Review by Jeanne W. Englert
History – October 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
Bacon, Beans, and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier
by Joseph R. Conlin
University of Nevada Press
ISBN 0-87417-105-9
Many aspects of gold-rush days, from transportation to mineral production, have been covered to exhaustion, even tedium. But previous historians have ignored a fascinating part of daily life — what the prospectors ate on the trail and in the mining camps.
This book satisfies that hunger. I liked it so much that I devoured the first half in one sitting, then slowed down in order to savor each delicious detail in its 246 pages, among them:
The legendary prostitute who netted $50,000 one summer from the proceeds of a garden she planted behind her crib.
The Coloma housewife who sold her pear crop in advance, tagging each blossom with the name of the purchaser.
The 49er on the Overland Trail who volunteered to serve as trail cook in exchange for getting out of guard duty, only to realize he was still scrubbing the skillet while everybody else was lying around the campfire swapping stories. (He should have asked his mother about that deal; she’d have set him straight.)
Though the book emphasizes the 1849 California gold rush, it has plenty to delight Colorado buffs, such as the Masonic banquet at Tom Walsh’s Grand Hotel in Leadville: “An artistic eye had amused itself by decking the table with flowers and vegetables grotesquely carved in imitation of many emblems of the order,” which also displayed “tall pyramids of butter.”
If indeed “you are what you eat,” then a serious social history about food and foodways should tell us much about the Western mining frontier.
For example, I never realized the full extent of the 1849 gold rush, that more than 50,000 people, mostly men, made that five-month trek that summer by the Overland Trail, around Cape Horn, or through the Isthmus of Panama.
One of the diarists on the Overland Trail wrote she had never seen so many people in her life, with some wagon trains passing others in their hell-bent rush to find the bonanza. It sounded like U.S. 285 around Conifer on a summer afternoon.
In this meticulously-researched and well-written book, Conlin notes that beans were not eaten as much as legend has it because it’s hard to soak beans in an open pot in a lurching wagon. He explains the derivation of the word “porkbarrel,” which might help understand politics then and now. He analyzes the pioneer diet, explaining why scurvy — the black canker — was not a problem.
Most 49ers were quite well provisioned when they headed west because a cannibalism tale had gained wide circulation in the eastern press a year before the famous Donner-Reed party set out.
Conlin explains something that I always wondered about: the oyster on every menu, even far inland. Oysters were popular because working people thought that rich people ate oysters. One enthusiastic goldseeker in San Francisco asked his brother to ship Back Bay oysters around Cape Horn in three tons of ice because “The miners crave them.”
In one of the interesting asides printed in the margins, Conlin mentions the “potato rush” of 1848. In anticipation of a flood of emigrants to California — this before James Marshall’s discovery of gold — so many potatoes were planted that the market was glutted, “creating such a nuisance that it was feared that they would breed a pestilence in some locations.”
Usually I don’t like square pages. But here the format does justice to the illustrations: the Denver grocer who was so proud of his canned-food display he commissioned a photographer to immortalize it; a mine cook taking center stage; the classic photo of San Miguel River miners joking about their predicament — Ladies without bloomers not allowed on the beach; and my favorite, the caption of a drawing from the Overland Trail, noting that “the long-handled frying pan was doubly handy when the buffalo chips were damp.”
Buy, borrow, or steal this book. Then you, too, can laugh at lines like, “Surely the California gold rush was one of the few booms of its kind in which the hors d’oeuvres were on the scene before the whores.”
— Jeanne W. Englert