Facultative Carnivore

Ancient Buffalo Hunt

It’s a Great Day to Hunt Buffalo

Runs-With-Fire and Small Bear stood warming themselves over the cooking fire alternately rubbing their hands together and then rubbing their chest and arms.  It was cold outside, but not as cold as it had been just a few days ago.  Neither spoke as they watched the smoke figures dance in the tipi and then escape through the hole in the center of the lodge.  The two, friends since their youth, and now the best hunters of their people had spent the early morning scouting for sign of a return of the great herds.  By instinct they knew that as the days grew longer it would soon be time to jump the Buffalo. Small Bear and Runs-With-Fire now talked trying to decide who in their tribe they should take to help them lead the big spring hunt.  A large hunt in the spring and another one in the fall kept the people alive, and choosing the right people could decide weather the tribe lives or dies.  This spring hunt would be the most important in their lifetime as the starving time (winter) had come early and many in the tribe were ill or weak from lack of food. Several days had passed and Runs-With-Fire and Small Bear knew it was time. The two stood stoically at the Tipi opening, enjoying the warm morning sun, and greeting the five hunter-warriors they had selected be hunt leaders.  Each of the five were chosen because they had proved themselves and each had a special skill, like White Weasel, selected for his cunning and stealth and Wind-At-Night selected because of his superior vision and hearing.  Although it was an honor to be chosen each knew it was a time for great seriousness and careful planning.  All of this made the selection of the sixteen-year-old Smiling Dog a mystery to the others because he seemed to be always joking and laughing but they would admit that he could throw his hunting spear farther and more accurately than any one else in the tribe.

This was a time long before the whites had come to the west and a time when the British still ruled America.  This was a time when the natives of western America ranged free without horses, living season-to-season and year-to-year.  This was a time when these seven men, none more than thirty yeas of age held the lives of their four hundred fellow tribe members in their hands.  This was a time when life was hard, life was easy, life was sure and life was unsure.  This was a time when the American Indian reigned supreme in his part of the world, the American West.

After three hours of smoking, offering prayers, burning the sweet grass and much planning for the upcoming hunt the council of seven was ready.  Each of the seven picked two or three warriors to help with their part of the hunt, the rest of the tribe would wait nearby until they could hear the awful chunking sound as the buffalo hit the canyon bottom.  When the sound came they would hurry to the area and begin the tedious skinning and butchering of the dozens of animals.  The hunt plan was simple, the same as the ancients had used, run the buffalo off the cliff, kill the cripples, and collect the meat.  The council could only hope that the kill would be that easy.

As the buffalo ranged ever closer to the jump sight the council and their helpers worked feverishly to repair the rock wall that would help turn the shaggy beasts into the cliff and into a six months supply of food for the tribe.  No member of the tribe could remember the original building of the wall; it was so long ago that none of their stories or songs told of it.  The tribal elders simply said it was built before “the sun brought light and warmth to the people”.

The jump sight had not been used in many years because the people always let the wind and rain and the seasons scrub the area clean of all scent and color related to a kill.  Now the time was right and the buffalo were close.  This night all of the tribe would sing and dance the buffalo dance around the fire tomorrow would be a good day!

A dreary gray March morning arrived but it didn’t dampen the spirit of the council because today was the day, Buffalo jump day. Theircamp was nearly an hour’s walk from the jump sight and the warriors left well before the first sight of light in the sky.  They walked by instinct in complete silence until Wind-at-Night stopped them with a barely audible shee, shee.  Wind-At-Night could smell the great heard as it had moved closer to their camp and farther from the jump sight.  Runs-With-Fire and Small Bear looked at each other and smiled, the buffalo were not where they had expected but it still would be a good day because they had prayed and danced around the fire last night and the buffalo were waiting.

In a matter of a few short minutes White Weasel let out the low cry of a morning dove telling the others that he and his three helpers were in place, just behind the herd.  They were crawling now within a few feet draped in wolf skins with the buffalo completely ignored them.  When the spear from Smiling Dog landed almost silently beside them Gray Antelope and Old Tree lit their torches and the torches of the four warriors with them from the hot coals they carried in a hollow buffalo leg bone.  The buffalo started to snort and move away startled as much by the men as by the fire.  But it was too late.  White Weasel and his followers were on their feet wildly swinging the wolf hides in the air and screaming pushing the herd forward.  The prairie was being lit on fire beside the hairy beasts and the buffalo were now starting to move away from the fire and away from the wild wolf men but the rock wall blocked the other side.  Panicking the buffalo stampeded over the cliff to what they thought was freedom and in some strange way it was.

The old people sang as they skinned and butchered the pile of buffalo flesh, assuring themselves health, wealth and shelter for many moons.  It was a great day!

