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Pemmican () (also pemican in older sources) is a mixture of tallow, dried meat, and sometimes dried berries. A calorie-rich food, it can be used as a key component in prepared meals or eaten raw. Historically, it was an important part of indigenous cuisine in certain parts of North America and it is still prepared today.
The name comes from the Cree language word ᐱᒦᐦᑳᓐ (pimîhkân), which is derived from the word ᐱᒥᕀ (pimî), 'fat, grease'.Sinclair, J.M. (ed) English Dictionary Harper Collins: 2001. The Lakota language (or Sioux) word is wasná, originally meaning 'grease derived from marrow bones', with the creating a noun, and sná referring to small pieces that adhere to something. It was invented by the Indigenous peoples of North America.
Pemmican was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Captain Robert Bartlett, Ernest Shackleton, Richard E. Byrd, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, George W. DeLong, Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, and Roald Amundsen.
Among the Lakota people and Dakota people nations, there is also a corn wasná (or pemmican) that does not contain dried meat. This is made from toasted cornmeal, animal fat, fruit, and sugar.
Today, some people store their pemmican in glass jars or tin boxes. The shelf life may vary depending on ingredients and storage conditions. At room temperature, pemmican can generally last anywhere from one to five years, but there are anecdotal stories of pemmican stored in cool cellars being safely consumed after a decade or more.
A bag of bison pemmican weighing approximately was called a taureau (French for "bull") by the Métis of Red River. These bags of taureaux ( "bulls"), when mixed with fat from the udder, were known as taureaux fins, when mixed with bone marrow, as taureaux grand, and when mixed with berries, as taureaux à grains. It generally took the meat of one bison to fill a taureau.
It has also been suggested that pemmican may have come through the Bering Strait crossing 40–60 centuries ago. The first written account of pemmican is considered to be Francisco Vázquez de Coronado records from 1541, of the Querecho Indians and Teya people, traversing the region later called the Texas Panhandle, who sun-dried and minced bison meat and then would make a stew of it and bison fat. The first written English usage is attributed to James Isham, who in 1743 wrote that "pimmegan" was a mixture of finely pounded dried meat, fat and cranberries.
The voyageurs of the North American fur trade had no time to live off the land during the short season when the lakes and rivers were free of ice. They had to carry all of their food with them if the distance traveled was too great to be resupplied along the way. A north canoe (canot du nord) with six men and 25 standard packs required about four packs of food per . Montreal-based canoemen could be supplied by sea or with locally grown food. Their main food was dried peas or beans, Hardtack, and salt pork. (Western canoemen called their Montreal-based fellows mangeurs de lard or "pork-eaters".) In the Great Lakes, some maize and wild rice could be obtained locally. By the time trade reached the Lake Winnipeg area, the pemmican trade was developed.
Trading people of mixed ancestry and becoming known as the Métis would go southwest onto the prairie in Red River carts, slaughter bison, convert it into pemmican, and carry it north to trade from settlements they would make adjacent to North West Company posts. O'Brien, Sam, "How to Make a 5,000-Year-Old Energy Bar", Atlas Obscura, April 30, 2020 For these people on the edge of the prairie, the pemmican trade was as important a source of trade goods as was the beaver trade for the Indigenous peoples farther north. This trade was a major factor in the emergence of the new and distinct Métis society. Packs of pemmican would be shipped north and stored at the major fur posts: Fort Alexander, Cumberland House, Île-à-la-Crosse, Fort Garry, Norway House, and Edmonton House.
So important was pemmican that, in 1814, governor Miles Macdonell started the Pemmican War with the Métis when he passed the short-lived Pemmican Proclamation, which forbade the export of pemmican from the Red River Colony.
Alexander Mackenzie relied on pemmican on his 1793 expedition from the Canadas to the Pacific.
North Pole explorer Robert Peary used pemmican on all three of his expeditions, from 1886 to 1909, for both his men and his dogs. In his 1917 book, Secrets of Polar Travel, he devoted several pages to the food, stating, "Too much cannot be said of the importance of pemmican to a polar expedition. It is an absolute sine qua non. Without it a sledge-party cannot compact its supplies within a limit of weight to make a serious polar journey successful."
British polar expeditions fed a type of pemmican to their dogs as "sledging rations". Called "Bovril pemmican" or simply "dog pemmican", it was a beef product consisting, by volume, of protein and fat (i.e., a 2:1 ratio of protein to fat), without carbohydrate. It was later ascertained that although the dogs survived on it, this was not a nutritious and healthy diet for them, being too high in protein. Members of Ernest Shackleton's 1914–1916 expedition to the Antarctic resorted to eating dog pemmican when they were stranded on ice during the antarctic summer.Alfred Lansing (1969), Endurance, New York: McGraw Hill, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-59666
During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), British troops were given an iron ration made of of pemmican and 4 ounces of chocolate and sugar. The pemmican would keep in perfect condition for decades. It was considered much superior to biltong, a form of cured game meats commonly used in Africa. This iron ration was prepared in two small tins (soldered together) that were fastened inside the belts of the soldiers. It was the last ration used and it was used only as a last resort—when ordered by the commanding officer. A man could march on this for 36 hours before he began to drop from hunger.
While serving as chief of scouts for the British Army in South Africa, American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham required pemmican to be carried by every scout.
Pemmican, likely condensed meat bars, was used as a ration for French troops fighting in Morocco in the 1920s.Rupert Furneaux, Abdel Krim, p.177 Pemmican was also taken as an emergency ration by Amelia Earhart in her 1928 transatlantic flight.
A 1945 scientific study of pemmican criticized using it exclusively as a survival food because of the low levels of certain vitamins.
A study was later done by the U.S. military in January 1969, entitled Arctic Survival Rations, III. The Evaluation of Pemmican Under Winter Field Conditions. The study found that during a cycle of two starvation periods the subjects could stave off starvation for the first cycle of testing with only 1000 calories worth of pemmican.
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