You are on the Oregon Trail and meet a strange man. He says, "Hi, my name is Terry." You laugh and say, "Terry is a girl's name." Terry shoots you. You have died of Dissin' Terry.

There once was a Max with a knack, For videos that featured hard tack, He mentions the quip, And then shows the clip, And his viewers all say *KLACK KLACK*

I live near the end of the trail; all over the place people STILL have the original covered wagons their families brought here 170 years ago. Someone actually refurbished one & modernized it & they rent it out on airbnb! I stayed in it for my birthday

The story about Smith having to give up his mother’s rolling pin brought tears to my eyes. I know, it’s not as bad as dying of dysentery, but it still hurts.

I cannot believe Max neglected to mention that the pioneers would sometimes eschew their wagons and instead ride large rocks for miles across the prairie.

My great-great-grandmother was 14 when she married my 16-year-old great-great-grandfather. The first year of their marriage included traveling across the plains to their new life in Nebraska from the east coast. They worked a farm together and, by all accounts, had lives they were happy with and proud of. They were married for over 75 years. I cannot imagine to this day how tough they were. My grandma was born too early and g-g-grandmother was the midwife. She realized by grandma was too weak so she warmed up the old stove they used to incubate animals and put her in it and kept her alive. I literally wouldn't be here without that woman. Her name was Nancy Anne.

The meat was often salted in old times and packed in ceramic jars. Salt, meat, salt, meat, all the way to the top. This kept meat from spoiling and had to be soaked in water a few times before use. My Uncle Don told me, when he was a kid, the pork was kept in barrels with salt water and lasted a year.

I love that Max shouted out Townsends! There needs to be a huge mashup of the best historical food channels. Max and Townsdends make early 19th century, historical accurate MREs, then have Steve1989MRE eat them while Steve Wallis does a stealth camp near a wagon train.

" Yes honey. I had no intentions of partaking in the boy's actions, I went back to my tent and spent the day writing to you" - most believable boys night out text home

As an Oregonian and a member of the Oglala Lakota, I'd like to see you do an episode on Wohanpi, which is a bison stew beloved by my ancestors, and maybe highlight some of the other tribes of Turtle Island.

As a historian and someone who works for a museum/interpretive center that deals with the Oregon Trail, I want to say thank you for the interesting and very accurate information in your video.

My grandmother came over in covered wagons. From Wyoming to Colorado. She was very young when she married grandpa Bates. She had 5 kids one was my father. He joined the Army and was sent to Harley Davidson to learn how to repair motorcycles. That’s where he met my mother. 1942 married then had my brother in 1944 sister in 1952 and me 1955. Then my youngest brother in 1956. What a story for the grandchildren.

Sweetie: I got your four food groups Beans 🫘 Bacon 🥓 Whisky 🥃 And lard 🧈

That man with the rolling pin. That grown man crying because he had to leave his mother's rolling pin and he missed her... He's like me. Like us. Every now and then I hear or read something that makes me realize on a deep level that everyone that ever existed was a person. All the heroes and villains of history, sure. But every single one of the common folk was as much a fully realized person as me. They all had dreams and memories and childhoods and dreams and happiness and misery. Tens of thousands of years of human experience. An ocean full of people that lived full lives not unlike mine. It's gut wrenching every time.

I love the idea of using an egg as a unit of general measurement as almost everyone in the world will know how big an egg is.

That quote about only finding bison skulls and no living bison made me realize why the go to depiction of the american southwest features a lot of bison skulls on the ground

20:52 I'm crying, thinking of this big burly man just missing his mama's biscuits 😭😭

My great-great-great-great grandfather came along the Oregon trail with his family when he was just three years old. This was in the late 1850's, so a little later than the stories you usually hear about. At this point there were a few more checkpoint settlements along the trail which made getting supplies a little easier. He passed down a story about how on one of the legs they'd misjudged how many rations they needed and had to scrape by on foraging off the land. His sister who was 12 at the time was off foraging when she ran into a Native American. In broken English he asked what a young white girl was doing so far out by herself. She told him of her family's situation, and after listening to her story he reached into his bag and gave her a large handful of the his buffalo jerkey to take back. That handful of dried meat managed to stretch their rations out a few more days and they were able to make it to the checkpoint a week later. Unfortunately she forgot to ask his name, but this stranger's generosity likely saved the lives of the younger siblings, including my great-great-great-great grandpa.

The hard tack 'knock knock' is such an old friend at this point, I love it every time.