Good Night.

[Translated from French]

All Paris has recently been upset about milk made from animal brains; which does not prevent all Paris today from drinking without disgust, and without remembering its forgotten emotion, the unhealthy beverage called café au lait.

Like adulterated milk, horse flesh, at a time when butcher's meat is so expensive, is said to enter Paris fraudulently in large quantities, and is sometimes sold for beef. It is curious and useful to examine whether this flesh in fact deserves the reprobation with which it is subjected.

Let us first seek what is the primary cause of the prejudices preserved to this day against horse flesh, used as food. Keysler, in his work entitled: Antiquitates selectœ septentrionales, after having demonstrated the good qualities and excellence of this flesh, teaches it in these terms:

— " The ancient Celts, northern peoples, sacrificed horses to their gods, and as the flesh of these victims composed the principal dish of the solemn feasts which followed these sacrifices, the horror which one had of these false acts of religion spread to all that entered into them; hence the zeal of the clergy, who, to destroy the heretical custom, believed it necessary to regard horse flesh as impure, and those who used it as filthy.
" The passage from a letter addressed on this occasion by Pope Gregory III to Saint Boniface, bishop of Germany, is too remarkable not to be quoted here.
"You have shown me," said this pontiff, "that some ate wild horse, and most of them domestic horse; Do not allow this to happen henceforth, most holy brother; abolish this custom by all means possible to you, and impose on all horse-eaters a just penance. They are filthy, and their action is execrable."
"It is since that time," adds Keysler, "that our ancestors have continued to be deprived of horse flesh, and this to their great detriment, magno rei familiaris de trimento."

This shows that horse flesh was very good and much sought after in those remote times. Let us prove that it has not changed in nature, and that it suits the stomachs of our contemporaries as well as those of our ancestors.

We owe the following documents to Mr. Baron Larrey, one of the most distinguished witnesses and instruments of our ancient military glory.
"The muscular flesh of the horse, especially that of the hindquarters, can be used to make soup, especially if a certain quantity of bacon is added; it can also be used in grilling and in beef à la mode, with the appropriate seasoning.
" Liver can also be used and prepared in the same way as that of horned beasts; it is even, it seems, more delicate than that which comes from them. This dish, continues Mr. Larrey, was especially sought after by our companions in the Russian campaign, who all spoke highly of it.
"Everyone knows, moreover, that horse flesh is the principal food of the peoples of Asiatic Tartary. I myself have very often had the soldiers and wounded of our armies use it with the greatest success.

"In some of our campaigns on the Rhine, Catalonia and the Maritime Alps, I have had it given to our soldiers on several occasions; but it was especially during the siege of Alexandria, in Egypt, that this meat was used to great advantage. Not only did it preserve the life of the troops who defended this city, but it also contributed powerfully to the healing and recovery of the sick and wounded, whom we had in great numbers in the hospitals; it also contributed to the disappearance of a scorbutic epidemic (scurvy) which had seized the whole army. Regular distributions of this meat were made daily, and fortunately the number of horses was sufficient to lead the army until the time of the capitulation. These animals, of the Arab breed, were very thin, due to the shortage of fodder, but they were generally young. To answer the objections which had been made by many prominent figures in the army, and to overcome the repugnance of the soldier, I was the first to have my horses killed and to eat this meat.
"At the siege of El-Arych in Syria, after having consumed the camels that we had, to feed the sick and wounded that were left in the fort, we were obliged to resort to horse meat, which served us very well.
"At the battle of Eylau, during the first twenty-four hours, I had to feed my wounded again with horse meat prepared in soup and in beef in the fashion; but, as we did not lack seasoning objects on this occasion, the wounded hardly distinguished this meat from that of beef. We must also say that the horses that were dedicated to this use were young and in satisfactory shape.
"After the battle of Eslingen, isolated on the island of Lobau, with the greater part of the French army and about six thousand wounded (the communication bridges having been broken), we were deprived of all resources for three days. To calm, in this critical circumstance, the hunger and impatience of these unfortunates, I had them make soup with the flesh of a fairly large quantity of horses scattered on this island, and which belonged to generals and senior officers. The breastplate of the dismounted and wounded horsemen themselves served as a pot for the concoction of this meat, and instead of salt, of which we were entirely devoid, it was seasoned with gunpowder. I only took care to decant the broth by pouring it from one breastplate into another through a cloth, and after having left it to clarify by rest. All our soldiers found this meat and this broth of a very good quality. Here I also gave the example by the sacrifice of one of my horses, and I made use of this same food, with this difference that I had been able to keep some salt and a little biscuit, which I used to make soup. Marshal Masséna, commander-in-chief of these troops, was very happy to share my meal, and seemed very satisfied with it.
"Thus," says Mr. Larrey, "experience shows that the use of horse meat is very suitable for human food; it seems to me especially very nourishing, because it contains a lot of osmazome. The taste is also pleasant; only this flesh is more or less stringy, according to the leanness and age of the animal. Why, adds this famous surgeon, not take advantage for the poor class and for the prisoners, of the horses that are killed every day in Paris? "

