The Food of a Younger Land (34 page)

Cleaned of the chaff, the women dried the oats on a wooden lattice by sustaining a fire beneath it for several days. Then they put the oats in skin bags, forced it into holes in the ground, treaded out the grain, winnowed it, reduced it to meal, boiled it in water and seasoned it in bear grease. In the same fashion other Frenchmen watched the lean Menominees, in the Wisconsin country, harvesting wild rice.

On the shores of Lake Superior Frenchmen found Chippewas living largely on fish, fresh in summer, dried or smoked in winter; and Chippewa squaws feeding their babies fish soup. Fish heads seasoned with maple sugar were a Chippewa delicacy. And beaver-tails, because of their smooth fatness, were an especial treat.

Venison the Chippewas boiled with wild rice or sliced it, roasted it and pounded it out on a flat stone. Jerked and tenderized venison steaks they stored and packed in
makuks
, or birchbark boxes, the covers of which were sewn down with split spruce root. The fall-killed deer they dried in fire or wind, packed it in hide and jerked the meat against the bitter lake winters.

Sometimes they cut venison into yet smaller slices, spread it out on birchbark and stamped it into edibility. The braves were proud to do the stamping, for such work required strength and so was a brave’s rightful task. Therefore the Chippewas called such meat, literally, “foot-trodden meat.”

The squaws performed lesser labors. When meat was needed for a trek, they lined a hole in the ground with hide, skin side out, as for the wild oats, filled it with dried meat, and, with a stone for a pestle, pounded it until it was pulverized. When buffalo meat was used the result was called “pemmican.” Mixing it with fat or marrow, and sometimes pounding cherries into the meat, they sealed it by pouring melted fat over the hide sacks. There it could keep for as long as three years. Such packs commonly weighed between 100 and 300 pounds.

The French
engagés
brought steel knives to the Chippewa nation to use instead of knives or ribs or bones of animals; clam shells were Chippewa spoons. Pointed sticks were employed to take meat out of a kettle when it was too hot to take with the fingers. Cups and all sorts of dishes were fashioned by this people from birchbark. In freshly cut birchbark vessels water could be heated before the bark was dry enough to catch fire.

The Chippewa customarily ate only once a day, usually about the middle of the morning. But if food was abundant he ate as frequently as his stomach would permit. He might go, in flush times, to as many as seven feasts in a single day; and at each be expected to eat all that was placed before him. When food was scarce, however, these, like other tribes, suffered severely; for they possessed no methods for storing food beyond the processing of pemmican.

Yet the explorer Coronado reported cultivated gardens and domesticated turkeys among the Zunis. All the way east, across the sunburnt mesas, he found Indian gardens. He came up the borders of old Nebraska and on into dusty land: and found the Kansas Indians, in the sandy Kansas bottoms, gardening Indian corn. And growing a strange dark gourd they called “askutasquash,” the same that the French named “Pompon.”

The gourd that we, today, call, simply, “squash.”

And somewhere between Nebraska and Kansas Coronado reported tribes to be existing on “maize whereof they have great store, and also small white peas and venison, which by all likelihood they feed upon (though they say not) for we found many skins of deer, of hares and conies. They eat the best cakes that I ever saw and everybody generally eats of them. They have the finest order and way to grind that we ever saw in any place. And one Indian woman of the country will grind as much as four women of Mexico.”

It was from the Indian nations, of course, that the white man took corn. They had expended hundreds of years in developing it out of a seed-bearing grass. Centuries before Columbus, the Indian was cultivating this grass in both North and South America. Among some tribes Coronado reported not only blue, but also red, yellow, black and white ears colored for use in ceremonials. The secret of developing such colored ears has, to this date, eluded the white man.

Coronado also found the Kansas Indians to possess “most excellent salt kernal.” But of the Sioux it is said that, as late as 1912, the older members of the tribe had never tasted salt. Yet, though the Sioux used neither salt nor pepper, they seasoned meat with wild ginger, and they brewed a sweet wilderness tea from wintergreen and raspberry leaves or little twigs of spruce. And in the long hot summers they refreshed themselves with cold water into which a little maple sugar had been dissolved.

Sioux living near the upper waters of the Minnesota River raised small patches of corn and beans, but their principal vegetable was
tipsinna
or “Dakota turnip,” eaten raw or roasted or boiled with buffalo meat. Among the river rushes, or in the shallow inland creeks, they too harvested the wild rice. And, as with other Indian nations, roast dog was a delicacy reserved for feastdays. They cooked it indifferently, without removing claws or hair.

“They feed themselves with such meats as the soil affords,” an early journal reports: “. . . their meat is very well sodden and they make broth very sweet and savory . . .”

Among this nation the French found beans, pumpkins, acorns and sunflowers, fresh and dried wild roots and bear fat and bulbs and oil of the wild sunflower’s seeds. Bread was baked by fire or sun and flattened on warm stones. In season, berries were plentiful; papayas and persimmons and, with the first frost, hickory nuts and walnuts. But mostly the Sioux lived by the fish of the streams, the wild geese and the wild pigeon and all the game of the prairie groves.

Cornbread, still popular in both urban and rural sections of the Middlewest, does not derive from either the “journey-cakes” nor from the richer breads of Virginia, in the days of the Old Dominion. Midwestern cornbread is a direct descendant of the Indian ash-cake, mixed from cornmeal and water, fashioned into thick cakes and baked in the cinders and ashes of prairie camp fires.

In the years of the Buckskin Border this method of baking cornbread remained unmodified by the frontiersman. One legend has it that, on an occasion when an unusually long train of Conestoga wagons was crossing the plains of Kansas, it was found necessary to separate into two trains. With but one frying pan, and a single pot in the whole caravan, the division was accomplished by counting off those who preferred ash-cake to boiled dumplings. Those who preferred ash-cakes took the skillet; the ones who went for dumplings followed the pot.

