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THE AMERICAN BISONS. £93 
for, as indeed I have never tasted, finer beef than the buffalo meat, which 
was almost exclusively used. Often at the hotel in Hays City, as well as at 
other public tables in the buffalo country, have I heard the beef praised by 
Eastern travellers, who frequently expressed their surprise at the excellent 
quality of this article set before them. Often, too, in the same connection, our 
Eastern traveller would ask about buffalo meat, whether it was fit to eat, 
whether it was much used for food, and whether he would be likely to get a 
chance to taste it in his journey across the plains. When told that he had 
just partaken of it, that it was buffalo beef which he had been praising, and 
that it was the staple meat of the table throughout the buffalo country, 
at the hotels and restaurants as well as in the hunter’s camp, his surprise 
amounted almost to incredulity, which only the strongest assurances would 
remove. The age and condition of the animal, as already stated, has much 
to do with the quality of the meat, and a more miserable semblance of food 
could hardly be set before one than a steak cut from one of the old “lords 
of the prairie.” 
The tongue of even an old bull is always regarded as a delicate morsel, 
and is often saved when no other part of the animal is touched. The hump 
is generally considered to be next in delicacy and tenderness. A few hunters 
killed buffaloes during the autumn months for the purpose of curing the 
meat. The best pieces only, from young and tender animals, were selected, 
and when properly cured were fully equal to the best dried and smoked beef 
found in the Eastern markets. <A single hunter at Hays City shipped annu- 
ally for some years several hundred barrels thus prepared, which the con- 
sumers probably bought for ordinary beef.* 
Further northward, on the plains of the Saskatchewan, Assinniboine, Red 
River, and Upper Missouri, large quantities of the meat were formerly made 
into pemmican. In this form it proves invaluable to the Northern voyageurs 
and trappers, of whose commissariat it formed the chief resource. Hind 
states that the Hudson’s Bay Company formerly obtained from the Plain 
Crees, the Assinniboines, and the Ojibways, pemmican and dried meat to 
* Dr. Richardson’s testimony respecting the quality of bison meat is as follows: “The flesh of the bison, 
in good condition, is very juicy and well flavored, much resembling that of well-fed beef. The tongue is 
deemed a delicacy, and may be cured so as to surpass in flavor the tongue of an English cow. ‘The hump 
of flesh covering the long spinous processes of the first dorsal vertebra is much esteemed. It .... hasa 
fine grain, and when salted and cut transversely, it is almost as rich and tender as the tongue.’”— Fauna 
Boreali-Americana, Vol. I, p. 282. 
