You are on the Oregon Trail and meet a strange man. He says, "Hi, my name is Terry." You laugh and say, "Terry is a girl's name." Terry shoots you. You have died of Dissin' Terry.
I cannot believe Max neglected to mention that the pioneers would sometimes eschew their wagons and instead ride large rocks for miles across the prairie.
My great-great-grandmother was 14 when she married my 16-year-old great-great-grandfather. The first year of their marriage included traveling across the plains to their new life in Nebraska from the east coast. They worked a farm together and, by all accounts, had lives they were happy with and proud of. They were married for over 75 years. I cannot imagine to this day how tough they were. My grandma was born too early and g-g-grandmother was the midwife. She realized by grandma was too weak so she warmed up the old stove they used to incubate animals and put her in it and kept her alive. I literally wouldn't be here without that woman. Her name was Nancy Anne.
Wow! What an amazing story! Imagine the fear having a baby early back then! Wow! Her mother must have felt so so overwhelming blessed when she lived! ❤❤
My great great grandmother was a Midwife in Northern Washington state too, she traveled all around the area delivering Babies and caring for people. This was very early 1850s onward North of Seattle , my Grandmother told me about her and was very proud of her. In those days , out West , these things were not done for money, it was out of love and concern for the other women and children, the community
Tough is right! I come from the same kind of stock. They began in Massachusetts and New York and stopped in S. Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. More recent generations eventually ended up in Oregon and California, so "going west" went on for several generations. Greetings from southern Oregon!😄
I live near the end of the trail; all over the place people STILL have the original covered wagons their families brought here 170 years ago. Someone actually refurbished one & modernized it & they rent it out on airbnb! I stayed in it for my birthday
" Yes honey. I had no intentions of partaking in the boy's actions, I went back to my tent and spent the day writing to you" - most believable boys night out text home
There once was a Max with a knack, For videos that featured hard tack, He mentions the quip, And then shows the clip, And his viewers all say *KLACK KLACK*
The story about Smith having to give up his mother’s rolling pin brought tears to my eyes. I know, it’s not as bad as dying of dysentery, but it still hurts.
This is kind of funny, since you mention the monotony of moving and the joy of eating. I worked for a moving company, so every day was the same thing but different. When we got together in the mornings, our first priority was deciding where we were going to eat lunch that day.
That man with the rolling pin. That grown man crying because he had to leave his mother's rolling pin and he missed her... He's like me. Like us. Every now and then I hear or read something that makes me realize on a deep level that everyone that ever existed was a person. All the heroes and villains of history, sure. But every single one of the common folk was as much a fully realized person as me. They all had dreams and memories and childhoods and dreams and happiness and misery. Tens of thousands of years of human experience. An ocean full of people that lived full lives not unlike mine. It's gut wrenching every time.
@@RustedOrange Thank you for this! There's so many emotions and states of being where I feel like we don't have words for it, only to find out we do but we just don't hear them much. Thanks for giving us one of those words.
I honestly feel for this man and the sacrifice he was forced to make. I have a few kitchen tools from my late grandmother, which is all I have left of her. If I were asked to part with any of them, I don't think I ever could. They would most likely have to be pried from my cold, dead fingers.
I love that Max shouted out Townsends! There needs to be a huge mashup of the best historical food channels. Max and Townsdends make early 19th century, historical accurate MREs, then have Steve1989MRE eat them while Steve Wallis does a stealth camp near a wagon train.
The meat was often salted in old times and packed in ceramic jars. Salt, meat, salt, meat, all the way to the top. This kept meat from spoiling and had to be soaked in water a few times before use. My Uncle Don told me, when he was a kid, the pork was kept in barrels with salt water and lasted a year.
Yes...outfitters sold barrels of salt pork for the wagon trains. Flour, corn meal, sugar and lard. Of course salt and pepper and coffee and dried beans were essentials every family carried.
sounds about right. my opa was one of nine kids in a small village in Bavarian Germany during ww2. He described them having a very well stocked pantry during the winter, barrels of sauerkraut and the like.
I more see these pioneers as people who made the choice to gamble for great wealth on the frontier. It's an inherently selfish move, I don't feel bad for those that paid a price for such a chance at increasing one's station in life
Many wanted fortune, but tons of people on the Oregon trail were poor and looking for land and opportunity. Oregon isn't super well known for their gold @@Konarcoffee
@@Konarcoffeewhen you’re talking about the gold rush, you have a point, but many of the folks on the Oregon Trail were just folks, who thought they could find a better life, land that they could call their own, and a measure of independence. I’m more disturbed by the attitude that it was perfectly OK to take the land because the people currently occupying it were (insert series of racial slurs here). But to people coming from Europe, where you pretty much couldn’t get out of sight of human occupation, it must have seemed like “all this vacant land, why shouldn’t I have a piece of it?” I’m not saying that makes it acceptable, but people are real good at justifying what they want to do.
I’m imagining a time traveler kicking in a door in the middle of a blizzard. The entire room goes silent as the stranger scans the room till his eyes rest upon the 6ft 5in 350 pound man with hat in hand, eyes downcast in front of another man with a rolling pin in his. The mysterious stranger points to the man holding the rolling pin “HE KEEPS THE ROLLING PIN!! THE FUTURE HAS SPOKEN!” Then backs up out of the building as the door blows closed. 😂😂
My great-great-great-great grandfather came along the Oregon trail with his family when he was just three years old. This was in the late 1850's, so a little later than the stories you usually hear about. At this point there were a few more checkpoint settlements along the trail which made getting supplies a little easier. He passed down a story about how on one of the legs they'd misjudged how many rations they needed and had to scrape by on foraging off the land. His sister who was 12 at the time was off foraging when she ran into a Native American. In broken English he asked what a young white girl was doing so far out by herself. She told him of her family's situation, and after listening to her story he reached into his bag and gave her a large handful of the his buffalo jerkey to take back. That handful of dried meat managed to stretch their rations out a few more days and they were able to make it to the checkpoint a week later. Unfortunately she forgot to ask his name, but this stranger's generosity likely saved the lives of the younger siblings, including my great-great-great-great grandpa.
That makes it all the sadder what the Native Americans went through. There are many instances throughout history of them helping the American settlers survive, from the pilgrims at Plymouth to the Oregon Trail, and their kindness and generosity were repaid with persecution that some would say continues even today
As a historian and someone who works for a museum/interpretive center that deals with the Oregon Trail, I want to say thank you for the interesting and very accurate information in your video.
My papaw taught me how to make hoe cakes and cornbread, in his old cast iron skillets. We made them together many times. His recipe was never written down, and there were no precise measurements. But I knew it by heart. I even won a 4-H competition, presenting his recipe. We never used bacon grease. But we did put plenty of butter on them, when they were done! I inherited his skillets. But somehow, my cornbread just never came out the same, after he died. Still, I will always, always treasure those memories of standing next to him at the stove, and of my family enjoying what we made. 😊
As an Oregonian and a member of the Oglala Lakota, I'd like to see you do an episode on Wohanpi, which is a bison stew beloved by my ancestors, and maybe highlight some of the other tribes of Turtle Island.
I'm cherokee from oklahoma that would be good to see but don't give to many secrets their starting to misuse edible mushrooms that I grew up on get ticket have to many crawdads everything love Buffalo anything
Honestly (don't know how much truth there is to it but I like to think of a point where our peoples lived in peace) the original Jonnycakes recipe to my understanding from stories passed down through my New England Yankee upbringing came from the Eastern tribes, specifically Abinaki and Penobscot. It was even simpler than Max's recipe, really just cornmeal and water. As is common when one culture adopts another's food, it got embellished along the way. I would love to learn more first nations recipes. I'm a big believer that we learn from each other.
My grandmother came over in covered wagons. From Wyoming to Colorado. She was very young when she married grandpa Bates. She had 5 kids one was my father. He joined the Army and was sent to Harley Davidson to learn how to repair motorcycles. That’s where he met my mother. 1942 married then had my brother in 1944 sister in 1952 and me 1955. Then my youngest brother in 1956. What a story for the grandchildren.
My dad had to learn how to fix motorcycles for the Army. WWII he was a great mechanic and owned his own Repair Shop called Bates Brothers, my Uncle Cecil was in charge with him.
Fun fact for anybody who’s never eaten those Camas bulbs Max mentions. They have a prune-y kind of taste and a texture similar to fruit leather when cooked. It’s also a mild laxative until your system gets used to it… to quote William Clark about eating camas: “it filled us so full of wind we were scarce able to breathe all night.”
But you have to make sure you have the right kind of camas because there is something called "death camas". You don't get to make that mistake more than once.
Hey man, Nebraskan native here! Just wanted to say thank you for showcasing such a monumental part of our history. Fyi, Kearny is pronounced Car-Knee. The fort never rally had much for travelers as it was an outpost rather than a supply depot. Town legend says there were so many pianos, potbelly stoves, and bookcases dumped by the pioneers that when the city was founded, all the citizens just grabbed them off the side of the road.
We just visited Kearney, well the Arch Monument there. It was our second time as our daughter was only six months old the first time and obviously not our third child. 😃 The museum was just as awesome the second time! If you are driving I80, plan on the stop!
In north dakota during the depression my grandmas family ran out of coal during the winter. When her dad took the wagon to get abother load she had to collect "buffalo chips" to burn in the stove to stay warm. I think he was gone for more than a week getting the coal. She said you had to bust them from the frozen ground.
I hear "Oregon Trail" and think "dysentery" the same way I hear "mitochondria" and think "the powerhouse of the cell" or hear "hardtack" and think [clack clack]. The only times I didn't have everyone die on the trail I was starting as a banker and therefore had lots of money to spend on provisions. I also remember how annoyed I was that they never let me keep more than like 100 lbs of meat from a bison even when they had ten times that (although, in retrospect, killing a lot of bison and leaving most of it to rot is, unfortunately, historically accurate).
You meet a man on the Oregon Trail. He tells you his name is Terry. “Terry?!” you say laughing, “Terry’s a girls name!” Without any hesitation, Terry pulls out a gun and shoots you dead. You just died of dissing Terry!
I wonder if a modern version of the Oregon Trail would have more social options. Almost no wagons would travel alone, and surely there would be space in somebody's wagon to carry some of the extra meat. And that sort of sharing would foster relationships with people who might well end up being your neighbours, your kids' future in-laws, a person of note in your settlement...
I'm a scientist that indirectly studies shigella (the bacteria that causes dysentery), and I always include that death screen as a a part of my background and significance when I present my work.
As someone who's had dysentery (albeit most likely caused by E. coli O157:H7, not a shigella strain), I thank you for your work. Hopefully someday there'll be a more effective treatment than just IV fluids and acetaminophen.
I first played Oregon Trail around 1985 at around 6 years old on an Apple IIe with the green screen. Booting off of a 5 1/4" floppy. Aw, the good ole days lol
@swankeepers Well, I was lucky in some regards. We lived around LA in the mid 80's and my Mom was a teacher at the local elementary school when Apple donated a bunch of computers. We got to have it at home to learn it. I of course used it for Oregon Trail, Frogger, and various educational games. All good, since I can say I was hands on keyboard at age 9 in 1985, way before most people even knew what a personal computer was. I was also on the early public Internet in college in 1994 and was a very early Linux user.
Haha! Same for me! Oregon Trail was the 1st floppy I learned to use & enjoy over & over & over...again on our school's 1st Apple II in "85. However, unlike you @6yrs old , I was a much older 28 yr old teacher @the time. Ah!! 😮
@@cindifelch8867 That's awesome! Not at your 26 years at the time, but the Apple/Oregon Trail story. The original is still playable online if you want to reminisce. Google it 😃
My girlfriend is a descendant of emigrants on the Oregon trail. Her ancestors were Norwegian immigrants that joined a wagon train around 1855. They first settled in central Oregon, but soon moved to Washington State after hearing about the port in Seattle
Makes sense Norwegians would prefer the fishing industry. My grandmother and aunt moved to Portland to work in the fish canning industry which boomed during WW2.
I work in the fishing industry in Seattle, and there's not a Norwegian to be found around here who doesn't have a few choice words for the hipsters who "ruined Ballard", which for those not from here is the neighborhood where there used to be a lot of fishing piers, wharves, and what-have-you (I work on Pier 91 at the head of Elliott Bay, better known for the cruise terminal that annoys all of us with the wandering tourists when we're trying to get work done!)
