"Perhaps no boom-bust cycle has had as lasting an impact on American society as the rise and fall of the cattle kingdom, and yet, oddly, this epic saga is largely forgotten today." The era ended in the winter of 1886-87 when nearly a million cattle died in the coldest winter ever experienced on the plains. It had begun twenty years earlier with the decimation of the bison. America viewed the great plains as a vast wasteland. The millions of bison that lived there, and the Plains Indian tribes who had cultivated the herds, were in the way on the route west. A Denver merchant imported some cattle in the 1860's presuming that they might hold up in the cold and arid climate. "In a stunningly short period of time...the bison were forced to the edge of extinction with no more than 325 surviving south of Canada. Cattle, so the thinking went, functioned better than the bison as a machine for converting grass into hide and meat, and ultimately into profits".
Cattle becoming king was a consequence of the devastation of the Civil War when the wild longhorn herd grew on untended lands in Texas. Eventually the cowboys, mostly Confederate cavalrymen, would drive ten million head north. They were shipped on the railroads east, mostly to Chicago, and the western railheads became the famous cattle towns of yore: Abilene, Dodge City, Witchita, Cheyenne and dozens more. The success attracted investors from the east coast and eventually the UK. And following the investments were the sons of wealth who came west to be cattlemen. The boom peaked in 1884 when twelve million cattle grazed over an area comparable to the size of western Europe. The Chicago stockyards cut the prices they would pay because of an oversupply and the ranchers reduced the wages and perquisites of the cowboys. The use of barbed wire and homesteading also reduced the demand for labor on the plains. The following year, Washington ordered cattle off the Arapaho and Cheyenne reservations that took up most of Colorado. Then, the Big Die-Up took nearly a million cattle. There was a run on western banks that spread to Wall Street and Aberdeen, Scotland. "The bursting of a commodity bubble is one of capitalism's most brutal and indiscriminate destroyers of wealth." The money that had poured into the industry was lost and what was left was withdrawn. The collapse was severe and quick.
Open range ranching and the era of the massive ranches was over. It was replaced by smallholders. The meatpackers* controlled the industry completely, and by managing demand, they limited the upside of the suppliers. They would no longer overpay the cattlemen. At long last, there also was a recognition that the resources of the west were finite. Conservation was taken up by the 'Cowboy President'. Owen Wister, a classmate at Harvard and friend of Roosevelt's, published 'The Virginian' in 1902 and created forever in American culture the myth of the cowboy and the old west. By 1890, the American west was populated and criss-crossed by railroads. Towns and cites spring up, states joined the union and the frontier was closed.
This is a delightful read for anyone interested in the west. I'm even thinking of visiting Cheyenne. One drawback is that the story is relatively thin, not meriting 354 pages of text and thus, there is a lot of related, but not really relevant, filler. I have long known that the death of the British aristocracy was caused by the globalization of farm commodities. One of the many nails in the coffin of the Downton Abbeys of England was American beef, both frozen and on the hoof.
*Swift and Armour developed such massive and successfully vertically integrated organizations with their stockyards, refrigeration and shipping businesses that they became the blueprint for the future industrialization of America.
No comments:
Post a Comment