Beginning with the founding of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1670, English colonists turned the southeastern deerskin trade into one of the colonies' most profitable export industries. The trade intensified in the early eighteenth century when European cattle epidemics reduced the supply of hides available for leather, while changing London fashions increased demand for leather hats made from deerskin. Cherokee, Catawba, Shawnee, Muscogee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw hunters exchanged skins for guns, cloth, knives, pots, and other European goods, but the arrangement steadily transformed hunting from a supplementary activity into a long-distance commercial obligation. Families spent extended periods away from home, communities became increasingly dependent on imported necessities, and access to firearms altered the military balance among Native nations.
The trade's human cost extended beyond hunting. English settlers seeking to reduce the expense of transporting hides to the coast encouraged Chickasaw raids against neighboring Native communities, where captives could be enslaved and forced into the labor of hauling deerskins. The broader colonial economy had already made Charleston a center for both Indian slavery and the hide trade; after the Yamasee War of 1715-1717, African slavery increasingly replaced the market for Native captives, but Native enslavement and intertribal violence remained tied to the commercial system. Intensified hunting caused white-tailed deer populations to collapse across the region: deer were already becoming scarce in Cherokee territory by about 1750, and by roughly 1800 the trade had largely ended after the animals were depleted east of the Mississippi. The episode illustrates how European fashion demand converted Indigenous territories into extractive supply zones, entangled trade goods with warfare and enslavement, and left both social and ecological damage behind.
