Bread Across He West

The cultural breads that sustained pioneers on the frontier.

- Sherry Monahan

Vile stuff” that suggested the “properties of poison” turned the bread a “green-yellow tinge” at the Pony Express station near Wyoming Territory’s Fort Laramie. Then British explorer Richard Francis Burton came across a different type of bread: “A hundred-fold better,” he wrote, “the unpretending chapati, flapjack, scone, or, as the Mexicans prettily called it, ‘tortilla!’”

Even though he found this bread more pleasing, he suffered from what he called the “travelers’ bane”—the tortilla tasted like the “rusty bacon and graveolent antelope” that it was placed near while cooking on “Uncle Sam’s stove,” better known as the dutch oven.