It started during a homeschool lesson about dinosaurs.

We were learning about the history of dinosaur fossils and talking about some of the discoveries being made during the 1800s.

Somehow — as conversations tend to do in our house — we ended up talking about spruce gum.

I explained that while Indigenous peoples in North America had been chewing spruce resin long before the 1800s, this was also the century when spruce gum became commercially produced and sold on a much larger scale.

That's when my son looked at me and said:

He'd seen it in a YouTube video.

Now, I've spent years working with spruce resin. I knew its traditional history. I knew Indigenous peoples had been chewing spruce resin long before commercial chewing gum existed. And I knew about the early commercial spruce-gum industry of the 1800s.

But soldiers?

That was a part of the story I have not really explored.

So naturally, I went digging.

And what I found connected Indigenous knowledge, nineteenth-century woodsmen, spruce-gum makers, soldiers, Wrigley and two World Wars in a way I wasn't expecting.

The Story Started Long Before the 1800s

Before getting into soldiers, there's an important part of this history that shouldn't be skipped.

Spruce gum did not begin with a chewing-gum company.

Long before commercial chewing gum existed, Indigenous peoples of North America were already using spruce resin, including for chewing. Historical records from Maine, for example, document spruce-resin use among Wabanaki peoples.

The knowledge of these trees, their resins and their uses existed generations before anyone thought about putting spruce gum into a commercial package.

That becomes important when we reach the next part of the story.

1848: Spruce Gum Goes Commercial

In 1848, a Maine man named John Bacon Curtis began selling State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum.

Curtis didn't invent the practice of chewing spruce resin.

What he helped create was something different:

a commercial chewing-gum industry built around it.

His early gum was made from spruce resin gathered from the forests around him, cleaned and prepared for sale.

And the idea took off.

By 1852, Curtis & Son had a factory employing around 200 people and producing approximately 1,800 boxes of gum per day.

Spruce Gum Was Part of Woods Life

Spruce gum wasn't simply something sitting on nineteenth-century store shelves.

It was actually closely connected to life in the northern forests.

Lumbermen in the northern United States and Canada collected spruce resin both for their own use and for sale.

They even made special little wooden containers for it.

Today, examples survive in museum collections. Often called spruce gum boxes or gum books, these pocket-sized carved boxes were part of a lumberman's craft practiced from roughly the mid-1800s into the early twentieth century.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes lumbermen using boxes like these to collect and carry spruce resin for personal use and for sale.

In other words, carrying pieces of spruce gum around in your pocket isn't exactly a new idea....

People were making dedicated little wooden containers for it more than a century ago.

Then Came the Civil War

This is where my son's comment started getting particularly interesting.

By the time the American Civil War began in 1861, commercial spruce gum had already been around for more than a decade.

In northern forest communities — especially places like Maine — spruce gum was already part of the culture from which many soldiers came.

And we have a wonderful firsthand glimpse of just how strongly Maine was associated with it.

Theodore Gerrish served with the 20th Maine and later wrote about his experiences in Army Life: A Private's Reminiscences of the Civil War.

Gerrish recalled the regiment travelling through Boston in September 1862. Someone watching the soldiers called out and asked where they were from.

A backwoodsman in the regiment answered:

The crowd laughed and cheered for Maine.

It's a tiny moment in a much larger historical record, but I love it.

Spruce gum was familiar enough that a soldier could use it as shorthand for where he came from.

There are historical connections between soldiers, northern woods culture and spruce gum during this period.

What I haven't found is strong primary evidence showing that Civil War armies officially issued spruce gum specifically to calm soldiers during battle.

That's an important distinction.

Because several decades later, the connection between chewing gum, soldiers and nerves becomes much easier to document.

Then Came Wrigley

By the time World War I arrived, chewing gum had changed.

The industry that had once included large amounts of spruce gum had expanded into other gum bases, flavours and enormous commercial brands.

One of those brands was Wrigley.

And this is where my son's comment about soldiers chewing gum to stay calm suddenly started sounding much less like a random YouTube fact.

Wartime Wrigley advertising promoted chewing gum to soldiers for several practical reasons.

Historical advertisements used phrases including:

A Canadian Wrigley's advertisement from 1918 even urged readers:

Those were advertising claims from the period — not modern medical claims about chewing gum — but they tell us something fascinating about how gum was being positioned during the First World War.

It wasn't being treated simply as candy.

Chewing gum had become something strongly associated with soldiers themselves.

Millions of Packages Went Overseas

And military records show just how enormous that relationship became.

The U.S. Army Quartermaster's historical records describe chewing gum as particularly valuable to soldiers on marches, including as a substitute when water wasn't immediately available.

