This is an exerpt from an article titled The Diet of the Mountain Men by William E. Hoston, written in 1963. You can read the full article HERE
In the early 1800s, American fur trappers and traders who were known as the "mountain men."
The average mountain man was an unwashed, unlettered, and unwanted individual. He divorced himself from civilization for most of the year, preferring the solitude of a placid beaver pond to the confines of an Eastern city.
The trapper's diet, in particular, mirrored the Indian way of life. Both the mountain men and Indians had to live off the land. Their diet was largely meat, especially the flesh of the bison. Elk was probably second in consumption for most of the trappers. Less frequently, the mountain men ate deer, bear, antelope, horses, dogs, beaver, and other small game. When food was scarce, as often happened in this hunting and gathering subsistence, the mountain men were reduced to eating the grease in the rifle stocks, fringes, and unnecessary parts of buckskin clothes, gun and ammunition bags, and every scrap of edible material, boiled up in an Assinaboin basket with hot stones, and finally were reduced to [eating] buds and twigs.
For lack of meat during the winter months, the Indians often were reduced to a starvation point. When meat became available, the Indians were prone to gorging. The mountain men, also living precariously off the land, adopted this primitive trait of overindulgence when food was obtainable. The major food of the mountain men was buffalo meat. Trappers claimed that fat buffalo meat was far superior to beef.
When mountain men had been without meat for several days before slaying a buffalo, all traces of Anglo-Saxon civilization vanished instantly. Immediately, the bison's skull was hacked open, and the raw brains were wolfed down in great, bloody chunks. The blood was quaffed and usually spilled down the trapper's face, arms, and body. The liver was torn from the body cavity.
Joe Meek, "I held my hands in an ant hill until they were covered with the ants, then greedily licked them off. I have taken the soles off my moccasins, crisped them in the fire, and eaten them."
Trappers did not worry about drinking the blood of animals. One of the men with Captain Bonneville's trapping party, slit the throat of a wounded buffalo and drank the tepid blood.
Typical of all of the mountain men, Kit Carson remarked: "Once a year, I would have a meal consisting of bread, meat, sugar, and coffee. I would consider it a luxury."
The recorded, excellent health of the average mountain man has helped to disprove certain dietary theories. For many years scientists refused to believe that men could subsist on an all meat diet and remain in good health. Experiments by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, in the twentieth century, have shown this belief to be only partially true. Eating a lean meat diet will result in dietary deficiencies; however a predominantly raw, fresh meat bill of fare, supplemented with liberal quantities of fat, is one of the most healthful regimens that an individual can eat. To maintain good health, a person daily would need to eat six to eight pounds of meat.
All the mountain men attributed their health to meat and swore that it was "the only food" for a man. "If a man could always live on such didins," said one old trapper, "he would never die."