A friend of mine had a small foot stool that her great grandmother had brought on the Oregon trail. The husband had been throwing out her belongings along the way until all she had left was this stool. When he threw it out she sat down on it and refused to get up. Her husband and another man had to pick her up with the stool and put her in the wagon, and so she saved the only personal belonging she had left.
The main point about the immigrants to Oregon walking is this: it reduced the load on the animals pulling the wagon. Riders were more weight and the horses/oxen could only pull so much for so long. One had to carefully husband the animal's strength if it were to survive more than 90 days of laboriously pulling the wagon full of supplies.
You also have to think if the people were staving themselves what were they doing to those poor animals they were forcing to do all the work. You often see those lists of supplies but rarely is animal feed anywhere on it. Green grass to ox and cattle is food but dried grass is just filler and offers very little. Their bellies might be full but they aint getting anything from it and being worked sun up to sundown.
That quote about only finding bison skulls and no living bison made me realize why the go to depiction of the american southwest features a lot of bison skulls on the ground
It's so cool to see you cover this topic! I'm from Oregon and my ancestors Ezekiel and Hannah Powers came here by way of the Oregon Trail. We even have Ezekiel's journal which chronicles their journey.
Hi Max. You probably won't see this, but my father and I spent many evenings watching your channel and sharing our shared interests in cooking and history. He had a heart attack last week and it's been incredibly difficult. Your videos are one of the few things that can bring a measure of comfort in these difficult times. Thank you, and thank you to Jose as well, for all that you do.
* hug * Heart attacks ain’t always lethal, so I don’t know if he’s still alive or not but I DO understand that caring for a loved one is stressful. Take care of yourself, too. Please!
One thing they never wrote down (because everyone knew it) is that you have to let the batter sit for 10-15, sometimes up to 30 depending on humidity, minutes to let the meal obsorb the water before cooking. That's why it tasted grainy. They used to do this with bread dough as well.
My son gave me a t-shirt last year that had the little ox-cart on it and the words, "You have died of dysentery." I laughed so hard, because we all used to play that game when the kids were growing up. Thank you for a very entertaining (and informative) episode!
Once during a job that I had years ago I had fallen off of a mountain and I was stranded for a while before I had gotten rescue. I used wild "horse chips" to start a fire. It felt right, but smelled a little wrong.
Crazy how much the New World crops like maize(corn) and potatos changed the world. Potatos in particular allowed for industrial revolution because of how reliable and calorie dense they were as food; People can survive off nothing but potatos so long as you have a good source of dietary iron. Furthermore potato plants can be trampled by horses marching through and the actual crop won't be destroyed, making wars less detrimental to the peasants class.
A big downside of our potato craze is we really only brought one variety out of South America. That's why the Irish potato famine happened, with only one type of potato the virus spread quickly. The Incan empire (i think i could be wrong) relied on potatoes and had huge storehouses of thousands of types of potatoes that could last their starving nation for years if they needed it
@@tux_duh That's not completely true. We didn't just bring one type of potato from the new world. They had many types of potatoes. The Irish before the famine foolishly relied on only one type of potato because of its large size, they didn't completely understand crop rotation
Friend of mine played Oregon Trail 2 using 4 60 year old ladies and bacon. He made it farther than I did. My survival skills were brought into immediate question.
I was an adult before my husband showed me how to buy supplies at the beginning. I never made it past my second grade twenty minute computer time allotment. 😂
That game was among my earlier childhood favorites for the silly reasons: fording a river too deep (at that age funny to watch) and the hunt screen where you just take out every animal you see. Despite how you run out of food on subsequent hunts, only able to carry back so much each outing too. Bad idea, but I still did it!
Amazing how that name Johnny cakes (original I believe originated from word journey cakes) which was always some sort of long lasting type of bun/cake/bread. In the Caribbean it is called johnny cakes and is made of flour, water and salt. Option to add a pinch of baking powder. It was then fried and served warm with butter. Yum. Cornmeal is also used in a dish called festival. It is served with very spicy fried fish.
I live right next to the end of the trail. The first sign of real civilization is down the street from me in Eagle Creek Oregon. Ruts and left over artifacts can still be found. I found a few on my own land from one of the first settlers. My greatx3 grandparents headed out on the Oregon Trail but split off and finished on the Mormon Trail into Salt Lake and settled Lehi
The Oregon Trail actually went right through my family's property. I was actually once the assistant director of a museum in the area. Not far from where I'm from, there's another museum where you can see this kind of food in person. We even sometimes make something similar today. This is a video that really connects to what I know. :)
In Oregon on someones property I saw some "remains" of the Oregon Trail - wagon ruts cut a trail over some rocks... Had to think about how many wagons it took to do that... Great memory.
@@TheGypsyVanners yeah, I've seen tracks like that before. It's pretty cool to see. I'm originally from Nebraska. There used to be some tracks on our property, but they're not there anymore. You can still see some nearby, though. Courthouse and Jailhouse Rock and Chimney Rock were landmarks travelers used to find their way. You unfortunately can't see the cool stuff anymore as they cut off public access years ago, but I got to go up to Chimney Rock and see it myself about twenty-five years ago. I still remember it well. Humans are going to human though, and they had to prevent vandalism. The other location was restricted a long time ago because kids were partying on top of the rock and fell off when they got drunk.
As a native Oregonian... getting an Oregon trail story, two Hard Tacks in the episode, and an errant "Proble-ing" at 17:54 has made this a great morning
@@krono5el They probably mean that they are born and raised in Oregon not that they are an indigenous Oregon Native. Oregon has I think 9 recognized tribes today like Klamath, Siletz, Grand Ronde, Umpqua so their still here not even including all the unrecognized ones or those belonging to multiple tribes.
I can totally empathize with Mr. Smith and his rolling pin. My most treasured possession is a wooden spoon that belonged to my mother, and her mother before her. The end is worn flat on a diagonal, from three generations of stirring, and there's a pronounced divot from tapping it on the sides of pots. It's kinda like those ancient stone temples, with ruts worn by years of pilgrim traffic. I use it when preparing special meals and preserves, and I always feel a connection to them when I do. I've occasionally thought that, in the event of a house-fire, I'd be tempted to take the 20-foot detour to rescue that spoon on the way out. Other items in my home would be expensive to replace, but that spoon is irreplaceable! PS: I wonder if those densely-nutritious "meat biscuits" they mentioned were pemmican - a delightful staple that I still enjoy (though I tend to make mine from beef). PPS: The hard tack (clack-clack!) meme still kills me every time. 😆
You posting this a few days before The Gaming Historian posted his hour and a half history of the Oregon Trail video game is the most beautiful unrelated timing ever
Notes on buffalo poop. Having lived in the bush in Kenya with cows, their poop smells like spring. Sweet and grass-like. I was told by a Nat'l park worker (in the US) buffalo poop smells similarly
I imagine it also depends on what food source is available too. I accidentally slid through some cow poop in the winter time and it smelled like an evergreen tree. I would imagine that was because grass was minimal in the winter so the cow was enjoying the only green thing around. Now had its diet been hay or grass then I think it wouldn't have been as "pleasant" of a smell.
Not only will buffalo/bison poop smell similarly to cattle poop, but the animals can actually breed with each other and get fertile offspring. There's at least two breeds of cattle (Beefalo is the one I recall the name of) that are specifically distinguished by having that as a requirement. The biggest issues are that bison are commonly twice as heavy (which can sometimes cause a cow's back to snap during mating), and bison are less docile/more wild.
@matthewc3120 you would be correct. I have cooked over smoldering cow chips when I was in Scouts. There is a different smell to the ones grazing on mountain grass vrs the ones eating hay.
Fun Fact: I grew up in the Sierra Nevadas and on the eastward side of the mountains near our house was a small "town" called Piano Flats. The story goes that a wealthy family hauled an upright piano all the way across the plains, along the southern routes around the Rockies, but when they got to the pass to get into California, they finally could not justify bringing it anymore. Rather than just dump it though, they set it on the ground, tuned it, and built a lean-to around it to mostly protect it from the elements and it became a landmark for people taking that path over the mountains. Pioneers who knew music would play it as they passed until it finally got unplayable, but later a trading stop would grow up in the same area. Just a neat story (that may or may not be true, as these things go) but its still fun.
Max! Your channel is pure delight! I must say here, from Brazil, that my husband bought me your book and just gifted it to me ❤ As I'm now during a cancer treatment, I'm trully happy to read and try the history in this book! I'll try one recipe a month 🎉
The short clip of the cowboy on the horse is from the TV Western "Wagon Train". Way before my time, but I could watch those Westerns all day long. The Rifleman, Have gun will travel, Laramie, Wanted Dead or Alive, Rawhide (young Clint Eastwood), etc.
@graceandglory1948 I cut the cable 10 years ago and we have nothing but over the air digital tv(excepting streaming of course). MeTV and those other family friendly tv channels is all you need, and they're free...and the shows are better than 90% of current tv shows..no matter the genre. I grew up on PBS and British shows (especially British comedy) was on at our house all of the time. Also a good childhood.
My grandmother made cornbread hoe cakes every day. I can remember standing in a chair in front of the stove to turn them for her when I was very little. It was their staple bread for lunch and dinner, with biscuits for breakfast. Well rendered lard will keep at room temperatures for a year.
@@richdiddens4059 We still make bacon that way. Every winter we kill a few hogs and my dad salts the bacon, ham and shoulder, then we hang them in a smokehouse my grandfather built in the 1940's. It is extremely salty and smoky and I can remember my grandmother keeping the bacons on strings hanging in the basement stairwell. I keep it in the freezer and refrigerator now.
@@deereating9267 I'm curious... I know a lot of cultures who salt fish soak it thoroughly before using it to remove a lot of the salt. Is that something that is done with bacon made the way you describe? I mean, I love bacon, but too much salt reminds me of my great-grandmother - she had lost a lot of her tastebuds at some point and would salt everything until she could taste it, almost to the point of being inedible. Great cook otherwise, but... yeah.
"Half as much as a hen's egg" is such a brilliant comparative measurement, most people in the world will be familiar with the domesticated chicken and therefore know roughly how big their eggs are, one of those measurements that transfers across borders unlike "3 barleycorn to an inch".
That's one of the reasons I think cup measurements for cooking vs. weighing got so common here in the US, everyone had s coffee cup. Can't bring scales cross country but cups are a must.
My grandma likes to say our family was almost stranded with the Donner party, I’m not sure how much of that is exactly true but it makes the Oregon trail a little more special to me living in the lovely state.
It could be true; the Donner party started out as part of a larger wagon train at the beginning of the trip, but split off from the group halfway to the end of the trail. Your family could have been part of the original wagon train that didn't get stuck in the mountains.
6:50 Yeah, the entire reason bacon was invented was as a way to preserve meat. Modern grocery store bacon isn't cured for preservation anymore, but back in the day, you just had to keep it away from sunlight and as anoxic as you could manage and you'd be fine. As for lard, as long as it's kept in an opaque container it'll last for some time. That's why it's sold in buckets and nobody who uses it regularly in cooking bothers to refrigerate it. (I certainly don't refrigerate the rendered bacon fat from cooking that I then use to cook other savory food.)
That explains why my grandma always kept her lard in the cupboard under her sink. It was much darker there than the pantry. She kept lard, Crisco, and the coffee can of bacon grease all in the same place and could grab the one she wanted without even looking.
10:20 salmon carries a parasite that is fatal to dogs, so if the dog ate the raw salmon it’s very likely it would have died, but from the parasite, not from overeating. Never allow your dog to eat raw salmon.
I named my older daughter Camas, after the plant. I'm half-Coast Salish and it was always a dear plant to me. My younger daughter is Olallie, after the berries that were also so important to my ancestors. The names suit them. My older daughter is delicate and shy, and hides a lot of herself under the surface. My younger daughter is exuberant and bright like a salmonberry.
As a professional chef AND a history buff, your channel has allowed me to relay to the service staff something I have wanted to say for years: "this dish is inspired by a Xth century recipe" Thank you, Max!
