In an Aspen, Colorado barbershop on a blustery day in April of 1884, a group of dapper men waiting for a shave got to talking about the best meal they ever ate. The connoisseur of the group, a man from Georgia named Joe Roney, surprised the lot when he chimed in: “Well, boys, the best thing in the world I ever tasted was possum with brown gravy and sweet potatoes.”
Joe Roney was met with blank faces. The other fellows in the barbershop didn’t understand why anyone would dine on a scaly-tailed, rodent-like creature with a face only a mother could love.
Who could blame them? Few people outside the handful of states where possum was commonly eaten, such as Georgia, Missouri, and Tennessee, knew the scavenging marsupials could “make for a meal fit for kings,” as Roney described it. But unlike traditional kingly fare, a fat possum could be enjoyed by anyone willing to tackle the hunt.
A possum hunt was a curious endeavor. In Roney’s version, printed days later in The Rocky Mountain Sun, he and his possum-hunting companions in Georgia would wait for twilight to arrive. Then they’d strike out into the forest with a possum-sniffing dog. When the dog chased a possum up a tree, the men either cut the tree down with an axe or climbed the tree to retrieve the possum from the branches.
Although Joe Roney convinced no one at the barbershop that day that roasted possum made for a scrumptious meal, it wouldn’t take long for Coloradans to embrace the unusual concept of eating the beady-eyed critters.
A prosperous miner named John M. Murphy, from the Hardscrabble region of Southern Colorado, made the news in December of 1891 after hosting a Missouri-style possum dinner to celebrate his mining success. According to The Colorado Daily Chieftain, Murphy presented his dinner guests with eight roasted Missouri possums flanked by piles of sweet potatoes. Many of his guests had never tasted possum before and left nothing on their plates but possum bones and potato skins.
That same December, the Greeley Union Hotel, built by Barnum & Bailey Circus founder P.T. Barnum, made the novel decision to serve possum at their annual Christmas dinner. As advertised in The Greeley Tribune in 1891, Greeley citizens could enjoy “one of the most elaborate dinners ever gotten up in Greeley” for 25 cents per person. Served alongside the roasted marsupials were Christmas favorites, like goose with currant jelly, turkey with oyster stuffing, and suckling pig with applesauce.
The Greeley Union Hotel’s possum-studded Christmas dinner must have been a success, for within the next few years, numerous hotels and restaurants across Colorado began serving possum at their holiday feasts. There, the pointy-nosed creatures were a stark comparison to the delicacies of green turtle soup, boiled rooster, puréed grouse, and roasted leg of bear.
Elite members of Denver society soon caught wind of the novel concept of eating possum. Rather than curling their noses at the unappetizing thought of dining on furry marsupials with long snouts, they saw an opportunity to entertain their friends and colleagues with a unique experience. They often made the papers in the process.
In March of 1898, The Rocky Mountain News wrote about the exclusive Colorado Grinders’ Club serving “a new and interesting meal” of possum, cornbread, and canvasback duck at their annual banquet in downtown Denver. Once their stomachs were full of possum meat, the club members capped off their pleasing night with a round of Shakespearean toasts.
In December of 1898, an aspiring Denver socialite named Miss Grace Sanders hosted a ragtime jubilee and possum dinner at her Victorian residence in Baker. As described in The Rocky Mountain News, the “enterprising young folk” who attended her event enjoyed a southern feast of possum and yams, and danced to ragtime music until midnight. Some of her guests savored the gamey flavor of possum, but most were simply charmed by the novelty.
At the elite Colorado Springs Democratic Club, a senior member named C.E. Ederle proposed the club serve possum at their annual Thanksgiving banquet in 1905. Having regularly dined on possum in his home state of Texas, Ederle believed the club’s 200 members would be wowed by a toothsome possum feast.
In preparation for the banquet, Ederle coordinated with “Rabbit Joe” Lewis of Fort Worth, Texas, to secure the delivery of a dozen fat possums and a pile of pumpkin yams. Another six possums were supplied by a hunter in Georgia, after it occurred to Ederle that the men of the club had hearty appetites. One of the possums was cooked up early, so Ederle could demonstrate to his fellow leaders the gentle art of possum carving.
Newspapers across Colorado, Texas, and Georgia ran stories about the club’s possum feast. The Rocky Mountain News even printed a cartoon depicting “Rabbit Joe” Lewis toting handfuls of possums, a member of the club wielding carving knives, and Ederle smiling in anticipation.
