Food for the early settlers of Whitmore was from the surrounding forest, streams, and home gardens. Their successful gardens were a tribute to their skill and persistence. After the first few years, they always had plenty to eat, even though, as one interviewee said:

Sometimes it was a lot of beans, venison, and other game.

The twenty-nine families of the German colony, from Missouri, Nebraska, and Illinois, arrived in 1885. Some of them brought seeds, apple, bing, and royal Anne cherry trees, and usually a shovel, an axe, and a hand saw.

The Germans were told that they had bought rich, cleared farmland. The land they bought turned out to be forested, and without water. They cleared, planted, dug a water ditch, managed to live off of the land, and left traces of their industry for us to admire.

Everyone raised cold-weather vegetables like cabbages, turnips and carrots. They raised dry beans for their own use and to sell. One interviewee said that his dad raised a lot of beans. They had them coming out of their ears. "Everything kids don't like."

Everyone had a cow for milk, butter and cottage cheese. Any extra was given to the hogs. They raised ducks, geese, chickens, rabbits and turkeys. In the old days the: Cream was spoiled, but with good bacteria. It was sour cream. During the 1940s they raised tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peanuts, and potatoes. They went to Tule Lake to get surplus potatoes for cow feed. They also picked wild strawberries and grapes.

A cookbook from the days of covered wagons said:

Pioneers replaced scarce foods with available substitutes. Sugar was replaced by maple syrup, sorghum, bee honey, molasses, or watermelon cooked to a syrup. Crushed crackers in vinegar for stewed apples, sour milk for sweet, parched rye or corn for coffee, wild grapes for raisins, chopped buffalo for pork. To catch wild ducks, geese or birds alive: Soak wheat in strong alcohol. Scatter where they are in the habit of feeding. Take them while they are drunk.

The recommended staples for a 110-day emigrant trip were:
150 lbs. of flour
25 lbs. of bacon or pork
Enough fresh beef to be driven on the hoof to make up part of the ration
25 lbs. sugar
Aleratus or yeast powders for making bread.

Living off the Land

Deer lasts a long time if you hang it. Keep a sack over it during the day, unsack it at night. Keep it in the shade, and it would kind of crust over. It'd keep a long time if you took care of it right.

--and--

[The venison was kept in a] screened cage. It was back in the woods. Venison, you skin it, and that layer right below, if it gets crusted, it won't spoil. It dries, especially when it's cold in the winter time. You have to keep your raw end trimmed. We used screen to keep the flies off. Everybody had deer meat then.

--and--

In the summer time when it was real hot, up in the mountains, they'd have one of these meat cages where they'd killed an old doe or a buck. I ate my share of deer, because that's what we had, and that was survival. It wasn't tough. After it hangs for three or four days, it's a good dinner. Buck steak, fried potatoes and gravy, there's nothing better.

Return to the home page