Pemmican

• 1. Introduction

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  Pemmican, a dense mixture of dried meat and rendered fat, earned one of the strongest endorsements ever given to a food. The explorer Robert Peary wrote in his 1917 book Secrets of Polar Travel, "It is an absolute sine qua non." He had used it on all three of his polar expeditions. Without it, he argued, a sledge party could not pack its supplies tightly enough to attempt a serious journey. That is a remarkable verdict on something made of pounded meat and animal fat. Pemmican fed fur traders, polar explorers, soldiers, and even an aviator crossing the Atlantic. Yet it was invented by Indigenous peoples of North America, and people still make it today. How did a food built on fat get its name? How was it made, and how long has it existed? And how did one preserved food help set off a conflict and shape a new society on the prairies?

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• 2. Names Rooted in Fat

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  The Cree word pimîhkân gives pemmican its name, and it grows out of pimî, which means fat or grease. Older sources spell it pemican, with a single m. Lakota speakers use a different word, wasná, which first described grease taken from marrow bones. The word is built in two neat pieces. The prefix wa- turns it into a noun, while sná refers to small pieces that cling to something. Both languages describe the food by its fat rather than by its meat. The source credits the invention to the Indigenous peoples of North America. Where the recipe began is a question that archaeologists answer with boiling pits.

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• 3. Deep Roots

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  Boiling pits and bone fragments scattered across the Great Plains show that people were producing bone grease there by AD 1. Bone grease is an essential ingredient in pemmican, so archaeologists treat evidence of its manufacture as a strong sign of pemmican making. The practice probably began much earlier. Calcified fragments from Paleo-Indian times prove less convincing, because they lack boiling pits and could have served other uses. One suggestion holds that pemmican crossed the Bering Strait between four and six thousand years ago. The earliest written account is credited to Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1541. He recorded the Querechos and Teyas, who crossed the region later called the Texas Panhandle. They sun-dried and minced bison meat, then made a stew of it with bison fat. The first English use of the word is credited to James Isham in 1743. He spelled it "pimmegan" and described finely pounded dried meat, fat, and cranberries. His list hints at how varied the ingredients could be.

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• 4. Meat, Fat, and Fruit

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  Pemmican was traditionally made from whatever meat the hunters could get. Bison, deer, elk, and moose supplied the large game, while salmon and duck show how flexible the recipe was. Contemporary makers may also use beef. The meat was dried and chopped, then combined with rendered animal fat known as tallow. Fruit was optional. Saskatoon berries, called misâskwatômina in Cree, could be added, as could blueberries, cherries, chokeberries, and currants. In some regions these berries were used almost only in ceremonial and wedding pemmican. European fur traders also noticed makers adding sugar. Among the Lakota and Dakota nations, a corn wasná skips the meat altogether. It combines toasted cornmeal, animal fat, fruit, and sugar. Turning the meat into something that could blend with that fat took real labor.

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• 5. Pounded and Packed

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  Five pounds of fresh meat shrank to just one pound of dried meat suitable for pemmican. Traditional makers cut the meat into thin slices and dried them over a slow fire or in the hot sun. The result was hard and brittle. The Cree call it pânsâwân, and North American English simply calls it dry meat. The pieces were spread across a tanned hide pinned to the ground. There they were beaten with flails or ground between two large stones until they were nearly powder. Melted fat, usually suet rendered into tallow, was stirred in at roughly equal weights. Some makers also pounded dried fruit into powder and added it. The mixture was packed into rawhide bags, where it cooled and hardened. Modern storage in glass jars or tin boxes gives a shelf life that depends on the ingredients and conditions. Once hardened, a bag could be opened and eaten in several ways.

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• 6. At the Table

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  In 1874, Sergeant Major Sam Steele of the North-West Mounted Police recorded three ways of serving pemmican. It could be eaten raw, boiled in a stew called rubaboo, or fried in what plains hunters called a rechaud. His rubaboo combined pemmican, water, and flour, with wild onions or preserved potatoes when they could be found. The rechaud went into a frying pan, either with onions and potatoes or on its own. Steele was frank about the raw version. He wrote, "Some persons ate pemmican raw, but I must say I never had a taste for it that way." Long before his notes, canoe crews had already made pemmican a matter of hard logistics.

