Introduction into Rawhiding

A taste of the old world.

“It’s hard to get any simpler than rawhide,” a cowboy friend of mine once commented. And he’s right. Rawhide, for those who may be unfamiliar, is untanned animal skin that has had the hair scraped off the outside and the flesh scraped off the inside. It’s simple. It’s probably one of the oldest materials humans have used, and it is still as functional today as ever.

Because of rawhide’s abundance, simplicity, durability, and utility, it also became a material of choice on the American frontier for a variety of tasks. People made rawhide beds, chairs, windows, tool cases, horseshoes, binding, and even shoe bottoms. Of course, the utility wasn’t something that only one group of people capitalized on. It was used by Native tribes, Americans, Spanish, French, and anyone else who happened to be on the frontier. If you know your western history, you may have heard of ranches called “rawhide outfits.” It was a term developed later in the frontier as a somewhat demeaning expression to denote a place where rawhide was holding the place together. Probably literally.

Unsurprisingly, rawhide also was used extensively in horse tack as well. Whether it was rawhide tapaderos, quirts, bosals, or reatas, the old horsemen would not have been able to do what they did without the durable material.

In this section of the website, we’ll try our hand at a few rawhiding projects. My hope is that you can learn enough that you’ll try to build some of your own tack as well. My limited experience has taught me that although rawhiding can be tedious work, it can also provide you with some beautiful and useful gear. You’ll also get the satisfaction of being part of a long tradition of people who know how to use this functional material.