WHOLESOME FOODS.
Men are governed, or prejudiced very much for, or against, things by
appearances or names. And this I find holds even with practical men
as are hunters, traders and trappers, men who as a rule reason much,
and are endowed with considerable common sense.
There are many food meats that the woods furnish that are tabooed
from the hunter's bill of fare simply by the name of the animal that
furnishes it. The skin is taken but the flesh is cast away, and this
for no other reason but the name the beast is generally known under.
Take, for instance, the water rat, musquash, or the more generally
used name of musk rat. Here we have certainly nothing against it but
the name. Because did we of the fraternity of hunters pause to
consider, and reason, we must see that a musquash ought not, and
cannot be different from a beaver. They are identically the same in
every detail except the formation of the tail. They live on the same
food, roots, grasses, and twigs, as the beaver does and to the eye
they are (barring the tail) a small beaver in miniature.
Musquash, like all animals in cold countries, are at their best
condition in the autumn. Let my hunter friend take one of the above
despised animals, select a nice mixed flesh and fat one, clean it as
you would a beaver, split it up the front, impale it on a sharp
pointed stick, introduce the point near the root of the tail, and
bring it up to the inside of the head. Plant your screwer in front of
your camp fire, giving it an occasional twist, while getting your tea
and other things ready. When done stand it back from the excessive
heat for a short while to cool and harden. Fill your pannican of tea,
spread out your biscuits, cut off a quarter section of your roast
suckling, and fall to, and a hundred to one you never ate anything
more delicious. I know prejudice has to be gotten over, "I have been
there myself."
I starved once for a day and a night, did hard paddling and portaging
all day and went supperless at night, simply because I could not get
over the idea of "rat." We had about a dozen with us, and my Indian
companion roasted a couple each meal and demolished both himself with
satisfaction and relish; for myself the thought of the name was
enough.
Take again the Canadian lynx. Were this name always adhered to, there
would be less room for prejudice, but unfortunately it is more
frequently called cat. I admit it has all the appearances and manners
of the cat, but let someone, unknown to you, fry some fat cutlets
from the ham of a lynx, and fifty to one you will relish it as very
fine veal and you cannot be convinced to the contrary. There again is
the porcupine, I think sometimes known as the hedgehog. When they are
in good condition, nicer or more juicy meat a hunter cannot put his
teeth into. When properly prepared and properly cooked, the white
mans "rarebit", the suckling pig, cannot prove its points.
The arctic or snow owl is a bird that gives as fine a flavored flesh,
and the same in color and appearance as a fat capon. But where one is
set against it, is when served up in Indian fashion, boiled whole, it
has then the appearance of a young baby, and one would almost have to
be a professional cannibal to tackle the object. The thick, plump
thighs, the round bald head, makes the appearance to a young infant
almost startling. However, if one closes his mental eyes to this
similitude, the flesh is most toothsome.
I come now to another that occurs to me as being much despised, that
is the festive and highly perfumed skunk. We look on a skunk, be it
man or beast, as the meanest kind of thing, but I assure you the
skunk (the four footed one) is not to be despised or cast aside when
one is hungry or desires a change from the everlasting bacon and
biscuit. A skunk, shot and prepared with care, makes very good
eating.
Two of the animals of our forest I never could stomach and very few
Indians eat them, be they ever so much pushed for food, and these
are: the otter and mink. Their flesh is oily, black and highly
flavored, resembling the meat of seal, only more so! The Indians as a
rule look down with contempt on a fellow Indian who eats otter or
mink, whether from necessity or from an acquired and perverse taste.
I venture to opine my little sketch will set many of my hunter
friends thinking and perhaps make a few converts. You won't repent
it.
* * *
Forty years ago, before the country was opened up to civilization and
the usual provisions of the white man were imported into the wilds,
the great staple foods of the territories, from the Labrador Atlantic
seaboard to the Pacific, consisted of buffalo, caribou, white fish
and rabbits. According to the parts of the country where these
animals resorted, the Indians, traders and trappers, lived almost
exclusively on their flesh, either in the fresh, dried or pemican
state.
All foods, not imported, went under the name of country produce, and
as flour is the staff of life to the white man, so was buffalo,
caribou, rabbit or white fish to the dwellers of the north country.
Beaver, partridge, porcupine and other small prey, a kind of entree,
or side dish, got only at odd times, and not to be depended on for
regular three times a day diet.
The quantity of any one of these four foods required to sustain, even
a family of six, during a long northern winter, was something to make
a layman incredulous.
The Indians living about the plains of the lower Saskatchewan and
foothills of the Rockies not only lived on the buffalo, but made up
immense quantities of pemican, which was parched in summer skin bags,
weighing about sixty pounds each, and traded for ammunition, cloth,
beads, hatchets, etc., at the forts.