Hey man, Nebraskan native here! Just wanted to say thank you for showcasing such a monumental part of our history. Fyi, Kearny is pronounced Car-Knee. The fort never rally had much for travelers as it was an outpost rather than a supply depot. Town legend says there were so many pianos, potbelly stoves, and bookcases dumped by the pioneers that when the city was founded, all the citizens just grabbed them off the side of the road.

Hi Max. You probably won't see this, but my father and I spent many evenings watching your channel and sharing our shared interests in cooking and history. He had a heart attack last week and it's been incredibly difficult. Your videos are one of the few things that can bring a measure of comfort in these difficult times. Thank you, and thank you to Jose as well, for all that you do.

Fun fact for anybody who’s never eaten those Camas bulbs Max mentions. They have a prune-y kind of taste and a texture similar to fruit leather when cooked. It’s also a mild laxative until your system gets used to it… to quote William Clark about eating camas: “it filled us so full of wind we were scarce able to breathe all night.”

Early European explorers suffered from scurvy on overland excursions until the natives taught them which plants they could gather and consume.

18:42 The importance of lemon extract may not just be about flavouring the water to give it a nicer taste, but to prevent the onset of scurvy.

That $600 shopping list equates to roughly $25,000 today EDIT: Elisha Perkins' $1500 worth of discarded supplies is roughly $62,000 today!!!

I hear "Oregon Trail" and think "dysentery" the same way I hear "mitochondria" and think "the powerhouse of the cell" or hear "hardtack" and think [clack clack]. The only times I didn't have everyone die on the trail I was starting as a banker and therefore had lots of money to spend on provisions. I also remember how annoyed I was that they never let me keep more than like 100 lbs of meat from a bison even when they had ten times that (although, in retrospect, killing a lot of bison and leaving most of it to rot is, unfortunately, historically accurate).

I first played Oregon Trail around 1985 at around 6 years old on an Apple IIe with the green screen. Booting off of a 5 1/4" floppy. Aw, the good ole days lol

This is kind of funny, since you mention the monotony of moving and the joy of eating. I worked for a moving company, so every day was the same thing but different. When we got together in the mornings, our first priority was deciding where we were going to eat lunch that day.

"as we try not to die of dysentery" should be the goal of every cooking show 😂

That hardtack clip is a gift that just keeps on giving

The ampersand was also developed as a shorthand for writing "et" and began its life as an E with the cross of a T on its tail!

Laura Ingalls-Wilder describes the pioneer experience in all its glory in her book “Little House on the Prairie” when she and her family went to live in Kansas Territory when it still belonged to the local indigenous tribes. She describes cooking on buffalo chip fires and what her mother would cook. It’s a very detailed description of the lives of those who had an itch to go west. I highly recommend it to all ages, really.

I'm a scientist that indirectly studies shigella (the bacteria that causes dysentery), and I always include that death screen as a a part of my background and significance when I present my work.

The main point about the immigrants to Oregon walking is this: it reduced the load on the animals pulling the wagon. Riders were more weight and the horses/oxen could only pull so much for so long. One had to carefully husband the animal's strength if it were to survive more than 90 days of laboriously pulling the wagon full of supplies.

Parching the cornmeal by placing it in a pan over a low heat until it browns a little improves the flavor substantially.

I live right next to the end of the trail. The first sign of real civilization is down the street from me in Eagle Creek Oregon. Ruts and left over artifacts can still be found. I found a few on my own land from one of the first settlers. My greatx3 grandparents headed out on the Oregon Trail but split off and finished on the Mormon Trail into Salt Lake and settled Lehi

Thank you for including that the near extinction of the bison in the US and Canada was an intentional genocidal act. Growing up I often heard it glossed over as just “overhunting” and I didn’t learn the true nature of the extermination until I was in my thirties.

A friend of mine had a small foot stool that her great grandmother had brought on the Oregon trail. The husband had been throwing out her belongings along the way until all she had left was this stool. When he threw it out she sat down on it and refused to get up. Her husband and another man had to pick her up with the stool and put her in the wagon, and so she saved the only personal belonging she had left.

Once during a job that I had years ago I had fallen off of a mountain and I was stranded for a while before I had gotten rescue. I used wild "horse chips" to start a fire. It felt right, but smelled a little wrong.

