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Evidence has been found the the huckleberry actually got its name from a simple mistake. Early American colonist, upon encountering the native American berry, misidentified it as the European blueberry known as the “hurtleberry,” by which name it was called until around 1670 it was corrupted to become know as the “huckleberry.”
The expression “I’ll be your Huckleberry” means just the right person for a given job, and it also means a mark of affection or comradeship to one’s partner or sidekick.
(Hmmm, I guess I had rather be someone's hucklberry than hurtleberry!)
Later, the term came to mean somebody inconsequential. Mark Twain borrowed aspects of this meaning to name his famous character, Huckleberry Finn. His idea, as he told an interviewer in 1895, was to establish that he was a boy “of lower extraction or degree” than Tom Sawyer.
Berries with the name huckleberry can be found throughout the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest, but the berry that grows in the high mountains of Montana, called “Vaccinium globulare” are the favorite berry of the people of Montana. Often confused with the blueberry due to its close resemblance, huckleberries are a wild blue-black berry. Although very similar in taste, the big difference is the seeds within the huckleberry that give it a crunchy texture when fresh and its thicker skin. The flavor is a little more tart than blueberries, with an intense blueberry flavor. Huckleberries are not cultivated commercially, so you will have to find them in the wild. Huckleberries can be used interchangeably in most blueberry recipes, so if you find yourself with a huckleberry harvest, just choose a blueberry recipe and give it a whirl. Huckleberry season is normally from June through August.
The huckleberry is a main food source for a wide range of animals including the deer, birds, rodents, insects, and the most well-known – black and grizzly bears. Huckleberries are one of the grizzly bear’s favorite foods, consisting of up to 1/3 of their sustenance. Bears often travel great distances to find them, as the berries are one of their major later summer and fall foods. If you do go huckleberry picking, be aware that you may be in some bear’s favorite patch.
Huckleberries have been a staple of life for Northwest and Rocky Mountain Native American tribes for thousands of years. In the Journals of Lewis and Clark, they wrote of the tribes west of the Rocky Mountains using dried berries extensively in 1806 and 1806. Captain Meriwether Lewis on reaching the Shoshone Tribe (also known as the Snake Nation, occupied areas both east and west of the Rocky Mountains) and the Great Divide, 15 August 1805:
“This morning I arose very early and as hungry as a wolf. I had eaten nothing yesterday except one scant meal of the flour and berries, except the dried cakes of berries, which did not appear to satisfy my appetite as they appeared to do those of my Indian friends. I found on inquire of McNeal that we had only about two pounds of flour remaining. This I directed him to divide into two equal parts and to cook the one half this morning in a kind of pudding with the berries as he had done yesterday, and reserve the balance for the evening. On this new-fashioned pudding four of us breakfasted, giving a pretty good allowance also to the chief, who declared it the best thing he had tasted for a long time. .”
Northwest tribes made special combs of wood or salmon backbones to strip huckleberries off the bushes. They dried the berries in the sun or smoked them and then mashed them into cakes and wrapped these in leaves or bark for storage.
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https://whatscookingamerica.net/History/HuckleberryHistory.htm