@@cam4636 it was Borscht, the instance I'm thinking of, I used Max's history lesson to make the most authentic (although vegan, so...do with that what you will) it wasn't a menu star but it meant a lot to me
@@cam4636 I also helped my bartender with a switchel. It sold like watery and vinegary hot cakes. I didn't expect it, but that summer we sold gallons and gallons of gin-spiked switchel. He adjusted it to be rum, and we sold even more. This took place in Minnesota, unfortunately the restaurant closed that same summer. Needless to say, I have been devastated (not my money involved, but MY menu didn't bring enough patrons in, etc, I will say that our service staff was less than adequate, but I can't tell if I'm passing the blame)
Oh man. This brought back a memory I had repressed. Growing up we were so poor, my parents would feed our whole family (mom, dad, my teenaged brother and me) with two boxes of Jiffy corn bread and a pound of bacon. Cornmeal pancakes. That was dinner. The bad old days. 😢
I would love to see more recipes from this era of American history! The combination of subsistence hunting/gathering and "glamping" with luxury cooking items from home fascinates me. The absolute versatility of portable goods and campfire cooking was on full display during this time. Excellent video as always!
I watch all of your weekly videos, but this one touched me the most. I never felt so close to the people who traveled the trails nor understood them as well. Thank you.
That's awesome! In my country our national bread is a sourdough. All bakers use starters that in one way or another date to about the 1550s. Some really old bakeries (1700s) still work as they always did today, with wood fired ovens. There is a national compact that if a baker's sourdough starter has developed a problem then other bakers share some of their own starter so the cycle is never broken. It's a great tradition and I hope your friend is able to maintain her centennial potato starter!
Max, I don’t know if you can still get hold of the footage but, in 1989 a married couple from Sweetwater, Montana (last name was Clark) organized an honest to goodness wagon train across private and public lands through Montana’s historic state capitols. I know that CNN and maybe Ted Turner’s network covered it. I was seven years old when my parents bought a team of Belgian draught horses and an old John Deere grain wagon and took off on the adventure of a lifetime! We traveled the prairie from Bannock, Montana through Twin Bridges, Dillon, and Boulder and finally into the current capitol, Helena, Montana. We arrived around the 4th of July. While on the road we baked Indian cakes, and also harvested gooseberries and serviceberries, tried rattlesnake and prickly pear cactus! Your video brought back awesome memories, thanks! ❤
Greetings from Billings. Are you still living in one the greatest places on Earth? ❤ Bannock is very interesting host town. If you ever go to the West side of the state again visit some natural hot spring. They are all over there. In fact Jackson Hot Springs isn’t too far away from Bannock.
@@kelseycox1177 LOL. I live in the Big Horn mountains of WY now but have loved lounging in the springs at Jackson! The new goal is building a love for nature, history, and our western culture in my kiddos. 🥰 Nice to hear from a fellow lover of the Big Sky state.
Just wanna say, camas is a very beautiful native plant that can often be found in nurserys in the PNW! It's a gorgeous purple flowered bulb in addition to being extremely edible.
I always love your videos, its fascinating to learn about history through the lens of food. Hearing about how people cooked and enjoyed meals really highlights the human experiences. I often wonder what the day-to-day was like for people in different periods of history, and how they did basic things like make breakfast. These videos really satisfy that curiosity for me!
Oh absolutely. Looked forward to rainy days when we were allowed into the other 4th Grade teacher’s room where we played the entire recess, usually as teams.
The secret to a better johnny cake is to soak your cornmeal for a bit first, then thicken/finish with some dry; it gives a softer texture with some contrast instead of "all grit all the time."
When I worked at a museum/historic site, we would put on interactive educational programs for visiting school classes. One of the activities we would prepare, was making tortillas and cooking them over a heat source (couldn't use open flame because of fire danger near a historic building); we would make the dough ahead of time with masa (finely ground cornmeal) and boiling water. The recipe was: one part masa and 1.5 parts boiling water, mix to create a thick batter, let stand 10 to 15 minutes to cool and thicken. In that time, the masa would absorb all of the excess water and become a soft dough which could be portioned out with a scoop, into equal-sized balls, placed in a clean bowl, and covered with a clean towel, ready to hand to the children for shaping and cooking. That soaking time meant that the tortillas (similar to these johnny cakes) were never gritty because the corn had softened while absorbing the hot water.
My grandfather came west on the Oregon Trail working as a water boy when he was a teenager. He would’ve done that in the last days of when the trail was still used. He only journeyed part of the way and settled in Butte, Montana. Thanks for making his journey a little bit more real to me.
Thank you Max for posting! I love this topic because I am from Missouri and grew up learning about the amazing Pioneers that made their way west . I am sill in awe , I remember our city had a ice storm and the electricity was down for two weeks ! we along with our family pets survived on our camping supplies, lanterns candles coolers that we kept near the house from the basement, it was very challenging but fun . I think we could do the 4 month journey with Missouri Mules! no oxen🐂🐂 😉
Thank you for including that the near extinction of the bison in the US and Canada was an intentional genocidal act. Growing up I often heard it glossed over as just “overhunting” and I didn’t learn the true nature of the extermination until I was in my thirties.
Yes, it's difficult to give up everything you hold dear to emigrate to a new and unknown place. I did it when I was 10 and my family and I had to leave Cuba in a crowded plane with just the clothes on our backs. We did it again when 10 years later we left Venezuela to come to the United States. This time we were lucky, we each brought a suitcase. That's why we owe so much respect to those who have trecked by foot from the north of South America. They are the same strong people who made this country wonderful.
Excellent story! But have you considered your ancestors coming across the Bering Straight ice, 20, 000 or so years ago and running straight through North America to South America to escape the "Short Faced Bear"? Not kidding. Look up "Short Faced Bear". I am surprised North America was even occupied.
@@scorpiouk5914 well, my particular ancestors crossed either the Strait of Hormuz or got on a ship to make it across the Mediterranean when the Romans kicked us out of Judea and Samaria. Some of these ancestors settled in the Catalonian region of Spain and others made it to Russia and Germany. Unfortunately, since three of the four grandparents came over to Cuba in the last century and the single native Cuban grandmother was only first generation, I don't think we can claim ownership of the treck across the Bering Strait.
Great video. I really like the context provided for the meals along with primary sources to show specific instances of what they went through for meals and other mundane things. Excellent channel I really like it as a lover of history and as a guy now forced to cook meals for myself lol
I loved going to the computer lab to play Oregon trail in elementary school. This video is so fun and informative, as always, but with added nostalgia. Thanks Max and Jose!
I so love that the Oregon Trail is so well known in the modern American zeitgeist thanks to one random video game. Peak edutainment. Just like Tasting History. Invicta taught me garum existed. Max made me love the stuff.
I remember that game like it was only five yesterdays ago. But hearing Max describe the horrendous dietary conditions that befell the travelers later on down the trail, the famous line "you've died of dysentery" strikes a much more haunting chord. Add to that the sad scene of that man having to give up his mother's rolling pin...waterworks for hours. 😢😢
@@SCIFIguy64 the game has actually been remade multiple times since the original 1985 version for the Apple II. The most recent version came out in 2022 and I highly recommend giving it a play. Still very fun and full of historical facts.
I am an adjunct history professor and high school history teacher. I teach early United States History, and one of my areas of expertise is the Oregon Trail and early pioneers. First, let's think about how much weight the food is. The wagons could only hold about 3000 lbs at the max. They big Conestogas cut hold more. But they didn't use those type of wagons because they were heavy and would have been too hard for the ox to pull on the trail. Now I want to address the going fifteen to twenty miles in a day. In my research and study, that is actually not a true fact. The wagons could go 15 miles to 20 miles a day on a really good day where nothing goes wrong and the weather is perfect. But most wagon trains might go 12 to 15 miles a day. They sometimes went less if the weather was bad. This was a really good video, and I did enjoy it as usual.
Thank you for this valuable insight. Nice to have a teacher who studied this from more direct and local sources. I was wondering why wouldn't they find easier solutions to travel. For example I live on the Black Sea coast, former Byzantine Emp. and Ottoman Empire, where the east meets west. On the Silk Road, people would only carry dehydrated food, for example dry noodles and pasta (this is why you can find all sorts of pasta in the cuisines of various people in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Caucasus, Central Asia and all the way into China). Dry fruits and vegetables. And for meat they would have herds of sheep and cattle for slaughtering, especially during war campaigns, and these would be afore-contracted to be found along the marching army's route. But there would also be caravanserais along the route, from the wall of China deep into the Balkans, now you can find them from China to Bosnia and Romania). These would offer accommodation and warm meals to travellers, they would be rectangular structures with an inner courtyard and would have a simple rule that said gates are open until sunset and they would open again at sunrise. At sunrise people would check their pockets and belongings to see all their money and stuff was in place and they would only open the doors once everybody gave their approval. Iran inscribed their network of caravanserais on UNESCO's heritage list. Now I understand the lands through which the Oregon trail went were mostly barren, so there weren't big possibilities to supply these migrants (unless for example they struck deals with the Indians to constantly supply them with livestock +game, I don't know if this ever happened), but I was also wondering why these migrants wouldn't organise themselves to lighten their burden. For example instead of carrying 300 pounds of bacon and 50 pounds of lard, why wouldn't they have 2-3 men to drive a herd of 200 cattle and slaughter 1-2 cows per day? They could travel 4 hours in advance and cook that beef and have dinner ready by the time the caravan arrived at the camping spot. Next day, the herd would leave earliest and the process could be repeated.
I have a serious fascination with the Oregon Trail! If you have the time, could you recommend a book or two? I’ve exhausted the internet and CZcams, really not much there. I’d really like to read some in-depth books. Thank you.
Hey Max! Thank you for all you do! I met you at the Renaissance Faire a couple years ago when you came to our camp. :) Please please please NEVER EVER stop playing the "Hard Tack" bit! It's simply the best!
Phoebe Judson founded the city of Lynden, WA. She delivered about a hundred babies, brought education to both the pioneers but also the local Indians. Her life is real interesting. The book she wrote was written decades after her travel.
@@markrossow6303 Thanks for the recommendation, but while I’d like to read it, I’ll have to see if I can get a library to order it because the least expensive copy is $111! It sounds like a very interesting account of the early days of Seattle.
Max, as someone who grew up on a farm & occasionally made butter, let me guarantee you that a bucket of fresh milk will not turn into butter, no matter how much jostling it gets. CREAM turns into butter, so they would've let the cream rise, skimmed it off, & then put it into a separate bucket to make butter. BTW, my hometown started as a trading post on the Oregon Trail. It was also a home station during the short life of the Pony Express.
Yeah and he's wrong about the meat too. Meat was generally packed in salt and kept in ceramic crocks, jars or wooden barrels. My Uncle Don told me, when he was a kid(Great Depression) That Grandpa and Grandma packed meat into barrels with really salty water and kept the meat below the surface with weights, thus they had pork until the next butchering time(fall). Other than that, they ate a lot of chicken and wild game.
Actually, he never claims that fresh milk was kept in a bucket to make butter - indeed, go back and listen again, he very clearly states that the cow itself is what was kept in a pail to be jostled about under the wagon, thus making butter.
@@doomtho42 delightful! We can't know everything but much set my teeth on edge bless him. Besides I strongly doubt much evidence of accompanying 'freshened' cows making the trip At All hello. 'History lite' had problems but good click bait
@@spocksdaughter9641 there are several letters and journals kept by the emigrants, that talk about milk cows being brought on the trail, along with extra oxen who could take turns pulling the wagons, because oxen dying along the trail (and even being butchered in extreme circumstances -- think, the Donner Party before they got stuck in the mountains) is something that is mentioned in just about every document that survives.
I once played the game on the Nintendo Switch and one female member of my party had dysentery three times and survived. She also was bitten by a snake, broke her leg, and was hit by the wagon and still lived. Then she died of starvation literally one mile from the next major stop. Her tombstone now reads “Here lies Natalie. She loved dysentery.”
It's a funny joke now, but dysentery and cholera were horrible, painful killers back in the day. You'd feel fine one minute, then the next, you'd have horrible stomach pains, with vomiting and diarrhea. You then died from the loss of fluids and salts, your organs failing and your blood basically becoming sludge. We now have modern drinking water and sewage treatment systems to prevent it.
In the South, Journey Cakes became Johnny Cakes, then Cracklin' Bread and Hot Water Cornbread. Cracklin' Bread had crispy fried pork skin mixed in, no sugar or molasses, and was fried in bacon fat. Hot water cornbread still a favorite today, does not have cracklins and is fried in oil. I have my grandmother's Cracklin' Bread recipe passed down from generations in Virginia. The first time I made Hot Water Corn Bread I burned my hands shaping the "patties" until I learned to keep a bowl of ice water on hand. So good.
