Stephen Rinella (111:28)
His imagination like the Rocky Mountain West. And no figure fascinated him more than the American mountain man. At one point in his travels, Ruxton watched as two trappers sat on a dirty saddle blanket with a long coil of boudin between them. Now, if you've traveled much in Louisiana, you might have encountered boudin, a type of sausage built on a base of hog liver and rice. But mountain man boudin was different. They would take the intestine of a buffalo and invert it. Ruxton notes that it would often be partially cleaned, but that this step is, quote, not thought indispensable. They then fill it with diced buffalo meat, liver, kidneys, whatever, and brown it over the ember of the fire like a crude sausage. So these two trappers are sitting across from each other on a filthy saddle blanket. Between them, quote, like the coil of a huge snake, Ruxton writes, sits one of these Boudin's and they are eating it from opposite ends so that, quote, the serpent on the saddle cloth was dwindling from an anaconda to a moderate sized rattlesnake. The two guys start hurrying to try to eat more of the boudin than the other before they run out of intestine. Such were the culinary exploits of the mountain men. For them, food was more than just sustenance. It was a source of pleasure, a badge of honor and a currency of camaraderie in a world where survival often hinged on the strength of one's stomach. But as one historian observed, the mountain man would often spend one month luxuriating in the wealth of buffalo meat and the next reduced to the very brink of starvation. They got wild fruits when and where they could. Wild plums and service berries were favorites of western travelers. But they lived a mostly carnivorous existence. They had a saying, meat's meat, which demonstrates a certain gastronomic open mindedness. The fact that it's meat matters more than what kind of meat it is. But that doesn't mean they didn't appreciate the idiosyncratic qualities of each. Rufus Sage, an American journalist who traveled west to document the culture of the mountain men, shared a sentiment of the era on the qualities of prairie dogs. Quote the flesh of these animals is tender and quite palatable, and their oil is superior in fineness and absence from all grosser ingredients. As we know, the mountain men were living year round in the wilderness. They're staying mobile, enabling them to move from stream to stream in search of fresh beaver sign and they're limited in what they can carry with them in terms of supplies. So the difference between life and death was what sort of food they could pull from the land around them. Hunting, of course, offered the most practical solution to this challenge. And the mountain men were legendary for their ability to put away vast quantities of the meat they killed. William H. Ashley, who you'll remember was one of the partners behind the expedition that led to the creation of the rendezvous system in the first place, claimed that, quote, nothing is actually necessary for the support of men in the wilderness than a plentiful supply of good fresh meat. It is all that our mountaineers ever require or even seem to wish. Ashley drove the point home with additional clarity. Quote the circumstance of the uninterrupted health of these people who generally eat unreasonable quantities of meat at their meals, proves it to be the most wholesome and best adapted food to the constitution of man. In the different concerns which I have had in the Indian country, where not less than 100 men have been annually employed for the last four years and subsist altogether upon meat. I have not known at any time a single instance of bilious fever among them. That means a fever with nausea and vomiting like the flu or any other disease prevalent in the settled parts of our country, except a few instances and but very few of slight fevers produced by colds or rheumatic affections contracted while in the discharge of guard duty on cold and inclement nights. Of course, Ashley's observation about a lack of infectious disease is likely attributed as much to a lack of outside contact as it was to diet. The mountain men lived in quarantine bubbles, to borrow a phrase from the COVID 19 pandemic. But it wasn't just these white trappers who believed in the supremacy of living off wild game. The Plains tribes had long recognized the power of eating meat and even looked down upon tribes who practiced agriculture or relied on white man's food. Again and again in the historic record, you find accounts from white Easterners coming to the west and experiencing a new vitality when adopting the strict diet of wild meat that supported Native American nomadic hunters. A few decades after the close of the mountain men era, when sickly malnourished veterans of the Civil War were coming west to try to expel Indians from their buffalo hunting grounds, they encountered in their enemies a level of strength and physical endurance that they could overcome only through advanced firepower and superior numbers. One on one, a white soldier fed on beans and salt pork and hardened bread riddled with larvae, was little match for a native combatant raised on buffalo meat. In Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, which is, in my opinion, the best thing that ever has been or likely ever will be, written about General Custer's humiliating defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the author describes a Unk papa Sioux warrior named Gaul who played a central role in that fight. Gaul happened to have his portrait taken. In the infancy of photography, Connell writes, quote, gaul was a man of such explosive strength that that he fairly cracks the photographer's glass. Every plate reveals a liter of prodigious psychic and physical energy. Full length photos make him look squat, with short, bent legs and a torso the size of a beer keg. Twelve years after the great fight, he stepped on a scale. He weighed 260 pounds at the little Bighorn. With white stripes painted on his arms and a hatchet in one thick