The Nor' wester on the march was faced with an entirely different problem of food supply. There was remarkably little game along the Northwest Road, and not much else that could be bought from the Indians en route. Once the plains were gained, hunters were sent out to shoot buffalo; but the brigades that continued on to the northern posts could not live off the land; they had to carry their rations with them in already overloaded canoes. 

The answer to this problem was lyed corn, wild rice and pemmican. The corn, grown by the Ottawa and Saulteur around Sault Ste. Marie, was processed at Detroit by boiling it in lye water, which removed the outer husk. It was then washed and dried, and was ready for use. One quart of lyed corn called hominy by the Americans was boiled for two hours over a moderate fire in a gallon of water. Soon after it came to a boil, two ounces of melted suet were added. This caused the corn to split open and form "a pretty thick pudding." Alexander Mackenzie maintained that, with a little salt, it was a wholesome, palatable, easily digestible dish. A quart of it, he said, would keep a canoeman going for twenty four hours. 

Mackenzie also observed that lyed corn was about the cheapest food the Concern could give its men, a voyageur's daily allowance costing only tenpence. And the elder Henry wryly commented that, since it was fare that nobody but a French-Canadian would put up with, the monopoly of the fur trade was probably in the North West Company's hands forever! 

Indian corn and grease possibly supplemented by a few fish, game birds, eggs, and Indian dogs along the way took the brigades as far as Rainy Lake. Here wild rice replaced the corn as far as Lac Winipic. After that, pemmican sustained the western brigades until they reached the buffalo plains and fresh meat; but the northern canoes had to depend on pemmican all the way to their wintering stations. The provisioning of Alexander Henry's canoes, from Lake Superior to the Saskatchewan, would be typical: 

At 4 P.M. I arrived at Fort Vermilion, having been two months on my voyage from Fort William, with a brigade of I1 canoes, loaded with 28 pieces each, and manned by five men and one woman. Our expenditure of provisions for each canoe during the voyage was: two bags of corn, 1½ bushels each, and 15 pounds of grease, to Lac la Pluie; two bags of wild rice, 1½ bushels each, and 10 pounds of grease to Bas de la Rivière Winipic; four bags of pemmican of go pounds each to serve until we came among the buffalo generally near the Monte, or at farthest the Elbow of the Saskatchewan. 

This, in a few words, was the formula that made possible the long voyages of the fur brigades, which must often be accomplished with hairbreadth precision between the spring thaw and the fall freeze-up. The North West Company's network of hundreds of canoe routes and more than a hundred forts, scattered over half the continent, could never have functioned without corn, rice and pemmican. And of the three, pemmican was perhaps the most important. 

The Nor westers got the idea, as they did so many, from the Indians. Or perhaps it should be said that Peter Pond dit since he, before anyone else, realized the logistical importance of pemmican and made a systematic use of it. Where the elder Henry and the Frobishers had failed in early attempts to reach the rich Athabasca country, Pond succeeded; and the key to his success is found in his own words: "Provisions, not only for the winter season but for the course of the next summer, must be provided, which is dry'd meat, pounded to a powder and mixed with buffaloes greese, which preserves it in warm seasons." In other words, pemmican. 

Almost every trader, from Peter Pond down, described pemmican, and how it was manufactured; but none so well as David Thompson. It was made, he explained, of the lean and fleshy parts of the buffalo, dried, smoked, and pounded fine. In that state, it was called beat meat. To it was added the fat of the buffalo. There were two kinds: that from the inside of the animal, called "hard fat" or grease; and that which lay along the backbone in large flakes and, when melted, resembled butter in softness and sweetness. 

The best pemmican, Thompson tells us, was made from twenty pounds each of soft and hard fat, slowly melted together and well mixed with fifty pounds of beat meat. It was stored in bags made of buffalo hide, with the hair on the outside, called taurenut. When they could be obtained, dried berries, and sometimes maple sugar, were mixed with the pemmican. "On the great Plains," Thompson wrote, "there is a shrub bearing a very sweet berry of dark blue color, much sought after. Great quantities are dried by the Natives; in this state the berries are as sweet as the best currants, and as much as possible mixed to make Pemmican." 