@@Blumpkinthehobbit If it takes mixtilisation (I genuinely have no clue how to spell that, I assume it has some z in there somewhere) to make most corn edible, would that count as an invention?
Depending on the wagon, many did actually have shocks. Strips of leather that the carriage ride on over the axel. Today, it’s fairly common to see this type of shock on pickup trucks, just made in metal. The Wells Fargo Stage Coach utilized the same concept, but a lot beefier to the point it induced motion sickness. Pretty much unless the wagon directly had the axel connected to the frame (cheapest of the cheap homemade piece of junk that even a hobo would run away from) it still had leaf springs or some kind of shock absorption… just, again, it could cause more rocking and rolling and motion sickness. Buffalo chips were not so much used for starting fires, actually… they were used for carrying the fire from one camp to the next. Light them and pack them in a pouch, they will smolder for 18+ hours so long as they have oxygen since the “chip” is made of highly compacted dried grass. Once at a new camp, they would use the still smoldering chip to technically “relight” the previous fire by using bellows and new tinder. Thus, a fire started in Missouri could travel all the way to Wyoming, since it was carried in this fashion rather than wasting time, energy, and resources to start a new fire each night. The smoke when put on an actual fire also drives mosquitos away. It’s why we now have oils in our tiki torches to do the same thing.
I saw peat logs in Ireland used the same way. The smells of both fuels is distinctive and flavors whatever is cooked over it. BTW buffalo chips don't make much smoke when burned but even thoroughly dried peat still retains some moisture so bread has a nice crisp crust.
My Southern 91 year old mother still makes Johnny Cakes. She fixes then to accompany dinner meals, she often calls dinner, supper. She eats them sliced with butter, like biscuits. They are often made to go with a meal of ham, turnip greens, boiled buttered potatoes or mashed potatoes and black eyed peas or succotash. Mom simply calls them corn cakes, my sister loves them. I think they are greasy but I will eat them at my mom's when I visit. I've never had them with syrup, I might try that the next time I visit my mom, she lives several states away. Some of my Southern relatives call Johnny Cakes, Hoe Cakes but my grandmother said Hoe Cakes are made with biscuit dough not cornmeal. When my grandmother was finished cutting out all the circles of biscuit dough she'd gather up the left over dough and make 1 or 2 of what she called Hoe Cakes even if they were not cooked over coals on a hoe blade but in her wood stove or electric oven, they were bigger than biscuits and not smooth, they were my Grandfather's favorite biscuits. My Grandfather always said my Grandmother used to be an excellent cook using the wood stove, he said the electric stove ruined her cooking and that nothing tasted good cooked on or in an electric stove. My grandfather made sure they had a big wood stove in their kitchen, he used to like to get up on chilly mornings and fixing himself breakfast on the wood stove and my grandmother would fix hers on the electric stove, lol.
4 to 6 months? Now it's 5 hours from coast to coast, a bad lean cuisine, a weak drink.... BOOM your there! My grandmother was born in 1903, the year the Wright brothers flew their first plane and lived long enough to board a jet and visited us in California and went to Disneyland LOL! You go granny!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My (several times) great grandmother traveled on the Santa Fe trail (same time, different destination) and she wrote a journal that was compiled into a book that’s out of print and hard to find anywhere called With a Doll in One Pocket and a Pistol in the Other: Rebecca Cohen Mayer, 1837-1930 A Memoir. Her husband, the caravan master was also a talented cook and she wrote in the diary about many of the things she ate and that her husband and other cooks in the convoy made. They were Jewish and one thing that I and people in the community found interesting to the story of American Judaism is that her and her husband did not follow kosher food laws at all on the trail: eating hunted game and bacon. An except I think you’d funny find is from one of the numerous times she talked about food: “Our cook makes good bread in a skillet using flour water bacon fat and salt. He has tried to make biscuits. They were so heavy that Henry said if we had a cannon we could use them for cannon balls.”
@@b.a.erlebacher1139 i wish I could, I don’t own it and the only place I’ve found it charges $50 for it, that excerpt was from a publicly available PDF that’s basically a condensed version of the book
@@C_hoffmanni It would be long out of copyright by now, so I think you would have as much right to distribute it as the $50 people, provided you didn't include anything they had added or changed. I'm not a lawyer, however! Can you give me a link to the PDF version you have?
I miss my grandma's Johnny cakes. She came up during the Depression and she knew how to make do. She went from Cabbagetown to the hinterland of B.C. during the war and then to Quebec for radar defence after. Good on her for all of that, but I think the best part about her was the love and care she gave to her grandkids. The Johnny cakes were also nice, 10/10.
not only do I live 9 miles from the end of the Oregon Trail. I also made the costumes for the End of the Trail Museum. I have visited several of the museums along the Oregon Trail (the one in Baker City, Oregon is the best IMHO) I have also had a huge Oregon Trail party at my house where everyone had to equip their "wagon" with supplies (scavenger hunt) while my grandchildren ran around handing out hazard cards that told them "You have just been ambushed by the natives" or "Small Pox is running rampant in your train" It is so much fun to play this kind of game with Non-LARP people. Thank you for making this video, was fun to remember all the connections I have with the Oregon Trail.
Great video! I was born and raised in Independence MO and it was such a shock to hear my hometown mentioned :) If you ever get to these parts, come during the Labor Day Weekend so you can experience Santa-Cali-Gon Days. Granted the festival is nothing like it was when I was a kid, but still something to see.
Using bovine poop (cow pats?) for fire is still a common thing around the world. People collect and stack them in pyramids in the same manner as firewood.
I've cooked with dried cow patties quite a few times. When you actually do it, it isn't a big deal. It isn't like they smell bad or anything. They are dry. Burning they smell more like grass than wood. Food tastes like it should. I've lived 2 places where we drank the spring water on the property. The last place had a very small spring house that was always super cool in the summer and we kept our drinks in there when doing yard work. The runoff watered an apple tree 24/7/365 and when you bit into one of those apples the juice would run down your chin and wet your shirt.
@@TastingHistory Doing this video without speaking to the racism that inspired the creation of Oregon Territory and the people who moved there is a gross omission. Do better. You have before. If you got to it over halfway through, I couldn't bear watching any longer. It should have led the video.
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You are on the Oregon Trail and meet a strange man. He says, "Hi, my name is Terry." You laugh and say, "Terry is a girl's name." Terry shoots you. You have died of Dissin' Terry.
😂❤
😂😂😂
😂😂😂
For those who somehow don’t get it, dysentery is a disease that was common back then
That's a good one😂
I cannot believe Max neglected to mention that the pioneers would sometimes eschew their wagons and instead ride large rocks for miles across the prairie.
Let's hope the did not encounter the alaskan bull worm 😁
Lmao 😂😂😂
🧽 🍍 🌊 🦑 🪨
@@Franky_StheinI believe it’s an AaaaLASkaaaan Buuuull Worm!!! 😮 😂
Can't forget the coral
@@jonleonard8883Or wait maybe it wasn't coral...
My great-great-grandmother was 14 when she married my 16-year-old great-great-grandfather. The first year of their marriage included traveling across the plains to their new life in Nebraska from the east coast. They worked a farm together and, by all accounts, had lives they were happy with and proud of. They were married for over 75 years. I cannot imagine to this day how tough they were.
My grandma was born too early and g-g-grandmother was the midwife. She realized by grandma was too weak so she warmed up the old stove they used to incubate animals and put her in it and kept her alive. I literally wouldn't be here without that woman. Her name was Nancy Anne.
Wow! What an amazing story! Imagine the fear having a baby early back then! Wow! Her mother must have felt so so overwhelming blessed when she lived! ❤❤
That’s a great story, thank you. They were a different breed back then
My great great grandmother was a Midwife in Northern Washington state too, she traveled all around the area delivering Babies and caring for people. This was very early 1850s onward North of Seattle , my Grandmother told me about her and was very proud of her. In those days , out West , these things were not done for money, it was out of love and concern for the other women and children, the community
Wish more people can see this, whites had it hard too. There was nothing for miles and you had to make do with what you could grow or make.
Tough is right! I come from the same kind of stock. They began in Massachusetts and New York and stopped in S. Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. More recent generations eventually ended up in Oregon and California, so "going west" went on for several generations. Greetings from southern Oregon!😄
I live near the end of the trail; all over the place people STILL have the original covered wagons their families brought here 170 years ago. Someone actually refurbished one & modernized it & they rent it out on airbnb! I stayed in it for my birthday
Wow! I guess I never thought what happened to those wagons
That's so cool! I never thought the wagons would still exist, I'm glad to hear they're everywhere :)
That Airbnb had to be fun
Now that would be neat. Or maybe a weekend camp experience where for a day or two you can live like our forebears.
@@coda7994 Wood can last forever as long as there is enough moisture in the air.
@@viperswhip I hadn't thought about that, makes perfect sense
" Yes honey. I had no intentions of partaking in the boy's actions, I went back to my tent and spent the day writing to you" - most believable boys night out text home
And by half-way through the trip, it's probably even become the truth.
First week? Much more variable.
There once was a Max with a knack,
For videos that featured hard tack,
He mentions the quip,
And then shows the clip,
And his viewers all say *KLACK KLACK*
You sir, win the internet for today
CUTE!!🥰
You have made the perfect limerick
Sir Max taps hardtacks with clacking sounds.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
The story about Smith having to give up his mother’s rolling pin brought tears to my eyes.
I know, it’s not as bad as dying of dysentery, but it still hurts.
Amen.
"...and they were awful good biscuits" hit me right in the heart.
If they remake the Oregon Trail video game that should definitely be a cutscene.
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 they did remake it and it's amazing
This is kind of funny, since you mention the monotony of moving and the joy of eating. I worked for a moving company, so every day was the same thing but different. When we got together in the mornings, our first priority was deciding where we were going to eat lunch that day.
That man with the rolling pin. That grown man crying because he had to leave his mother's rolling pin and he missed her... He's like me. Like us.
Every now and then I hear or read something that makes me realize on a deep level that everyone that ever existed was a person. All the heroes and villains of history, sure. But every single one of the common folk was as much a fully realized person as me. They all had dreams and memories and childhoods and dreams and happiness and misery. Tens of thousands of years of human experience. An ocean full of people that lived full lives not unlike mine. It's gut wrenching every time.
It's a real emotion, called "sonder." Super interesting to think about
@@RustedOrange Thank you for this! There's so many emotions and states of being where I feel like we don't have words for it, only to find out we do but we just don't hear them much. Thanks for giving us one of those words.
I had the same reaction. Realizing that guy from the Oregon Trail was having the same thoughts and feelings I'd have about my own dad was surreal.
I often feel like the heroes and the villains are often less fully developed humans, tbh.
I honestly feel for this man and the sacrifice he was forced to make. I have a few kitchen tools from my late grandmother, which is all I have left of her. If I were asked to part with any of them, I don't think I ever could. They would most likely have to be pried from my cold, dead fingers.
Sweetie: I got your four food groups
Beans 🫘
Bacon 🥓
Whisky 🥃
And lard 🧈
Don't forget the beer for your horses.
@@jeepstergal4043there aint no horses at the bottom of the ocean.
"don't worry, it just keeps,,,and keeps,,,and keeps...
"Cy-lan-tro? What to cock-a-doodle is Cy-lan-tro?"
@@robertharris6092 Poseidon, King of the Sea, has something to say about that!
I love that Max shouted out Townsends! There needs to be a huge mashup of the best historical food channels. Max and Townsdends make early 19th century, historical accurate MREs, then have Steve1989MRE eat them while Steve Wallis does a stealth camp near a wagon train.
I know it's more "recent" history, but B. Dylan Hollis is another gem.
Mash up of everyone!!
The meat was often salted in old times and packed in ceramic jars. Salt, meat, salt, meat, all the way to the top. This kept meat from spoiling and had to be soaked in water a few times before use. My Uncle Don told me, when he was a kid, the pork was kept in barrels with salt water and lasted a year.
Sounds like how I make my sauerkraut. Cabbage and salt, all the way down, lol.
