FUN DRESSING UP

[Buck Conner1]

Seems you had a poor cook with such a limited supply of edibles. That's were a knowledge of correct period edibles - cultivated or foraged comes in handy. I had a period correct edibles store for years supplying such items used in camp or on the trail for AMM brothers and trekkers, mountain folks, etc. Everything we carried was dated, period correct and locations with docs of use. 

Mark Baker, Wes Houser and several other writers were our testers and wrote about our supplies and Wes even did a video using our goods - from edibles to correct cooking pots, pans and whatever else we had for sale for camp life accessories. Those guys gave us a large shove ahead with over 150 items had available over the little traders selling parched corn. Clark and Sons Mercantile "shined" for over 10 years until selling the whole operation in 2002. It lasted another couple years until the new owner had health issues and it closed for good. I get asked to start up again, suppliers have changed and now with health stores carrying edibles like "Wild Oats" and a few other about all I can do is give a shopping list of periods, correct and not correct edibles! If I continue to be asked I'll post a list for those interested.

Let's change the time period from what we have done to what we are planning to do and we may get some good suggestions on how to make our journey easier, what do you folks think.  :?:     You know, that's were you have to use that old gray matter between your ears ....  :shock:   :cheers:

 

[NWTF Lobo]

Well, back in that day, nobody had the wide range of choices — and nobody complained about their food. But the voyageurs’ diet — pea soup twice a day — does not seem very nourishing.
To do the continuous work of paddling for 12-14 hours or the harder work of portaging, voyageurs needed 5,000 calories a day! That’s two and a half times the fuel that adults today need. It’s more than marathoners burn in a race.

A little history: In the early fur trade days, canoemen found their own food by hunting, fishing or trading when they came upon friendly Indians with extra provisions. However, that took extra time each day and meant the brigade could not travel as far to trade.
Then, fur trade companies realized the wisdom of having brigades carry their own food from Montreal to the rendezvous. Along with the 55 packages of trade goods each canoe carried, they also toted several bushels of peas, and several hundredweight of biscuit and of pork or grease.
Every night a cook from each canoe poured about nine quarts of peas in their kettle, added a strip of bacon or pork and lake water and hung it on a tripod over the fire to simmer until daylight. In the morning four biscuits were crumbled and added to thicken it, enough so that the stirring spoon stood straight up. Now filling the kettle to the brim, the pea porridge provided two full meals that day for the eight to 12 men in the canoe. They paddled for a hour or so before stopping for breakfast; supper came about 8 p.m.

Over time, when the brigades arrived at Sault Ste. Marie, they could purchase other food supplies, like pemmican made by aboriginal women of various Great Plains tribes. Pemmican is a mixture of dried and pounded buffalo meat and fat, with berries added to improve the flavor. Moose, caribou or even fish might be substituted for buffalo. The mixture was crammed into buffalo-skin bags and topped off with melted fat to make a 90-pound parcel. It could last for months or even a year without spoiling. Best of all, it was such a concentrated source of nutrition that a man needed only two to four pounds a day (compared to eight pounds of fish or fresh meat a day)!
Pemmican could be eaten raw or made into “rubaboo,” a porridge traditionally made of peas or corn (or both) with grease (bear or pork) and a thickening agent (bread or flour). Maple sugar or berries could also be added to the mixture. After six weeks of only pea soup, the men looked forward to rubaboo.
Finally, (this next part came as a surprise to me) pea soup was probably the most nutritious food, delivering the most usable calories for work, that they could have eaten.

Pea protein is particularly high in arginine, an amino acid that is a precursor to creatine, which delivers energy to muscles. It boosts iron so it builds muscle mass as well as other proteins. It might curb appetites better than other proteins do. And — pea protein is free of common allergens that are found in eggs, dairy or gluten.
So the voyageurs probably couldn’t have come up with a better food. Light to carry when dry, cheap, tastes good with added herbs or vegetables. And here we thought they had a poor diet. Wrong.

• http://nikkirajala.com/2017/08/

 

[NWTF Lobo]

Buck, it wasn't that we didn't have a good cook, Charlie was a great survival cook as I'll relate in another story about another trek.

We were following the Voyagers path and living off the kind of food that they did. We very well could had more variety in our diet but that wasn't our intent.

 

[NWTF Lobo]

You mentioned Mark Baker, when I first met Mark he was going to school at MSU and was just getting into muzzleloading. He use to come around Jud Brennan's shop a lot. I was there back then making stuff on Jud's forge. Mark was a very likable guy and picked our brains, he wanted to learn all he could about muzzleloading.  He started writing after that and the rest is history.

 

[Buck Conner1]

We had the same experience with Mark, was going a half dozen ways at once being educated. He got the column in Muzzleloader, wrote some books then finally settled down. We made contact again and I started sending him correct period edibles, he got into the bread baking thing. That was easy had all kinds of different flour from an early grist mill in upper New York state. Those hippies grew all kinds of good stuff, organic food nuts with items you can't find. I spent weeks researching everything they grew or were willing to grow for me if we could just find the seeds. 

Biggest problem was to get a good price I was buying 50 lb. sacks of each of there items, lived in a 2,400 sq. ft. house - built more damn platforms to get everything off the cement floor. Man we had a mini warehouse.

This is funny, I sent Wes Houser and Jeff Hingebaull (wrong spelling) one kind of flour and Mark Baker another kind. Baker wrote about how wonderful "millet flour" was, within a week after the magazine came out I had orders for over 50 pounds, talk about scrambling to fill orders. We use to brag of our 3-5 day turn around on orders. Then the next issue Wes wrote about dried peas and blue parched corn. It was crazy how the new business took off. 

My supplier I met in Santa Fe NM at a rendezvous, was having him do a variety of roasted coffee beans from F&I War to American Civil War, he also supplied me raw beans for those wanting to do their own roasting. John had one roaster catch on fire (common if not cleaned - coffee dust really burns easy) and expensive to rebuild the roaster $10K plus. I'm buying blue corn (Natives have used it for 700 years), we decided to try roasting it. I send him 25 lbs. of sea salt from the Great Salt Lake in Utah (Jim Bridger, Jed Smith and others wrote about it during the fur trade days. We made salted (like found in the cliff dwellings in CO). A surprise it turns out the corn has less dust than the coffee, we're in business on parched blue corn, sold hundreds of pounds over the years.

Now your making me think of all this stuff and now I'll dream of the fun it turned out to be helping guys like you.  :Red tup:

This is a cleaner view of our listing seen in a half dozen magazines each issue for 9-10 years.​

This is a small list of friends that helped when needed in this venture in different ways with sharing the same interests. Thank you folks for believing in me that we could make this work.​

I'll start a new topic with our listings, references, time frames and locations found being used.  Later.

 

[JLBSparks]

Forgot to say, beaver hat and beaver mitts

Ron, I believe that's the first pic I've ever seen of you wearing gloves or mitts.

   -Joe