Properly made and stored, the ninety-pound bags of pemmican would keep for years. Post masters took great pride in the quality of the product they turned out. But sometimes, through nobody's fault, it went sour, and great quantities had to be thrown to the post dogs. Often, as in the case of dried meat, mold formed; but that, the traders cheerfully agreed, only improved the flavor. 

Pemmican could be hacked off the piece and eaten in its natural state; or it could be boiled up with corn or rice to make a highly nourishing and not unpalatable kind of stew. Whereas a daily allowance of eight pounds of fresh meat was required to sustain a man, two pounds, or even a pound and a half of pemmican would do. A better emergency ration for men in a cold climate has never been developed. So vital was pemmican indeed to the North West Company's system of communications that a highly specialized organization was set up to make and distribute it. On the prairies were built the famous "pemmican posts" Fort Alexandria, Fort George, Fort Vermilion, Fort de la Montée whose principal business was not pelts but provisions, chiefly pemmican, for the canoe brigades and the hungry posts in the forest belt. Archibald Norman McLeod gives us a glimpse of the activities at Alexandria: "I got the last Pounded meat we have made into Pimican, viz. 30 bags of 90 lb., so that we now have 62 bags of that Species of provisions of the above weight. I likewise got nine kegs filled with grease, or Tallow rather, each keg nett 70 lb." 

Looking into his storehouse in January, Duncan McGillivray noted that he had 8000 pounds of pounded meat, with enough fat to make it up into pemmican sufficient, he added, to "answer the expectations of the Gentn. of the Northern Posts, who depend on us for this necessary article* in April, he made his pounded meat and grease into two hundred bags of pemmican. 

For one year, 1807-1808, Alexander Henry listed the returns from his four Lower Red River posts as only 60 packs of furs, but 334 bags of pemmican and 48 kegs of grease; a striking statistical sidelight on the importance of beat meat and grease in the economy of the North West Company.

 Getting the huge production of pemmican from the prairie posts to where it was needed was a major problem in logistics: and the Nor' westers solved it with their usual flair for organization. Besides the posts that specialized in making pemmican, certain others principally Cumberland House and Fort Bas de la Rivière were established at strategic spots to distribute it. To Cumberland House, at the juncture of the Saskatchewan and the waterways leading to Athabasca, the pemmican posts sent hundreds of taureaux in skin canoes and roughly built boats. And there the vast store of shaggy buffalo-hide bags was rationed out to the Great Northern brigades for the posts in the forest Fort Chipewyan, Fort de I'Isle, Fort Resolution, Fort Providence where the supply of pemmican made of deer and bear meat was both scanty and uncertain. The pemmican from the Red River and Assiniboine posts was distributed from Bas de la Rivière. And later on, Fort Esperance on the Qu'Appelle became the North West Company's chief depot for rushing emergency supplies to posts in distress. 

Wherever he was stationed, and however long the march he must make to his wintering grounds, the Nor wester could usually depend on his supply of pemmican to see him to journey's end and, if necessary, through a winter's scarcity of game and fish. It was his staff of life in a way that bread never was in more civilized parts of the world. It was often his last defense against the forces of famine that hung, like wolves on the trail of a wounded caribou, about every trading post. And he never spoke of it with anything but respect.

Better off were the posts in the buffalo country that subsisted on a fare of juicy steaks, roasts and tongues. As in the case of fish, enormous quantities of meat were required to sustain a man who ate only flesh. The daily allowance of buffalo meat at Fort George was eight pounds a man. The voyageurs who, between them, ate thirty-five whitefish a day would have required forty rabbits to get the same amount of nourishment. Two whole geese were no more than a meal for a man in the northern posts.

The prairie posts were blessed with an almost inexhaustible supply of buffalo meat that delivered itself, so to speak, to their very doors. Hunters sometimes killed entire herds and returned with nothing but the tongues. In seasons of lesser abundance, the whole carcass of the animal was utilized. The hunters cut the meat up into twenty pieces much like our standard cuts of beef for transportation to the post. The choice cuts were the hump and back meat. The tongue generally went to the hunter.