Yes...outfitters sold barrels of salt pork for the wagon trains. Flour, corn meal, sugar and lard. Of course salt and pepper and coffee and dried beans were essentials every family carried.
Ship's used to store pork and beef that way during sailing' days
sounds about right. my opa was one of nine kids in a small village in Bavarian Germany during ww2. He described them having a very well stocked pantry during the winter, barrels of sauerkraut and the like.
20:52 I'm crying, thinking of this big burly man just missing his mama's biscuits 😭😭
I more see these pioneers as people who made the choice to gamble for great wealth on the frontier. It's an inherently selfish move, I don't feel bad for those that paid a price for such a chance at increasing one's station in life
@@Konarcoffee You appear to have an atrophied sense of empathy and humanity, and a very flawed way of perceiving what such a decision includes.
Many wanted fortune, but tons of people on the Oregon trail were poor and looking for land and opportunity. Oregon isn't super well known for their gold @@Konarcoffee
@@Konarcoffeewhen you’re talking about the gold rush, you have a point, but many of the folks on the Oregon Trail were just folks, who thought they could find a better life, land that they could call their own, and a measure of independence. I’m more disturbed by the attitude that it was perfectly OK to take the land because the people currently occupying it were (insert series of racial slurs here). But to people coming from Europe, where you pretty much couldn’t get out of sight of human occupation, it must have seemed like “all this vacant land, why shouldn’t I have a piece of it?” I’m not saying that makes it acceptable, but people are real good at justifying what they want to do.
I’m imagining a time traveler kicking in a door in the middle of a blizzard. The entire room goes silent as the stranger scans the room till his eyes rest upon the 6ft 5in 350 pound man with hat in hand, eyes downcast in front of another man with a rolling pin in his. The mysterious stranger points to the man holding the rolling pin “HE KEEPS THE ROLLING PIN!! THE FUTURE HAS SPOKEN!” Then backs up out of the building as the door blows closed. 😂😂
My great-great-great-great grandfather came along the Oregon trail with his family when he was just three years old. This was in the late 1850's, so a little later than the stories you usually hear about. At this point there were a few more checkpoint settlements along the trail which made getting supplies a little easier. He passed down a story about how on one of the legs they'd misjudged how many rations they needed and had to scrape by on foraging off the land. His sister who was 12 at the time was off foraging when she ran into a Native American. In broken English he asked what a young white girl was doing so far out by herself. She told him of her family's situation, and after listening to her story he reached into his bag and gave her a large handful of the his buffalo jerkey to take back. That handful of dried meat managed to stretch their rations out a few more days and they were able to make it to the checkpoint a week later. Unfortunately she forgot to ask his name, but this stranger's generosity likely saved the lives of the younger siblings, including my great-great-great-great grandpa.
Hear, hear 👏🏼
That makes it all the sadder what the Native Americans went through. There are many instances throughout history of them helping the American settlers survive, from the pilgrims at Plymouth to the Oregon Trail, and their kindness and generosity were repaid with persecution that some would say continues even today
What a wonderful family story to pass down through the ages. Thank you for sharing.
Damn. So your life was made possible by a Native American. I’m sure so many of ours actually were tbh but it’s amazing you have that story
Real, unprocessed Buffalo jersey sounds delightful.
As a historian and someone who works for a museum/interpretive center that deals with the Oregon Trail, I want to say thank you for the interesting and very accurate information in your video.
Baker City?
@@melissamiller1673 I work for the National Oregon California Trail Center in Montpelier, ID.
That sounds like my dream job ❤ You're so lucky!
My papaw taught me how to make hoe cakes and cornbread, in his old cast iron skillets. We made them together many times. His recipe was never written down, and there were no precise measurements. But I knew it by heart. I even won a 4-H competition, presenting his recipe. We never used bacon grease. But we did put plenty of butter on them, when they were done! I inherited his skillets. But somehow, my cornbread just never came out the same, after he died. Still, I will always, always treasure those memories of standing next to him at the stove, and of my family enjoying what we made. 😊
"as we try not to die of dysentery" should be the goal of every cooking show 😂
😂😂
I mean, it's a low bar for sure, but it does feel like such an important one...
Good one!!! 😊😊😊
Dysentery has nothing to do with food but contaminated water. If you have enough fuel, boiling is the answer
Should be the goal of every camper.
As an Oregonian and a member of the Oglala Lakota, I'd like to see you do an episode on Wohanpi, which is a bison stew beloved by my ancestors, and maybe highlight some of the other tribes of Turtle Island.
That sounds awesome, I'd love to see Max do more episodes on N.American First Nations cooking in general.
Native American/First Nations recipes would be some great episodes.
I'm cherokee from oklahoma that would be good to see but don't give to many secrets their starting to misuse edible mushrooms that I grew up on get ticket have to many crawdads everything love Buffalo anything
Honestly (don't know how much truth there is to it but I like to think of a point where our peoples lived in peace) the original Jonnycakes recipe to my understanding from stories passed down through my New England Yankee upbringing came from the Eastern tribes, specifically Abinaki and Penobscot. It was even simpler than Max's recipe, really just cornmeal and water. As is common when one culture adopts another's food, it got embellished along the way.
I would love to learn more first nations recipes. I'm a big believer that we learn from each other.
im also oglala lakota. but in california. nice to meet ya
My grandmother came over in covered wagons. From Wyoming to Colorado. She was very young when she married grandpa Bates. She had 5 kids one was my father. He joined the Army and was sent to Harley Davidson to learn how to repair motorcycles. That’s where he met my mother. 1942 married then had my brother in 1944 sister in 1952 and me 1955. Then my youngest brother in 1956. What a story for the grandchildren.
My dad had to learn how to fix motorcycles for the Army. WWII he was a great mechanic and owned his own Repair Shop called Bates Brothers, my Uncle Cecil was in charge with him.
The hard tack 'knock knock' is such an old friend at this point, I love it every time.
That hardtack clip is a gift that just keeps on giving
The face he makes is what cracks me up
Just like hardtack itself.
Fun fact for anybody who’s never eaten those Camas bulbs Max mentions. They have a prune-y kind of taste and a texture similar to fruit leather when cooked. It’s also a mild laxative until your system gets used to it… to quote William Clark about eating camas: “it filled us so full of wind we were scarce able to breathe all night.”
But you have to make sure you have the right kind of camas because there is something called "death camas". You don't get to make that mistake more than once.
@@theresemalmberg955 “if the flower isn’t blue, you will be soon if you eat it” was what my elder friend said about death camas
Like fartichokes ie Jerusalem artichokes
Lol😂
@@johnransom1146 Sunchokes contain inulin. "Nuff said.
Hey man, Nebraskan native here! Just wanted to say thank you for showcasing such a monumental part of our history. Fyi, Kearny is pronounced Car-Knee. The fort never rally had much for travelers as it was an outpost rather than a supply depot. Town legend says there were so many pianos, potbelly stoves, and bookcases dumped by the pioneers that when the city was founded, all the citizens just grabbed them off the side of the road.
We just visited Kearney, well the Arch Monument there. It was our second time as our daughter was only six months old the first time and obviously not our third child. 😃 The museum was just as awesome the second time! If you are driving I80, plan on the stop!
Which tribe?
Thank you for speaking up- from another Nebraskan
In north dakota during the depression my grandmas family ran out of coal during the winter. When her dad took the wagon to get abother load she had to collect "buffalo chips" to burn in the stove to stay warm. I think he was gone for more than a week getting the coal. She said you had to bust them from the frozen ground.
I hear "Oregon Trail" and think "dysentery" the same way I hear "mitochondria" and think "the powerhouse of the cell" or hear "hardtack" and think [clack clack].
The only times I didn't have everyone die on the trail I was starting as a banker and therefore had lots of money to spend on provisions. I also remember how annoyed I was that they never let me keep more than like 100 lbs of meat from a bison even when they had ten times that (although, in retrospect, killing a lot of bison and leaving most of it to rot is, unfortunately, historically accurate).
You meet a man on the Oregon Trail. He tells you his name is Terry. “Terry?!” you say laughing, “Terry’s a girls name!” Without any hesitation, Terry pulls out a gun and shoots you dead.
You just died of dissing Terry!
I always assumed it was just a long, boring, dangerous miserable journey. This proved me wrong.
I wonder if a modern version of the Oregon Trail would have more social options. Almost no wagons would travel alone, and surely there would be space in somebody's wagon to carry some of the extra meat. And that sort of sharing would foster relationships with people who might well end up being your neighbours, your kids' future in-laws, a person of note in your settlement...
The trick to playing as a farmer is to buy no food at the start, focus on ammo and hunt all the way to max food.
I'm a scientist that indirectly studies shigella (the bacteria that causes dysentery), and I always include that death screen as a a part of my background and significance when I present my work.
😂😂😂
Cholera killed many in that time.
That’s hilarious.
That's how they know you're legit.
As someone who's had dysentery (albeit most likely caused by E. coli O157:H7, not a shigella strain), I thank you for your work. Hopefully someday there'll be a more effective treatment than just IV fluids and acetaminophen.
I first played Oregon Trail around 1985 at around 6 years old on an Apple IIe with the green screen. Booting off of a 5 1/4" floppy. Aw, the good ole days lol
hah! The "Disk II" - separate 5.25 floppy drive to replace the earlier cartridges. Those were the days.
@swankeepers Well, I was lucky in some regards. We lived around LA in the mid 80's and my Mom was a teacher at the local elementary school when Apple donated a bunch of computers. We got to have it at home to learn it. I of course used it for Oregon Trail, Frogger, and various educational games. All good, since I can say I was hands on keyboard at age 9 in 1985, way before most people even knew what a personal computer was. I was also on the early public Internet in college in 1994 and was a very early Linux user.
Haha! Same for me! Oregon Trail was the 1st floppy I learned to use & enjoy over & over & over...again on our school's 1st Apple II in "85. However, unlike you @6yrs old , I was a much older 28 yr old teacher @the time. Ah!! 😮
@@cindifelch8867 That's awesome! Not at your 26 years at the time, but the Apple/Oregon Trail story. The original is still playable online if you want to reminisce. Google it 😃
18:42
The importance of lemon extract may not just be about flavouring the water to give it a nicer taste, but to prevent the onset of scurvy.
My girlfriend is a descendant of emigrants on the Oregon trail. Her ancestors were Norwegian immigrants that joined a wagon train around 1855. They first settled in central Oregon, but soon moved to Washington State after hearing about the port in Seattle
Makes sense Norwegians would prefer the fishing industry. My grandmother and aunt moved to Portland to work in the fish canning industry which boomed during WW2.
I work in the fishing industry in Seattle, and there's not a Norwegian to be found around here who doesn't have a few choice words for the hipsters who "ruined Ballard", which for those not from here is the neighborhood where there used to be a lot of fishing piers, wharves, and what-have-you (I work on Pier 91 at the head of Elliott Bay, better known for the cruise terminal that annoys all of us with the wandering tourists when we're trying to get work done!)
Ballard district of Seattle had lots Scandinavians when I was growing up, not sure if it still does.
Congrats, you have a girlfriend
The original Vinland saga
A friend of mine had a small foot stool that her great grandmother had brought on the Oregon trail. The husband had been throwing out her belongings along the way until all she had left was this stool. When he threw it out she sat down on it and refused to get up. Her husband and another man had to pick her up with the stool and put her in the wagon, and so she saved the only personal belonging she had left.
You gotta wonder how the person that made that foot stool would have felt knowing it meant so much in the end.
I love this 😊 Also makes me think of Waiting for Guffman 😃
Parching the cornmeal by placing it in a pan over a low heat until it browns a little improves the flavor substantially.
The ampersand was also developed as a shorthand for writing "et" and began its life as an E with the cross of a T on its tail!
The main point about the immigrants to Oregon walking is this: it reduced the load on the animals pulling the wagon. Riders were more weight and the horses/oxen could only pull so much for so long. One had to carefully husband the animal's strength if it were to survive more than 90 days of laboriously pulling the wagon full of supplies.
“Animal husbandry” is a term I often giggle at
@@jlshel42 It always makes me smile when I play civilization and imagine my people getting so sick of others that they decide to turn to the animals.
Yes only the infirm and maybe little babies only rode in the wagon. If you knew how to walk you walked.
Also, with that diet lots of excersize is the only way they are clearing their digestive systems. No fruit or veggies.