Amazing how that name Johnny cakes (original I believe originated from word journey cakes) which was always some sort of long lasting type of bun/cake/bread. In the Caribbean it is called johnny cakes and is made of flour, water and salt. Option to add a pinch of baking powder. It was then fried and served warm with butter. Yum. Cornmeal is also used in a dish called festival. It is served with very spicy fried fish.

Fun Fact: I grew up in the Sierra Nevadas and on the eastward side of the mountains near our house was a small "town" called Piano Flats. The story goes that a wealthy family hauled an upright piano all the way across the plains, along the southern routes around the Rockies, but when they got to the pass to get into California, they finally could not justify bringing it anymore. Rather than just dump it though, they set it on the ground, tuned it, and built a lean-to around it to mostly protect it from the elements and it became a landmark for people taking that path over the mountains. Pioneers who knew music would play it as they passed until it finally got unplayable, but later a trading stop would grow up in the same area. Just a neat story (that may or may not be true, as these things go) but its still fun.

Crazy how much the New World crops like maize(corn) and potatos changed the world. Potatos in particular allowed for industrial revolution because of how reliable and calorie dense they were as food; People can survive off nothing but potatos so long as you have a good source of dietary iron. Furthermore potato plants can be trampled by horses marching through and the actual crop won't be destroyed, making wars less detrimental to the peasants class.

My son gave me a t-shirt last year that had the little ox-cart on it and the words, "You have died of dysentery." I laughed so hard, because we all used to play that game when the kids were growing up. Thank you for a very entertaining (and informative) episode!

It's so cool to see you cover this topic! I'm from Oregon and my ancestors Ezekiel and Hannah Powers came here by way of the Oregon Trail. We even have Ezekiel's journal which chronicles their journey.

The Oregon Trail actually went right through my family's property. I was actually once the assistant director of a museum in the area. Not far from where I'm from, there's another museum where you can see this kind of food in person. We even sometimes make something similar today. This is a video that really connects to what I know. :)

My girlfriend is a descendant of emigrants on the Oregon trail. Her ancestors were Norwegian immigrants that joined a wagon train around 1855. They first settled in central Oregon, but soon moved to Washington State after hearing about the port in Seattle

The short clip of the cowboy on the horse is from the TV Western "Wagon Train". Way before my time, but I could watch those Westerns all day long. The Rifleman, Have gun will travel, Laramie, Wanted Dead or Alive, Rawhide (young Clint Eastwood), etc.

You posting this a few days before The Gaming Historian posted his hour and a half history of the Oregon Trail video game is the most beautiful unrelated timing ever

I named my older daughter Camas, after the plant. I'm half-Coast Salish and it was always a dear plant to me. My younger daughter is Olallie, after the berries that were also so important to my ancestors. The names suit them. My older daughter is delicate and shy, and hides a lot of herself under the surface. My younger daughter is exuberant and bright like a salmonberry.

I have a friend who has potato starter that her ancestors first made over a hundred years ago, and she still makes bread with it.

Max! Your channel is pure delight! I must say here, from Brazil, that my husband bought me your book and just gifted it to me ❤ As I'm now during a cancer treatment, I'm trully happy to read and try the history in this book! I'll try one recipe a month 🎉

As a southerner, we made “hot water cornbread”. This was made by pouring boiling water into corn meal forming it into disks and then pan frying it ( similar to the Venezuelan “Arepa”).

Notes on buffalo poop. Having lived in the bush in Kenya with cows, their poop smells like spring. Sweet and grass-like. I was told by a Nat'l park worker (in the US) buffalo poop smells similarly

My grandmother made cornbread hoe cakes every day. I can remember standing in a chair in front of the stove to turn them for her when I was very little. It was their staple bread for lunch and dinner, with biscuits for breakfast. Well rendered lard will keep at room temperatures for a year.

