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The Role of Pemmican in the Canadian Northwest Fur Trade

1955; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pcg.1955.0000

1551-3211

Willis B. Merriam,

Culinary Culture and Tourism

34Yearbook of The AssociationVol. 17 THE ROLE OF PEMMICAN IN THE CANADIAN NORTHWEST FUR TRADE Willis B. Merriam Washington State College This paper is an informal account of one rather interesting segment of the economic and historical geography of Canada. It relates only the significant use of pemmican as a food among fur traders, and makes no effort to discuss the fur trade of the Canadian Northwest. No detailed citations to the literature are made in the text, but a list of representative sources consulted is appended. Pemmican is a Cree Indian word for a highjy concentrated food consisting of dried meat, pounded and mixed with fat, and used by the northern Plains Indians as their staff of life. Among other northern and western Indians pemmican was sometimes made of venison, elk, reindeer, or salmon, but the Plains Indians used only the meat of the buffalo, and in this discussion "pemmican" will be understood to mean buffalo pemmican. Among Plains Indians the pemmican supply was traditionally packed in the summer following large scale buffalo kills. Choice lean meat was cut in wide, thin strips or sheets and dried in the sun and wind, or occasionally over smoke. When completely dried it was placed upon a hide pegged to the ground and beaten with flails, or ground between stones, until reduced to a mass of fibers and powder. Marrow and fat were rendered and added to ihe< shredded meat in the proportion of 50 pounds of meat to 40 pounds of melted fat. The mixture was then packed in buffalo hide bags and the mess cooled and hardened as pemmican. Sometimes dried fruits such as wild cherry, service berry or, later, a few pounds of sugar were added to improve the flavor and quality. Prepared in this manner the product seldom became tainted or rancid , even after years of storage. Peter Pond and the Frobishers were among the first white men to appreciate its significance as a provision, in the late 18th century, and for half a century it became the main subsistence food of those men and their families who manned the fur brigades of Canada's northwestern frontiers. Today its traditional significance has almost been forgotten, and the most recent reference in the indexes to periodical literature dates back to 1902. Yet during the first half of the nineteenth century pemmican supported a fur trade empire and played a vital role in economic control over the vast plains and northern forests of Western Canada. So significant was it as a frontier ration that when its use ended, with the decimation of the buffalo, one might venture to say that the old order of the fur trade empire fell with it. 1955of Pacific Coast Geographers35 It was the Northwest Company from Montreal that first made commercial use of pemmican. For travel by canoe into remote river districts where the most valuable furs were to be obtained, a concentrated, easily kept provision was needed, as in this area it was impossible to live consistently off the land or obtain supplies from the scattered Indian settlements. For provisioning under these conditions pemmican proved ideal. It would pack easily in canoes, and in a ventilated cache, summer or winter, it would keep almost indefinitely. Any group, company, or economy that could effectively utilize pemmican had a distinct advantage in this far-flung trade empire. Pemmican has been called the greatest of all concentrated foods. It provided a complete diet, and as it was already cooked, in a manner of speaking, by sun, wind, and hot fat, it could be eaten raw or cooked in a number of ways.In food value a pound was the equivalent of four to eight pounds of fresh meat, fish, or wild fowl, and it needed no medicine to correct a constant use of it as food. Thus pemmican became an indispensable provision for the travelling trader who had to move constantly. The largest source of pemmican was the area of the Red River Valley near present-day Winnipeg. In the summer of 1800 Alexander Henry, an employee of the Northwest Company, set up a post at the point where the Park River enters the Red, and where a salt seep attracted buffalo and other game. Henry and his company engaged in several killings that fall and the following spring, and made up the meat according to the Indian formula. When he broke camp in May of 1801 he took back to headquarters at Grand Portage about 5000 pounds of pemmican. Later that summer he constructed a permanent post on the Pembina River and for the next eight years the Northwest Company depended upon Henry for a large part of its pemmican. From 1800 to 1808 the company utilized approximately 21,000 pounds. Although reference thus far has been made only to the Northwest Fur Company , competition among fur companies had been keen and merciless for three decades or more in the far northwest prior to 1810. Soon after the Northwest Company started operations on the frontier the Hudson's Bay Company followed and as early as 1774 was attempting to meet competition by establishing frontier posts of its own. Nor were these two companies fighting it out alone. From 1793 to 1804 there were no less than five independent rivals. By 1804 the Northwest Company had succeeded in effecting a consolidation of the independent companies into a strong fur trading company that for nearly two decades more held its own against Hudson's Bay. It was said of this new and vigorous result of consolidation that the Northwest Company was perhaps the