Dried, or “jerked” meat.—­The most popular and universal method of curing buffalo meat was to cut it into thin flakes, an inch or less in thickness and of indefinite length, and without salting it in the least to hang it over poles, ropes, wicker-frames, or even clumps of standing sage brush, and let it dry in the sun.  This process yielded the famous “jerked” meat so common throughout the West in the early days, from the Rio Grande to the Saskatchewan.  Father Belcourt thus described the curing process as it was practiced by the half-breeds and Indians of the Northwest: 

“The meat, when taken to camp, is cut by the women into long strips about a quarter of an inch thick, which are hung upon the lattice-work prepared for that purpose to dry.  This lattice-work is formed of small pieces of wood, placed horizontally, transversely, and equidistant from each other, not unlike an immense gridiron, and is supported by wooden uprights (trepieds).  In a few days the meat is thoroughly desiccated, when it is bent into proper lengths and tied into bundles of 60 or 70 pounds weight.  This is called dried meat (viande seche).  To make the hide into parchment (so called) it is stretched on a frame, and then scraped on the inside with a piece of sharpened bone and on the outside with a small but sharp-curved iron, proper to remove the hair.  This is considered, likewise, the appropriate labor of women.  The men break the bones, which are boiled in water to extract the marrow to be used for frying and other culinary purposes.  The oil is then poured into the bladder of the animal, which contains, when filled, about 12 pounds, being the yield of the marrow-bones of two buffaloes.”

In the Northwest Territories dried meat, which formerly sold at 2_d._ per pound, was worth in 1878 10_d._ per pound.

Although I have myself prepared quite a quantity of jerked buffalo meat, I never learned to like it.  Owing to the absence of salt in its curing, the dried meat when pounded and made into a stew has a “far away” taste which continually reminds one of hoofs and horns.  For all that, and despite its resemblance in flavor to Liebig’s Extract of Beef, it is quite good, and better to the taste than ordinary pemmican.

The Indians formerly cured great quantities of buffalo meat in this way—­in summer, of course, for use in winter—­but the advent of that popular institution called “Government beef” long ago rendered it unnecessary for the noble red man to exert his squaw in that once honorable field of labor.

During the existence of the buffalo herds a few thrifty and enterprising white men made a business of killing buffaloes in summer and drying the meat in bulk, in the same manner which to-day produces our popular “dried beef.”  Mr. Allen states that “a single hunter at Hays City shipped annually for some years several hundred barrels thus prepared, which the consumers probably bought for ordinary beef.”