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Scattered across the internet and a handful of books, there is a lot of information out there about pemmican. What I haven’t seen, though, is a short general overview about pemmican from a truly expert source. Over the last several years, I’ve learned about as much about pemmican as any modern person has ever known. Now I want to share some of what I’ve learned with you.
The first thing to understand is that pemmican is much more than just a food – it is a concept as rich in meaning as in nutrition. In fact, the word ‘pemmican’ also makes a verb. To “pemmicanize” something is to condense it down to its smallest, most concentrated form. In this post, I am pemmicanizing the subject of pemmican, for your benefit.
The most basic and classic definition of pemmican is dried buffalo meat mixed with rendered fat. In fact, the word ‘pemmican,’ according to 19th-century explorer-artist Paul Kane, "pimmi" means meat, and "kon" means fat in the Cree language. And so the definition of pemmican is actually "pemmicanized" in its name: meat-fat.
The 3 Powers of Pemmican:
Animal fat is what gives pemmican its three unique super powers:
1) Pemmican is the most calorie-dense food out there (other than straight fat itself). Lightweight energy.
2) Pemmican will keep for years and even decades when properly stored.
3) Pemmican is a complete food, if you go into a ketogenic state.
These three qualities are what makes pemmican perennially valuable, century after century. There is simply no other food that can compete – certainly no all-natural food that can come directly from the earth.
Note that "deliciousness" is not the first, second, or third word used to describe pemmican. The flavor and texture is highly variable. In 1847, an Englishman named JB Nevins wrote that pemmican "eats a little like a candle flavoured with coarse sand."
Sheesh. Must have been a bad batch (not uncommon during the fur trade's industrial-scale pemmican production).
It's true that pemmican is not for everyone. But obviously this food would not have such a long history, if many people didn't enjoy eating it. In fact, I've found it to be a well-acquired taste: the more you eat, the more you like it. I ate pemmican alone for 30 days, several years ago, and I enjoyed it even more at the end than I had at the beginning.
The Pre-American Importance of Pemmican:
We can’t say exactly how long North American Indians have been eating pemmican. Like other aspects of oral history, its origins are deep in the mists of time. However, we know it has been half a millennium, at least: early European explorers noted elaborate rituals around pemmican that suggested an ancient relationship.
In his detailed (but quite dry) academic work called Pemmican Empire, scholar George Colpitts recounts one tradition from the Arapahoe people in what is now Colorado. After running a herd of buffalo off a “buffalo jump,” the people were faced with an enormous glut of meat to deal with. Pemmicanizing was their way to preserve it until the next hunting opportunity arose – and much more. There were religious songs that were sung during the pemmican-making process, offering thanks to the Creator and to the buffalo spirits for feeding them. In fact, there were different songs for the several different types of pemmican they would make. Yes, the Arapahoe apparently made seven different types of pemmican from one animal. Their favorite was made with rendered bone marrow, which produced a soft, silky-textured pemmican that was a delicacy lasting for several months. Each type of fat (marrow, back fat, kidney fat, etc) and even different cuts of lean meat (chuck, round, sirloin) could be combined for different pemmican products.
The pemmican produced by these prairie peoples was absolutely crucial to help them survive long, dry, windy winters.
Traditional Pemmican-Making
Using knives of sharpened buffalo bone, peoples like the Arapahoe would slice the lean buffalo meat into long thin ribbons and hang them on drying racks made of sticks (likely cottonwood). A few days in the prairie sun and wind would usually suffice to dry the meat enough. If the weather turned, they’d use smoke from a fire built near the drying racks to finish the job.
Meanwhile they’d split open the bones with rocks and render the marrow in ceramic pots. The other types of fat would be rendered separately.
The most labor-intensive part of the process was probably the pounding. Using well-shaped stones as a mortar and pestle, women would pound the dry meat until it was pulverized into thin shreds and powdered bits. I noticed this process depicted in a scene from Dances with Wolves:
Here's another great picture:
The shredded dry meat was then stuffed into rawhide bags, and the rendered fat was poured in after it, saturating all of the dry meat’s pores with fat. Then the rawhide bag would be sewn up with bison sinew, and its seams sealed with more fat.
A Note on Berries
When I tell people that pemmican is basically dried meat mixed with fat, many reply by saying, “And berries.”
In response I say yes, I like pemmican with dried berries. I also like pemmican with salt. But both ingredients were rare in traditional native preparations. Later, European travelers and traders added these ingredients into pemmican, to bring its taste closer to what they were used to. (Unsalted, fatty, unsweetened meat is a unique taste that takes some time to be acquired.) The vast majority of early pemmican accounts mention dried buffalo meat and rendered fat, which was often melted into a stew.
