Pioneer Foods We’ll Be Eating A Lot After SHTF- If Society Collapses, You Can Bet That The Foods The Pioneers Ate Will Become Dietary Staples

Once upon a time, heading on down to the grocery store to fill the pantry whenever you needed to was not an option. Pioneers who traveled west in pursuit of religious freedom and a better life in the early days of U.S. settlement aimed to settle in areas where chances to buy supplies were few and far between.

What did the early pioneers eat to survive in the Old West?

Most of the women who emigrated west were competent in cooking and in making do. They seem to have been excellent managers under very trying conditions, even if they had no trouble with the Indians. The need to feed one’s family as a pioneer really came in several phases: Getting there; wintering over, and getting established.

One of these pioneer women was Rebecca Ridgley who traveled with her husband Joshua from Wisconsin to Nevada in 1864. She was described as “an ideal helpmate for a westward bound pioneer.” Rebecca seems to have been a remarkably good cook, and according to Albert Dickson, a 13-year-old bound-boy traveling with the group, they “ate well.” She took along on the trip “dried apples and peaches, cereals, dried pumpkins and sweet corn, beans, some root vegetables (including onions with which one could work wonders in the limited diet), a year’s supply of bacon and lard, [and] enough flour to last until the next year’s wheat crop could be harvested and ground.”

Ridgley also packed bags of seed and cuttings for planting, a number of window sashes, and an iron cook stove, all things that were difficult to find on the frontier. Rebecca packed her glass canning jars and preserves in the barrels of flour where the temperature was uniform and the jars protected from breaking. When the wagons stopped for a layover or to rest the livestock, Rebecca put-up jams and jellies made from local chokeberries, currants, gooseberries, and wild plums. The Ridgley party expected to buy potatoes at the stepping-off place on the trail, but the wagon train ahead of them had bought up the entire supply. Joshua was able to trade 50 pounds of flour for an equal quantity of potatoes from a group he passed on the prairie.[i]

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The Ridgley’s were among the first families to settle in the Galantine Valley of western Montana Territory, and it was six months before their family in Wisconsin knew they had arrived safely. With a crude cabin built of logs and a field cleared for planting, Joshua and Rebecca immediately realized a need to irrigate their crops, and they joined with thirteen other families to dig a great ditch for the purpose of tapping a local creek for irrigation. Their first crops of rutabagas, cabbages, and potatoes were loaded on two wagons and headed for the goldfields near Helena (90 miles away) where they brought 28 cents a pound in gold and twice that in greenbacks in 1865.

Another young woman remembered for her written accounts of life on the Oregon Trail was Amelia Stewart Knight. Her diary remains a rich source of information about the hazards and hardships of the journey, which began in 1853 in Monroe County, Iowa, with her husband and seven children. She wrote about her fear of Indians, lightning strikes on the plains, and poisonous alkali water. In 1857, Helen Carpenter described the endless chores women encountered on the Oregon Trail. She wrote of the monotony and struggles that ruled her journey west, and commented on the lack of variety in her family’s diet, penning that the only change was from bread and bacon to bacon and bread.

For most families, the 160-acre section offered under the Homestead Act of 1862 was more than enough land to farm. There was a rule-of-thumb behind the 160 acre section: one quarter section of forty acres under production for a cash crop using 2 horses or mules, forty acres for livestock pasture, forty for a woodlot, and forty for a house, barn, chickens, pigs, and kitchen garden to feed the family. A pioneer arriving on his homestead might immediately put in a crop of corn or wheat by striking slits in the virgin earth with an axe and dropping in the seed — a strategy meant to stave off hunger in the next season. A single man might put virgin land into production at only a few acres per year. A farmer walking behind a plow could turn about two acres of prairie a day.

One of the most difficult farming jobs was breaking the sod for the first time. It has been estimated that sustained subsistence farming required at least twenty acres of cleared land, equally subdivided into three components: grain tillage, hay fields, and pastures. At a rate of four acres of forest cleared per year, twenty acres was five years of work for one man. Many farmers joined with their neighbors to clear land or attempted shortcuts like planting among the stumps of felled trees. In his American Notes (1842) author Charles Dickens wrote: “The eye was pained to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat … It was quite sad and oppressive, to come upon great tracts where settlers had been burning down the trees, and where their wounded bodies lay about, like those of murdered creatures, while here and there some charred and blackened giant reared aloft two withered arms, and seemed to call down curses on his foes.”

Once established, a pioneer could take down a month’s meat with a single bullet, but it was more like that the pioneering family would raise their own stock of common farm animals and poultry. Most went from subsistence farming in the Mid-West or East to essentially the same form of agriculture in their new place of residence. Almost all farm families involved in agriculture worked their own land and planned their lives around rural activities and seasonal chores. They raised a variety of eatable crops including several types of grain, vegetables, and fruits. Chickens and hogs provided meat and eggs, but the consumption of beef and mutton was unusual and sporadic. In the period before refrigeration, the meat of cattle and sheep did not preserve as well as pork. Moreover, sheep were raised for their wool, and beef was not a significant part of the American diet until after the Civil War. Up until then cattle were used for milk, butter, hides, and for drafting. Only very aged animals or redundant male calves might be sent to slaughter for cash.

