This time of year is exciting for me because I like to hunt and my friends will usually ask me to cook some of their game. I always enjoy cooking wild game, especially venison.
Venison and bison were America’s first red meat. It wasn’t until 1513 that the Spanish brought the first Andalusian cattle to Florida. Before that, venison was a standard fare for natives and settlers alike. When I think of venison, I often think about the Native American tribes who were eating it for thousands of years before white Europeans settled here.
The Calusa nation reached a population of nearly 50,000 people, all living along the coastline of Southwest Florida. The word Calusa means “fierce people.” They weren’t very friendly to the newcomers, and were often described as warlike. The Spanish found themselves the targets of Calusa arrows. Many wrote home about the attacks they had experienced from Calusa warriors.
The Calusa made their lives on the waterways and coastlines and were the first people to build Florida homes on stilts. They had woven palmetto leaves as their roofs and sturdy floors, but no walls. These chickee huts are similar to the Hawaiian tiki huts, except raised off the ground. Chickee means “house” in the greater Seminole language.
The Calusa also were known as shell collectors. If you go down to Pejuan Cove on Cayo Costa and ride along the shoreline, you can see piles of discarded shells that the Calusa left there many hundreds of years ago. I think the area might be called Faulkner Mound, but I might be wrong.
I do know that in Estero Bay there is an island called Mound Key, and there you’ll find a mound that is constructed entirely of shells and clay. This is said to have been where the chief town of the Calusa was, and also where tribal leader Chief Carlos lived.
The Calusa didn’t make much pottery. Instead, they used shells as tools and utensils, and also for jewelry and ornaments. Shells were also used along with shark teeth to make some pretty deadly handheld war clubs.
The Calusa weren’t much into farming. They fished, hunted and gathered wild fruits and vegetables. The men and boys would make their nets from woven palm leaf webbing to catch mullet, pinfish and catfish. Now, they could have had any fish they wanted, but they seemed to like the taste of the hardhead catfish because that’s one of the most common bones found in their ruins.
The men also used the catfish bones to make arrowheads for their arrows to hunt animals such as deer (mmm … venison). They also made spears to catch turtles and eels. The women and children would catch shellfish like conch, oysters, clams and crabs.
The Calusa didn’t just harvest food from the water — they also used it to defend their land from other smaller tribes and the explorers from Europe. The Caloosahatchee River (literally, “River of the Calusa”) was their main highway.
They traveled the Caloosahatchee by way of dugout canoes made from hollowed-out cypress logs, usually about 15 feet long. I have only ever seen two of them. One of them is at the Cracker Trail Museum at Pioneer Park in Zolfo Springs. The other is sitting on top of the sign at Whidden’s Marina in Boca Grande.
They would use the dugouts to go upriver and hunt for food. Deer were prime targets (and remember, there were no wild pigs here back then — they hadn’t yet been released by Europeans). Other times they would go down the coastline, and in colonial time even took their dugouts as far as Cuba to raid anchored ships and salvage goods from shipwrecks.
During the late 1700s the Calusa tribe began to crumble. Weakened by diseases such as smallpox and measles brought over by French and Spanish explorers, they were also killed by tribes that had formerly been under their thumb. Many Calusas were captured and sold as slaves. The few that did survive fled to Cuba when the Spanish gave Florida to the British in 1763.
I began this column thinking of writing about hunting today, but it turned into a short history lesson about the Calusa people and what they ate. I found a venison stew recipe that came from the greater Seminole tribe. I thought I’d share a similar version of that with you (and just because the Natives didn’t have crock pots doesn’t mean we can’t use them).
Chef Tim Spain is a Florida native and has years of experience cooking professionally, both in restaurants and in private settings. He offers private catering and personal culinary classes. For more info, visit ChefTimSpain.com or call 406-580-1994.
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December 03, 2020 at 06:00AM
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Eat like a Native | Waterline - yoursun.com
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