You also have to think if the people were staving themselves what were they doing to those poor animals they were forcing to do all the work. You often see those lists of supplies but rarely is animal feed anywhere on it.
Green grass to ox and cattle is food but dried grass is just filler and offers very little. Their bellies might be full but they aint getting anything from it and being worked sun up to sundown.
That $600 shopping list equates to roughly $25,000 today
EDIT: Elisha Perkins' $1500 worth of discarded supplies is roughly $62,000 today!!!
so this was somewhat of a commitment.
WOW.
Still would have found room for my mother's rolling pin.
@@humorss colonization 🚩
And that rolling pin? Priceless.
For all else, there's Cheyenne Card.
That quote about only finding bison skulls and no living bison made me realize why the go to depiction of the american southwest features a lot of bison skulls on the ground
It's so cool to see you cover this topic! I'm from Oregon and my ancestors Ezekiel and Hannah Powers came here by way of the Oregon Trail. We even have Ezekiel's journal which chronicles their journey.
Hi Max. You probably won't see this, but my father and I spent many evenings watching your channel and sharing our shared interests in cooking and history. He had a heart attack last week and it's been incredibly difficult. Your videos are one of the few things that can bring a measure of comfort in these difficult times. Thank you, and thank you to Jose as well, for all that you do.
Sorry for your loss 💔
I am so sorry for your loss lovey 😢
fart balls
* hug *
Heart attacks ain’t always lethal, so I don’t know if he’s still alive or not but I DO understand that caring for a loved one is stressful. Take care of yourself, too. Please!
I’m so sorry to hear of this awful time. I hope things get better for you all. Sending you love from Australia ❤
One thing they never wrote down (because everyone knew it) is that you have to let the batter sit for 10-15, sometimes up to 30 depending on humidity, minutes to let the meal obsorb the water before cooking. That's why it tasted grainy. They used to do this with bread dough as well.
Yeah, still you are supposed to let your corn meal batter sit for a bit before you bake it.
My son gave me a t-shirt last year that had the little ox-cart on it and the words, "You have died of dysentery." I laughed so hard, because we all used to play that game when the kids were growing up. Thank you for a very entertaining (and informative) episode!
Once during a job that I had years ago I had fallen off of a mountain and I was stranded for a while before I had gotten rescue. I used wild "horse chips" to start a fire. It felt right, but smelled a little wrong.
Crazy how much the New World crops like maize(corn) and potatos changed the world. Potatos in particular allowed for industrial revolution because of how reliable and calorie dense they were as food; People can survive off nothing but potatos so long as you have a good source of dietary iron. Furthermore potato plants can be trampled by horses marching through and the actual crop won't be destroyed, making wars less detrimental to the peasants class.
I survived on mashed potatoes and milk for 6 months. Not fun.
@@annettefournier9655 Nonetheless, you survived.
A big downside of our potato craze is we really only brought one variety out of South America. That's why the Irish potato famine happened, with only one type of potato the virus spread quickly. The Incan empire (i think i could be wrong) relied on potatoes and had huge storehouses of thousands of types of potatoes that could last their starving nation for years if they needed it
Cast iron cookware is a good source
@@tux_duh That's not completely true. We didn't just bring one type of potato from the new world. They had many types of potatoes. The Irish before the famine foolishly relied on only one type of potato because of its large size, they didn't completely understand crop rotation
Friend of mine played Oregon Trail 2 using 4 60 year old ladies and bacon. He made it farther than I did. My survival skills were brought into immediate question.
I was an adult before my husband showed me how to buy supplies at the beginning. I never made it past my second grade twenty minute computer time allotment. 😂
That game was among my earlier childhood favorites for the silly reasons: fording a river too deep (at that age funny to watch) and the hunt screen where you just take out every animal you see. Despite how you run out of food on subsequent hunts, only able to carry back so much each outing too. Bad idea, but I still did it!
@@davidgladthe classic “from the animals you shot, you got 500 pounds of meat, however you were only able to carry 100”
The Oregon trail 2 exists ??
@user-tf6ol3gd5v there are a bunch of Oregon Trail games.
Amazing how that name Johnny cakes (original I believe originated from word journey cakes) which was always some sort of long lasting type of bun/cake/bread. In the Caribbean it is called johnny cakes and is made of flour, water and salt. Option to add a pinch of baking powder. It was then fried and served warm with butter. Yum. Cornmeal is also used in a dish called festival. It is served with very spicy fried fish.
I live right next to the end of the trail. The first sign of real civilization is down the street from me in Eagle Creek Oregon. Ruts and left over artifacts can still be found. I found a few on my own land from one of the first settlers. My greatx3 grandparents headed out on the Oregon Trail but split off and finished on the Mormon Trail into Salt Lake and settled Lehi
The Oregon Trail actually went right through my family's property. I was actually once the assistant director of a museum in the area. Not far from where I'm from, there's another museum where you can see this kind of food in person. We even sometimes make something similar today. This is a video that really connects to what I know. :)
In Oregon on someones property I saw some "remains" of the Oregon Trail - wagon ruts cut a trail over some rocks... Had to think about how many wagons it took to do that... Great memory.
@@TheGypsyVanners yeah, I've seen tracks like that before. It's pretty cool to see. I'm originally from Nebraska. There used to be some tracks on our property, but they're not there anymore. You can still see some nearby, though. Courthouse and Jailhouse Rock and Chimney Rock were landmarks travelers used to find their way. You unfortunately can't see the cool stuff anymore as they cut off public access years ago, but I got to go up to Chimney Rock and see it myself about twenty-five years ago. I still remember it well. Humans are going to human though, and they had to prevent vandalism. The other location was restricted a long time ago because kids were partying on top of the rock and fell off when they got drunk.
@@MichaelHall1989 all so neat right?
As a native Oregonian... getting an Oregon trail story, two Hard Tacks in the episode, and an errant "Proble-ing" at 17:54 has made this a great morning
what tribe are you from i'm surprised there are any natives left?
Indeed, what is proble-ing? Is it just his way of saying problem?
@@krono5el They probably mean that they are born and raised in Oregon not that they are an indigenous Oregon Native. Oregon has I think 9 recognized tribes today like Klamath, Siletz, Grand Ronde, Umpqua so their still here not even including all the unrecognized ones or those belonging to multiple tribes.
The tribes aren't native to oregon. They walked there just like everybody else. They just came from the north instead of the east.
@krono5el that's a funny joke. I'm gonna argue with it, thus explaining the joke, and ruin the giggles.
I can totally empathize with Mr. Smith and his rolling pin. My most treasured possession is a wooden spoon that belonged to my mother, and her mother before her. The end is worn flat on a diagonal, from three generations of stirring, and there's a pronounced divot from tapping it on the sides of pots. It's kinda like those ancient stone temples, with ruts worn by years of pilgrim traffic. I use it when preparing special meals and preserves, and I always feel a connection to them when I do. I've occasionally thought that, in the event of a house-fire, I'd be tempted to take the 20-foot detour to rescue that spoon on the way out. Other items in my home would be expensive to replace, but that spoon is irreplaceable!
PS: I wonder if those densely-nutritious "meat biscuits" they mentioned were pemmican - a delightful staple that I still enjoy (though I tend to make mine from beef).
PPS: The hard tack (clack-clack!) meme still kills me every time. 😆
You posting this a few days before The Gaming Historian posted his hour and a half history of the Oregon Trail video game is the most beautiful unrelated timing ever
Notes on buffalo poop. Having lived in the bush in Kenya with cows, their poop smells like spring. Sweet and grass-like. I was told by a Nat'l park worker (in the US) buffalo poop smells similarly
I imagine it also depends on what food source is available too. I accidentally slid through some cow poop in the winter time and it smelled like an evergreen tree. I would imagine that was because grass was minimal in the winter so the cow was enjoying the only green thing around. Now had its diet been hay or grass then I think it wouldn't have been as "pleasant" of a smell.
@@matthewc3120 Wow!! That's so cool! I have a strong desire to sniff evergreen cow poop now!!
@@matthewc3120 Still has to be better than pig 💩, though. 😅😜
Not only will buffalo/bison poop smell similarly to cattle poop, but the animals can actually breed with each other and get fertile offspring. There's at least two breeds of cattle (Beefalo is the one I recall the name of) that are specifically distinguished by having that as a requirement. The biggest issues are that bison are commonly twice as heavy (which can sometimes cause a cow's back to snap during mating), and bison are less docile/more wild.
@matthewc3120 you would be correct. I have cooked over smoldering cow chips when I was in Scouts. There is a different smell to the ones grazing on mountain grass vrs the ones eating hay.
Fun Fact: I grew up in the Sierra Nevadas and on the eastward side of the mountains near our house was a small "town" called Piano Flats. The story goes that a wealthy family hauled an upright piano all the way across the plains, along the southern routes around the Rockies, but when they got to the pass to get into California, they finally could not justify bringing it anymore. Rather than just dump it though, they set it on the ground, tuned it, and built a lean-to around it to mostly protect it from the elements and it became a landmark for people taking that path over the mountains. Pioneers who knew music would play it as they passed until it finally got unplayable, but later a trading stop would grow up in the same area. Just a neat story (that may or may not be true, as these things go) but its still fun.
Any tuning was probably rather dubious even when it was set up, but otherwise not outlandish.
@@absalomdraconis I suppose if it was tuned a semi-tone down would be the reason the place is called Piano Flats?
@@brawdygordii😂 nice one
@@brawdygordiibravo
@@brawdygordii
You’re a right sharp fellow! 😂
Max! Your channel is pure delight! I must say here, from Brazil, that my husband bought me your book and just gifted it to me ❤ As I'm now during a cancer treatment, I'm trully happy to read and try the history in this book! I'll try one recipe a month 🎉
Hope you get through it!
@@greenapple9477 thank you very much 🙏♥️
The short clip of the cowboy on the horse is from the TV Western "Wagon Train". Way before my time, but I could watch those Westerns all day long. The Rifleman, Have gun will travel, Laramie, Wanted Dead or Alive, Rawhide (young Clint Eastwood), etc.
At 76 I recognized Ward Bond immediately. Grew up watching all those shows. Great childhood. Great video!
@graceandglory1948 I cut the cable 10 years ago and we have nothing but over the air digital tv(excepting streaming of course). MeTV and those other family friendly tv channels is all you need, and they're free...and the shows are better than 90% of current tv shows..no matter the genre. I grew up on PBS and British shows (especially British comedy) was on at our house all of the time. Also a good childhood.
My grandmother made cornbread hoe cakes every day. I can remember standing in a chair in front of the stove to turn them for her when I was very little. It was their staple bread for lunch and dinner, with biscuits for breakfast. Well rendered lard will keep at room temperatures for a year.
"cornbread >hoe< cakes" teehee 😂 ooooh my.
Well it's good to feed them too.😊
Omg the original is hoe cake. That did not modernize well!
And I believe the bacon, especially on the trail, was smoked and much more heavily salted than modern bacon.
@@richdiddens4059 We still make bacon that way. Every winter we kill a few hogs and my dad salts the bacon, ham and shoulder, then we hang them in a smokehouse my grandfather built in the 1940's. It is extremely salty and smoky and I can remember my grandmother keeping the bacons on strings hanging in the basement stairwell. I keep it in the freezer and refrigerator now.
@@deereating9267 I'm curious... I know a lot of cultures who salt fish soak it thoroughly before using it to remove a lot of the salt. Is that something that is done with bacon made the way you describe?
I mean, I love bacon, but too much salt reminds me of my great-grandmother - she had lost a lot of her tastebuds at some point and would salt everything until she could taste it, almost to the point of being inedible. Great cook otherwise, but... yeah.
"Half as much as a hen's egg" is such a brilliant comparative measurement, most people in the world will be familiar with the domesticated chicken and therefore know roughly how big their eggs are, one of those measurements that transfers across borders unlike "3 barleycorn to an inch".
Though it might not be consistent over time. I think hen's eggs average bigger now.
That's one of the reasons I think cup measurements for cooking vs. weighing got so common here in the US, everyone had s coffee cup. Can't bring scales cross country but cups are a must.
My grandma likes to say our family was almost stranded with the Donner party, I’m not sure how much of that is exactly true but it makes the Oregon trail a little more special to me living in the lovely state.
It could be true; the Donner party started out as part of a larger wagon train at the beginning of the trip, but split off from the group halfway to the end of the trail. Your family could have been part of the original wagon train that didn't get stuck in the mountains.
