“I know!” said Jesse, his mouth full of bread and marmalade. “Deer and turkey all along in here, then.”
“Sure!” added John. “Thirty deer, four bear, and two wolves in the first six weeks.”
Uncle Dick sighed. “Well, we’ll have to live on rolls and marmalade, and if Jesse’s appetite holds we’ll have to make a good many towns for supplies. More’s the pity, there’s a good town now about every ten miles or so—two dozen towns in the first two hundred and fifty miles.”
“Aw now!” said Jesse. “Aw now! I guess a fellow can’t help getting hungry. Maybe we can catch some fish, anyhow.”
“Gass said they did,” nodded John. “They got a lot of fine catfish, and I think Patrick Gass must have liked them, way he talks. He says, ‘We are generally well supplied with catfish, the best I have ever seen.’”
“What kind of a grub list did they have?” inquired Jesse; and John was able to answer, for he found the page in the Journal, which was close at hand on a box top, so it could be consulted at any time.
“They didn’t have any marmalade or preserves, or fruit or acid of any kind, and they must have relied on the hunt. They had four bags of ‘parchmeal,’ which I suppose was parched corn ground—the old frontier ration, you know. That was about twenty-eight bushels in all, with some eighteen bushels of ‘common’ and twenty-two bushels of hominy. Then they had thirty half barrels of flour, and a dozen barrels of biscuit, a barrel of meal, fifty bushels of meal, twenty-four bushels of Natchez hulled corn, four barrels of other hulled corn, and one of meal. That was their cereal list.
“They only had one bag of coffee, and one each of ‘Beens & pees,’ as Clark spells them, and only two bags of sugar, though eight hundred and seventy pounds of salt.”
“Not much sweets,” grumbled Jesse. “How about the grease list?” Jesse was rather wise about making up a good, well-balanced grub list for a camping trip.
“Well,” answered John, “they had forty-five hundred pounds of pork, a keg of lard, and six hundred pounds of ‘grees,’ as he calls it. Not so much; and they ran out of salt in a year, and out of flour, too, so they didn’t have any bread for months. They had some stuff spoiled by getting wet.