The importance of survival skills in colonial America

The United States started as a single British colony called Jamestown, a tiny settlement founded in 1607 along the banks of the James River in what is now known as Virginia. In the beginning, the population of this new colony was entirely English, with Irish and Welsh settlers moving over in the following years. It didn’t take long for Europe to flood its people into this new land to explore it for riches and start new lives, but because the native Americans lived very differently than the Europeans, it made it exceptionally difficult to travel across. The natives didn’t build cities, wells, or roads like the Europeans were used to, and this led to a complete lack of support or set places to get fresh supplies from while out exploring, forcing people who wanted to explore this new land to become very capable when it came to survival skills. One of the jobs people wouldn’t usually associate with survival skills is that of a gold prospector, the person tasked with finding large deposits of gold to later come back and mine.

The risks of being a Gold Prospector

When people first arrived on the continent they quickly found out that the native population had no need for gold, and simply left it where it was. Huge nuggets were found lying on the surface and the most obvious veins were quickly mined dry, but the huge and sudden rush of gold appearing caused thousands of people to try their luck at finding some. All the land around the settlements was owned, so if you wanted to get rich by finding gold that no one already had mineral rights to, this meant going out into the wilderness to find some.

Prospectors would sometimes spend months hiking around the wilderness to find that special high-yielding gold deposit, but when no one knows where you are and wouldn’t come looking for you anyway, any kind of serious injury is basically a death sentence. All food would have to be taken along from the start but because most of the journey would take place around hills and mountains, this meant carrying it all by foot leading to a very limited carry capacity. It wouldn’t take long before a prospector would have to rely on hunting and gathering, with something as small as a rifle malfunction soon turning into starvation.

There are a number of jobs where people would be left out in the wilderness for weeks or even months at a time. These people had to know exactly how to survive in the wild, or they simply didn’t survive, some of these jobs included cattle handlers, people finding routes to build roads, long-distance messengers, traders, and anyone who needed to travel in an area there wasn’t any kind of settlement. The biggest factor in how they survived would be their food, but with such a limited carry capacity the food they took had to be the best it could be. The two foods that stood out as survival food in the colonial era were hardtack and pemmican.

Hardtack

A favorite survival food of anyone since the Dark Ages, Hardtack is just a small square of bread that has been baked several times to remove every single drop of moisture. The reason it’s been so popular over the ages is that it stays safe to eat for years, and as long as it doesn’t get wet and is kept away from the air, it will last for a journey of any length. It had to have water or milk dripped on it before it became chewable, but was more often smashed into a powder and used as a thickener for liquid dishes.

Pemmican

Considered by many to be the ultimate survival food, Pemmican also happened to be the most traded product with the native Americans who made huge batches of it. Pemmican is made by drying strips of bison meat in the sun before grinding them into a powder, the meat is then mixed with rendered fat at a 50/50 ratio and formed into bars to cool down. As long as it’s kept away from the air it will stay good to eat for years, which is very rare for any kind of meat product.

Apart from this, there would be many other foods appearing in the diet of a colonial traveler, a few of the most common are listed below:

Stock fish
Fish that has been dried in the sun for several weeks to remove all the moisture. Lasts for a very long time but has to be soaked for at least several hours before it can be eaten.

Beef and Jerky
The thin strips of dried beef known as jerky were very popular across the continent as travel food, but for the cattle herders, it became boring really quickly. A cow or two would be designated to be slaughtered on the herding, which could last for months at a time to fatten up the cows. Beef would be the most commonly available food source for the handlers and surviving documents from cattle handlers of the 1800s frequently report how beef was served as every single meal, which may sound good at first but gets old real fast.

Ketchup and spices

Up until the mid to late 1800s, people in America thought that tomatoes were poisonous since they believed them to be from the same plant family as the deadly nightshade. This led to the early versions of ketchup being made from other things, mostly mushrooms. Spices were limited but the most common ones were usually available like mustard, pepper, and the most common garden herbs, but one thing that was produced in large amounts and seems to be featured in most 18th-century recipes is nutmeg. Here’s a video from a colonial cooking channel that shows how to make the best mushroom ketchup there is.

Other than what food to take, people traveling across the wilderness would also have to know how to find water, which plants were safe to eat, how to track and hunt animals, and a whole range of other things their lives might rely on. In an age where antibiotics don’t exist and the locals are out to kill you, it’s no wonder the old West had such a reputation for people dying young.