Early European explorers suffered from scurvy on overland excursions until the natives taught them which plants they could gather and consume.
6:50 Yeah, the entire reason bacon was invented was as a way to preserve meat. Modern grocery store bacon isn't cured for preservation anymore, but back in the day, you just had to keep it away from sunlight and as anoxic as you could manage and you'd be fine. As for lard, as long as it's kept in an opaque container it'll last for some time. That's why it's sold in buckets and nobody who uses it regularly in cooking bothers to refrigerate it. (I certainly don't refrigerate the rendered bacon fat from cooking that I then use to cook other savory food.)
That explains why my grandma always kept her lard in the cupboard under her sink. It was much darker there than the pantry.
She kept lard, Crisco, and the coffee can of bacon grease all in the same place and could grab the one she wanted without even looking.
The USDA has made everyone so paranoid now.
@@purplefern6010 Well, it also made us not die of dysentery anymore (much), so - Yay for food safety regulations!
@@FrikInCasualModeThat was more from drinking bad water than the food.
10:20 salmon carries a parasite that is fatal to dogs, so if the dog ate the raw salmon it’s very likely it would have died, but from the parasite, not from overeating. Never allow your dog to eat raw salmon.
I named my older daughter Camas, after the plant. I'm half-Coast Salish and it was always a dear plant to me. My younger daughter is Olallie, after the berries that were also so important to my ancestors. The names suit them. My older daughter is delicate and shy, and hides a lot of herself under the surface. My younger daughter is exuberant and bright like a salmonberry.
Very cool!
There's salmon berries in Stardew Valley.
That's womderful!
Those are really cool, unique names! 😁😁
These are absolutely beautiful names. I love how you related them to qualities your daughters have ❤
Why didn't you name her Salmonberry?
stop the man who gave up his mother's rolling pin literally made me start crying
I love the idea of using an egg as a unit of general measurement as almost everyone in the world will know how big an egg is.
As a professional chef AND a history buff, your channel has allowed me to relay to the service staff something I have wanted to say for years: "this dish is inspired by a Xth century recipe"
Thank you, Max!
Ooooh what was it? What was the dish?
Maybe the dragon's heart recipe @@cam4636
@@cam4636 it was Borscht, the instance I'm thinking of, I used Max's history lesson to make the most authentic (although vegan, so...do with that what you will) it wasn't a menu star but it meant a lot to me
@@cam4636 I also helped my bartender with a switchel. It sold like watery and vinegary hot cakes. I didn't expect it, but that summer we sold gallons and gallons of gin-spiked switchel. He adjusted it to be rum, and we sold even more.
This took place in Minnesota, unfortunately the restaurant closed that same summer. Needless to say, I have been devastated (not my money involved, but MY menu didn't bring enough patrons in, etc, I will say that our service staff was less than adequate, but I can't tell if I'm passing the blame)
Oh man. This brought back a memory I had repressed. Growing up we were so poor, my parents would feed our whole family (mom, dad, my teenaged brother and me) with two boxes of Jiffy corn bread and a pound of bacon. Cornmeal pancakes. That was dinner. The bad old days. 😢
I would love to see more recipes from this era of American history! The combination of subsistence hunting/gathering and "glamping" with luxury cooking items from home fascinates me. The absolute versatility of portable goods and campfire cooking was on full display during this time. Excellent video as always!
I watch all of your weekly videos, but this one touched me the most. I never felt so close to the people who traveled the trails nor understood them as well. Thank you.
I have a friend who has potato starter that her ancestors first made over a hundred years ago, and she still makes bread with it.
No way! I didn’t even know you could have a potato starter. That is cool.
That's awesome! In my country our national bread is a sourdough. All bakers use starters that in one way or another date to about the 1550s. Some really old bakeries (1700s) still work as they always did today, with wood fired ovens. There is a national compact that if a baker's sourdough starter has developed a problem then other bakers share some of their own starter so the cycle is never broken. It's a great tradition and I hope your friend is able to maintain her centennial potato starter!
@@heldaneurbanus5135 That's amazing and heartwarming. I love the sense of community that can be found within trades.
@@heldaneurbanus5135 can i ask, what country?
@@AlanDai1130 sure. Malta. If curious just google Maltese bread.
Max, I don’t know if you can still get hold of the footage but, in 1989 a married couple from Sweetwater, Montana (last name was Clark) organized an honest to goodness wagon train across private and public lands through Montana’s historic state capitols. I know that CNN and maybe Ted Turner’s network covered it. I was seven years old when my parents bought a team of Belgian draught horses and an old John Deere grain wagon and took off on the adventure of a lifetime! We traveled the prairie from Bannock, Montana through Twin Bridges, Dillon, and Boulder and finally into the current capitol, Helena, Montana. We arrived around the 4th of July. While on the road we baked Indian cakes, and also harvested gooseberries and serviceberries, tried rattlesnake and prickly pear cactus! Your video brought back awesome memories, thanks! ❤
How cool of your family to do that.
@@mistsister I’m 42 now with kids of my own and I STILL smile when I think about it! 😆
This is my dream come true 🤗💖🤩
Greetings from Billings. Are you still living in one the greatest places on Earth? ❤ Bannock is very interesting host town. If you ever go to the West side of the state again visit some natural hot spring. They are all over there. In fact Jackson Hot Springs isn’t too far away from Bannock.
@@kelseycox1177 LOL. I live in the Big Horn mountains of WY now but have loved lounging in the springs at Jackson! The new goal is building a love for nature, history, and our western culture in my kiddos. 🥰 Nice to hear from a fellow lover of the Big Sky state.
Just wanna say, camas is a very beautiful native plant that can often be found in nurserys in the PNW! It's a gorgeous purple flowered bulb in addition to being extremely edible.
I always love your videos, its fascinating to learn about history through the lens of food. Hearing about how people cooked and enjoyed meals really highlights the human experiences. I often wonder what the day-to-day was like for people in different periods of history, and how they did basic things like make breakfast. These videos really satisfy that curiosity for me!
Who else got to enjoy the Oregon trial computer games as a kid? I remember me and my buddy loaded up on ammo and stayed alive by hunting lol.
Played them so much in my fifth grade classroom that I convinced my parents to buy me a personal copy.
I remember dying from dysentery over and over
Oh absolutely. Looked forward to rainy days when we were allowed into the other 4th Grade teacher’s room where we played the entire recess, usually as teams.
I always hated it, lol. But it has some nostalgia now, I suppose.
That game traumatized me as a kid. I remember OT and seeing what happened when someone died… a tombstone, two crying people and the funeral dirge.
The secret to a better johnny cake is to soak your cornmeal for a bit first, then thicken/finish with some dry; it gives a softer texture with some contrast instead of "all grit all the time."
Make the base mix with boiling water, let it sit and cool for 15 minutes before adding eggs/milk or whatever other additions.
When I worked at a museum/historic site, we would put on interactive educational programs for visiting school classes. One of the activities we would prepare, was making tortillas and cooking them over a heat source (couldn't use open flame because of fire danger near a historic building); we would make the dough ahead of time with masa (finely ground cornmeal) and boiling water.
The recipe was: one part masa and 1.5 parts boiling water, mix to create a thick batter, let stand 10 to 15 minutes to cool and thicken. In that time, the masa would absorb all of the excess water and become a soft dough which could be portioned out with a scoop, into equal-sized balls, placed in a clean bowl, and covered with a clean towel, ready to hand to the children for shaping and cooking. That soaking time meant that the tortillas (similar to these johnny cakes) were never gritty because the corn had softened while absorbing the hot water.
My grandfather came west on the Oregon Trail working as a water boy when he was a teenager. He would’ve done that in the last days of when the trail was still used. He only journeyed part of the way and settled in Butte, Montana. Thanks for making his journey a little bit more real to me.
Thank you Max for posting! I love this topic because I am from Missouri and grew up learning about the amazing Pioneers that made their way west . I am sill in awe , I remember our city had a ice storm and the electricity was down for two weeks ! we along with our family pets survived on our camping supplies, lanterns candles coolers that we kept near the house from the basement, it was very challenging but fun . I think we could do the 4 month journey with Missouri Mules! no oxen🐂🐂 😉
Thank you for including that the near extinction of the bison in the US and Canada was an intentional genocidal act. Growing up I often heard it glossed over as just “overhunting” and I didn’t learn the true nature of the extermination until I was in my thirties.
Genocide refers to people.
@@mrdarklightThat’s what they mean. It was a way to starve the indigenous peoples of the prairies.
@@mrdarklightthey’re not referring to the buffalo, cutting off peoples’ main sources of living in many aspects was part of the genocide.
@@mrdarklight Curious as to whether you've heard the band H.I.M.?
😩😞
Yes, it's difficult to give up everything you hold dear to emigrate to a new and unknown place. I did it when I was 10 and my family and I had to leave Cuba in a crowded plane with just the clothes on our backs. We did it again when 10 years later we left Venezuela to come to the United States. This time we were lucky, we each brought a suitcase. That's why we owe so much respect to those who have trecked by foot from the north of South America. They are the same strong people who made this country wonderful.
Excellent story! But have you considered your ancestors coming across the Bering Straight ice, 20, 000 or so years ago and running straight through North America to South America to escape the "Short Faced Bear"? Not kidding. Look up "Short Faced Bear". I am surprised North America was even occupied.
@@scorpiouk5914 well, my particular ancestors crossed either the Strait of Hormuz or got on a ship to make it across the Mediterranean when the Romans kicked us out of Judea and Samaria. Some of these ancestors settled in the Catalonian region of Spain and others made it to Russia and Germany. Unfortunately, since three of the four grandparents came over to Cuba in the last century and the single native Cuban grandmother was only first generation, I don't think we can claim ownership of the treck across the Bering Strait.
I agree. When we moved to Australia, we were only allowed to bring 40kgs with us. We left everything behind.
Oh you mean the current illegal aliens?
Great video. I really like the context provided for the meals along with primary sources to show specific instances of what they went through for meals and other mundane things. Excellent channel I really like it as a lover of history and as a guy now forced to cook meals for myself lol
I loved going to the computer lab to play Oregon trail in elementary school. This video is so fun and informative, as always, but with added nostalgia. Thanks Max and Jose!
I so love that the Oregon Trail is so well known in the modern American zeitgeist thanks to one random video game.
Peak edutainment. Just like Tasting History.
Invicta taught me garum existed. Max made me love the stuff.
Funnier than that is how that game hasn’t been played by kids in years but everyone knows what “you’ve died of dysentery” is referring too.
I remember that game like it was only five yesterdays ago. But hearing Max describe the horrendous dietary conditions that befell the travelers later on down the trail, the famous line "you've died of dysentery" strikes a much more haunting chord.
Add to that the sad scene of that man having to give up his mother's rolling pin...waterworks for hours. 😢😢
I’m from the UK and this is how I know it too! 😂
@@SCIFIguy64 the game has actually been remade multiple times since the original 1985 version for the Apple II.
The most recent version came out in 2022 and I highly recommend giving it a play. Still very fun and full of historical facts.
I am an adjunct history professor and high school history teacher. I teach early United States History, and one of my areas of expertise is the Oregon Trail and early pioneers. First, let's think about how much weight the food is. The wagons could only hold about 3000 lbs at the max. They big Conestogas cut hold more. But they didn't use those type of wagons because they were heavy and would have been too hard for the ox to pull on the trail. Now I want to address the going fifteen to twenty miles in a day. In my research and study, that is actually not a true fact. The wagons could go 15 miles to 20 miles a day on a really good day where nothing goes wrong and the weather is perfect. But most wagon trains might go 12 to 15 miles a day. They sometimes went less if the weather was bad. This was a really good video, and I did enjoy it as usual.
Thank you for this valuable insight. Nice to have a teacher who studied this from more direct and local sources.
