The Odd Nickname Cowboys Had For Bacon

The work of a cowboy was hard and there wasn't a lot of leisure time to spend on hunting and fishing. So when a cowboy in the Old West talked about overland trout, he was not referring to freshwater fish. Overland trout was cowboy slang for bacon, one of the four basics of a cowboy's diet, along with sourdough biscuits, beef, and beans. In 1874, Joseph "Cowboy" McCoy included what a typical cowboy's diet looked like in his book "Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest." McCoy wrote, "Corn bread, mast-fed bacon and coffee constitute nine-tenths of their diet." (Mast-fed refers to the pigs' primary diet of fruits, seeds, and nuts.)

Bacon from the chuckwagon over a century ago was not quite the same as the streaky bacon common today in the United States. Back then, they ate sowbelly, a fatty cut of meat that came mostly from the pig's belly but sometimes back and sides. The meat was salt-cured so it could last the journey without spoiling. Like today, the leftover bacon grease was useful for frying up other foods, like potatoes and onions.

Overland trout was not the only colorful nickname used for the foods that cowboys ate in the Old West. For starters, there's the word chuck, as in chuckwagon. Chuck meant food, and a chuckwagon is where the cookie, or cook, stored and cooked the food. Alongside the serving of overland trout in the morning, one might find hen fruit or cackleberries, both cute ways of saying eggs. Additionally, breakfast likely included beans, also known as whistle berries, Mexican strawberries, and prairie strawberries. Sinkers, or biscuits, might also be on the plate. Cowboys washed it all down with a cup or more of six-shooter, which was really strong coffee.

When cowboys went into town, they likely visited a saloon and ordered a bug juice, gut warmer, nose paint, red eye, rotgut, scamper juice, snake poison, or tonsil varnish — in modern parlance, a whiskey. Beer was called a John Barleycorn, purge, hop juice, wobbly pop, laughing water, and pig's ear. Just plain water was Adam's ale.