To the trader, settling down with his "family" for the long prairie winter, the sight of tons of fat meat in his icehouse or glacière must have been a comforting one. The size of his store depended on his needs; but Duncan McGillivray gives us an idea of what the average post required. In his glacière were stacked 500 thighs and shoulders the meat of 413 buffalo, weighing almost a quarter of a million pounds. Even in the elder Henry's time, the beef reserves at some of the posts were awe-inspiring. "At Fort des Prairies I remained several days," he wrote, "hospitably entertained by my friends, who covered their tables with the tongues and marrow of wild bulls. The quantity of provisions which I found collected here exceeded everything of which I had previously formed a notion. In one heap I saw fifty tons of beck, so fat that the men could scarcely find a sufficiency of lean."

While the meat of the buffalo made excellent steaks and roasts although not so delicious as those of the moose -it was the fat cuts, especially the long depouilles of back fat, that were most prized. "The Canadian voyageur's appetite for fat meat is insatiable," Franklin observed. And the bourgeois had no less a fondness for the grease and tallow that are mentioned so often and almost as a delicacy in their journals. In this they were following a sound instinct. For, as Vilhjalmur Stefansson and other arctic explorers have often pointed out, a man could live long and well on meat alone provided he got enough fat along with the lean. Without it as the rabbit and fish eaters knew by experience he was likely to become sick, and even to die, from fat starvation.

Hence, the North West Company took good care to satisfy the craving of its men for fat. Thousands of kegs of grease– really buffalo tallow – were put up at the pemmican posts" for the northern departments. In one year at Pembina, Henry kegged up almost two tons of it, and another two tons in the form of pemmican. By the traders it was called "the bread of the pays d'en haut. Henry, incidentally, has left us this list of provisions "destroyed" at his Pembina post in one winter by 17 men, 10 women, 14 children, and 45 dogs:

• 112 buffalo cows -- 45,000 pounds

• 34 buffalo bulls -- 18,000 pounds

• 3 red deer

• 5 large black bears

• 4 beavers swans

• 12 outardes geese

• 36 ducks

• 1,150 fish of different kinds

• 775 sturgeon

• 410 pounds of grease

• 140 pounds of bear meat

• 325 bushels of potatoes and an assortment of kitchen vegetables

This adds up to about a ton of meat and fish apiece for every man, woman and child in the post; but more interesting, perhaps, is the inclusion of no small quantity of potatoes, and even kitchen vegetables, at the end of the list. Not every post was as fortunate as Pembina in this respect. Only the larger establishments were able to supplement their basic fish and meat diets with potatoes, cereals, and garden truck; but some of them did so on a rather large scale.

Like Bas de la Rivière, with its fields, barns, stables and storehouses, Rainy Lake also had its cultivated fields and domestic animals. And at Pembina, Alexander Henry himself did not do badly as a farmer. In the fall of one year he reported:

The men had gathered the following crops: 1000 bushels potatoes (produce of 21 bushels); 40 bushels turnips; 25 bushels carrots; 20 bushels beets; 20 bushels parsnips; 10 bushels cucumbers; 2 bushels melons; 5 bushels squashes; 10 bushels Indian corn; 200 large heads of cabbage; 300 small and Savoy cabbages. All these vegetables are exclusive of what have been eaten and destroyed since my arrival.

The virgin prairie soil produced not only abundandy, bur spectacularly for Farmer Henry: 

I measured an onion, 22 inches in circumference; a carrot is inches long and, at the thick end, 14 inches in circumference; a turnip with its leaves weighed 25 pounds, and the leaves alone weighed 15 pounds.

The North West Company's post at Fond du Lac, on the St. Louis River, kept two horses, a cow, a bull, and a few pigs. The fort at Leech Lake had a garden that produced a thousand bushels of potatoes, thirty of oats, cabbages, carrots. beets, beans, turnips, pumpkins and Indian corn. The Concern had also brought horses to the post, "'even cats and hens."

