Pemmican

Combine equal parts of buffalo suet; dried fruit such as cherries, berries, and plums; and dried venison or other game. Add salt if available, and pound the mixture in a bowl or a hollow rock; then form into bricks. Dry in the sun, or near the fire in rainy weather. Pemmican may be eaten as is, by biting off chunks, or bricks may be simmered in water to make a thick soup or stew.

Like the Indians, early white explorers, traders, and missionaries lived largely off the land, carrying only as much of the basic items like flour, sugar, and coffee as their packs could accommodate. Even these were not in their present convenient form. Until the last decades of the nineteenth century, refined white sugar was scarce and expensive on the frontier; and when it was available, it was supplied in the form of loaves, or cubes. Brown sugar, much coarser than that we see today, was used extensively, as well as molasses. The flour, unbleached and perhaps unbolted, was subject to an unpleasant rawness (some recipes of the period instruct the cook to dry the flour in front of the fire before using it). Only green coffee was sold, and it had to be roasted and ground before brewing. Salt pork was a frontier staple because it kept almost indefinitely and was easily prepared: after soaking a few hours or over night in fresh water to remove the salt, it was generally fried.

When Fort Atkinson was established in 1820 near present Fort Calhoun as the westernmost outpost of the United States, the regulation daily ration called for three-fourths of a pound of pork or bacon, or one and one-fourth pounds of fresh or salted beef; eighteen ounces of bread or flour, or twelve ounces of hard bread, or one and one-fourth pounds of cornmeal; and one gill of whiskey per man. Two quarts of salt, four quarts of vinegar, and twelve quarts of peas or beans were allotted with every hundred rations. The War Department, apparently influenced by current medical theories, directed that meats were to be "boiled with a view to soup, sometimes roasted or baked, never fried," but from all evidence these eccentric instructions were generally ignored.

Although Fort Atkinson was abandoned after only seven years, agriculturally it was a great success. The abundant crops of corn, beets, cabbages, radishes, parsnips, carrots, and other vegetables, planted in an attempt to see if the post could be made self-sufficient, provoked one military inspector in the mid-1820s to complain irately that "the present system is destroying military spirit and making officers the base overseers of a troop of awkward ploughmen." Along with the hogs and cattle which were also raised at the fort, these provisions were augmented by wild game and wild berries and fruits in season.