hand and the fullness of manhood. He must have galloped through Custer's desperate troopers like a wolf through a flock of sheep. How's that for a buffalo meat testimonial? And when it came to the preferences of the mountain men, buffalo was top choice. With their woolly hides, massive hump and sharply curved horns, these creatures roamed the Great Plains and intermountain valleys of the Rockies in herds numbering in the thousands. At the beginning of the mountain man era, the total population was perhaps as high as 30 million. The animals were seemingly everywhere in mountain man country, so much so that their absence rather than presence would be noted in journals. Unless, of course, they were too present. Then you'll encounter mentions of an annoying abundance. One traveler wrote, quote, during our progress, we were obliged to keep men in advance to affrighten the buffaloes in our path. That day, the author mentioned his party killed 110 buffalo, saving only the tongues and hump ribs. I could fill this whole chapter with nothing but accounts of people trying to describe the immensity of the herds, and I wouldn't be able to fit them all in. Here's just one about a herd of unfathomable size trying to cross a river. There was, quote, such a dense and continuous column that it formed a temporary dam, causing the current to, quote, rise and rush over their backs. The roaring and rushing sound of one of these vast herds crossing a river may sometimes, in a still night, be heard for miles. In my own book about the animals, American buffalo in search of a lost icon, I describe the immensities through witness accounts of mass buffalo drownings that occurred as a result of these chaotic river crossings. In May 1795, a man counted 7, 630 that drowned en masse in Saskatchewan. In 1829, another man in Saskatchewan counted 10,000 dead in the river. In the early 1830s, a traveler along the missouri river found Multiple slews holding 1800 or more drowned carcasses. Another traveler watched thousands of carcasses drift by in a river in a continuous line where the stench was so bad he couldn't eat dinner. The Indians he traveled with told him every spring was about the same. Given the sheer abundance of these animals at the time, there aren't a lot of mountain man stories about wild and daring buffalo hunts. For the most part, they rode up on them or did a short downwind sneak on them and shot them through the lungs with a rifle slug. There just wasn't much to it. Hunting buffalo was often more of a grocery run than anything else. The mountain men butchered buffalo in what was known as the Indian manner, which wasn't terribly dissimilar to what's known as the gutless method among big game hunters today. Positioning the animal on its belly with the knees folded and legs propped out on either side. To hold the body upright, they'd cock the neck around sideways so it looked like the animal was watching its back trail. This stabilized the animal from rolling in that direction. You could wedge a rock or an old buffalo skull opposite the head to prop it up on the other side. It's hard to generalize about what the mountain men would and wouldn't use from a buffalo carcass once they got started, because it depended a little bit on personal taste and depended a lot on how hard up for food they were. They got Picky when resources were abundant. One observer described how men were rendered dainty by profusion and would cook only the choicest pieces. So in relatively normal times, when a buffalo was meant to provide a night's meal for a small band of trappers who weren't worried about what they'd eat tomorrow, here's what might happen. They'd open up the animal's hide with a cut along the spine. Then they'd peel the hide back on either side, exposing the back straps and also a sometimes 2 inch thick layer of fat along each side of the hump that they would call the depui. This layer of fat was a favorite cut of the mountain men and native people alike. Beneath the fat were the hump ribs, the protrusions of muscle on either side of a buffalo's spine just behind its head. Removing the hump ribs required the use of a hatchet or tomahawk. The Cheyenne warrior Wooden Leg described using a buffalo's legs as a mallet to bust off the hump ribs. And he pointed out that the hump ribs were the only bones he'd typically remove from the kill site. Same with the mountain men, who'd often satisfy themselves with just this cut alone, plus maybe the tongue removed through the triangle of soft hide underneath the animal's lower jaw. If more meat was needed, or if buffalo were scarce, they would debone the front and rear quarters as well and bundle it all up, maybe 20 large pieces or so inside folded sacks made from the buffalo's hide. Depending on mood and taste and need, they might also remove the fleece, a word for additional layers of fat found beneath the hide. They'd take the femurs and shin bones to be roasted in coals before smacking them open with a rock or hatchet to get out the marrow. They'd crack the skull open with a hatchet and eat the brains raw. They'd drink the blood. They might mimic the Plains tribes and drink the mother's milk from ripened mammary. They'd squeeze the contents of the gall bladder over the liver and eat it raw as well. Sometimes they just drank the gall straight, as one account suggests. Quote, a man could get quite a glow if he took it straight on an empty stomach. The mountain men did not travel with an assortment of cast iron pots and pans and wire grates, which would have been too heavy and cumbersome. Instead, they had a minimalist kit. They demonstrated a fondness for spit, roasting meat, often skewering great hunks of buffalo on a green stick and slow, cooking it over the glowing embers of a campfire. Out on the prairie, where firewood was hard to find, buffalo dung served as a substitute. A common technique would be to alternate chunks of fat with chunks of lean meat on a sharpened stick, which would then either be held over the fire or pushed into the ground next to it. In other instances, a