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"What the coca~nut is to the East Indian, and the plantain and the calabash to various tribes of Africans, such is the 'boss' to the carnivorous son of America." SIR RICHARD BURTON HEN GENERAL Alfred Sully and his troops destroyed 400 lodges in a Sioux village in 1863, they discovered among the charred lodgepoles about 500,000 pounds of dried meats. 1 This would make, at the usual one and a half pounds of dried meat per day per person, a seventy day food supply for these 4800 people, an equivalent to one and a half million pounds of fresh meat; about 3500 buffalo carcasses would have gone into the making of it. In Montana's Judith Basin, army scouts at an abandoned, Blackfeet-razed Nez Perce camp ran upon "tons of dried and partly dried meat lying around"; they ate breakfast from the "big pile" of meat before destroying it. 2 Such quantities of dried buffalo meat came the way of most buffalo tribes. Each November they fell upon the herds to gather meat for February and March, the Nez Perce once socking away so much of it they seemed to "have thought the winter was going to last about 99 years." 3 On the buffalo range the Indians ate three to five pounds of fresh meat per person per day.4 Their surplus of food prevented "all fear of want, a fear which is incessantly present to the Indians of the north." 5 So much meat meant they were seldom out of food, although day by day eating of dried food instead of fresh red meat made them complain of starving,6 an atti65 tude seen in trapper John Work saying his traveling companions, the Flatheads, were faring "but indifferently having only dry meat ..." 7 Buffalo surplus meant that on many days the buffalo Indian could, instead of hunting, train his buffalo horse, reglue his bow, braid a bridle, make arrowheads , take care of his trappings. And he yet had time for long afternoons of the stick game: guessing in which hand a man of an opposing team held small polished bone. Like today's wheat farmer, he worked the harvests but had many weeks relatively free. Women too had time to play. They wove but little cloth, threw no pottery, planted and tended no corn patches, did little fancy cooking. Once they had the white man's metal pot, they boiled meat all day long; when someone grew hungry, he dipped into the pot. Boiled meat was Indian fare. They made up for such monotony by feasting and giving feasts; here they ate roasted gut and barbecued ribs, a change from the everlasting, boiled, unsalted soup. Women gambled in their free time just as the men. They sat in on the stick game. Or played their own favorite, the plum-stone game, casting eight polished plum stones marked variously, much as dice, to make a count. Or they gambled trying to catch a tiny loop of beads on the end of a kind of knitting needle. They Heads, Hides & Horns played a host of other games and spent much free time swimming and riding. Both men and women spent days performing the great ceremonies of the year, the "Sun Dance," the tobacco planting ritual, the Medicine Hat ceremony. They spent hours attending meetings of their societies , performing the buffalo dances, telling tales of exploits. As Wooden Leg remarked, "We had but to kill and eat. As I now think back upon those days, it seems that no people in the world ever were any richer than we were."e And Tom LeForge, a white man who lived as a Crow amongst Crows, recalled, "Oh it was a great life ... At all times I had ample leisure for lazy loafing and dreaming and visiting. ,,9 Each autumn, folds of thin-sliced meat hung drying on pole racks under the crisp autumn sun, a good flyfree time of year, moisture-free to boot. Indian summer , a time of big hunts, days when 50,000 or 100,000 pounds of meat needed butchering and 200 hides needed saving before dark, lest during the night wolves ruin the meat and mangle the hides. A job that took all hands-man and wife could cut up a buffalo in about an hour. As of old, they severed the meat from the bones to reduce the weight to be carried back to camp. Such butchering white men called "Indian fashion" and complained that...

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