Today cornbread and chicken, with dumplings, remains a favorite in Kansas. But an anonymous balladeer long ago warned all Nebraskans against the Kansas ash-cake:

And further deprecated Kansas:

In making bread, a thin sponge was made the night before, with yeast dissolved in lukewarm water, buckwheat flour, and enough additional water to make a thin paste. The batter bowl or crock was then covered with a lid and placed near the stove to rise overnight. If the night was quite cold, a piece of old blanket would be thrown over the crock just before going to bed, to keep the heat in. In the morning the batter, all bubbly from fermentation, would be stirred thoroughly with more buckwheat flour and water and seasoned. Sometimes milk was used as part of the liquid.

Baked on a cast-iron griddle, the cakes were small and not over an eighth of an inch thick, brown on top and crisp around the edges.

The residue of batter in the bowl was saved as a starter for the next morning’s batch. After standing all day in the sun it was again well fermented and ready to be mixed into another thin sponge.

 

“When I was single,”
a married minstrel mourned,

Such bread, like pemmican, would keep for a long time, and was easily transported by men who lived on their feet.

Broiling was accomplished by putting meat on the end of a pointed stick and holding it over a fire. When the hunter cut a smooth stick and thrust it through the body of the bird or animal he had killed, he could rest the two ends of the stick on stones and roast his meat over the coals.

The primitive Indian stick was replaced by a “spit” or iron rod to let the heat of the iron cook the inside of the roast. Finally, the cook learned to “baste” the meat with oil, water, or gravy collected in a dripping-pan set under the spit.

The barbecue was adapted by the white buffalo hunters from the Indian method of barbecuing. Even pemmican was sometimes barbecued by adding, to the jerked meat, ground corn and bacon, cooking the mess together in steaming bear fat.

The modifications effected by the Indian and frontiersmen upon each other’s diet were reciprocal. The Indian taught the white man to exist in the wilderness, on the unstaked plains and across the endless desert passes; and, in turn, the frontiersmen instructed the Indian in the fastest known methods of getting blind drunk on barrel-whiskey.

For as little as one rabbit pelt a throw.

The frontiersmen did, however, stabilize the Indian diet by improving on and inventing methods of storage. He built timber silos for the stored grain, established himself in one place whereat he could alternate crops against the hard Midwestern winters. Though in all means of developing grain and providing against the future he was more thoughtful than the Indian, in the killing of wild game he was prodigal. Before the homesteaders had come, the great clouds of wild pigeons were gone, the buffalo were going, and the wilderness streams were fished dry. In killing he surpassed any savage. For he took to it imaginatively, as he might go dancing, for the anticipated pleasure and the relating of it after the slaughter was done; till the plains were littered with buffalo carcasses, touched only by the fingers of the wind.

He desolated the Indian lands, then went on to destroy the food of his own sons, making square-dance songs all the while:

It was not until the advent of the homesteaders, with all the caution that domestication brings, that some pause was put to the destruction. By that time the Indian was eating government rations from tins. And by the time of the War Between the States, the white had modified the Indian’s natural diet in more ways than one. In fact, he had just about put a stop to it altogether.

Before the land was laced by the railroads, and the long fields bound by Sears-Roebuck fencing, the prairies yielded abundant game. Deer and wild turkey wandered the land. Bee trees gave such tubs of honey that every prairie grove sheltered sugar camps. Corn was cultivated for use in “johnny-cake,” corn mush, “big hominy,” ash-cake, corn whisky, corn pone; or the small loaves called “corn dodgers.”

A corn-dodger carnival, in coonskin tatters, came through the Cumberland into Illinois. Hungry movers from the settled seaboard, flintlock vagrants looking for a home.

one of them sang,

To many, the Illinois country looked like home. They built log cabins and exchanged their coonskins for wide farmer’s straws and overalls. The flintlocks hung rusting on the cabin walls. The land was cleared and fields were sown. Rain came, sun came, the land was bounded.

Beside each cabin, in the squaw winters, they dug a pit, eight or ten feet long and about six feet deep, in which to store vegetables against the snow. Potatoes, cabbage, and turnips were covered with straw, and the entire pit covered with about three feet of earth, leaving a small opening near the center for the heat of the vegetables to escape. Sometimes, during extreme cold, one would have to start a fire to thaw out the frost so as to get at the food; this very seldom occurred as the heat of the vegetables kept the earth from freezing.

Cabin chairs were three or four-legged stools; tables had four legs but were made from puncheon; and the “silverware” consisted of jack knives or a butcher knife. Boarding house guests were frequently requested to bring their own cutlery. Plates and dishes were of tin or pewter, and often wooden bowls, known as noggins, served when metal containers were not available. Or sometimes even thin wooden shingles served for plates. Drinking cups made from gourds were common.

Corn-dodger days are occasionally recalled in Illinois by corn-dodger dinners; but in the early pioneer times they were the mainstay of the average man’s diet. Six days a week the coonskin folk ate them. These were baked in a skillet to such a consistency that a wit of the era once observed that “you could knock down a Texas steer with a chunk of the stuff or split an end-board at forty-yards off-hand.”

My clothes is all ragged, as my language is rough,
one tune complained,

Only on Sunday, if all the children had been good, was there any variation in this corn-dodger diet. The Lord’s Day brought biscuit and preserves to the righteous. And a casual visit by a circuit-riding preacher always called for the best a homesteader could lay on the table. Perhaps it was some such visit that inspired an anonymous hired-man, when requested to say grace, to ad lib his own lines—with one eye on the table: