Frontier boarding-house meals were swarmed with flies and barely edible

Evidence

I was actually so dull and tired that I deliberately slept away the afternoon in order to forget the heat and flies. Thirty men in working clothes, silent and sad looking, came in to supper. The beef was tough and greasy, the butter had turned to oil, and beef and butter were black with living, drowned, and half-drowned flies. The greasy table-cloth was black also with flies, and I did not wonder that the guests looked melancholy and quickly escaped. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Vivid frontier squalor detail echoing the physical discomfort themes from the silence/noise reading and general pioneering-hardship literature.