Welcome back to another installment of my long running series on ACESTAL EATING. I thought it would give us a pleasant, or perhaps not so pleasant, interlude with a discussion of the diet of the famous mountain men, those hardy souls who traded comfort for a life of danger deep in the great American wilderness. . For all intents and purposes, these men became natives, trading European customs, especially dietary customs, for those of American Indians.
I’m going to build on an extraordinary article written by William Holsten al California Historical Society Quarterly of 1964 to illustrate the discussion in vivid detail. All blog quotes are taken from this article, which can be accessed here in JSTOR. I’m told there are easy ways to sneeze the paywall… *sneeze* sci-hub.se *sneeze*
You might even find a forbidden recipe at the end of this piece. You’ll have to read on to find out!
Back in my ANCESTRAL FOOD piece on blood, I noted how the sausage traditions of America’s early British colonists didn’t seem to last long in America, which explains why most Americans are so repressed to consume blood products (comments on my article proved this to be very true). In fact, the early British in America seem to have completely abandoned the English tradition of eating from nose to tail, because they found so much farmland that they did not need to eat so carefully, using every possible part of the animal . to eat, like their contemporaries back in the old country.
One of the first Americans to follow a nose-to-tail diet was the Mountain Men, but they weren’t returning to the traditions of Europe in doing so. Rather, they were following the maxim of “when in Rome” and doing as the Native Americans did during the long months or even years they spent in Indian territory. William Holsten’s wonderfully vivid account of his dietary exploits, related above, is an invaluable aid in understanding the uses to which the mountain men put almost every part of the animals, especially the buffaloes, which they killed; although sometimes you need a strong stomach to keep reading it. I will provide excerpts from Holsten’s article as well as summaries of the most important points.
The movie has made it famous in recent years The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, mountain men traveled west into the Rocky Mountain territories in search of primarily fur to sell back east. After the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803-1806, which traveled through the Rocky Mountains into the Oregon Country, large numbers of men, perhaps as many as 3,000 during the peak of the fur trade in the decade of 1840, the garments of established civilization were thrown off and, for all intents and purposes, became indistinguishable from the numerous native tribes that still roamed the great western territories. Apart from the color of his skin, which in any case would have been superficially darkened by the sun and weeks or months of accumulated sweat and dirt, the mountain man in his devil skins changed to the level of his own gestures Like the native, he placed a different emphasis on his words, gestured frequently, and showed great skill in the use of sign language. It was common for mountain men to marry Indian squaws and take them 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 environment, the great American wilderness, the mountain men could be reduced to
eating the grease from the rifle tracks, the fringes and unnecessary parts of the buckskin clothing, the gun and ammunition pouches, and all the remains of edible material, were boiled in an Assinaboin basket with hot stones and finally reduced to [eating] shoots and twigs.
Because of the precariousness of existence in the desert, engorgement was one of the main 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 nature, as we shall see.
Mountain men often spent “this month enjoying the richness of buffalo meat, and the next reduced to the brink of starvation.”
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