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• 7. Feeding the Canoes

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  A north canoe, or canot du nord, carrying six men and 25 standard packs of 90 pounds each, needed about four packs of food for every 500 miles. The voyageurs of the fur trade had no time to live off the land during the short season when lakes and rivers were free of ice. Canoemen based in Montreal could be supplied by sea or from local farms. They lived on dried peas or beans, sea biscuit, and salt pork. Western canoemen mocked them as mangeurs de lard, meaning pork-eaters. Around the Great Lakes, some maize and wild rice could be found locally. By the time trade reached the Lake Winnipeg area, a pemmican trade had developed. In 1793, Alexander Mackenzie relied on pemmican for his expedition from the Canadas to the Pacific.

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• 8. The Métis Trade

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  Red River carts rolled southwest onto the prairie carrying people of mixed ancestry who were becoming known as the Métis. They slaughtered bison, turned the meat into pemmican, and carried it north to trade. Their settlements stood next to North West Company posts. For these prairie-edge communities, pemmican mattered as much as beaver did for Indigenous peoples farther north. The trade was a major factor in the emergence of a distinct Métis society. Packs were shipped to and stored at Fort Alexander, Cumberland House, Île-à-la-Crosse, Fort Garry, Norway House, and Edmonton House. The Métis of Red River called a bag of bison pemmican weighing about 90 pounds a taureau, French for bull. Mixed with udder fat it became taureaux fins, with bone marrow taureaux grand, and with berries taureaux à grains. The meat of one bison generally filled one taureau. In 1814, governor Miles Macdonell passed the short-lived Pemmican Proclamation, forbidding export of pemmican from the Red River Colony. That decision began the Pemmican War with the Métis.

  Captain Robert Bartlett, Ernest Shackleton, Richard E. Byrd, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, George W. DeLong, Matthew Henson, and Roald Amundsen all numbered among the polar explorers who adopted pemmican. Dogs ate it too. British expeditions fed their teams a beef version called Bovril pemmican, or simply dog pemmican, as sledging rations. By volume it was two parts protein to one part fat, with no carbohydrate. Researchers later found that the dogs survived on it but did not thrive, because it held too much protein. When Shackleton's 1914-1916 expedition to the Antarctic was stranded on the ice during the Antarctic summer, its men resorted to eating the dog pemmican themselves. Armies discovered a different use for the same idea.

  British troops in the Second Boer War of 1899-1902 carried an iron ration of 4 ounces of pemmican and 4 ounces of chocolate and sugar. It came in two small tins soldered together and fastened inside the belt. A soldier opened it only as a last resort, when the commanding officer ordered it. A man could march on it for 36 hours before hunger began to drop him. The pemmican would keep in perfect condition for decades, and it was judged far better than biltong, the cured game meat common in Africa. American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham, chief of scouts for the British Army in South Africa, required every scout to carry pemmican. In the 1920s, French troops fighting in Morocco were given a ration that was likely condensed meat bars. Amelia Earhart took pemmican as an emergency ration on her 1928 transatlantic flight.

  A scientific study in 1945 criticized the idea of relying on pemmican alone for survival, since it contains low levels of certain vitamins. In January 1969, the U.S. military produced a report titled Arctic Survival Rations, III. The Evaluation of Pemmican Under Winter Field Conditions. Its subjects went through a cycle of two starvation periods. During the first cycle, only 1000 calories of pemmican was enough to hold starvation at bay. Pemmican has outlasted such tests. People in many Indigenous communities across North America still make it for personal, communal, and ceremonial use. Some recipes now include ingredients introduced to the Americas in the past 500 years, beef among them. Indigenous-owned companies also sell pemmican, or foods based on traditional pemmican recipes, to customers far from the prairie.

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