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Rawhiders were a rough-hewn class of frontier itinerants who gathered cow or buffalo hides for sale. Rawhide was an all-purpose material. Frontier folk used it for just about anything from wire and gate hinges to mending a broken rifle stock. The term referred to someone always on the move or to a small cow outfit. A “Rawhide Texan” meant one tough hombre. A “Rawhide Job” meant a tough job. A “Rawhide Outfit” was a tough one to work for. So you can see it had a lot of meanings, all of them rough and rawhide tough.

On the railroad it took the meaning of an official, or any employee, who is especially hard on men or equipment, or both, with which he works. A rawhider, like a slave driver, delights in causing someone to do more than his share of work. Running too fast when picking up a man on the footboard, or making a quick stop just short of him when he is expecting to step on, so that he has to walk back, are two ways it is done; but there are almost as many ways of rawhiding as there are different situations.