And how, one might wonder, did the Concern succeed in transporting horses, cows, bulls and other livestock through a roadless wilderness, traversable by only canoe and dog sledge, to forts a thousand miles or more from any civilized settlement? Were they brought out in the Company's small schooners, such as the Otter and the Beaver, to the Grand Portage, and thence over the winter ice to the Interior posts? Were they even carried while young and small, perhaps, in the great canots du maître? Or, had they already been brought to the pays d'en haut by the French, in the earliest days of the fur trade? Peter Pond, writing of his trip up the Fox River, in what is now Wisconsin, says: "I ort to have Menshand that the french at ye Villeg whare we Incampt Rase fine black Cattel & Horses with Sum swine."

It is something to speculate about like so many of the Nor' westers' doings!

In addition to his garden and livestock, there were other ways a trader could vary his diet of straight meat, or fish, or a combination of both. He could, for instance, buy certain items of food from the Indians. Among these, wild rice or, as the traders often called it, wild oats was perhaps the most important. Rainy Lake was the great source of supply Growing in the water to a height of more than eight feet, the rice was harvested by the Indians, who drove their canoes through the rice beds and beat out the grain. In ordinary seasons, Harmon tells us, the North West Company bought from 1200 to 1500 bushels of wild rice from the natives; "and it constitutes a principle article of food at the posts in this vicinity."

Maple sugar, also bought from the Indians, was more than a luxury on the trader's table: it was often an important staple, and sometimes all he had to eat for long periods of time. It was made from the sap of the true and bastard maples, and even a certain variety of birch. The work of gathering the sap and boiling it down was left mostly to the women. In the spring the whole tribe went to the sugar bush, where the men cut wood for the fires and hunted game for food, while the squaws gathered and boiled the sap. The elder Henry describes one sugar-making expedition that produced 1600 pounds of sugar, besides 36 gallons of syrup not counting 300 pounds consumed on the ground. During the whole month in the bush, he tells us, sugar was the principal food. He knew Indians, he adds, who lived wholly on sugar and understandably enough grew fat.

Game was bought from the Indians, or procured by the trader's gun: venison, moose, bear, antelope, as well as ducks, geese, swans, and occasionally their eggs. By the voyageurs, if not always by the bourgeois, dogs were frequently purchased for food. A small dog, of a species specially bred for eating, was regarded as a great delicacy by the Canadians.

On November 4 Captain Marquez arrived from New Spain and left Puaray for Acoma, following the governor.

On the 8th the sargento mayor came back from the land of the buffalo. He brought quantities of meat, fat, and tallow, although he was unable to bring any live animals. There were infinite numbers of them. Their hide is very wooly and thick. He traveled seventy leagues inland, as far as the pueblo which is nine leages long. Several times he found traces of Umana. 

On Wednesday, November 18, at noon, the maese de campo set out for the South sea, following the governor. 

Mrs. H F Bell and the Indian cows were up -- the gate creaking, an Indian lay behind a log some 15 feet off, peeped up his head, which Mrs. B saw -- dashed to & fastened the gate, & escaped. The Indian knowing the alarm wd. be instantly give,  jumped up & ran off.

Wm. & Nick S. Baker & some few others from the settlement, living on McAdoe Creek, a few miles above Clarkesville, in the present county of Montgomery - went down Cumberland below Palmyra,  down the north shore hunting buffalo -  Wm Baker had wounded a old buffalo bull, & was following it close behind through the cane, it turned upon him; Baker turned & ran but was soon over taken by the enraged animal, run one of his horns through his leather pants & badly goring his thigh, threw him back entirely over his head -- the buffalo went on.  Baker was barely able to clear the other way & left the buffalo to go unmolested. This was in 1790. 

