careful and not overdue it or the hide will rot. Check the hide once a day to see if the hair can be scrapped yet. Expect the chore to be a bit tedious. If the hair just falls out your hide is probably rotten and worthless.

Go back to post 05 of this blog and you'll see a photo of me wet-scrapping the hair from a hide with a stone scrapper. That hide was never dried out from the time it was skinned from a deer until after it was brained. I find wet scrapping easier and faster, but it doesn't produce nearly as aesthetic a final product as Jim's dry scrape method. The root of each hair is embedded in the grain, which is the very outer layer of the hide.

For nice soft and beautiful ceremonial buckskin you want to remove every bit of this grain as you scrape. But for just some serviceable leather, like for making a rough jacket or moccasins, it doesn't really matter whether you leave it on or take it off. Most commercial cowhide leather, like for shoes, still has the grain on--except suede shoes. With the grain left on the leather is a bit less soft and flexible.

After the hair is off, by either wet or dry scrape method, the hide is soaked in clean water until it is pliable and then as much water as possible is squeezed and wrong out of the skin. You then mash up the brains of the animal, they contain a special sort of oil, into some water--maybe a quart of water for a deer hide. I've generally just used raw brains, but there is some danger of contacting disease so boiled brains are safer. You then sponge up all of the brains-water mix into the damp hide.

If you just let that soggy hide dry thoroughly it would end up stiff as a board. When the hide is starting to dry, but still pliable, you start working it to keep the fibers from gluing tightly together. In an area where saplings were in profusion and could be spared I've taken a sapling, about four inches in diameter, and cut it off about six feet high and with a chisel shaped top. Then I would pull the drying hide back and forth over that chisel. When you get tired you rest and when you're rested it's time to pull some more. By the time the hide is bone dry it should be nice and flexible.

But if that hide gets wet again it will dry board hard unless you work it soft again. To make it dry reasonably soft you have to smoke it like Jim is doing in the above photo. He continually rearranged the hide, maybe every hour, to do a uniform job. The photo was taken in the backyard of Jim's La Grande, Oregon apartment. He graciously moved out somewhere and let us borrow his apartment when my daughter Jean was due to be born. Before and after that event we lived in a tent in the wooded hills out of Elgin.
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post 10

Tar Baby and Charlie Brown taking a rest, 1988. Tar Baby has the black muzzle, possible because of his inbred status. They are not confined in any way--and we're in the middle of nowhere in the southeast corner of Oregon's High Desert. If your wellbeing is dependent on others, animals or people, it is wise to have a good relationship with those others--and to understand the limits of that relationship.

Gentle Ben, the oldest of the three brothers, is not in the photo--and he does have a rope on him. Whenever Ben was not confined he would methodically start walking toward "home" with his two siblings trailing right behind. Where Ben considered home was diagonally clear across the state in the northwest corner. The one time Ben got loose I had to track them for a couple of miles before I caught up with them. But they were not trying to escape from me. If they had been I never could have caught them.

As you can see in the photo, grass is scarce in the desert, and it's a very big advantage if you can let your animals roam free to find their own. Then to catch them again, it helps if you have a little treat to give them. I like to have everything I carry serve multiple purposes. Instead of carrying oats for the burros, I just carried flour for making ash bread that both the burros and I liked.

To make ash bread, you open your flour sack and make a little depression, like a cup, in the flour. You pour a little water in that depression and then stir the water and adjacent flour into a thick dough. You then work that dough (coating it with dry flour if it's sticky) into a disc maybe a quarter of an inch thick and four or five inches in diameter. You scrape the burning wood of your campfire to one side and lay the disc on the hot ashes where the fire just was. You then scrape some more hot ashes, with a few live coals, onto the top of the disc. If you started with a small "Indian" fire, like I often use, you may want to repeat the cooking procedure, moving the burning wood again and turning the disc over in the process.

