The Extermination of the American BisonHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
History
The Extermination of the American Bison
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
American bison; Wildlife conservation -- United States -- Sources
"Other portions which are destined to be made into pimikehigan, or
pemmican, are exposed to an ardent heat, and thus become brittle and
easily reducible to small particles by the use of a flail, the
buffalo-hide answering the purpose of a threshing-floor. The fat or
tallow, being cut up and melted in large kettles of sheet iron, is
poured upon this pounded meat, and the whole mass is worked together
with shovels until it is well amalgamated, when it is pressed, while
still warm, into bags made of buffalo skin, which are strongly sewed up,
and the mixture gradually cools and becomes almost as hard as a rock. If
the fat used in this process is that taken from the parts containing the
udder, the meat is called fine pemmican. In some cases, dried fruits,
such as the prairie pear and cherry, are intermixed, which forms what is
called seed pemmican. Tho lovers of good eating judge the first
described to be very palatable; the second, better; the third,
excellent. A taurean of pemmican weighs from 100 to 110 pounds. Some
idea may be formed of the immense destruction of buffalo by these people
when it is stated that a whole cow yields one-half a bag of pemmican and
three fourths of a bundle of dried meat; so that the most economical
calculate that from eight to ten cows are required for the load of a
single vehicle."
It is quite evident from the testimony of disinterested travelers that
ordinary pemmican was not very palatable to one unaccustomed to it as a
regular article of food. To the natives, however, especially the
Canadian _voyageur_, it formed one of the most valuable food products of
the country, and it is said that the demand for it was generally greater
than the supply.
_Dried, or "jerked" meat._--The most popular and universal method of
curing buffalo meat was to cut it into thin flakes, an inch or less in
thickness and of indefinite length, and without salting it in the least
to hang it over poles, ropes, wicker-frames, or even clumps of standing
sage brush, and let it dry in the sun. This process yielded the famous
"jerked" meat so common throughout the West in the early days, from the
Rio Grande to the Saskatchewan. Father Belcourt thus described the
curing process as it was practiced by the half-breeds and Indians of the
Northwest:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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