Nature Bulletin No. 257-A   February 18, 1967
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
Richard B. Ogilvie, President
Roland F. Eisenbeis, Supt. of Conservation

****:PEMMICAN

Somewhere, there should be a monument to Pemmican. This 
remarkable energy-giving food, borrowed from the Indians, was in great 
measure responsible for the first crossing of the North American 
continent, the exploration of the far northwest, and the first successful 
attempts to reach the North Pole and the South Pole. To the lack of it 
can be attributed the failure of Scott' s first Antarctic expedition; the 
almost incredible hardships endured by explorers seeking routes across 
the Rockies to the Pacific, such as the Lewis and Clark expedition in 
1804-06; and the death of hundreds in the gold rush to the Klondike.

The North West Fur Company was founded in Montreal shortly after 
the British defeated the French in 1763 and occupied the St. Lawrence 
River Valley, For 100 years, the Hudson's Bay Company had held a 
legal monopoly of the fur trade in the vast drainage basin of Hudson 
Bay. Their "factors" lived in trading posts and, even when traveling, 
they clung to the costly bulky heavy items of British diet -- porridge, 
bread and salted meat.

The traders of the new company, led by Peter Pond, a Connecticut 
Yankee, found a route up the St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes, 
and thence to the heart of the unexplored northwest at Lake Athabaska, 
near the headwaters of two great rivers -- the Peace and the Mackenzie. 
From the Crees and Chipewyans, Pond learned to make and use 
pemmican, which he described as "dried meat pounded to a powder and 
mixed up with buffaloes greese", Alexander Mackenzie spent the winter 
of 1788-89 with old Peter Pond and, using pemmican as food, went on 
northward to the Arctic Ocean, traveling the river which now bears his 
name.

In, 1793, he went down the Peace River to the Pacific Ocean, leaving 
pemmican buried in caches along the route for his return. That was the 
first westward crossing of this continent. Eventually, competition 
between the rival fur companies became so bitter that, in 1814, it 
flamed into the bloody Pemmican War. In 1821 the two merged and the 
new Hudson's Bay Company based its remarkable transportation 
system, covering all of Canada and what is now the northwestern part of 
the United States, upon the use of canoes and pemmican.

The Indians invented pemmican as a condensed food for long overland 
journeys and for winters when game was scarce. The lean meat of 
animals such as buffalo, elk and deer, was cut in thin slices and dried 
over a slow fire, or by the hot sun, or by freezing. Then it was pounded 
to shreds between two stones. The pounded meat was mixed with an 
equal quantity of boiling fat from the suet (inside fat) and from the 
hump or rump, and packed in bags or baskets. Eaten cold, it is nearly 
tasteless at first but the flavor develops as it is chewed.

Some Indians added berries or wild cherries, and Mackenzie 
occasionally boiled it with the tops of wild parsnips. Admiral Peary 
sometimes added a few raisins but he and his men ate it cold -- one-half 
pound twice a day. He wrote that it was the only food for Eskimo dogs 
on a long Polar journey and: "Of all foods I am acquainted with, 
pemmican is the only one that, under appropriate conditions, a man can 
eat twice a day for three hundred and sixty-five days in the year and 
have the last mouthful taste as good as the first.... It is the most 
satisfying food I know. " Other than pemmican, he carried only tea, 
condensed milk and hardtack.

Men forced to live solely on salted meats, bread and cereals, suffered 
and died from scurvy: a disease which results from the lack of Vitamin 
C. Men who live on pemmican have no scurvy. It is unequaled for 
compactness, lightness, wholesomeness, palatability and sustaining 
power.