Possum dinners had become all the rage around Denver, but they didn’t always go as planned. The Denver Ladies’ Aid Society discovered this fact in 1915, after a possum ordered for their annual church fundraising dinner escaped.
The ladies had been wise enough to hire a cook to prepare the possum but accidentally left the critter’s wooden crate open. By the time the cook arrived, the possum was nowhere to be found. After searching the church and its grounds to no avail, the ladies organized a possum hunt. They sought help from a nearby resident named Tom Ward, whose dog was raised in Missouri and could smell a possum a mile off. Then they notified The Rocky Mountain News to spread the word.
Speaking to a reporter from the paper, one of the exasperated ladies said, “This possum is either a sinful creature who refuses to make a sacrifice for the cause of religion, or a downright dissenter ornery enough to ruin a dinner given by a church with whose principles he disagrees.”
The Rocky Mountain News printed an announcement of the possum hunt, along with a cartoon depicting the chaos caused by the wily marsupial. In the cartoon, a lady exclaims, “He’s gone!” A gentleman adds, “What the persimmons!” Meanwhile, the possum, hiding somewhere in the city, thinks, “I never did like these informal affairs.”
For a fat possum, evading the dinner table didn’t always require pulling off a sneaky escape. Some possums were spared the oven simply because the people who received them didn’t want them in the first place.
One such lucky possum made the papers in 1916, after finding himself in the possession of an unsuspecting Denver postal worker named Harvey Slusser. The possum had been delivered to Slusser as a gift from a friend in North Carolina. It was a nice gesture, but Slusser had no clue how to cook a possum and didn’t think it looked terribly appetizing.
Slusser toted the possum around the post office, hoping to find someone to take it off his hands. No one was interested.
As the young possum blinked sleepily in its crate, Slusser tried to figure out how to unload the thing. He decided to contact the Denver Zoo and sell the zookeeper on the idea of adding a possum to their raccoon habitat. To Slusser’s dismay, the zookeeper told him possums didn’t exhibit well. “They’re always curlin’ up in a ball and goin’ to sleep,” said the zookeeper. “Go on, eat him. That’s all he’s good for.”
Intent on changing the zookeeper’s mind, Slusser took the possum to the zoo, where the zookeeper took one look at the creature and said, “Aw, well. I’ll keep you. But you gotta be good.”
Possum consumption was on the rise across Colorado, but there were plenty of people who had never seen what a possum looked like. Meat markets discovered they could use this to their advantage.
Over in Routt County, in Northwest Colorado, a barber named Charles Gaffney received the gift of a live possum from his daughter in Oklahoma in 1915. Learning of the delivery, the local butcher convinced Gaffney to let him hang the processed possum in his display window for a couple of days before Gaffney cooked it up. Few people in Routt County had ever seen a possum before, and the creature attracted considerable attention.
A similar scene unfolded in December of 1915, when a man in Marble, Colorado had several live possums shipped to him from the banks of the Wabash in Illinois. The man intended to sell the possums to people in town, who had the notion to cook possum for Christmas dinner. The affable man allowed the local meat market to place the possums in their show windows before he sold them off for $3 to $5 each.
Like all unusual culinary trends, the appeal of eating possum was bound to wear off.
People who didn’t grow up eating the unfamiliar meat didn’t appreciate the musky flavor and greasy feel on the palate. Many didn’t care for the smell of roasted possum either. In a story published by The Salida Recorder in 1919, a possum dinner hosted by a judge at the Buena Vista courthouse left “a pungent possum odor, which permeated the offices.”
Always seeking new and novel things for entertaining, Denver’s elite deemed possum dinners quaint, and turned their attention to high-class menus, inspired by the fine cuisine upon which New Yorkers were dining. Exclusive clubs jettisoned possum from their banquet menus, focusing instead on elegant buffets of plump turkeys, glazed hams, roasted lamb, and Colorado game. Hotels and restaurants removed possum from their Christmas menus too, recognizing guests were more interested in feasting on traditional holiday favorites.
By the mid-1920s, possum had vanished from the dinner tables of all Coloradans except for those with roots in the South. These individuals continued to eat possum as they always had, but their dinners were no longer newsworthy unless something more sensational than the presence of a possum occurred.
