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...
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...