Although there were variations in both the scope and methods of farming — most notably the large-scale, nearly industrialized bonanza wheat farms of the Red River Valley, the irrigated farms around Salt Lake City, or the giant fief-like plantations of the South — most antebellum farms were small, labor-intensive operations in which men, women, and children struggled against nature to eke out a marginal existence in all parts of the nation.

The western regions were vast, but they were not devoid of white contact or of commerce. Francis Parkman, recording his observations along the Arkansas River in 1845, noted, “When we had stopped to rest at noon, a long train of Santa Fe wagons came up and trailed slowly past us in their picturesque procession.” The emigrant trains on the Oregon Trail followed the same road along the Platte River that was used by the Overland Stage Lines. Fast coaches that moved between stations and forts at the gallop for only 10 to 15 miles often overtook slow-moving emigrant wagons.

There were a number of purpose-written guidebooks to the West containing an array of information that migrants consulted before and during their Overland journeys. Parkman’s own book was initially published in 1849 as The California and Oregon Trail, a misleading title because Parkman had ventured nowhere near California. He keenly regretted this “publisher’s trick” of mentioning California as a stimulus to better sales. Other books of this genre bore such names as A Journey to California (1841), the Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California (1845), and The Gold Regions of California (1845). One of the best was The Prairie Traveler, A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions (1859) by Captain Randolph B. Marcy.

These guidebooks described what supplies to take — including clothing, furniture, animals, firearms, and food — what routes were the most direct, and where to stop along the way. “The necessary outfit of supplies can always be procured at any of the starting-points on the Missouri River at moderate rates,” wrote Marcy, “The allowance of provisions for men in marching should be much greater than when they take no exercise.” (See below)

Typically authored by a single individual — who may or may not have actually traveled the routes being described — hundreds of guidebooks were published, some only a few pages in length. Inaccuracies were numerous especially concerning the maps the guidebooks contained, and the amount of supplies needed to successfully complete the journey. Some emigrants, relying on a guidebook, found that they were overstocked with arms and ammunition but ran out of food before reaching their destination.

One route, pioneered by the Mormons and used by others, entered Salt Lake and made a side connection with the California Trail. It was appropriately called the Mormon Trail. There was also a number of other short-cuts proposed by various wagon guides, but some of these like Meck’s or Hasting’s proved dangerous or even deadly. It was on Hasting’s short-cut that the Donner party became stranded and was forced to resort to cannibalism to survive; while Meck’s short-cut proved hundreds of miles longer than staying on the original trail. The main artery to the southwest was the Santa Fe Trail, which split after entering the mountains into the Gila Trail and the Old Spanish Trail.

“Supplies for a march should be put up in the most secure, compact and portable shape.

“Bacon should be packed in strong sacks of a hundred pounds each; or, in very hot climates, put in boxes and surrounded with bran, which in a great measure prevents the fat from melting away.

“If pork be used, in order to avoid transporting about forty per cent. of useless weight, it should be taken out of the barrels and packed like the bacon; then so placed in the bottom of the wagons as to keep it cool. The pork, if well cured, will keep several months in this way, but bacon is preferable.

“Flour should be packed in stout double canvas sacks well sewed, a hundred pounds in each sack.

“Butter may be preserved by boiling it thoroughly, and skimming off the scum as it raises to the top until it is quite clear like oil. It is then placed in canisters and soldered up. This mode of preserving butter has been adopted in the hot climate of southern Texas, and it found to keep sweet for a great length of time, and its flavor is but little impaired by the process.

“Sugar may be well secured in India-rubber or gutta-percha sacks, or so placed in the wagon as not to risk getting wet.

“Desiccated or dried vegetables are almost equal to the fresh, and are put up in such a compact and portable form as easily to be transported over the plains. They have been extensively used in the Crimean war, and by our own army in Utah, and have been very generally approved. They are prepared by cutting the fresh vegetables into thin slices and subjecting them to a very powerful press, which removes the juice and leaves a solid cake, which, after having been thoroughly dried in an oven, becomes almost as hard as a rock. A small piece of this, about half the size of a man’s hand, when boiled, swells up so as to fill a vegetable dish, and is sufficient for four men. It is believed that the antiscorbutic properties of vegetables are not impaired by the desiccation, and they will keep for years if not exposed to dampness. Canned vegetables are very good for campaigning, but are not so portable as when put up in the other form. The desiccated vegetables used in our army have been prepared by Chollet and Co., 46 Rue Richer, Paris. There is an agency for them in New York. I regard these compressed vegetables as the best preparation for prairie traveling that has yet been discovered. A single ration weighs, before being boiled, only an ounce, and a cubic yard contains 16,000 rations.

“In making up their outfit for the plains, men are very prone to overload their teams with a great variety of useless articles. It is a good rule to carry nothing more than is absolutely necessary for use upon the journey. One cannot expect, with the limited allowance of transportation that emigrants usually have, to indulge in luxuries upon such expeditions, and articles for use in California can be purchased there at less cost than that of overland transport.”