most efficient and effective economic concern that had been organized in the New World. Without doubt the battle for the western field up to 1814 was decidedly in favor of the Canadian company, and a significant reason for that success was the wide spread use of pemmican as a provision food among its field men. Opposition from the Hudson's Bay Company was gradually becoming more vigorous and effective, but the Northwest Company remained in the ascendency. Hudson's Bay posts were costly to maintain because most of their food supply had to be imported from England. Hudson's Bay personnel consisted as yet largely of "gentlemen" who would not, like the Canadians, give up civilized living for the fur trade and learn to relish pemmican as a food in the back country. Meanwhile the Northwest Company was buying pemmican from several of the tribes of Plains Indians, and was itself manufacturing pemmican in enormous quantities around Pembina on the Red River, where a settlement of French and English ha'f breeds, the Metis of the Canadian Plains, were making a living running buffalo and making pemmican from the meat. 36Yearbook of The AssociationVol. 17 The Hudson's Bay Company took frequent steps to harass its rival and finally hit upon one strategy either by design or accident that brought the Northwest Company to its knees and then completely eliminated it through merger. Ten years were required for this transfer of control. In 1811 the Earl of Selkirk purchased from the Hudson's Bay Company a large tract of land including the areas occupied by the Red River Metis. It was Selkirk's hope to form a Utopian farm colony of displaced Scottish highlanders. This objective was never achieved, but the indirect results were enough to eliminate the Northwest Company. From 1812 to 1814 around three hundred colonists arrived at the Selkirk settlement. Nature in the form of drought, flood, and grasshoppers proved discouraging to agriculture, but the reaction of the Northwest Company was even more of a deterrent. The settlement extended directly athwart the Northwest Company's route from Montreal to the west, and both the Northwesters and the Indians objected to agricultural settlement in the chief buffalo hunting grounds. In short, the Northwest Company looked upon Selkirk's newcomers as invaders whose presence was detrimental to their interests, and awaited a chance to destroy the colony. Violence broke out, and crops and dwellings were destroyed. Furthermore and counter to the wishes of settlement leaders many of the young men began to adopt the semi-nomadic life of the Metis and to take part in pursuit of buffalo. Meanwhile it was charged that the Northwesters were taking too much food out of the country while the legal settlers went hungry. Early in 1814 an embargo was placed against removing provisions, meaning pemmican, from the area. The Northwest Company refused to comply, whereupon Governor MacDonnell, acting for the colony, seized 600 bags of pemmican, and the "pemmican war" began. Trouble of this type was just what the Hudson's Bay Company had been hoping for, and in 1821, under official Commonwealth pressure, hostilities ended with the merger of the two rival companies under the name of Hudson's Bay Company. After the merger every phase of life in the Red River Valley increased in scope. Within ten years the population had grown from some 300 to 2400. By 1843 total population passed 5000, and this figure nearly doubled before the end of the decade. A few of the older members tried to farm; the main activity, however, continued to be the production of pemmican. Intermarriage with aborigines and ten years of the free, roving life of the plains hunter, had rendered agriculture distasteful to the younger portion of the sturdy Scots, whereas the Fernch Metis wilfully clung to old habits. Thus a large majority of the people forming the settlement followed the chase, presenting the anomaly of a sedentary community subsisting by pursuits common to a nomadic life. Methods of the hunt were similar to those in use many years before. Regiments of buffalo runners, with a large following of retainers and impedimenta, swept over the plains twice annually, bringing wholesale slaughter and destruction to its shaggy herds, the product being sufficient to maintain the colony in plenty, and even in comparative luxury, for the remainder of the year. These hunts provided an almost certain means of livelihood, and for the amount of labor required , offered inducements far superior to those from agriculture. Numerous details of these picturesque and adventurous hunts are available in the literature. The hunting season of 1840 provided many writers with colorful descriptive material. Parties to the summer hunt started around the first of June and remained on the plains until the beginning of August. They then returned to the settlements for a short time for the purpose of trading the pemmican they had prepared. The autumn hunters started late in the month of August and remained 1955of Pacific Coast Geographers37 on the prairie until the end of October or early November, when they returned bringing, along with pemmican, great quantities of fresh meat preserved at this late season by the cooler temperatures. The initiation of the fall hunt was always set for the first days of September, and the place of the rendezvous was usually near Pembina Mountain on the Dakota boundary.» The encampment for the fall hunt of 1840 numbered 1630 persons, and it was described as the largest hunting camp in the world. On the way to the hunting grounds no attention was paid to small bands and no shooting was permitted. When fresh meat was