Frontier Cooking: Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men

Earliest to explore the Rocky Mountains were the trappers, traders, and mountain men of the French trading companies, the Indian forts, and the U.S. Army; their presence began as early as 1803, and they were well established west of the Rockies by 1820. Shaggy, recondite men, clad in buckskin and isolated for months at a time, these “old mountain hands” had long abandoned the ways of civilization, bringing along only the barest of implements—matches, a butcher knife for quartering buffalo, a small knife for sharpening roasting sticks, a skin hat used to wear or to melt snow, and a pouch of beaver castor that, when mixed with spicebush roots, could be used as elixir, tea, or medicine. Outfitted with tobacco, well-greased leather clothes, and an occasional tin pot, if they were lucky, they had salt and little else by way of supplies.