Pemmican is a concentrated food consisting of dried pulverized meat, dried berries, and rendered fat. It was invented by the native peoples of North America, and widely used during the fur trade as a high-calorie food. Properly packaged, it could be stored for long periods of time.
The specific ingredients used in it were usually whatever was available; the meat was often bison, moose, elk, or deer, the fruit saskatoon berries, though cherries, currants, chokeberries and blueberries were also used.
The very best pemmican is made from lean meat and bone marrow fat; the pemmican buyers of the fur trade era had strict specifications.
The Pemmican War
To conserve scarce food, in 1814 Governor Miles Macdonell of Assiniboia (or Red River Colony) forbade, in the Pemmican Proclamation, the export of pemmican from his jurisdiction. However, the founder of the colony was the chief shareholder of the Hudson's Bay Company, while pemmican was exported by the Métis to the North West Company, the Hudson's Bay Company's chief competitor. The proclamation led to the destruction, twice, of the chief Red River settlement of Fort Douglas by the North West Company, and to the Battle of Seven Oaks.
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