COWBOYS AND COFFEE, Part Two

Nothing goes together better than cowboys and coffee

The love of coffee spread after the war as veterans from both North and South headed out to make their fortunes in the growing cattle industry, and in the gold, silver and copper mines of the West.

The Folgers Coffee Company had been founded by James A. Folger in San Francisco, California, in 1850. James came to San Francisco from Nantucket Island at the age of 15 with his two older brothers during the California Gold Rush. They imported coffee mostly from Brazil to supply the California miners.

Coffee was also being imported to the West from the Kona region of the Hawaiian Islands and the era from 1860 to 1890 saw a steady growth in Kona coffee being shipped to California and the West. Although far superior to the Robusta coffees from South America, Kona Arabica coffee was more expensive to grow and ship in rather meager amounts and so was making little progress economically in getting very far beyond the West Coast.

Before the end of the Civil war, only green coffee beans were sold in stores because, after exposure to air, roasted coffee beans would become stale or rancid. The green coffee beans had to be roasted in a skillet on a cook stove or over a campfire before it could be ground and brewed. A single coffee bean burned in the roasting process could ruin the whole batch.

In 1865, John Arbuckle and his brother Charles, partners in a Pittsburgh grocery business, changed all this by patenting a process for roasting and coating coffee beans with an egg and sugar glaze to seal in the flavor and aroma. Marketed under the name Arbuckle’s' Ariosa Coffee, in patented airtight, one pound packages, the new coffee was shipped all over the country in sturdy wooden crates, one hundred packages to a crate. The Arbuckle Brothers printed coupons on the bags of coffee redeemable for all manner of items including handkerchiefs, razors, scissors and wedding rings, everything a cowboy or a westward moving pioneer might come to need. To further entice the chuck wagon cook purchase, each package contained a stick of peppermint candy which became a means by which cookie could get the firewood collected and the coffee grinder handle spun with the call "Who wants the candy?" Some of the toughest cowboys on the trail would jump at the opportunity to satisfy a sweet tooth. Arbuckle’s' Ariosa Coffee became so dominant in the west, that many cowboys were not even aware there was any other kind.

Coffee has been a staple of cowboy cuisine since the days of the great cattle drives. The cowboy’s job was to bring herds of half-wild Mexican cattle through the range to the rail heads. After working cattle for hours, the cowboy was hungry. He welcomed the cookie’s call to "Come an' get it." With his famished appetite, he was prepared to chow down. The cookie's job was to prepare steaks, create stews, cook the beans, bake sourdough biscuits, and boil coffee. The staple of the cowboy was coffee. It kept him awake. It kept him alert for dangers on the trail. And to do that, it had to be black and strong.

There is a certain mystique about making coffee for the cowboy. The most common story about cowboy
coffee is that cookie has to toss in a horseshoe, and if it sinks, put in some more coffee. The standard coffee pot was three to five gallons, which handled ten to twelve cowboys. And those cowboys expected their coffee to be “brown gargle,” and that means hot, black and strong. Some ignore the horseshoe and say that it has to float a six shooter. The Cowboy Coffee folks up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming say that it should float a pistol, heal an ailing steer, scare off a pack of wolves and cure the effects of a short night.

The paniolas at the Kona Cowboy Coffee Company in New Mexico and Hawaii suggest that you start with a pot full of good, clean tasting water. In most towns I use bottled water. Measure out one rounded tablespoon of ground coffee for each cup. Now here’s where you’re experimenting. If that’s too strong for you, use less the next time. If not strong enough, add more. The best way to make coffee is with a French Press, but you want to make it the cowboy way. Put that coffee directly into the pot, if you’re not using a drip coffeemaker or a French Press. If you have a percolator… remember those? …throw it away. They always made bitter coffee. Don’t give it to the Salvation Army, toss it. If you’re brewing directly in the pot, bring it to a rolling boil and take the pot off the fire. Here’s where a splash of cold water will settle the grounds.

Or just let it sit a spell. Legend talks about dropping in an egg shell to settle it and you might have tried that. Then pour and enjoy a cup of cowboy coffee. And enjoy some history of the Old West at the same time. Or you could put a handful of roasted coffee beans into an old sock, beat the coffee beans in that sock with the butt of your six shooter, pop the sock full of crushed coffee beans into a pot of boiling water and end up with some pretty bad coffee and a clean, although brown, sock.

