What did cowboys eat?

Having to spend large amounts of time in the wilderness is usually quite uncomfortable, especially when it comes to food. Cowboys and gunslingers of the Wild West would spend months at a time away from civilization herding cattle and hiding from the law, but what would someone eat if they were out in the old Western wilderness for such long periods of time?

Food in the old west during the early to mid-1800s would have been much better than your standard wilderness menu of pretty much anywhere else, with the huge amount of cattle raised in the country playing a big part in their diet.

Beef – fresh and preserved

Salt pork was the usual preservable meat of choice because it had a much longer shelf life than other meats, but with the widespread availability of cattle, beef played a huge part in the diet of a cowboy. Smoked jerky would be the most common way of consuming beef because it lasted longer than fresh and could be boiled into a stew.

Pork

Salted pork was only chosen when beef wasn’t on the menu because it simply wasn’t as nice. The problem with salt pork is that you have to soak it in water for several hours with multiple changes to flush out enough of the salt to make it edible, as eating it directly would make you feel quite ill.

Pemmican

This was the most heavily traded food product with the native American population for many years. It’s simply nothing more than rendered fat mixed with dried meat that’s been ground into a powder and formed into bars. When kept away from the air it can be edible for years and was normally used as a backup food or for especially long journeys.

Biscuits

The word biscuit is the name given to what most people know as hardtack, dense bread baked more than once to remove every drop of moisture. They can be edible for years and provide a long-lasting preservable food, with the only downside being they were so hard people would have to soak them in water or milk before eating them. There are various stories of people who would smash up a piece of hardtack with their rifle stocks to mix into a stew as a thickener.

Beans and potatoes

The two most common vegetables by far in the Old West were potatoes and beans. Potatoes provided a good meal and made the best filler for a stew, and beans could be dried and would be safe to eat for months. One of the favorite recipes of people living in the old West was to rehydrate their beans by mixing them with some molasses and water and leaving them to slow cook on the ashes for several hours.

Syrup and molasses

Both of these products were produced locally and used heavily across the continent. Maple syrup would be available from the northern regions but molasses was a by-product of refining sugar, so any state that had a sugar plantation would be mass-producing molasses. They were most commonly used as flavorings, poured into anything from a pie to a stew, but mostly with beans. The recipe below is the best use of molasses a cowboy could hope for, but finding a chef capable of providing such a meal was an entirely new challenge.

Cornmeal and grain

Corn is easier to mass produce by hand than wheat or barley and also contains a higher sugar content. Corn would be dried and ground into corn meal for making sourdough bread or mixed whole into liquid dishes, it was also the grain of choice for making biscuits.

Dried fruit and nuts

Pecan and almond plantations provided large quantities of nuts that weren’t good enough to sell over in Europe and added to the list of preservable foods available. Apples were the most common fruit around and made up the bulk of a dried fruit supply, but apricots, peaches, cherries, and a range of others would be available depending on the location.

Imported goods

Before the Panama Canal was built, most of the trade between the US and Southeast Asia was done by landing ships on the west coast and moving supplies across land. This meant that the closer to the West Coast you were, the higher the chance of finding goods like rice, coffee, tea, and sometimes exotic spices.

Hunting and fishing

Both of these would be done whenever the opportunity and time would allow. All the people in a cattle herding team would be there to do a job and wouldn’t have time to go on lengthy hunting trips, so whenever camp was made in the evening and a lake or river was close enough, they would try their luck at some fishing. Wild game was quite limited because the cattle would be grazed along the large flat plains and kept away from the mountains or forests where goats and deer could be found. Rabbits, Hares, pigeons and occasionally snakes and possums would be on the menu, but all the food they needed was brought with them from the beginning so hunting was nothing more than meal variation instead of a necessity.

Spices and flavorings

Nutmeg was the most commonly available spice by a long shot and is found in more recipes from the 1700s than any other type of flavoring. Mustard and pepper followed in 2nd and 3rd place, with all the other flavors they had access to only becoming available whenever a trader happened to have some. To make their meals more appealing the more creative chefs would come up with flavorings or their own, like the mushroom ketchup recipe shown in the video below.

Other ways of feeding the cowboys 

The Chuck Wagon

During the 18th and 19th centuries, people flooded to America in the millions to become a part of the gold rush and grow cash crops, or simply just wanted a new start. With this increase in the population, the food demand also increased greatly which meant that beef would need to be even more mass-produced. The size of cowboy teams would increase to up to 30 men for the larger herds and all these people needed their strength to do their jobs, so the chuck wagon was invented.

(A typical late 1800s chuck wagon)

It was simply just a field kitchen that included a series of pots and small ovens as well as acting as the main food storage unit for the group. In the bigger teams, a cook would be hired to work full time making meals for the group out of whatever he had to work with. Some old records from people working as cattle handlers talk about the quality of their chefs because some cattle bosses would often hire the cheapest chef available and the team would end up eating nothing but beans and beef three times a day.