Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/198

178 well known to and highly appreciated by the Indian. Among these were the buffalo's tongue and hump, the elk's nose, the beaver's tail, and the bear's paws. Of the cookery of the squaws it may not be well to give any more particulars than those on a previous page. Doubtless it was and is unappetizing, repulsive, revolting often, especially when the process was watched and the materials in the kettle were known. But wilderness food and wilderness appetites went together; and the kitchen, even a French one, is not for the eye a good provocative for the dining-table.

Readers who are versed in the voluminous and highly interesting literature of the Hudson's Bay Company, the narratives of the Arctic and Northwest voyagers and explorers, the adventures of fur-traders, trappers, etc., know well how an article called “pemmican” appears in them all as a commodity for subsistence and traffic. This highly nutritive, compact, and every way most convenient and serviceable kind of food, for preservation and transportation, might rightfully be patented by the Western and the Northern Indians. It was invented by them, and by them it is most skilfully and scientifically prepared. The flesh of the buffalo, the deer, the bear, or the elk is shredded off by the squaws, dried in the sun to retain its juices (two days of favorable weather are sufficient), pounded fine, and then packed in sacks made of the skins of the legs of the animals, stripped off without being cut lengthwise. The lean meat, without salt, is then covered from the air by pouring the fat upon it. The proportions are forty pounds of fat to fifty of lean; and sometimes, when the articles are at hand, there will be mixed in the compound five pounds of berries and five of maple sugar. This may not make the most palatable of viands, but it is admirably adapted for the uses which enormous quantities of it have served alike for men and their sledge-dogs.