needed, a rawhide rope was sometimes used to entangle a cow and throw her to the ground while her throat was slit. When the main herd •was sighted, about 400 huntsmen mounted and readied themselves for the starting signal. Usually it was possible to move within a mile of the herd before the charge signal was given, and the horsemen were within 400 or 500 yards before the buffalo started to take flight. Then it was a matter of fast and skillful running and shooting, amid smoke and dust for an hour or more, until many hundreds of buffalo carcasses strewed the plain. Hunters with the swiftest and the best trained horses frequently would bring down ten or twelve; those with ordinary mounts would average three or four. A prosaic account tells only half the story of the skill, courage, and adventure associated with a buffalo run. The mounted hunters were armed with flint-lock, muzzle loading muskets. A powder horn with a large vent, from which the stopper had been removed before the hunt, hung from the shoulder. The hunter's mouth was filled with musket balls. When a shot had been delivered the hammer and pan-cover of the gun were quickly drawn back, the muzzle elevated, the powder horn inserted and its contents permitted to run freely into the barrel until the hunter judged that a sufficient quantity had run in, after which the horn was dropped and allowed to fall into holster position at the hunter's side. The muzzle of the gun was now drawn to the hunter's lips, a salivated bullet was virtually spit into it and the rider was ready for another victim. All this was accomplished with the horse racing at top speed. By keeping the muzzle of the gun elevated and only depressing it at the instant of firing the charge remained in place. In the hunt of 1840, 2500 buffalo were killed. The process of skinning and cutting meat started immediately and lasted until night fall. What remained after dark fell to the wolves. Obviously the waste was tremendous. This expedition made only 375 bags of pemmican und 240 bales of dried meat from the kill described. Seven hundred animals should have provided that amount. In the making of pemmican it should be noted, using only the lean meat, one buffalo produced one 90- pound bag of the processed food. Production figures were never carefully kept, hence only fragmentary information can be provided about the size and extent of these expeditions. In 1820, 540 buffalo carts took part, and in 1830, 820 were listed. In 1840, 1630 people were involved and 1210 carts were used to haul the finished product home. From 1821 through 1840 a total of more than 650,000 buffalo were killed. The 1840 hunt represented the peak of activity, although in 1847 some 1200 carts were still reported. But the following year only 603 were used, and by 1850 the figure was 500. After 1844 and up to 1858 buffalo hides entered the picture commercially and many of the animals were killed for their hides alone. After 1847 no large herds were left in Canada, and commercial hunting was virtually over. In earlier years pemmican was bartered or bargained for on an open market. By 1840 the Hudson's Bay Company had established the price at two pence a pound. From the sale, even at this price, hunters received as much or more of a 38Yearbook of The AssociationVol. 17 financial return than the farmers of the area received for the produce of their season's work in the fields. By the late 1840's the product was becoming so scarce that the price had gone up to one shilling three pence a pound. The fur empire of the far northwest had been based upon a cheap as well as versatile provision. This latter price was prohibitive, and as a reflection of a vital scarcity, it marked the twilight of the fur baron's domain. The passing of pemmican, *t must be concluded , more than any other factor, brought an end to the older order of fur empire that had reigned so supreme in the Canadian Northwest during the first half of the nineteenth century. Literature Consulted Robert Michael Ballantyne, Hudson Bay, T. Nelson and Sons, London, 1897, p. York, 1929. Chap. IV. Harold E. Briggs, Frontiers of the Northwest, D. Appleton-Century Co., New York, 1940. Pt. II. The Frontier of the Buffalo. George Bryce, Lord Selkirk's Colonists, Barse & Hopkins, New York, 191 1 . Ch. XXI. Lawrence J. Burpee, On the Old Athabaska Trail, Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1926, pp. 226-7. Bleasdell Cameron, "The Romance of Pemmican," Scientific American Supplement, Vol. 53, No. 1380, June 14, 1902. Marjorie Wilkins Compbell, The Saskatchewan, Rivers of America Series, Rinehart and Co., New York, 1950. pp. 79-80. Hiram Martin Chittenden, The American IFur Trade, Barnes and Noble, Inc., New York, 1935, Vol. 11, p. 802. Isaac Cowie, The Company of Adventurers, William Briggs, Toronto, 1 91 3, Ch. Vl. Bernard De Voto, The Course of Empire, Houghton-Mifflin Co., Boston, 1592, p. 301. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1936 pp. 238-9 and 304-6. Douglas MacKay, The Honourable Company, Bobbs-Merrill Co., New York, 1936, Ch. IX. Frederick Merk, Fur Trade and Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1 931 . John Perry Pritchett, The Red River alley, 1811-1849, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1942. H. M. Robinson, The Great Fur Land, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1882. Frank Gilbert Roe, The North American Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1951, G. O. Shields, The Big Game of North America, Rand McNaIIy and Co., Chicago 1890. George F. G. Stanley, The Birth of Western Canada, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1936, pp. 12-13. ...