This same year Hugh F. Bell, his older brother John & Isaac Peterson went out hunting on Little River in Trigg Co - Ky-. John Bell was pursuing a gang of elk,  Hugh F Bell & Peterson got after a gang of buffalo, & each shot buffalo bulls. Bell went and sat down upon Peterson’s buffalo, & then proposed to go & skin his first - went; and on their return Peterson’s had gone! By the time John Bell returned, not having killed any of the elk, & aided the others in hunting up the lost buffalo. The grass in the river bottom there was thick & as tall as a man’s head - the two Bells clamped several feet up a fallen lodged tree & discovered the bull lying down some 15 paces off. Called  to Peterson to shoot it - he said he wd go & stick it - crept up behind a small blackjack pine nine inches through, close to which the buffalo lay - & as Peterson was within point of giving the fatal stab in the buffalo’s side, the animal suddenly bounded to his feet, & Peterson up the tree - clear of limbs for fifteen or 20 feet - would get some eight feet, & then from fear & exhaustion, wd. fail & gradually slip down until nearly in reach of the buffalo’s horns, - who all the while kept a warfare upon the tree, completely barking it with his horns -  Again Peterson wd make an effort & ascend about the old height, & again give way & slide down - begging the while for the Bells to shoot the buffalo; who, so full of laughter, could not - Seeing after his third ascension, that he could not stand it much longer, & had already rubbed the skin from his breast & face, - shot the buffalo, & rescued Peterson.

The next year, 1791, Hugh F. & Wm Bell over Little River on the Barrens - they went so far, became less dangerous than nearer the settlements - hunting; came across two buffalos,  Hugh F. Bell shot one of them - & William took buffalo & Elk after the other -  the buffalo took after Bell, who mounted dashed away around a large sink hole of some ten acres, & the buffalo in hot pursuit, went around twice, & the buffalo gained & had got within 20 steps when Hugh F. Bell came up & shot him down. They both thought the buffalo had no evil design, but in its fright mistook  Bell’s horse for its mate & thus followed. At a subsequent hunt, Hugh F. & John Bell & John Newell were again out together, in the old range on Little River, came upon a gang of 3 or 4 elk - the dogs took after & overtook him, some seizing him by the nose, others by the ears, while one of the dogs bounded upon his back & took post between the large antlers that lay up behind, & the dog clung to his place all the while gnawing into the flesh of the neck of the elk - & the elk ran several rods with the dog upon his back; took post in a spring, & there took his stand, & remained until H.F.B. came up & shot him. The hunters wd take with them some pack horses, to convey home the meat. When they had it, they wd take with some salt & pepper & sage - a camp kettle; these with their knives & rifles, tomahawks sufficed. They always relied upon the forest for a supply of food - buffalo, bear, dear, elk & turkey. 

A buffalo hide per adventure wd be stretched across poles overhead for a covering from the damps & rains - other skins, with the hair side up, wd be placed upon the ground before the fire to be used as a kind of rug & for the bed at night - & sometimes with another hide for a covering. When upon the hunt by day they wore a kind of moccasin made of buffalo hide, the hair side turned in - these would not easily saturate; at night these were taken off & thrown one side & away from the fire that they might freeze if the weather shd be sufficiently cold to congeal water - for the buffalo moccasins were all the better for being frozen. While in camp, the hunters wore the light tanned deer skin moccasins. 

 Now for the mode of living.  The stew was a common and favorite mode - the choicest bits of buffalo, deer, elk, bear & turkey, part or all of these as the case might be - put into the kettle, with the proper seasoning would furnish a nice dish, leaving each of the company to choose as to kind. Stewed bear's liver, or roasted bear's kidney, made a good substitute for bread. When hunters had a roast turkey, they had a way of cutting numerous small incisions in the body, & putting in them bits of fat bear meat & proper seasoning - this was excellent. But when a luxurious meal was to be provided it consisted of one or all of these articles, roasted beaver tail, buffalo tongue, or marrow bone. 

Take a large beaver tail, some 8 inches long, and 4 broad, well seasoned, & wrapped up in a coat of wetted oak leaves & put into a bed of embers & covered up over night, wd be elegantly cooked by morning. 

To cook properly after hunter's style a fine buffalo tongue - first scorch it a little & peel off the outside coating, then stick it upon a spit made of spice bush, with the lower end inserted in the earth & left to roast before the fire all night - the spicebush wd give it a very agreeable flavor. 

Cooking a buffalo marrow bone was the work of a few minutes - simply lay one end upon the live coals, & in a few minutes the other - then cut the bone in two with the hatchet, then split or hew off one side to the marrow - what rich delicious eating! Neither this nor bear's oil in any quantity even produces the least injurious effect - tip up the kettle after cooking bear's meat, & sometimes tip off a pint!

