They must have been high quality. The American Restaurant in Lander advertised oysters as the focal point of dinner in an 1888 snippet in the Lander Clipper newspaper. These were Atlantic oysters, harvested along the East Coast.
Oysters were once a mainstay of the American diet along the East Coast and served as a reminder of home as settlers moved west. The peak harvest came in 1890 when 15,000,000 bushels of oysters were pulled out of Chesapeake Bay, with many more north to Nova Scotia. By 1900, the natural supply was almost gone due to overharvesting, raw sewage pumped into rivers from major cities, and the silting of oyster beds by runoff from inland farms.
In our era of ubiquitous fast food along with home delivery at the click of a cell phone screen, it’s difficult to imagine the time, toil, and limited fare that our ancestors faced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Those Lander oysters were harvested by oystermen, sold on the docks to middlemen, before being sorted and sold to brokers. The brokers took contracts from buyers in inland cities, with Denver being the farthest west.
San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland had their own limited oyster harvest just offshore. That grew when Japanese oysters were planted along the coast around 1920.
Once in Denver, the oysters were marked for delivery to Cheyenne, Rawlins, Rock Springs, Salt Lake City, and eventually Elko, Winnemucca, and Reno.
A trip to Rawlins on a fast freight took four days from Boston, on a regular freight, up to 10 days. From Rawlins, the oysters were hauled overland by freight wagon on the Lander Road for another 30 to 48 hours before arriving at the American Restaurant.
They experimented with fresh oysters packed in ice, but spoilage almost always ruined the shipment. The oysters at the American came out of a can.
By 1900, culinary experts predicted most or all Americans would be eating at least dinner from a can. In an age before microwave ovens and frozen foods, the can was the answer.
Fremont Clipper – February 27, 1891
A DINNER FROM CANS.
How People Who Work Without Clubs or a Kitchen Manage.
“Such an advance has been made in late years in canning all sorts of food that one can maintain a whole house without any kitchen whatever, except an oil stove. The variety of canned goods now on the market is so great that housekeeping is as nearly automatic as it ever can be made. One may select from the stores exactly what one wants, whether it be salmon, lobster, mackerel, herring, sardines, shrimps, oysters, clams, crawfish, crabs, lobsters, clams and even more costly delicacies, such as caviar and pate. All these keep cool in cans and will not harm one to be exposed to the atmosphere.
If one does not care to begin his meal with soup, he may choose to have oysters. These come in cans and may have either edible rock or bivalves. He then takes or cuts his meat from a can, be it roast beef, roast mutton, or roast chicken. If one does not like roast meat, he can have corned beef or tongue. He may have corned beef hash ready for frying or canned beef stew, Irish stew, chicken stew, or turkey stew. If fish be preferred, there are all sorts of tinned fish on the market. The varieties include salmon, tuna, sardines, herrings, anchovies, and even fresh-water fish.For vegetables one has canned peas, corn, asparagus, tomatoes, beans, spinach, squash, potatoes, string beans, lima beans, peas and turnips. For fruits there are pineapples, pears, peaches, apples, apricots, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, cherries, plums, and even strawberries with cream. For dessert he may have jelly, custard, pudding, or ice cream, all put up in cans.
If one is tired of meat, fish, or vegetables, he may have bread and butter from tins. Milk is put up in tins and may be had fresh or condensed. Coffee, tea, and chocolate are also to be had ready prepared. One can have sugar, salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, oil, and all the condiments from cans.
It is quite possible to take this one step further and dispense with dishes entirely. Knives and forks are now made of wood and may be thrown away after using. Plates and cups may be made of paper, and after the meal they may be thrown into the fire. Thus one may dine without leaving a trace behind.”
Cooking has largely been the realm of women since we first looked out of the cave, but cooking on the range was a man’s job in the post-Civil War period.
Cities along both coasts and dotting the major rivers of the Mississippi drainage had hundreds of restaurant options, but the choices outside Denver, Kansas City, and Omaha on the Great Plains were limited.
So were the ingredients.
Fresh pork, ham, and bacon were staples in the South along with cornbread and grits. Turnips, greens, green beans, and a new arrival, the tomato, were vegetable options.
Out west, ham, pork, and bacon were replaced by beef, wild game, especially pronghorn and elk, with lots of potatoes.
Fountain drinks exploded in popularity in New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago, but for most of America, it was milk, buttermilk, coffee, and tea. A jug or two of hard cider was almost always passed around before and after dinner.
Dessert was an occasional cake, donuts, and fruit pies in late summer and early autumn.
For the wealthier city dwellers, salmon, oysters, turtle, duck, and wild game were often on the table. Duck and turtle were so popular that they almost became extinct due to professional hunting and harvesting.
The nightmare of many family gatherings and church picnics, the Jello salad emerged in the 1890s as a byproduct of industrial meat-packing houses. The beef gelatin tied in with a sudden increase in sugar intake.
The United States orchestrated an overthrow of the Hawaiian government in 1893 and defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War five years later in a wave of imperialistic expansion. Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba were major producers of sugar cane. Under American control, the tariffs charged to American companies were eliminated, and markets exploded.
Sugar consumption was only 18 pounds per person per year in 1800, but jumped to 92 pounds by 1900. Today it’s 180 pounds, almost a half-pound a day. This sudden influx of cheap sugar, along with chocolate, vanilla, and cola nuts from Africa and South America, changed the American diet.
Candy bars and soft drinks became nationalized. You could still get a custom soda at the corner drug store, but Moxie, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi-Cola took over on an epic scale.
All of these were available in the cafes, diners, and restaurants of Lander, then Shoshoni, and Riverton. Hudson and Dubois soon followed by 1908, and Pavillion entered the café market by 1920.
The first eating houses in Fremont County were in Lander, beginning in 1878. They weren’t much more than the roadhouses that dotted the trails from Casper and Rawlins.
Isabella L. Bird, an English traveler in Colorado and southern Wyoming in the late 1870s, described the fare at most way stations and hotels across the Rockies in her book “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.”
Here’s her description of a typical dinner: “Thirty men in working clothes, silent and sad-looking, came in to supper. The beef was tough and greasy, the butter had turned to oil, and both the beef and butter were black with living, drowned, and half drowned flies. The greasy tablecloth was also black with flies, and I did not wonder why the guests looked melancholy and quickly escaped The hotel room she described wasn’t much better: I got down and found a single room of the rudest kind, with the wall at one end practically broken down, holes in the roof, holes for windows, and no furniture but two chairs and two unplaned wooden shelves with straw sacks upon them for beds. There was an adjacent cabin room with a stove, benches, and a table where they cooked and ate, but this was all. A hard, sad-looking woman looked at me measuringly. She said they sold milk and butter to parties camping in the canyon, that they never had any boarders except two asthmatic old ladies, but they would take me for five dollars a week if I ‘would make myself agreeable.”
The Hilton it was not, but this was what travelers could expect on stage routes west from Casper through Wolton to Rongis, or the many stops northwest from Rawlins to Fort Washakie, including Bull Springs, Crooks Gap, Myersville, Hailey, and Derby.