How Much Pemmican Did Posts Produce?
To make the pemmican, everyone in the post pitched in pounding dried meat, rendering fat and mixing the two together in wooden troughs. This was usually done in spring before warm weather made any stored meat start to decay. Once started, pemmican production neared near industrial levels. For example, the journal entry for 17 April 1795 for Fort George indicates that 200 bags of pemmican were made that day alone (about 9 tonnes of it). In total, Fort George was expected to produce between 300 and 350 bags of pemmican per year for the brigades in the 1790s. This represented a little more than a third of the total pemmican needs of the North West Company. North West Company canoes from the North Saskatchewan and Athabasca districts needed 10 or more bags of pemmican per canoe for a trip to Rainy River/Grand Portage and back, since one bag of pemmican fed one canoeman for between 45 and 60 days. In 1806, the North West Company sent 156 canoes inland from Fort William. Not all travelled as