big hunk of meat would simply be placed in the coals of a fire directly. The mountain man Osborne Russell described a camp keeper rolling out a ponderous mass of bull beef, meaning meat from a male buffalo from a smoldering fire pit and then smacking it with a club to knock the ashes off of it. Each whack with the club made the chunk of meat fly in the air, quote like a huge ball of gum elastic. Once the man dropped his club, the others knew it was time to pull out their knives and dig in. Most accounts suggest that buffalo was typically consumed rare, probably in part because they were too impatient to wait very long for their meals, but also because game meat dries out quickly when overcooked. John Ball wrote of feasting on buffalo meat, quote uncooked or slightly roasted on the coals, taking a bite of the fat part with the lean, eating it like bread and cheese. In another instance, George Ruxton observed several men retreating from the campfire to enjoy solo their half cooked morsels. Trappers also made jerky and pemmican to preserve their harvest against spoilage. To make jerky or jerk, thin strips of meat cut along the grain would be hung on racks of cottonwood branches or willow stems. Sun, wind and a slow fire underneath the racks would dry out these lean strips into a product that kept well in the arid climate of the West. Pemmican would be produced by removing connective tissue from the jerky, which was then pounded into a sawdust like powder using a wooden mortar. The dried powdered meat would then be mixed with melted fat and or bone marrow inside a sewn up bag made from buffalo hide, with the stitching sealed with buffalo fat like seam sealer on your tent. Other times, the meat, dust and fat or melted marrow would be packed into separate sacks or, as was often the case, buffalo bladders, and then mixed together at mealtime. One account mentioned that pemmican was used throughout the country as familiarly as we use bread in the civilized world. Of course, buffalo was rarely the only thing on the mountain man's menu. Elk was probably the second most commonly eaten meat after buffalo. Either that or, depending on the area, bighorn sheep. They ate Mule deer, too, and bears, both black and grizzly, and pronghorn or antelope, mountain lion meat or painter meat was especially prized. There were far, far more bighorn sheep on the landscape back then, before huge numbers of the animals were killed off by a strain of pneumonia introduced to the west by domesticated sheep from Europe. Places that now hold decent herds of elk used to hold tremendous herds of bighorns. Osborne Russell recalled sitting atop a mountain where, quote, an eye could scarcely be cast in any direction, around or above or below, without seeing fat sheep gazing at us with anxious curiosity or lazily feeding among the rocks and scrubby pines. Numerous accounts compare the meat of bighorn or mountain sheep, as they were known to mutton. Frequently stories about killing sheep remark on the difficulty of getting a shot at and recovering these animals. William H. Ashley observed that they were so wild and the country so rugged, we found it impossible to approach them. Likewise, the artist George Catlin observed that bighorn sheep had a tendency to make themselves, quote, secure from their enemies, to whom the sides and slopes of these bluffs, around which they fearlessly bound, are nearly inaccessible. Pursuing these creatures was, quote, attended with great danger, Osborne Russell wrote, especially in the winter season when the rocks and precipices are covered with snow and ice. These efforts were worth the rewards, however. Washington Irving noted that the gourmands of the camp pronounced bighorns to have the flavor of excellent mutton, while another count states that sheep were known as the game par excellence of the Rocky Mountains, which takes precedence in a comestable point of view. George Ruxton declared it to be a choice supply of meat, certainly the best I had eaten in the mountains. One winter, Osborne Russell and some 15 of his fellow mountain men attempted to stay as long as they could at a place they called Mutton Hill, 40 miles southeast of Fort hall in southeast Idaho. There they lived on bighorn sheep until heavy snows drove the trappers out of the area in February. Another time, in 1839, Russell and some other mountain men attempted to overwinter at Fort hall, where they figured they could live off buffalo meat. When they got tired of dried buffalo, instead of going lower to seek milder weather, they actually pushed higher into the mountains, to the head of the south fork of the Snake river, and spent the remainder of the winter killing and eating mountain sheep. While Ruxton preferred bighorn, he was cool with pronghorn as well. The animal, he wrote, affords the hunter a sweet and nutritious meat when that of nearly every other description of game, from the poorness and Scarcity of the grass during the winter is barely eatable. Among those barely eatable critters, according to Ruxton, were elk killed midwinter. Quote the meat of the elk is strong, flavored and more like poor bull than venison. It is only eatable when the animal is fat and in good condition. At other times it is strong, tasted and stringy. The three elk Jedediah Smith killed in mid June of 1828 were probably in great shape as he recorded that, quote, men could be seen in every part of the camp with meat raw and half roasted in their hands, devouring it with the greatest alacrity. Bear meat, both black and grizzly, was well regarded. According to Rufus Sage, bear meat to be tender and good should be boiled at least 10 hours. Sage recounted an episode when a bear was drawn into camp by the smell of fresh buffalo meat. After several of the men shot and wounded it, the bear charged and spooked off their horses while the trappers climbed trees for safety until one managed to kill the bear with a pistol shot to the head. They then butchered their quote, greasy victim and enjoyed a ample feast of bear's liver, heart and kidneys, basted with fat.
