At Big Timbers, William Bent built a new trading post after moving there in 1853, following the U.S. Army’s occupation of Bent's Old Fort, the deaths of his brothers George and Charles, the death of his wife Owl Woman, and a cholera epidemic that killed half of the Cheyenne Tribe within a few years. With abundant buffalo, timber, and forage, builders used native rock to construct a fort with walls 16 feet high for protection. Bent relied on Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche hunters to supply buffalo hides and tan them into robes sought worldwide as soft, warm lap robes. Tribes exchanged 10 buffalo robes for one Navajo blanket, while Bent traded $3 worth of goods for a prime hide and sold the robe in Missouri for $5. His company bartered calico, blankets, guns, gunpowder, flint, knives, European beads, clay pipes, Oriental tea, coffee, Mexican chocolate, and other goods to acquire buffalo hides. For seven years, Bent's New Fort flourished as a trading post along the Santa Fe Trail, processing thousands of buffalo hides each year and offering respite, supplies, and entertainment, while helping propel the southern plains into the global economy of the fur trade.