How the Pemmican War prefigured ​the protein obsessions of today

Time of India

08-06-2025

The news that Canada's
Hudson's Bay Company
(HBC) was closing its last stores had echoes of another age. HBC was one of 'the corporations that built British colonialism', as Philip J Stern describes in his book Empire, Incorporated .
We are most familiar with the East India Company (founded 1600), but HBC (1670) was one of many, like the Muscovy Company (1555), Royal African Company (1660) and Levant Company (1592), which carved the world for commercial interests, often then leading to colonial domination. HBC lasted longer because it ran stores across North America, originally outposts which sold supplies for survival in the harsh terrain. They later became regular department stores, which are now closing their doors.
HBC was founded for fur. The far north was full of animals with luxurious pelts, particularly beavers whose thick, waterproof fur was in great demand for making hats. HBC started trading with native American tribes for pelts, but soon Europeans arrived to make their fortunes as fur trappers. But winters were freezing and summers worse, with large parts of the land turning into swamp and mosquito swarms, severely limiting activities.
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Foraging or hunting food in these conditions was hard, so some form of sustenance had to be carried. But the standard travel foods of that time, like salted meats or hard biscuit, proved to be too cumbersome or impractical for conditions when even basic cooking could be hard. This is when Europeans turned to a product that native tribes prepared that was called pemmican. This was the lean meat from animals like bison or caribou, which was carefully dried to make it lighter and less likely to spoil. This was pounded into shreds and melted fat from the same animals was poured over, helping preserve it further.
Fat also made it highly calorific, providing energy from even small amounts. Dried berries pounded in made it taste better and improved its nutritional profile. Pemmican could be fried or boiled into a stew, but also eaten raw, a big advantage in bad weather. It became essential fuel for the fur trade and a major industry grew, with native tribes hunting animals and preparing pemmican to sell to trappers. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an Arctic explorer who studied tribal diets and writes extensively on pemmican in his book Not By Bread Alone , writes that HBC, which was still controlled from Britain, was initially disdainful of this native food.
This changed with the formation of the North West Company (NWC) in Montreal in 1779. As a Canadian enterprise, it knew the value of pemmican and soon was bringing in more fur from regions that HBC considered under its control. This came to a head in what is now Manitoba, where HBC tried to stop sale of pemmican outside its control. Corporate battles today happen in stock markets and courts, but the
Pemmican War
, as the conflict was called, involved real guns and violence. The NWC enlisted the tribes who made pemmican, and from 1812-1821 a deadly series of skirmishes took place. Finally, the bosses ended the war by agreeing to merge the companies under the HBC name, but making it a Canadian controlled company.
Stefansson writes that British attitudes to pemmican also changed completely. It was now seen as a wonder food, imperative for polar expeditions and even tried as army rations. It was an early example of the protein bars that are hot products today. It helps that Stefansson's book was eagerly cited by the meat industry and has become the basis of the hugely popular keto and paleo diets today. This is a bit of a distortion, since he was careful to place pemmican, and the high protein diet in the specific context of the climate and communities it came from. But the allure of pemmican has outlasted HBC and the fur trade. Doomsday preppers now stock it, piling up the protein against an apocalypse someday.