I was wondering why wouldn't they find easier solutions to travel. For example I live on the Black Sea coast, former Byzantine Emp. and Ottoman Empire, where the east meets west. On the Silk Road, people would only carry dehydrated food, for example dry noodles and pasta (this is why you can find all sorts of pasta in the cuisines of various people in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Caucasus, Central Asia and all the way into China). Dry fruits and vegetables. And for meat they would have herds of sheep and cattle for slaughtering, especially during war campaigns, and these would be afore-contracted to be found along the marching army's route. But there would also be caravanserais along the route, from the wall of China deep into the Balkans, now you can find them from China to Bosnia and Romania). These would offer accommodation and warm meals to travellers, they would be rectangular structures with an inner courtyard and would have a simple rule that said gates are open until sunset and they would open again at sunrise. At sunrise people would check their pockets and belongings to see all their money and stuff was in place and they would only open the doors once everybody gave their approval. Iran inscribed their network of caravanserais on UNESCO's heritage list.
Now I understand the lands through which the Oregon trail went were mostly barren, so there weren't big possibilities to supply these migrants (unless for example they struck deals with the Indians to constantly supply them with livestock +game, I don't know if this ever happened), but I was also wondering why these migrants wouldn't organise themselves to lighten their burden. For example instead of carrying 300 pounds of bacon and 50 pounds of lard, why wouldn't they have 2-3 men to drive a herd of 200 cattle and slaughter 1-2 cows per day? They could travel 4 hours in advance and cook that beef and have dinner ready by the time the caravan arrived at the camping spot. Next day, the herd would leave earliest and the process could be repeated.
I have a serious fascination with the Oregon Trail! If you have the time, could you recommend a book or two? I’ve exhausted the internet and CZcams, really not much there. I’d really like to read some in-depth books. Thank you.
Hey Max! Thank you for all you do! I met you at the Renaissance Faire a couple years ago when you came to our camp. :) Please please please NEVER EVER stop playing the "Hard Tack" bit! It's simply the best!
I love that now you say "hard tack" i automatically expect that sound now!
Phoebe Judson founded the city of Lynden, WA. She delivered about a hundred babies, brought education to both the pioneers but also the local Indians. Her life is real interesting. The book she wrote was written decades after her travel.
Thanks for sharing this. I’ve ordered the book. Sounds very interesting.
a small book is "Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle"
Thank you for the share - I've ordered the book, too .
There is a book called "Women's diaries of the westward journey." It is a pure delight. I'm looking forward to Phoebe's book. Thanks
@@markrossow6303 Thanks for the recommendation, but while I’d like to read it, I’ll have to see if I can get a library to order it because the least expensive copy is $111! It sounds like a very interesting account of the early days of Seattle.
Max, as someone who grew up on a farm & occasionally made butter, let me guarantee you that a bucket of fresh milk will not turn into butter, no matter how much jostling it gets. CREAM turns into butter, so they would've let the cream rise, skimmed it off, & then put it into a separate bucket to make butter.
BTW, my hometown started as a trading post on the Oregon Trail. It was also a home station during the short life of the Pony Express.
THANK YOU yup! god bless him at least a lot of us watched just to find faults.
Yeah and he's wrong about the meat too. Meat was generally packed in salt and kept in ceramic crocks, jars or wooden barrels. My Uncle Don told me, when he was a kid(Great Depression) That Grandpa and Grandma packed meat into barrels with really salty water and kept the meat below the surface with weights, thus they had pork until the next butchering time(fall). Other than that, they ate a lot of chicken and wild game.
Actually, he never claims that fresh milk was kept in a bucket to make butter - indeed, go back and listen again, he very clearly states that the cow itself is what was kept in a pail to be jostled about under the wagon, thus making butter.
@@doomtho42 delightful! We can't know everything but much set my teeth on edge bless him. Besides I strongly doubt much evidence of accompanying 'freshened' cows making the trip At All hello. 'History lite' had problems but good click bait
@@spocksdaughter9641 there are several letters and journals kept by the emigrants, that talk about milk cows being brought on the trail, along with extra oxen who could take turns pulling the wagons, because oxen dying along the trail (and even being butchered in extreme circumstances -- think, the Donner Party before they got stuck in the mountains) is something that is mentioned in just about every document that survives.
Fascinating video Max! Hope you can expand the subject with all those pioneers food, covering more history of the U.S.
Only Max can have a beaming smile and say “as we try not to die of dysentery…” casually 😂
Best history channel on youtube. He has more enthusiasm than john Townsend. That said the softer tone fits townsend very well. So i guess its a tie.
😂😂😂
Granted, Max's history lesson ended going into the Rocky Mountains...but not coming out of them. Probably so with many a traveler back then.
I once played the game on the Nintendo Switch and one female member of my party had dysentery three times and survived. She also was bitten by a snake, broke her leg, and was hit by the wagon and still lived. Then she died of starvation literally one mile from the next major stop. Her tombstone now reads “Here lies Natalie. She loved dysentery.”
It's a funny joke now, but dysentery and cholera were horrible, painful killers back in the day. You'd feel fine one minute, then the next, you'd have horrible stomach pains, with vomiting and diarrhea. You then died from the loss of fluids and salts, your organs failing and your blood basically becoming sludge.
We now have modern drinking water and sewage treatment systems to prevent it.
In the South, Journey Cakes became Johnny Cakes, then Cracklin' Bread and Hot Water Cornbread. Cracklin' Bread had crispy fried pork skin mixed in, no sugar or molasses, and was fried in bacon fat. Hot water cornbread still a favorite today, does not have cracklins and is fried in oil. I have my grandmother's Cracklin' Bread recipe passed down from generations in Virginia. The first time I made Hot Water Corn Bread I burned my hands shaping the "patties" until I learned to keep a bowl of ice water on hand. So good.
Crackling is crispy fried pork skin in the UK, its a very popular pub snack for with beer, so that's probably where that bit comes from!
@@Rose-jz6sxHog Nuts? From Shaun of The Dead?
whoever invented corn and corn bread are the greatest people ever.
@krono5el
How do you invent corn? Unless you’re talking about selectively breeding natural corn into modern corn
@@Blumpkinthehobbit If it takes mixtilisation (I genuinely have no clue how to spell that, I assume it has some z in there somewhere) to make most corn edible, would that count as an invention?
My mother's side of the family came across the plains to Utah in the 1840's-1860's. The stories are incredible!
This was sooo interesting! It's amazing that anybody made it through!
Depending on the wagon, many did actually have shocks. Strips of leather that the carriage ride on over the axel. Today, it’s fairly common to see this type of shock on pickup trucks, just made in metal. The Wells Fargo Stage Coach utilized the same concept, but a lot beefier to the point it induced motion sickness. Pretty much unless the wagon directly had the axel connected to the frame (cheapest of the cheap homemade piece of junk that even a hobo would run away from) it still had leaf springs or some kind of shock absorption… just, again, it could cause more rocking and rolling and motion sickness.
Buffalo chips were not so much used for starting fires, actually… they were used for carrying the fire from one camp to the next. Light them and pack them in a pouch, they will smolder for 18+ hours so long as they have oxygen since the “chip” is made of highly compacted dried grass. Once at a new camp, they would use the still smoldering chip to technically “relight” the previous fire by using bellows and new tinder. Thus, a fire started in Missouri could travel all the way to Wyoming, since it was carried in this fashion rather than wasting time, energy, and resources to start a new fire each night. The smoke when put on an actual fire also drives mosquitos away. It’s why we now have oils in our tiki torches to do the same thing.
I saw peat logs in Ireland used the same way. The smells of both fuels is distinctive and flavors whatever is cooked over it. BTW buffalo chips don't make much smoke when burned but even thoroughly dried peat still retains some moisture so bread has a nice crisp crust.
My Southern 91 year old mother still makes Johnny Cakes. She fixes then to accompany dinner meals, she often calls dinner, supper. She eats them sliced with butter, like biscuits. They are often made to go with a meal of ham, turnip greens, boiled buttered potatoes or mashed potatoes and black eyed peas or succotash. Mom simply calls them corn cakes, my sister loves them. I think they are greasy but I will eat them at my mom's when I visit. I've never had them with syrup, I might try that the next time I visit my mom, she lives several states away. Some of my Southern relatives call Johnny Cakes, Hoe Cakes but my grandmother said Hoe Cakes are made with biscuit dough not cornmeal. When my grandmother was finished cutting out all the circles of biscuit dough she'd gather up the left over dough and make 1 or 2 of what she called Hoe Cakes even if they were not cooked over coals on a hoe blade but in her wood stove or electric oven, they were bigger than biscuits and not smooth, they were my Grandfather's favorite biscuits. My Grandfather always said my Grandmother used to be an excellent cook using the wood stove, he said the electric stove ruined her cooking and that nothing tasted good cooked on or in an electric stove. My grandfather made sure they had a big wood stove in their kitchen, he used to like to get up on chilly mornings and fixing himself breakfast on the wood stove and my grandmother would fix hers on the electric stove, lol.
4 to 6 months? Now it's 5 hours from coast to coast, a bad lean cuisine, a weak drink.... BOOM your there! My grandmother
was born in 1903, the year the Wright brothers flew their first plane and lived long enough to board a jet and visited us in
California and went to Disneyland LOL! You go granny!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Love your videos! Thank you for keeping it family friendly!
My (several times) great grandmother traveled on the Santa Fe trail (same time, different destination) and she wrote a journal that was compiled into a book that’s out of print and hard to find anywhere called With a Doll in One Pocket and a Pistol in the Other: Rebecca Cohen Mayer, 1837-1930 A Memoir.
Her husband, the caravan master was also a talented cook and she wrote in the diary about many of the things she ate and that her husband and other cooks in the convoy made. They were Jewish and one thing that I and people in the community found interesting to the story of American Judaism is that her and her husband did not follow kosher food laws at all on the trail: eating hunted game and bacon.
An except I think you’d funny find is from one of the numerous times she talked about food:
“Our cook makes good bread in a skillet using flour water bacon fat and salt. He has tried to make biscuits. They were so heavy that Henry said if we had a cannon we could use them for cannon balls.”
You should consider making your ancestor's book available on the internet.
@@b.a.erlebacher1139 i wish I could, I don’t own it and the only place I’ve found it charges $50 for it, that excerpt was from a publicly available PDF that’s basically a condensed version of the book
@@C_hoffmanni It would be long out of copyright by now, so I think you would have as much right to distribute it as the $50 people, provided you didn't include anything they had added or changed. I'm not a lawyer, however! Can you give me a link to the PDF version you have?
I miss my grandma's Johnny cakes. She came up during the Depression and she knew how to make do. She went from Cabbagetown to the hinterland of B.C. during the war and then to Quebec for radar defence after. Good on her for all of that, but I think the best part about her was the love and care she gave to her grandkids. The Johnny cakes were also nice, 10/10.
not only do I live 9 miles from the end of the Oregon Trail. I also made the costumes for the End of the Trail Museum. I have visited several of the museums along the Oregon Trail (the one in Baker City, Oregon is the best IMHO) I have also had a huge Oregon Trail party at my house where everyone had to equip their "wagon" with supplies (scavenger hunt) while my grandchildren ran around handing out hazard cards that told them "You have just been ambushed by the natives" or "Small Pox is running rampant in your train" It is so much fun to play this kind of game with Non-LARP people. Thank you for making this video, was fun to remember all the connections I have with the Oregon Trail.
Great video! I was born and raised in Independence MO and it was such a shock to hear my hometown mentioned :) If you ever get to these parts, come during the Labor Day Weekend so you can experience Santa-Cali-Gon Days. Granted the festival is nothing like it was when I was a kid, but still something to see.
Using bovine poop (cow pats?) for fire is still a common thing around the world. People collect and stack them in pyramids in the same manner as firewood.
It works really well. I have made fires from it myself.
I've cooked with dried cow patties quite a few times. When you actually do it, it isn't a big deal. It isn't like they smell bad or anything. They are dry. Burning they smell more like grass than wood. Food tastes like it should.
I've lived 2 places where we drank the spring water on the property. The last place had a very small spring house that was always super cool in the summer and we kept our drinks in there when doing yard work. The runoff watered an apple tree 24/7/365 and when you bit into one of those apples the juice would run down your chin and wet your shirt.
The cut to hard tack every time it's mentioned in any video gets me every single time. I love it!
You always help me relax. Not sure why, you just do, honesty and historical facts i guess❤ I laugh and smile. Thank you!
Max, you are absolutely CRUSHING it with these video topics lately. Can't wait to see what is next!
Thank you 😊
@@TastingHistory Doing this video without speaking to the racism that inspired the creation of Oregon Territory and the people who moved there is a gross omission. Do better. You have before. If you got to it over halfway through, I couldn't bear watching any longer. It should have led the video.