The long hunters

 

and there we have it. You obviously were not in the meat business in any way shape or form.  worse still this is not just several men as that was the leadership.  They had a serious group of employees as well.  This meant at least a couple of dozen men or as many as needed for their target..

Locating trap lines and stripping them also cannot be repeated easily which is why scant fur animals exist in the USA.  Recall, it took about one year or so to strip wild ginseng in this country.

These good old boys were harvesting indian villages for slaves who were taken to a beach somewhere and sold into the Bahamas.  The village disappeared, the population disappeared and a land barron would lay claim to newly cleared fields.

The Spanish were doing as much during the 16th and 17th century and the americans took over during the 18th century.  all this makes the fairy tales about massive epidemics a cover story to hide what was going on.

Spanish slaving was actually murderous in its own right, but not before the captive was sold.

How did the ‘long hunters’ of the Colonial period in North America finance their expeditions and make money? How important a role did they truly play in exploring new country and how far to the West did they travel?

quora.com

The Long Hunters

These parties of two or three men usually started their hunts in October and ended toward the end of March or early in April, going west into the territory of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. Gone from the settlements for six months at a time (a long time). they became known as long hunters. Many long hunters were employed by land speculators who wished to establish claims on trans-Appalachian lands once the French influence had been removed (1763). Daniel Boone's vivid accounts of his hunting exploits helped draw a flood of settlers to Kentucky in subsequent years.

The number of noted long hunters is actually quite small — about a dozen men — Boone, Harrod, Kenton, Smith, Gist, Mansker, Bledsoe, Skaggs, etc. The long hunters lived in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. After gathering in large groups and buying all the supplies they would need for the extended excursions, they traveled west through passes in the Appalachian Mountains. Once over the mountains, these groups hunted in the Ohio River drainage. Today, this area consists of the states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

As with the mountain men of the West that came later, each individual came for a variety of personal reasons, but hunting and fur gathering was the primary occupation of all of them.