stop the man who gave up his mother's rolling pin literally made me start crying

I grew up & still live in extreme southern Mississippi…less than 70 miles inland from the Gulfcoast. When I was little my grandma on my mom’s side would make me “Johnny cakes” for breakfast or a snack. For breakfast she made them adding sugarcane syrup which our neighbor made fresh each year & sold or maple syrup when she ran out of cane syrup instead of molasses. She said her mom used molasses but she didnt care for the flavor it gave. Then she would warm up some cane syrup so it would be thinner to put on top. -Now for “Johnny cakes” as a snack or for bread at the evening meal she would often add canned creamed sweet corn that she put in the blender until almost a completely smooth liquid. She would also add a couple tablespoons cane syrup & sweet salted real butter to the cream corn. She would then use that instead of the liquid & molasses in the “Johnny cakes” adding just a tiny bit of water if the mix was too thick. So they still came out slightly sweet but were more savory instead. Especially since she kept a jar in her fridge that she put all the drippings(aka fat)left in the pan any time she cooked bacon or fatty sausage. And she would fry the savory Johnny Cakes in a couple tablespoons of that fat! For the breakfast version it just depended on if we were also eating bacon & eggs. If we were JUST eating the cakes kinda like you do pancakes…she didn’t use the bacon fat. - My grandma was 1/4th Native American as her mom was half & my great great grandma was full blooded Native American. My grandmother had recipes passed down from her. She called “Johnny cakes” simply “corn cakes”. She said her grandma made them by soaking course ground cornmeal in hot water for 40-60min, squeezed out as much water as possible using a cheese cloth & then adding the other ingredients to that until it made the right consistency. Some times she would fry bacon up extremely crispy, crumble it, add it to the corn cake mix & then fry it in that bacon grease. Sometimes also adding a little bit of salty shredded cheese. I’ve tried making it that way & if you soak the course cornmeal long enough that made that way can actually come out with a smoother texture. -For anyone wanting to try this who wants a smooth cake…use Jiffy Cornbread mix rather than the cornmeal. The cake will turn out much smoother & will puff up a little. But the flavor is really good. -I keep a jar in my fridge for bacon & sausage fat. I use it to fry these cakes but also add some to things like blackeyed peas or turnip greens!

As a native Oregonian... getting an Oregon trail story, two Hard Tacks in the episode, and an errant "Proble-ing" at 17:54 has made this a great morning

Friend of mine played Oregon Trail 2 using 4 60 year old ladies and bacon. He made it farther than I did. My survival skills were brought into immediate question.

4 to 6 months? Now it's 5 hours from coast to coast, a bad lean cuisine, a weak drink.... BOOM your there! My grandmother was born in 1903, the year the Wright brothers flew their first plane and lived long enough to board a jet and visited us in California and went to Disneyland LOL! You go granny!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of the highlights of my school days was when learning about the Oregon Trail. My teacher made it into a game and my classmates and I pretended to be on two different wagon trains competing to arrive in Oregon first. My wagon train got buried in an avalanche in the Rockies... I probably shouldn't have packed that piano. 🤣

"Half as much as a hen's egg" is such a brilliant comparative measurement, most people in the world will be familiar with the domesticated chicken and therefore know roughly how big their eggs are, one of those measurements that transfers across borders unlike "3 barleycorn to an inch".

One thing they never wrote down (because everyone knew it) is that you have to let the batter sit for 10-15, sometimes up to 30 depending on humidity, minutes to let the meal obsorb the water before cooking. That's why it tasted grainy. They used to do this with bread dough as well.

Also, Townsend is by far one of the best cooking channels I’ve ever come across, and their catalog is amazing.

I used to love that Oregon Trail game. I'm a millennial and we used to play that all the time in school. Amazon Trail was another good one. I miss those games terribly. I'm praying that some game creator comes up with newer versions of one or both of those games at some point.

The secret to a better johnny cake is to soak your cornmeal for a bit first, then thicken/finish with some dry; it gives a softer texture with some contrast instead of "all grit all the time."

Max, I don’t know if you can still get hold of the footage but, in 1989 a married couple from Sweetwater, Montana (last name was Clark) organized an honest to goodness wagon train across private and public lands through Montana’s historic state capitols. I know that CNN and maybe Ted Turner’s network covered it. I was seven years old when my parents bought a team of Belgian draught horses and an old John Deere grain wagon and took off on the adventure of a lifetime! We traveled the prairie from Bannock, Montana through Twin Bridges, Dillon, and Boulder and finally into the current capitol, Helena, Montana. We arrived around the 4th of July. While on the road we baked Indian cakes, and also harvested gooseberries and serviceberries, tried rattlesnake and prickly pear cactus! Your video brought back awesome memories, thanks! ❤

My grandma likes to say our family was almost stranded with the Donner party, I’m not sure how much of that is exactly true but it makes the Oregon trail a little more special to me living in the lovely state.

I just want to add that a corn cake with butter and maple syrup is a taste of heaven.

