ANCESTRAL EATING: The Mountain Men
Choice cuts from a wonderful account of the eating habits of those wild frontiersmen who went native among the American Indians
Welcome back to another instalment of my long series on ANCESTRAL EATING. I thought Iād provide a pleasant ā or maybe not so pleasant ā interlude for us with a discussion of the diet of the famous mountain men, those hard souls who traded comfort for a life of danger in the depths of the great American wilderness. For all intents and purposes, these men became natives, trading European customs, especially dietary customs, for those of the American Indians.
Iāll be drawing on a tremendous article written by William Holsten in the California Historical Society Quarterly from 1964 to illustrate the discussion with vivid detail. All block quotations are taken from that article, which can be accessed here on JSTOR. Iām told there are easy ways to get around the paywallā¦ *sneeze* sci-hub.se *sneeze*
Maybe youāll even find a forbidden recipe at the end of this piece. Youāll have to read on to find out!
Back in my ANCESTRAL EATING piece on blood, I noted how the blood-sausage traditions of Americaās early British colonisers didnāt seem to last long in the US, which accounts for why most Americans are so squeamish about consuming blood products (the comments on my article proved this to be very true). In fact, the first Brits in America appear to have given up the English nose-to-tail-eating tradition altogether, because they found so much farmable land they just didnāt need to eat as carefully, using every possible part of the animal for food, as their contemporaries back in the old country.
One group of early Americans that did follow a nose-to-tail diet were the mountain men, but they werenāt returning to the traditions of Europe in doing so. Rather, they were following the maxim of āwhen in Romeā and making like the Native Americans during the long months or even years they spent in Indian territory. William Holstenās wonderfully vivid account of their dietary exploits, linked above, is an invaluable aid to understanding the uses to which the mountain men put almost every part of the animals, especially the buffalo, they killed; although at times you need a strong stomach to keep reading it. Iāll be providing extracts from Holstenās article, as well as summaries of the most important points.
Made famous in recent years by the film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the mountain men travelled west into the Rocky Mountain territories in search mainly of fur to sell back east. After the Lewis and Clark expedition between 1803 and 1806, which travelled through the Rockies into the Oregon Country, large numbers of men ā perhaps as many as 3,000 during the peak of the fur trade in the 1840s ā threw off the garments of settled civilisation and, for all intents and purposes, became indistinguishable from the many native tribes that still roamed the great western territories. Apart from the colour of his skin, which in any case would have been superficially darkened by the sun and by weeks or months of accumulated sweat and grime, the mountain man in his buckskins was changed down to the level of his very mannerisms. Like the native he would place distinct emphasis on his words, gesticulate frequently and show extensive skill in the use of sign language. It was common for mountain men to marry Indian squaws and take them off into the wilderness with them.
Like the Native Indians, the mountain men lived off the land, eating almost entirely meat. The going was, for the most part, very good, but in the depths of winter, as food supplies dwindled in that most unforgiving of environments, the great American wilderness, the mountain men could be reduced to
eating the grease in the rifle stocks, fringes, and unnecessary parts of buckskin clothes, gun and ammunition bags, and every scrap of edible material, boiled up in an Assinaboin basket with hot stones, and finally were reduced to [eating] buds and twigs.
Because of the precariousness of existence in the wilderness, gorging was one of the principal tendencies of both the natives and the mountain men. They never knew where the next meal was coming from, although they carried provisions with them and created them in the wild, as weāll see.
The mountain men often spent "this month luxuriating in the wealth of buffalo meat, and the next reduced to the very brink of starvation.ā
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