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...
The Boss Drink
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frontier fare
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...
Suds for Crab Cowboys
Texas's oldest continuously operating tavern can be found in Austin. August Scholz opened his establishment after the Civil War, in 1866, and it...
Red Hot for the Crowd
In 1879, when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe chugged into Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, the railroad brought in a wide variety of food that...
Mark Twain’s Vittles and Viands
Once Missouri-born Samuel Clemens headed west in July 1861, he began his lifelong career of penning frontier life accounts that were both serious...
Dinner in Deadwood with Calamity Jane
In the fall of 1875, a makeshift tent town popped up, beginning a stampede to Deadwood Gulch. By the winter of 1876, the population of this Dakota...
Gourmet Glitz at Gateway to the West
When high society ladies threw a party in the West, they spared no expense. Women living in rural areas had their challenges, but the wealthy ladies...
The Picnic Disease
As towns across the frontier West heated up during the spring and summer months, sweltering pioneers found ways to beat the heat at picnics. They...