6:50 Yeah, the entire reason bacon was invented was as a way to preserve meat. Modern grocery store bacon isn't cured for preservation anymore, but back in the day, you just had to keep it away from sunlight and as anoxic as you could manage and you'd be fine. As for lard, as long as it's kept in an opaque container it'll last for some time. That's why it's sold in buckets and nobody who uses it regularly in cooking bothers to refrigerate it. (I certainly don't refrigerate the rendered bacon fat from cooking that I then use to cook other savory food.)

Yes, it's difficult to give up everything you hold dear to emigrate to a new and unknown place. I did it when I was 10 and my family and I had to leave Cuba in a crowded plane with just the clothes on our backs. We did it again when 10 years later we left Venezuela to come to the United States. This time we were lucky, we each brought a suitcase. That's why we owe so much respect to those who have trecked by foot from the north of South America. They are the same strong people who made this country wonderful.

I'm glad that they brought the lemon extract with them. The rest of their diet sounds like Scurvy R Us.

I grew up in a small town in Wyoming, not too far from Immegrants(sp) Rock where most wagon trains got to around July 4th. That part of Wyoming is a desert. Almost no water, and no trees. There is nothing but wind, sage brush, jack rabbits and dust. There is no wild game, because there is no vegitation for them to feed upon, so there were no buffalo chips to use as fire wood. If you hadn't stock piled chips, you had to use sage brush which took a lot of effort to get enough for a very small fire. The Rock (where you camped on July 4th) is situated in such a way that it can be seen for about 30 miles to the West. So, after walking in the heat and dust for 10 miles, you could look back and see where you camped the night before. That must have been depressing, realizing how few miles you had walked. And then, the same for the next two days. Only sometime on the fourth day, after three days walking, could you no longer see the Rock, where you had camped on July 4th, only 30 miles ago. Those people were a stronger breed back then.

As a professional chef AND a history buff, your channel has allowed me to relay to the service staff something I have wanted to say for years: "this dish is inspired by a Xth century recipe" Thank you, Max!

My (several times) great grandmother traveled on the Santa Fe trail (same time, different destination) and she wrote a journal that was compiled into a book that’s out of print and hard to find anywhere called With a Doll in One Pocket and a Pistol in the Other: Rebecca Cohen Mayer, 1837-1930 A Memoir. Her husband, the caravan master was also a talented cook and she wrote in the diary about many of the things she ate and that her husband and other cooks in the convoy made. They were Jewish and one thing that I and people in the community found interesting to the story of American Judaism is that her and her husband did not follow kosher food laws at all on the trail: eating hunted game and bacon. An except I think you’d funny find is from one of the numerous times she talked about food: “Our cook makes good bread in a skillet using flour water bacon fat and salt. He has tried to make biscuits. They were so heavy that Henry said if we had a cannon we could use them for cannon balls.”

I would love to see more recipes from this era of American history! The combination of subsistence hunting/gathering and "glamping" with luxury cooking items from home fascinates me. The absolute versatility of portable goods and campfire cooking was on full display during this time. Excellent video as always!

As someone preparing to up sticks and migrate away from everything I've known, I understand why they set off on the trail. It's just so damn crowded down south, and I can't actually afford to live where I grew up.

Oh man. This brought back a memory I had repressed. Growing up we were so poor, my parents would feed our whole family (mom, dad, my teenaged brother and me) with two boxes of Jiffy corn bread and a pound of bacon. Cornmeal pancakes. That was dinner. The bad old days. 😢

Who else got to enjoy the Oregon trial computer games as a kid? I remember me and my buddy loaded up on ammo and stayed alive by hunting lol.

This was fun! I live near Emigrant Lake in Oregon :) I used to drive all around the Oregon woods in my van, and stop at roadside markers to learn more. I remember reading in one spot about how they would use pack mules to bring in coffee and sugar from the coast, and laughed to think of how some things never change :P

Man...I really love your channel...it combines 2 things that I love! Food, the incomparable experiential experience of trying new things and history, every detail, no matter how common or rare, from our ancestors. INCREDIBLE!

I am an adjunct history professor and high school history teacher. I teach early United States History, and one of my areas of expertise is the Oregon Trail and early pioneers. First, let's think about how much weight the food is. The wagons could only hold about 3000 lbs at the max. They big Conestogas cut hold more. But they didn't use those type of wagons because they were heavy and would have been too hard for the ox to pull on the trail. Now I want to address the going fifteen to twenty miles in a day. In my research and study, that is actually not a true fact. The wagons could go 15 miles to 20 miles a day on a really good day where nothing goes wrong and the weather is perfect. But most wagon trains might go 12 to 15 miles a day. They sometimes went less if the weather was bad. This was a really good video, and I did enjoy it as usual.

