Native Americans did not take killing an animal lightly, and believed that if you did take something from Mother Nature you should use it to its full extent.

Most animal hides that are to be used for leather are a byproduct of meat, originating at the slaughterhouse where they are gathered and shipped off to a Tannery for further processing. At least in this case, one could say that the entire animal is being used with a minimum of waste for the benefit of the human tribe.

The leather tanning process can be broken down into three stages: Preparing the hide for tanning, the actual tanning of the hide, and the finishing stage. While it used to take weeks or even months to tan a hide, today’s modern tanning processes have reduced the time and energy spent to a matter of days.

Preparing a Hide for Tanning: The Beamhouse

The first thing to do is to stop the putrification process, which is done in what is known as the Beamhouse Operations. The hides are first cured with salt, either by a process called wet salting, where hides are heavily salted and stacked, or by soaking them in a brine solution. Wet salting takes a month, whereas Brine Curing can be done in about 16 hours, making it the preferred method today.

Next, the hides are soaked in a clean water solution to remove the salt, and to rehydrate the badly dried out skins.

Following a good soaking comes the liming stage to prepare the hides for dehairing and to further remove left over biological materials. The majority of the hair is removed by a machine, and what’s left is removed manually with a dull knife in a process called scudding.

Hides will then go through a deliming process to bring the down the pH of the collagen to an acceptable level for the actual tanning proceedure.

Next: Tanning the Hides

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