Nowadays, there are all sorts of products called “Pemmican” that are totally different from what that name traditionally referred to. Least egregiously, there is a beef jerky brand called Pemmican. Okay, close enough. But perhaps the worst offender is the little bars you could find at REI or Cabela’s that are labeled pemmican, but with ingredients like almonds, peanuts, raisins, brown rice syrup. That’s not pemmican, just because it has some fat. That’s GRANOLA.
(Note: there is also a related food that uses corn or corn meal mixed with bison fat – this was also traditional among plains peoples.)
All of the early explorers commented on the uniqueness of the animal-based pemmican stuff, and quickly put it to use for their commercial purposes.
Early European Pemmican Encounters
The Spanish explorer Coronado recorded pemmican’s existence in Texas, way back in 1541. The next mention comes from a British-Canadian names James Isham, way up on Hudson’s Bay in 1743. The vast distance between these two records shows how pervasive pemmican was, across the vast expanse of the North American heartland.
Sir Alexander Mackenzie was a fur-trading explorer who sought a Northwest Passage trade route between the Great Slave Lake and the Pacific Ocean in 1793. Records indicate that each member of his expedition carried 45-70 pounds of pemmican, along with weaponry and other gear, for all overland parts of the journey.
William Clark (co-leader of the Lewis and Clark journey to the Pacific) was near what is now Great Falls, Montana when he wrote in his journal, “The Hunters killed 3 buffalow the most of all the meat I had dried for to make Pemitigon.”
Pemitigon. Pahmikin. Pimeekian. Spelling was much more creative in those days, and perhaps pronunciation varied regionally, too.
Whichever way it was spelled, pemmican was prized. One legend even goes that Catholic missionary priests, working in the wild Canadian prairie lands, even used pemmican as the "bread" host for their Holy Sacrament. Symbolically, this makes some sense in a region where buffalo meat is the staple food. But they probably never mentioned it to the Pope.
Spiritually important, and nutritionally omnipotent: pemmican soon became the cornerstone of the fur trade.
The War that Killed the Canadian Buffalo
Oddly enough, the first industrial product of the North American West was from a wild aquatic animal: beaver fur. European demand for hats drove thousands of rugged men west and north, to procure, transport, and sell beaver fur in nothing short of industrial quantities. The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company, the two main fur trading outfits, were some of the largest companies in the world at the time. The town of Astoria, Oregon, and New York City’s Astor neighborhood were named for one of the world’s great fur traders, John Jacob Astor.
The trade was based on the fact that the very best hats - functional, durable, and handsome - were made from beaver fur. Abraham Lincoln's famous top hat was probably made from beaver. Back then, you were nobody if you lacked a beaver-made hat. This was the hardest part of the story for me to understand, until I witnessed the Stanley water bottle craze a couple years ago… trends are a heck of a drug.
After the European beaver was nearly decimated, It turned out that there were millions and millions of beaver in Canada, and there were native people willing to trap and trade them to the fur hunters (the movie The Revenant is about this).
Several logistical problems hindered the movements of these fur expeditions: the beavers were thousands of miles away from navigable ports. Travel through these areas was remarkably difficult, often involving paddling up rivers and portaging heavy boats around rapids, all in the extremely humid, mosquito-swarmed heat of the sub-Arctic Canadian summer. Game was often scarce. Traditional supplies like bacon and beans weren’t light enough to carry for thousands of miles, threatened to spoil, and could lead to scurvy.
Enter Pemmican.
Around the Red River of the North, which flows from North Dakota up to Manitoba, there was a young tribe called the Métis people – meaning “mixed” in French. These people were half French-Canadian and half native and they were buffalo pemmican specialists. Every autumn, they’d have a great buffalo hunt and making an industrial quantity of pemmican.
The Métis pemmican produced for the fur companies was a bit innovative: they mixed all the fat of each buffalo together, including the kidney fat (also known as suet), which had a harder, waxier, longer-lasting quality than marrow or other types of fat. In Métis hands, one whole buffalo could be pemmicanized down into a single 90-pound rawhide bag of pemmican, called a piece or a toro.
One of these toros of pemmican contained over 250,000 calories – enough food to last a trapper about four months in the wild. On many expeditions each trapper was required to carry at least one toro for himself. I’d be moving slow under that weight!
Apparently, most trappers and Métis people ate their pemmican melted in a stew that they called "Rubaboo" - true luxury was when they were able to add flour and onions, and maybe even a dash of wine.
The Northwest Company bought all the pemmican that the Métis people could produce. This was the technology that enabled their expeditions were able to go further west and further north beyond the range of their competitors, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Recognizing this, the Hudson’s Bay Company used their political influence to issue a blockade against the Métis and their pemmican. Then they stole what the Métis tried to smuggle out.