From these bases of supply the bags of meat were sent to posts
farther north, and used for tripping and feeding the men about the
post. Large quantities were floated down each spring from Fort Ellis,
Qu Appelli and other plain forts, by the Assiniboine to Fort Garry
and from there in larger boats to Norway House, on Lake Winnipeg,
which in those days was the receiving and distributing factory for
all the country north and east, and had the distinction of being the
place of council each year.
The people inhabiting the country embraced by the Mackenzie River,
Great Bear Lake, and the coast of Lake Winnipeg, subsisted almost
entirely on white fish. These were killed in great numbers each
spawning season, not only for their own food, but for their team dogs
as well, the posts putting past from ten to one hundred thousand,
according to the importance of the place and the mouths to feed.
The fish were hung in number on skewers as taken from the water, the
sharpened stake being run through the fish near the tail.
The string of ten fish on a skewer was called a "percer," and was
hung head down from long horizontal poles, as high as a man could
reach, and the length of these traverses would accommodate one
hundred "percers." The great stock of fish was surrounded by a high
picket stockade open to the weather, with one entrance, which was
kept strictly under lock and key, and opened each evening by the
post-master, i. e., steward, who gave out the requirements for the
next twenty-four hours' consumption.
The expenditure was kept posted up each night, showing for what use
the fish had been given out, under the following headings:
Mess Account.
Men's Rations.
Indians visiting the post.
Dog Rations.
Thus, at any time, the factor could tell the exact number of fish
consumed and number yet on hand.
Many of the posts would have an expenditure of a thousand fish a week
for all purposes, which would be about thirty thousand for the
winter.
In the country lying south of Lake Winnipeg to Lake of the Woods and
east as far as the Ottawa River, the staple food was the harmless
little rabbit. It is a dispensation of Providence that the rabbit is
a prolific animal, for they are the life not only of the people, but
of martens, lynx, foxes, ermine, owls, hawks and ravens.
An ordinary family of Indians, living on plain boiled or roasted
rabbits, require about twenty a day, and even that keeps their
vitality a very little above zero. There is no doubt but what the
food a man eats makes or lowers his valor and endurance.
No one ever heard of the fish or rabbit-eating Indians going on the
war-path, while, on the other hand, the buffalo eaters were fearless
men both as horsemen and fighters.
The Labrador Peninsula, bounded by the Saguenay river on the west,
Hudson's Bay and Straits on the north, the Atlantic seaboard on the
east, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the south, a country as large
as England, France and Austria combined, is the home of the Caribou
or wood deer, who migrate north and south in countless herds spring
and autumn, and are followed by bands of roaming Indians continually
preying on them.
As in the case of the pemican, these Nascapies, Montagnais, and Cree
Indians bring into the posts dried meats, marrow fat and tongues to
barter, and on this the post dwellers live.
With the Indians of the present day armed with modern rifles, and the
great depletion in the calf-crop made by the marauding of wolves, the
day cannot be far off that the caribou will be of the past as the
buffalo is.
In their migrations north and south, at certain places well known to
the natives, the deer have to cross rivers. Taking the crossings the
mob of deer would compact itself so much that the traverse would be
black with their bodies.
The Indians who had been waiting for some days the passing of the
herd, would attack them from up and down the river in their canoes,
shooting them with arrows, spearing and axing the poor frightened
brutes in the water till the lower waters were covered with floating
carcasses.
Much meat and many skins were spoiled for the want of quick
attention. After the battle the Indians gorged themselves to such a
state of repletion, that it rendered them unfit for exertion, but a
just God frequently punished them during the bitter weather of the
following winter by starvation, and whole families succumbed for want
of the very food they so wantonly wasted in the autumn.
The Hudson's Bay Company had a post years ago on Lake Mis-a-ka-ma
right on the tableland between Ungava bay and the Canadian Labrador
coast, for the trading of deer skins, both dressed and in the
parchment state. One year the skins were in such numbers that the
boats of the brigade could not carry the whole to the coast, and
bales of them had to be wintered over to the next year.
The Labrador has been for many years the base of supplies for fish
and rabbit districts, where the natives have no deer to make
moccasins, mitts and shirts, and the parchment for their snowshoe
knitting.
These deer skins take a round about route to reach their destination,
being in the first place shipped from Ungava, or Nigolette, to
London, and after passing the winter in London, are reshipped to
Montreal, via the St. Lawrence, and from that depot sent with the new
outfit to posts that have requisitioned them the previous year.
One would think with the introduction of flour, pork and other
imported provisions that the slaughter would be a thing of the past,
but the killing goes on as before, and now only the skin is taken,
the meat remaining to rot.