Using bovine poop (cow pats?) for fire is still a common thing around the world. People collect and stack them in pyramids in the same manner as firewood.

My grandfather came west on the Oregon Trail working as a water boy when he was a teenager. He would’ve done that in the last days of when the trail was still used. He only journeyed part of the way and settled in Butte, Montana. Thanks for making his journey a little bit more real to me.

Dying of Cholera was more common than dysentery back in the Oregon Trail Days

Phoebe Judson founded the city of Lynden, WA. She delivered about a hundred babies, brought education to both the pioneers but also the local Indians. Her life is real interesting. The book she wrote was written decades after her travel.

Can you release the "clack clack" sound bite to the public so we can have it as our ringtone? Lol

My third great-grandmother Phoebe traveled the Oregon Trail with her first husband to King County, Oregon. After he passed away a couple of years later, she returned to the East Coast with her second husband. They had a large family together. Over a decade later, they set out again and settled in Kansas. Her oldest son, my 2nd-great-grandfather, was with her on each of these journeys and seemed to enjoy this lifestyle because he eventually moved his own family to Montana.

You can’t churn butter from milk, by the way. The settlers must have skimmed the cream off their milk, then put the cream in a container to be shaken into butter by the bumps in the road. Instead of butter, though, they typically saved the fat from cooking bacon, salt pork, or other fatty meats, and used it as cooking fat.

Max, as someone who grew up on a farm & occasionally made butter, let me guarantee you that a bucket of fresh milk will not turn into butter, no matter how much jostling it gets. CREAM turns into butter, so they would've let the cream rise, skimmed it off, & then put it into a separate bucket to make butter. BTW, my hometown started as a trading post on the Oregon Trail. It was also a home station during the short life of the Pony Express.

My moms side of the family came over on the mayflower and later migrated to California on a wagon, my mom has the hand written diary of one of our female relatives which covers the entire journey.

I love that now you say "hard tack" i automatically expect that sound now!

The clack- clack of the hard tack clip never gets old! 😂

I so love that the Oregon Trail is so well known in the modern American zeitgeist thanks to one random video game. Peak edutainment. Just like Tasting History. Invicta taught me garum existed. Max made me love the stuff.

Grew up in Idaho. There are places in Boise (more outside it) where you can stand on the wagon ruts made from the Oregon Trail. My girl scout troop did a scavenger hunt in the neighborhood where some of that land is cordoned off. As soon as you mentioned camas root and trading the native people for salmon on the Snake River, I knew exactly where you were talking about. Damn, I'm missing home today. Thanks Max!

not only do I live 9 miles from the end of the Oregon Trail. I also made the costumes for the End of the Trail Museum. I have visited several of the museums along the Oregon Trail (the one in Baker City, Oregon is the best IMHO) I have also had a huge Oregon Trail party at my house where everyone had to equip their "wagon" with supplies (scavenger hunt) while my grandchildren ran around handing out hazard cards that told them "You have just been ambushed by the natives" or "Small Pox is running rampant in your train" It is so much fun to play this kind of game with Non-LARP people. Thank you for making this video, was fun to remember all the connections I have with the Oregon Trail.

Thank you Max for posting! I love this topic because I am from Missouri and grew up learning about the amazing Pioneers that made their way west . I am sill in awe , I remember our city had a ice storm and the electricity was down for two weeks ! we along with our family pets survived on our camping supplies, lanterns candles coolers that we kept near the house from the basement, it was very challenging but fun . I think we could do the 4 month journey with Missouri Mules! no oxen🐂🐂 😉

Only Max can have a beaming smile and say “as we try not to die of dysentery…” casually 😂

In the South, Journey Cakes became Johnny Cakes, then Cracklin' Bread and Hot Water Cornbread. Cracklin' Bread had crispy fried pork skin mixed in, no sugar or molasses, and was fried in bacon fat. Hot water cornbread still a favorite today, does not have cracklins and is fried in oil. I have my grandmother's Cracklin' Bread recipe passed down from generations in Virginia. The first time I made Hot Water Corn Bread I burned my hands shaping the "patties" until I learned to keep a bowl of ice water on hand. So good.

every time max clacks hard tack together, an angel gets their wings. 👼

Just wanna say, camas is a very beautiful native plant that can often be found in nurserys in the PNW! It's a gorgeous purple flowered bulb in addition to being extremely edible.