This didn’t sit so well with the Métis, whose entire economy was centered around pemmican production and sale. So they went to get their pemmican back, meeting the Hudson’s Bay officers at a place called Seven Oaks. Apparently 21 Hudson’s Bay fighters were killed, while only one Métis perished. Thus concluded the “Pemmican War.” I guess that hunting buffalo is good training for skirmishes.
And the Métis were extremely efficient on the buffalo fields, as well. So efficient, in fact, that they began to run out of prey. Pemmican Empire author George Colpitts argues that by 1825, most of the buffalo in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and parts of Alberta were wiped out by hunting for the pemmican trade.
Down south in the USA, buffalo were all but exterminated for their valuable hides. Up in Canada, they were slaughtered for the meat - for the pemmican.
Exploration and Carnivores
After the beaver fur craze died down, and the buffalo herds dwindled, pemmican was produced mainly in small batches and mainly out of beef. During the late 1800s, it was used mainly as foodstuff for Arctic and Antarctic explorers.
Admiral Robert Peary, who claimed to be first to reach the North Pole, stated in his book Secrets of Polar Travel that pemmican was a “sine qua non” – the single most important item that he brought on his voyages. "Of all the foods that I am acquainted with, pemmican is the only on that... a man can eat twice a day for 365 days in a year and have the last mouthful taste as good as the first... It is the most satisfying food I know."
Ernest Shackleton, leader of the epic failed voyage of the Endurance to the South Pole, also brought loads of pemmican on his trip. During their entrapment in the pack ice, both man and sled dogs survived by rationing their pemmican (along with seal meat).
Militaries took notice, too. Pemmican was packed and rationed during the Boer Wars, in South Africa. In the early 1900s, the U.S. Army produced canned pemmican as an emergency food ration.
(Crazy fact: in 2015, a man named Steve ate pemmican canned in 1906. And he lived to post his adventure on YouTube.)
And then another craze began, one even less rational than the beaver fur hat times: the anti-animal fat craze. Increasing rates of heart disease were blamed on animal fats. Rates of animal fat consumption were not increasing. Despite this lack of correlation, as well as the fact that animal fats had always been prized as nourishing health foods, a massive P.R. campaign began, which continues to this day, demonizing animal fats.
Thus, pemmican was no longer considered a superfood. Instead it was considered a slow poison. So the heroic staple of American exploration was almost forgotten.
But even in those early dark years, there were lights that kept the truth alive. A man named Viljalmur Stefansson, a Canadian anthropologist, wrote extensively about pemmican in his book The Fat of the Land. He adopted a ketogenic carnivore diet after spending several years living among the Inuit people, eating fish and only fish.
His book is loaded with accounts of friends switching to carnivore diets – he even mentions one man who happily eats only pemmican – and thriving. The problem was that nobody believed him, even after he and a friend did a carnivore diet study for two years. Under medical supervision, in New York City, they ate only meat. Stefansson didn’t know it at the time, but the diet he naturally came to was about 75% fat, by calories, with the rest protein. You would also get this macronutrient ratio eating only ribeye steaks or pemmican.
However, Stefansson was mainly ignored for almost a hundred years, until the various pro-animal fat movements began to grow again, in America. We wanted to be healthy again, and we saw that we’d been misguided.
The Return of the American Superfood
In 2015, a new chapter in the history of pemmican began: in a little book called Long Way on a Little by Shannon Hayes, a young ranch hand read about the food that kept forever, packed the most nutrition per ounce, and was complete on its own. His mind was blown. The book was all about how to use every part of a cow, and pemmican was mentioned in a sidebar about using the kidney fat. Intrigued, the ranch hand made a few batches of pemmican with wild blackberries and grass-fed beef. They helped fuel his hiking trips.
Fast forward six years, and that ranch hand was helping to run a pasture-based livestock farm, and their freezer is filling up with boxes of pasture pork suet. Even though more people were beginning to recognize the wholesomeness of pasture-origin animal fat, packages of raw fat were just too hard to deal with. So they didn’t sell.
At the same time, he wanted pemmican to bring on hiking trips. The real stuff was almost impossible to find online. “I’m probably not the only one who wants this stuff,” he thought. He saw a convergence: there was a glut of good animal fat, and an open market niche for a traditional way to use it.
Thus began Steadfast Provisions. For several years, we worked with a co-packer to have our pemmican produced for us. And now, in the summer of 2025, we are opening the first dedicated pemmican production facility in at least one hundred years.
As you read this, and as you enjoy Steadfast Provisions pemmican, you are part of the unfolding history of America’s toughest food. The food that won the west.
Times change. Pemmican remains. This is why the more times change, the more valuable pemmican becomes.
The future is bright. And rich. And full of animal fat-laden deliciousness. No matter where your future leads, pemmican will keep you and your people energized along the way.
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