Despite the spartan simplicity of their way of life, the Plains Indians ate a surprisingly varied diet. And in keeping with the need of some tribes to be constantly on the move in pursuit of buffalo, cooking paraphernalia was limited, lightweight and sometimes was made of disposable materials.
The staff of life for the nomadic Indian was, of course, the buffalo. After a successful hunt, women would roast chunks of meat on skewers hung over the flame (drawing, below right) from a tripod. When food was plentiful, the tribes ate three meals a day; but they were seldom wasteful. They threw away none of the animal's edible parts, even breaking the bones and boiling the marrow. Moreover, they cleaned and shaped the entrails into sausage cases, stuffing them with marrow fat and strips of meat that had been seasoned with wild onions and such herbs as sage.
Indian women also made stew with buffalo meat, using the imaginative device shown in the left-hand drawing. They tied the ends of a buffalo's stomach lining or a piece of hide to four poles, then filled it with water and meat and vegetables, such as wild peas and the root vegetable white men called prairie turnips. To make the water boil, the women then dropped hot, fist-sized stones into the pouch.
The Indians varied their diet by hunting and trapping elk, deer, antelope, mountain sheep, quail and jack rabbits. Some of the plains tribes would eat fish, which they speared or netted, while certain tribes, such as the Blackfoot, Crow and Comanche, regarded fish as taboo. The desert dwellers caught and roasted snakes and insects. Some plains tribes, like the Mandan and Pawnee, regularly planted crops of corn, beans, squash and pumpkins, which they not only ate but traded to other Indians. In the course of a year, women would pick more than a dozen kinds of wild fruits, ranging from persimmons to choke-cherries, and even more varieties of roots and stalks. They peeled fresh sweet thistle stalks that tasted like bananas. They collected milkweed buds and rose hips, and sliced the fruit of the prickly-pear cactus, adding them to buffalo soups and stews.
While the Indians might gorge themselves at the peak of the hunting and harvesting seasons, they knew well that lean months would follow. Accordingly, they preserved buffalo meat by cutting it into thin slices and hanging it to dry. The dried strips, known as jerky, could be pulverized with a stone maul, and the powdered meat mixed with ground and dried berries and fat. The result was a high-protein food called pemmican.
Not only was pemmican nutritious, but it could also be stored away in rawhide cases called parfleches, where it would keep for months. Some tribes stored meat, dried corn and other vegetables and fruit in large jug-shaped caches dug into the ground. Such preserved foods helped to sustain the plains people through the midwinter months, until the grasslands again quickened with wild plants and quivered beneath the hoofs of the buffalo.
The traditional cooking paunch at left, made from the lining of a buffalo's stomach, lasted for three or four days, when it became soggy and soft from the heat. The Indians then disposed of the paunch by eating it. When broiling meat, plains women hung the skewered chunks on a rawhide strip moistened to keep the leather from burning through.