Doctor Berthollet, nephew of the famous chemist of the same name, and who practiced medicine for a long time in Taranto (kingdom of Naples), wrote that the people of this city ate horse flesh with pleasure; that it was sold there publicly by the pound, and that the sale was always prompt. The liver was considered a delicate piece; it was prepared in the same way as that of other livestock.

Géraud, a distinguished physician of the last century, advances in a very remarkable work, "that one would derive a very great utility from horse flesh, by using it as food."... After some developments, he adds: "A considerable quantity of horse and donkey flesh stealthily enters the large cities, and especially Paris, which, after the barrier, is sold under the name of beef, veal, and this meat is given at a lower price than that under the name under which it is sold... Why should we not have butcher's stalls where this meat would be publicly sold? It would be a great resource, especially in these times, when the flesh of ordinary animals is at a price that hardly allows the unfortunate to feed themselves with it. "

Géraud attributes several illnesses of the workers to the deprivation of meat... He would prefer horse flesh for them to the viscera of animals, such as the lungs, liver, spleen, stomachs, which the tripe sellers provide them... "If the sale of horses were free," he says, "it would be better and more advantageous, because the animal would be killed while still in good health, without waiting for an illness, an accident or old age to make it perish."

Let us add to these notions that at the time of the revolution, Paris was fed largely, for the space of three months, only with horse meat, without anyone noticing it and without the slightest accident resulting from it. Mr. Huzard has the proof; no one was any more able by their position to know what was happening there in this respect.

These precious details of facts observed on a large scale, at points of the globe far removed from each other, and in completely opposite circumstances, tend to demonstrate that horse flesh can be used, without inconvenience, as food.

The sturgeon season opened, with immense quantities of the great fish strung between stakes in the villages along the river. The importance of sturgeon on the Columbia Was comparable to that of buffalo on the prairies, or whitefish in the forest belt. It was the staple food of the traders: 

Our party, when all together, numbers 60 men, who consume 13 sturgeons per day, weighing from 25 to 250 pounds each. One of the largest we have seen measured to ft. 7 inches over all, the head 3 ft. 10 inches in circumference; it weighed, after the guts were out, 395 pounds.

The food problem, at almost all times an acute one, was dealt with by the Nor'westers under two headings: the provisioning of the posts, and the provisioning of the fur brigades on the march.

The posts in the forest belt subsisted largely on fish. Often, indeed, the traders in the northern departments had no other food at all. Yet, eating nothing but fish the year around, without vegetables or even salt, they were healthier, Mackenzie avers, than the venison eaters of the west. A prodigious amount of food was required to keep an active man going on an all-fish diet. In one house at Chipewyan, five men, a woman, and three children ate between them thirty-five whitefish, weighing between five and ten pound apiece, every day. A large post would consume a thousand or more a week.

Fortunately, the lakes and streams of the Northwest were full of many kinds of fish, which were taken by both net and line in vast quantities. In the autumn, as many as 500 white-fish could be caught in a couple of hours with a scoop net from a canoe. Long mentions a catch of 18,000 pounds of whitefish netted through the ice in two months. Trout weighing up to 70 pounds were taken by the hundreds with both line and seine. Sturgeon of 150 pounds or more, Harmon says, were sometimes driven onto sand bars and shot; "We have no trouble killing any number of them we please."

Among the kinds of fish mentioned by the Nor westers were: whitefish, trout, sturgeon, pike, walleyed pike, carp, herring, sucker, fresh-water drum, smallmouthed bass, and bream. Of all these, the whitefish - fresh, frozen or dried - was considered the variety par excellence. "It is the only fish that sauce spoils," the Baron Lahontan maintained. Nicholas Garry was no less enthusiastic: "All I had heard of its excellent quality and taste fell far short of its real excellence. I should say it is the most delicate tasted fish I have ever eat." But Alexander Henry the Elder paid it perhaps the highest tribute of all: "Those who live on whitefish for months together preserve their relish to the end. This cannot be said of trout." With all this, many a gourmet will agree; still, a steady diet of even whitefish must have sated the heartiest appetite in time. The voyageur was not one to complain much; but one of his rare cries of anguish has come down to us in a trader's journal: "Toujours le poisson!"

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.