Late on the night of November 22, 1987, an unknown person interrupted broadcasts on two Chicago television stations while wearing a mask resembling Max Headroom, a glitchy, distorted futuristic TV character popular in the 1980s. The hijacker rambled, made strange jokes, and behaved erratically before the signal abruptly ended. Despite an FBI investigation, the “Max Headroom Incident” was never solved.
Pemmican is dried meat pounded into powder, combined with rendered fat in equal proportions by weight, and pressed into bars with dried berries. That is the entire recipe. Three ingredients. No refrigeration. No cooking required to eat it. A shelf life measured in months to years under the right conditions. One pound of pemmican delivers approximately 3,000 to 3,500 calories, a full day of sustenance for an active adult, in a package you can carry in your coat pocket.
The Cree, Lakota, Blackfeet and dozens of other Plains nations had been making it for generations before the fur trade era, and when European explorers and traders encountered it they immediately understood what they were looking at. The Hudson's Bay Company built an entire industrial supply chain around it. Robert Falcon Scott took it to Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton's men ate it on the ice after the Endurance was crushed.
William Clark wrote in his journal near what is now Great Falls Montana in 1805: the Hunters killed 3 buffaloe, the most of all the meat I had dried for to make Pemitigon. The spelling is characteristically Clark, creative and phonetic, but the reference is unambiguous. The Corps of Discovery made pemmican from bison on the trail and first encountered it as a prepared food at the formal feast hosted by the Lakota Sioux early in the journey.
The journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Gary Moulton and published by the University of Nebraska Press, are the most thoroughly documented food record in American exploration history and pemmican appears in them as a staple of survival rather than a curiosity. These men were eating nine pounds of fresh meat per man per day on good days and boiling candles to eat on bad ones. When they made pemmican they were thinking about the bad days.