Women of grit and grace brought home cooking to their restaurants across the West.
They Earned A Living On Their Feet
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frontier fare
Gunpowder to Oysters
A miner, a cook and a housewife all walked into a store to get groceries and supplies.
Cowboy Cuisine
In the cow towns at the end of the trail, cowboys left the beans and biscuits in camp and dined like city slickers.
The Bitter Truth
Whiskey bitters became an elixir for women on the frontier.
Pioneers and Their Pies
All across the West travelers can still enjoy sweet or savory slice of history.
Yummy Yosemite
Yosemite Valley is a magical place where pioneers have visited since the mid-1800s. People still travel here to dine in a snow-covered Christmas....
The Boss Drink
Pioneers were sipping ice cream soda waters as early as the 1860s, but ice cream sodas wouldn’t come along until the next decade. Ice cream soda...
Horrors of Stage Station Grub
By the 1850s, gold rush fever inspired more and more pioneers to board concord coaches and make their way West. The stagecoach held nine...
Mexican Marvels
The cuisine of Mexican natives living in the frontier West did not appear on menus in most restaurants or hotels. Victorian pioneers considered it...
Hell on Wheels Meals
Wyoming Territory became home to makeshift towns as the Union Pacific Railroad laid tracks to meet the Central Pacific Railroad from 1867-1869. When...
The Constable Butcher
In the 1860s, Upper Lake, California, was a farming and mill town, but because of Clear Lake’s boating and fishing, and the healthful benefits of...
Black Bart’s Epicurean Escapades
Notorious for his 1880s stage-coach robberies, what did gentleman bandit and poet Black Bart eat and where? Everyone thought San Francisco resident...