Buckskin Tanner: A Guide to Natural Hide Tanning

Buckskin Tanner
is the author — Jaime Jackson — who narrates the
story of his adventure into natural tanning, beginning
in the early 1950s at Disneyland’s Indian Village,
where, as a young boy, his father took him to meet
elder Native Americans brought by Walt Disney to
guide park technicians construct the village. This was
during the year before the park officially opened. “I
remember a dialogue between my father and some of
the Indians about native tanning and the hide tipis
put together there. The women traditionally tanned
the hides and sewed them together into tipis. But the
hides used here were commercially tanned. I wondered
how they did the tanning during the bygone buffalo
days. And that is how it all began for me.”