THE Natives of this Stoney Region subsist wholly by the chase and by fishing, the country produces no vegetables but berries on which they can live. The term " hunting " they apply only to the Moose and Rein Deer, and the Bear; they look for, and find the Beaver, they kill with the Gun, and by traps the Otter and other animals. Hunting is divided into what may be termed " tracking " and " tracing." Tracking an animal is by following it's foot-steps, as the Rein Deer and the Bear and other beasts; tracing, is following the marks of feeding, rubbing itself on the ground, and against trees, and lying down: which is for the Moose Deer, and for other animals on rocks and hard grounds. My remarks are from the Natives who are intimately acquainted with them, and make them their peculiar study. 

The first in order is the Moose Deer, the pride of the forest, and the largest of all the Deer, [it] is too well known to need a description. It is not numerous in proportion to the extent of country, but may even be said to be scarce. It is of a most watchful nature; it's long, large, capacious ears enables it to catch and discriminate, every sound; his sagacity for self preservation is almost incredible; it feeds in wide circles, one within the other, and then lies down to ruminate near the centre; so that in tracking of it, the unwary, or unskillful, hunter is sure to come to windward of, and start it; when, in about two hours, by his long trot, he is at the distance of thirty or forty miles, from where it started; when chased it can trot, (it's favorite pace) about twenty five to thirty miles an hour; and when forced to a gallop, rather loses, than gains ground. In calm weather it feeds among the Pines, Aspins and Willows; the buds, and tender branches of the two latter are it's food: but in a gale of wind he retires among the close growth of Aspins, Alders and Willows on low ground still observing the same circular manner of feeding and lying down. If not molested it travels no farther than to find it's food, and is strongly attached to it's first haunts, and after being harassed it frequently returns to it's usual feeding places. 

The flesh of a Moose in good condition, contains more nourishment than that of any other Deer; five pounds of this meat being held to be equal in nourishment to seven pounds of any other meat even of the Bison, but for this, it must be killed where it is quietly feeding; when run by Men, Dogs, or Wolves for any distance, it's flesh is altogether changed, becomes weak and watery and when boiled; the juices separates from the meat like small globules of blood, and does not make broth; the change is so great, one can hardly be persuaded it is the meat of a Moose Deer. The nose of the Moose, which is very large and soft, is accounted a great delicacy. It is very rich meat. The bones of it's legs are very hard and several things are made of them. His skin makes the best of leather. It is the noblest animal of the Forest, and the richest prize the Hunter can take. In the rutting season the Bucks become very fierce, and in their encounters sometimes interlock their large pal-mated horns so strongly that they cannot extricate them, and both die on the spot, and [this is a thing] which happens too often: three of us tried to unlock the horns of two Moose which had died in this manner, but could not do it, although they had been a year in this state, and we had to use the axe. In the latter end of September [1804] we had to build a trading house at Musquawegun Lake/ an Indian named Huggemowequan came to hunt for us, and on looking about thought the ground good for Moose, and told us to make no noise; he was told no noise would be made except the falling of the trees, this he said the Moose did not mind; when he returned, he told us he had seen the place a Doe Moose had been feeding in the beginning of May; in two days more he had unraveled her feeding places to the beginning of September. One evening he remarked to us, that he had been so near to her that he could proceed no nearer, unless it blew a gale of wind, when this took place he set off early, and shot the Moose Deer. This took place in the very early part of October. This piece of hunting the Indians regarded as the work of a matchless hunter beyond all praise. The Natives are very dextrous in cutting up, and separating the joints, of a Deer, which in the open season has to be carried by them to the tent, or if near the water, to a canoe; this is heavy work; but if the distance is too great, the meat is split and dried by smoke, in which no resinous wood must be used; this reduces the meat to less than one third of its weight. In winter this is not required, as the flat sleds are brought to the Deer, and the meat with all that is useful is hauled on the Snow to the tent. The Moose Deer, have rarely more than one Fawn at a birth, it's numbers are decreasing for, from it's settled habits a skillful hunter is sure to find, and wound, or kill this Deer, and it is much sought for, for food, for clothing and for Tents. The bones of the head of a Moose must be put into the water or covered with earth or snow.