The only ingredients are flour and water. You do not add any grease or shortening. That would make dirt stick to the bread. The dry bread is remarkable clean after cooking and shaking the ashes off. A few ashes won't hurt you at all. The bread is kind of a hard cracker, but it's good and it keeps forever.

If you don't have store-bought flour several starchy food plants of the wilderness can be dried thoroughly and pounded with rocks as mortar and pestle into suitable flour. Experiment to minimize adding rock dust to the flour. Biscuitroot was the most available and suitable plant in the High Desert, but the starchy root is only easy to find during the few wet weeks in early spring when carrot type leaves and yellow umbel flowers reveal its location. The rest of the year you have to have sharp eyes and hunt for the tiny and inconspicuous withered seed stalk which will be the only visible remnant of the plant. (Caution--some relatives of this plant are deadly poisonous.)

The ash bread did not form a significant amount of the burro's food at all. I just gave them a little bite, maybe an inch square, and not every day. But that bite made them feel that I loved them--and I did. And I never had any trouble walking right up to them, wherever they were, and putting their halters on.

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Installment ten of:

IN OPPOSITION TO CIVILIZATION

by Andy Van't Hul

When examined from a species extinction point of view, the invention of gunpowder was certainly one of the most damaging and dreadful innovations ever conceived of. The very first time an application of fire caused a mix of chemicals to explode forcefully, the experimenter should have instantly received a sustained shock from a cattle prod to let him know that he had committed a boo-boo and he'd better not play with that stuff anymore. But instead, the exact opposite happened. His buddies all crowded around in fascination at the feat and begged for the recipe. Instead of being punished for the great crime of causing the future extinction of many species, the inventor received a massive pleasure hit of happybrain that most certainly encouraged him to try to invent ever more powerful explosive mixtures.

First, we decimated all of our prey species with our hi-tech weapons. Even Stone Age bows and arrows exterminated many species. Then we switched to farming with the clear cutting of vast forests and the building of huge dams that disrupted river ecologies. Our agriculture system is a total disaster now with extreme soil erosion, trace element deletion, chemical poisoning, desertification etc. I could write another thick book just on that subject. In order to really comprehend how seriously in trouble civilized humans are today, it is important to realize the damage agriculture has caused and is continuing to cause every day to the total life support capacity of earth.

In my analogy comparing Earth Entity to a human body I say that humans are wildly proliferating cancer cells sickening EE. A cancer in a human body does not cause damage only by the sheer number of cancer cells. The cancer also causes tissue breakdown and toxins to develop. Agriculture, the cancer affecting EE, is massively doing the same thing to EE, to Mother Nature.

The erosion of topsoil is obvious and atrocious, but the trace element deletion may be just as bad, and it is not visible--until you see the end effects such as the mindless cretins and the women with huge goiters on their necks. Those symptoms, common in China and the Philippines, are the result of farming-caused iodine deficiency in the soil. Crops suck trace elements out of the soil, and those trace elements, locked in the grain kernels or etc. are then shipped great distances to a city or an animal feedlot where the grain is fed to a hog or a person. Nearly all of those transported trace elements end up in feces which then never leave the locality of that city or feedlot. Those trace elements are no longer available to the food chain--but they are tremendously important for good health--and they took literally millions of years to accumulate, by gradual decomposition of minerals, in the soil. Back during the millions of years we lived as hunter-gatherers we never displaced those trace elements. They were always carefully hoarded by Mother Nature and recycled from life to life right in their original locality. We have no way of measuring the damage we are now doing to the soil, to flowerpot earth, with agriculture--we just know that it is immense. In previous writings I have spent some space and time on the damage agriculture is causing to the environment--but like I said above, the subject is so extensive that it demands its own book, or several volumes, and those books are already published and available in any extensive library. To keep this essay from becoming too rambling I will not try to reproduce the bulk of that material here.

To be continued.

This is a work in progress.

Comments are welcome

(but they may not be posted or replied to immediately)