Monotony, starvation, maybe even poisoning. You can expect a healthy helping of all three when you look at northern food history from the viewpoint of early explorers and gold-rush stampeders. You’ll also find depth beyond the drama and insights into the traditions and knowledge that sustained Indigenous communities over millennia. It contrasts pitiable examples of European arrogance with moments of wisdom during the era of exploration. And, once in a while, it even foreshadows trends decades—even a century—into the future.
For starters, consider the dining style of English trader and explorer Samuel Hearne and the Dene people who made sure he lived long enough to claim his place in history. In 1769, the chief of the Hudson’s Bay Co. post at Churchill ordered Hearne, then 24, to organize an overland expedition to find the source of copper that Dene and Inuit had been offering for trade. Hearne’s first effort quickly failed when his main guide left the travelling party as supplies ran out. A second attempt a few months later got further, but it failed again due to poor provisioning.
Hungrier but wiser, Hearne adjusted tactics for his third expedition in 1771, enlisting a group of Dënesųłıné and their leader, Matonabbee, as guides. With Hearne enforcing a strict schedule and Matonabbee showing him the ways of the land, the group reached the Coppermine River—the source of the trade metal—in July of that year. Unfortunately, he didn’t find riches. In an extensive search of the area, Hearne uncovered only one lump of copper. It weighed less than two kilograms.
Although he failed at mining, Hearne scored a more important win. He proved that explorers increased their odds if they parked their arrogance and used the hard-won traditional knowledge of Indigenous people as a strategy for success. Indeed, credit for the success of Hearne’s third expedition belongs to Matonabbee, his guides and, notably, his wives, who served as cooks on the trek.
In his memoir of his Coppermine expeditions, A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean, Hearne writes about food in mostly positive ways. At worst, he writes about the boredom of one stretch when the travelling party ate nothing but fish. But he delighted in muskox, which he described as practical for overland travel as well as delicious. And he raved about a recipe called beeatee, a kind of caribou haggis made from blood, organs, fat and “some of the tenderest of the flesh… all of which is put into the stomach, and roasted, by being suspended before the fire by a string.”
Hearne may not have grown fat on his expeditions, but he stayed healthy and, for the most part, happy. Too bad others neglected his lesson. In 1845, almost 75 years after Hearne reached the Coppermine, John Franklin left port at Greenhithe, England, and began his ultimately disastrous voyage to find the Northwest Passage.
The journey would cost the lives of Franklin and his 129-member crew. One theory blames the rations. Instead of following Hearne’s method of adopting Indigenous practices, Franklin put his faith in a man named Stephen Goldner to outfit the expedition. The entrepreneur owned a large stake in a Moldavian factory that specialized in an emerging technology—canned food. Franklin believed this innovation would anchor his presumed success. It was probably the worst call in the history of Arctic exploration.
In the mid-1980s, University of Alberta anthropologist Owen Beattie exhumed the graves of three members of Franklin’s crew—John Torrington, John Hartnell and William Braine—at Beechey Island. On-site autopsies of the well-preserved bodies revealed they had high levels of lead in their systems. Analysis of fragmentary remains from crew members collected elsewhere showed similar levels. The findings led Beattie to conclude lead in the solder used to seal the cans eventually poisoned the expedition, playing a major role in its doom.
Other researchers have since challenged that theory. Some argue that lead levels in Franklin’s crew were no different than those found in British sailors of the era who did not die. Others have found evidence indicating the crew suffered severe zinc deficiencies that weakened their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to a host of diseases.
But if canned food turns out to be a red herring in the Franklin story, the stuff was dreadful, a fact known even in the 19th century. In 1852, The Times broke a scandalous story, reporting that a review by the British Admiralty of 2,000 cans of tinned meat from Goldner’s factory found that only 197 were fit for eating. In one of its gentler comments, the newspaper described the contents as “garbage and putridity in a horrible state.”
All things considered, it’s worth asking if a taste for beeatee might have changed the fate of Franklin and his crew. No one will ever know, but there’s one more food provisioner to meet, someone who avoided both Hearne’s boredom with fish and the dinner-table disgust and ultimate demise of Franklin’s crew and went on to become a pioneer in what you might call “fast food.”
Fannie Quigley, born in 1870 in Wahoo, Nebraska, developed her culinary skills after leaving home at 16 to cook for crews building railroads into the western United States. After news broke of the discovery of gold at Bonanza Creek in 1896, she joined the stampede to the Klondike. She tried her hand at prospecting, but soon figured out that she could make better money hauling a stove-equipped sled into the bush, hanging out a shingle, not unlike a trendy pop-up restaurant today, and serving meals at $1 per plate to miners who were too busy to cook for themselves.
Quigley became a local celebrity, but the Klondike rush soon collapsed and she moved to Alaska, where she continued serving food, farming, hunting and prospecting for gold until her death in 1944. Her memory is now honoured in the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame.
If there was a hall of fame for northern food history, we’d nominate her for that, too, alongside heroes such as Hearne and goats like Franklin.
