Afghan Muslim Tamale Peddlers in Wyoming

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Like other forms of peddling, the tamale business required relatively little up-front money, which made it attractive to immigrants and the poor. In New York City, tamales were sold chiefly by Irish and Italians, while in the South and the Midwest most venders were African-American. But in the Rocky Mountain West the tamale trade was dominated by men from Afghanistan.

Specifically, it was dominated by men from Afghanistan with the surname Khan. (The men were generally unrelated; the name is extremely common.) In the first two decades of the twentieth century, tamale-selling Afghan Khans could be found in Deadwood and Fargo and Reno; in Seattle and Spokane and Wenatchee, Washington; in Butte, Montana, which boasted eighteen such tamale men by 1913, and all over the rest of the state as well—in Flathead, Fort Benton, Silver Bow, Anaconda, Havre, Great Falls, Red Lodge, Miles City, Chinook, Billings. Starting in 1908, you could buy tamales in Alaska from a Buhadin Khan, a Habib Khan, an M. Khan, and a guy called Tamale Joe, whose real name was likely also Khan.

Not every tamale vender in the West was from Afghanistan, of course, and not every Afghan vender sold tamales. A smaller but still significant group, for instance, sold chili, as Zarif Khan later did in his restaurant.
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