Western artists and writers such as Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour have embellished images of cowpokes brewing coffee over chuck wagon stoves and blazing campfires. And every Western film and every TV oater has featured those same scenes.

Thanks to history and legend, cowboys and coffee have been paired forever.

COWBOYS AND COFFEE, Part One

During the Civil War, Union General George B. McClellan issued the very unpopular General Order #136, which banned the issuance of whiskey among the Federal troops. Whiskey was thought to increase bravery, or at least bravado, but it also caused lethargy, indolence, sluggishness and not a little insubordination. Thus, the drink of choice for soldiers in the field became coffee. And a little caffeine made them more alert! And being alert, attentive and on the ball is what a general wants in a soldier.

In 1861, the standard daily ration of victuals in the Union army was based on the assumption that not all required ingredients would be available at all times and places. Supplies were issued on an either-or basis. Each 100-man company was to share ten pounds of roasted coffee or one and a half pounds of tea. The Confederate War Department adopted precisely the same ration allowance as the old prewar United States, except that the Confederacy recognized the scarcity of coffee and cut rations from ten pounds of coffee to six. In any event the Southern commissary was rarely able to provide coffee. The blockades were cutting off the importation of everything from New York apples to Brazilian coffee. In 1863, responding to the rigors of campaigning, even the Union War Department revised the ration from ten pounds of roasted coffee beans to ten pounds of green coffee beans or eight pounds of roasted beans. Because of an average twenty percent moisture loss in roasting, ten pounds of green equals eight pounds of roasted coffee.

Soldiers North and South could go for days without food as long as they had their coffee. In the Confederacy, coffee became as highly prized as shoes, and commanded outrageous prices in times of insufficiency. Substitutes were tried using burnt chicory or parched corn. Some used the roasted dry crusts of brown bread, others tried rye grain soaked in rum, if they could get rum, and even others attempted to roast peas in the same way as coffee. Even acorns were roasted and ground. Nothing approached the real article. As a result, coffee was the item most often asked for when Rebs informally met Yanks between the lines for illicit trading. Virginia tobacco was most often the commodity exchanged. The taste of coffee laced with burnt chicory became habitual, perhaps a sign of Southern pride, and you can buy coffee laced with chicory in Louisiana to this very day. 

There was rarely any shortage of coffee beans in the North, and coffee became so popular with the army that the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company issued a few experimental models of their New Model 1863 Carbine with a small coffee mill with a detachable handle in the stock! It has been said that the idea was to issue one Sharps carbine with a coffee grinder built into the butt stock per 100-man Company. According to research by David H. Arnold, the grinder might have been a mill for grinding forage grains into flour. It is reported that perhaps only four are now in existence.

            

According to the Civil War Cookbook, the best coffee was slow roasted over a low fire, "until of a chestnut brown color and not burnt, as is so commonly done." It was to be boiled briskly for two minutes, then taken from the fire at once, a little cold water thrown in, then the boiler's contents poured through a piece of flannel after it had settled for five minutes."

Every soldier was provided with some sort of bag in which he stored his coffee; but the sort of bag he used indicated pretty accurately the length of time he had been in the service. For example, a raw recruit would put his coffee ration in a paper sack and stow it in his haversack, only to find it a part of a general mixture of hardtack, salt pork, pepper, salt, knife, fork, spoon, sugar and coffee by the time the next halt was made. A recruit of longer standing, would put his coffee in a bag made of a scrap of rubber blanket or poncho; but after a few days the rubber would peel off or the paint of the poncho would rub off from contact with the greasy pork or boiled meat ration and make a black, dirty mess, leaving the coffee-bag unfit for further use. Now and then some young soldier would bring out an oil-silk bag lined with cloth, which his mother had made but even oil-silk couldn't stand everything, certainly not the peculiar inside furnishing of the average soldier's haversack, so it also did not last long. But the plain, straightforward old veteran, who roughed it, took out an oblong plain cloth bag, which looked about as clean as the every-day shirt of a coal miner and into it scooped both his sugar and coffee, and stirred them thoroughly together. That way he had sweetened coffee. As for milk in his coffee, condensed milk of two brands, Lewis and Borden, was to be had at the sutler's when sutlers were handy, and occasionally milk was brought in from stray cows. In any event, each time the march stopped, fires were built, coffee was roasted, roasted beans were either ground or crushed with a rifle butt, coffee was brewed and men were refreshed.