By Andrew Somerville with assistance from E.L. Foxx

Recipes and cooking practices tell us something about the creativity and adaptability of frontier people in early Yavapai County. Before the late 1880s, when the railroad connected to Prescott, food resources were limited or expensive.

In the 1860s and 1870s, most goods were sold by merchants who had government contracts with military outposts like Fort Verde and Fort Whipple. An economic depression in the mid-1870s likely didn’t make purchasing food any easier. According to Scott Fritz’ Ph.D. paper, Yavapai County Merchants: The Center of Arizona's Early Territorial Economy, 1863-1881, merchants sold local products like corn, wheat, vegetables, beef, veal and mutton, as well as imported goods like flour, sugar and coffee to forts and civilians.

George Barnard created the Juniper House, apparently Prescott’s first restaurant, named because it originally had no building or stove, so cooking and serving food was done from a campfire under a juniper tree. Its menu for July 4, 1864, published in the July 6, 1864, Arizona Miner newspaper, may indicate meals sometimes eaten by frontier people.