During the summer of 1918, approximately 1.5 million packages of chewing gum per month were being supplied overseas.

Then, in January 1919 alone:

The Army's historical account says chewing gum came to be regarded as a necessity by American troops in France and describes it as helping maintain their spirits during hardship.

That's a long way from somebody picking a piece of hardened spruce resin from a tree.

But historically, the two stories belong to the same much larger evolution of chewing gum.

By World War II, Gum Was Part of Military Life

During World War II, the relationship became even more established.

Chewing gum appeared directly in military ration systems, including American K-rations and other military food and emergency supplies.

By then, the gum being carried by soldiers was generally the mass-produced commercial chewing gum familiar to the twentieth century — not the traditional spruce-resin gum that helped form part of the industry's earlier history.

In less than a century, chewing gum had travelled an extraordinary path.

A forest resin people had chewed for generations had become part of an enormous international industry — and chewing gum itself had become a familiar companion to soldiers at war.

From Spruce Resin to Military Rations

So, Was My Son Right?

In the wonderfully simplified way kids sometimes connect pieces of history, he was onto something.

Spruce gum really does have connections to nineteenth-century soldiers and the northern woods culture many of them came from.

And several decades later, chewing gum really was being promoted to soldiers with language about nerves, thirst and appetite.

Then millions upon millions of packages of gum were sent overseas during World War I, and chewing gum eventually became embedded in military ration culture.

What I haven't found is evidence that Civil War armies officially handed soldiers spruce gum specifically as a battlefield treatment for stress.

The real history is more nuanced than that.

And I think the real story is much more interesting.

And Maybe the Story Isn't Finished

Nearly two centuries after spruce gum became one of North America's earliest successful commercial chewing gums, most people have never even heard of it.

But it never completely disappeared.

And that's an important distinction.

Alberta Wildcraft didn't invent spruce gum.

We didn't rediscover it.

And we're certainly not the first people to walk into the forest, harvest spruce resin and chew it.

The history stretches back generations before us — especially through the Indigenous peoples of North America whose knowledge and use of spruce resin long predates the commercial chewing-gum industry.

We're simply one small part of where that very long story is today.

In 2026, Ron and I still walk Alberta forests and harvest the resin ourselves.

We clean it, sort it and prepare it as gum, then send it to people across the world— many of whom had no idea this old kind of chewing gum still existed.

And while researching this article, I kept coming back to John B. Curtis.

When Curtis began selling State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum in 1848, I doubt he was standing over a batch of spruce resin thinking that nearly 180 years later people would still be writing articles about his little gum business.

He was probably just making gum.

And that made me wonder what all of this will look like from the other side of history.

Maybe thirty years from now, someone researching the modern history of spruce gum will stumble across Alberta Wildcraft.

Maybe they'll find old photographs of Ron and me standing in the Alberta bush with buckets of resin.

Maybe they'll read about one of the small Canadian businesses that was harvesting its own resin and making real spruce gum in the 2020s.

Or maybe we'll simply be one of the many people who helped carry an old tradition forward for a little while.

Who knows?

Curtis probably didn't know either.

For now, I'm just pretty happy that we get to be one small part of a story that's much older than us.

And to think — I went down this entire historical rabbit hole because my son interrupted a homeschool lesson about dinosaur fossils.

He learned something from a video and passed it on to me.

I went looking for the history behind it.

And now I'm passing the story on to you.

Maybe that's how old knowledge survives.

Someone tells someone else.

Sources & Further Reading

History gets repeated quickly on the internet. In researching this story, I wanted to separate what could actually be documented from the stories that have grown around it.

• Maine Atlas Project — Spruce Gum — Wabanaki spruce-resin use, John B. Curtis, State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum and the early commercial spruce-gum industry.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Marriage Spruce Gum Box in Book Form — A surviving spruce-gum box made by Joseph Morin in 1903.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Spruce Gum and Bible Boxes — History of spruce-gum boxes as a lumberman's craft in the northern United States and Canada.
• Theodore Gerrish — Army Life: A Private's Reminiscences of the Civil War — Gerrish's account of the 20th Maine and the “land of spruce gum and buckwheat cakes” remark.
• Wrigley's Spearmint — 1915 Wartime Advertisement — Period advertising marketing chewing gum directly in connection with soldiers, thirst and nerves.
• U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum — Quartermaster Activities in World War I — Official historical information about chewing-gum shipments overseas and its use among American troops.

Historical advertising claims mentioned in this article are presented as part of the historical record. They should not be interpreted as modern medical or health claims about spruce gum or Alberta Wildcraft products.