Red Meat Republic
Red Meat Republic does the heavy work of grounding abstract cuts of meat in material historical analysis of how the Cattle-Beef Complex came to be and how capitalism, genocide, land theft, and the Cowboy mythology played a pivotal role in its proliferation across the country.
Introduction
The expansion of cattle ranches across Turtle Island was anything but an inevitable result of technology and progress nor was it a restoration of the natural order of ecosystems. The expansion of industrial meat production was driven by the self-interest of meatpacking plant owners, cattle ranchers, and other corporate owners who would benefit from industrial food production.
Before the industrialization of meat production, a different transformation first took place, a transformation of genocidal proportions. Cattle ranching in the west would serve as a justification to steal even more Indigenous land and cattle ranchers directly collaborated with the US military supplying them food, accompanying them on raids against Indigenous Nations, and organizing army expeditions.
The profits that accompanied cattle ranching encouraged further settlement on Indigenous land and replaced the natural system of relations between Indigenous persons and Bison with uniform monoculture cattle ranches. First the mass genocide of Bison would take place destroying many Indigenous Nation’s main food source causing dependence upon the united states government for food rations.
Cow's Labor
Part of the reason cows have become industrialized is their ability to perform labor: "It was their ability to feed themselves on the range that was the origin of much of their value, meaning they were even performing a kind of labor."
Cattle Kingdom
The mythology of the frontier and individualism helped cultivate a narrative about "civilizing" "untamed" land and people (Indigenous Persons) and through this mythology mass genocidal violence, displacement, and theft of land was justified in part due to cattle ranchers and the land they needed to raise cattle. Cattle ranchers would play a vital role in the expansion of the american empire into the Midwest prairies and further west past the Rocky Mountains.
"The tale of ranchers taming the West fits neatly into this larger narrative, as the "cowboy and Indian" trope in film, music, and literature attests. Advertisements and promotional material for the beef industry still trade on this imagery, whether through expansive images of western plains or stylized depictions of cowboys and the old West."[1]
Post Civil-War
The end of the American civil war brought "the expansion of settlement, the spread of railroads, and the rise of the commercial bison hunt, transforming simmering conflict between settlers and the Plains Indians into formal warfare. Armed with the logistics strategies and warfare techniques pioneered during the Civil War, generals like William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan confined the plains Indians to reservations. By the end of this process vast expanses of newly available grazing land would be immortalized as the "open range." Ranchers would spread hundreds of thousands of cattle over seemingly limitless grassland. The open range is often romanticized as untouched by human hands or industry; in reality, it was produced by the violent exclusion of people and bison."[2]
Cattle-Beef Complex
... Western ranching was about scattering cattle far and wide on marginal land, and this required remaking the Great Plains as an ecosystem as well as a political space... I argue that the cattle-beef complex depended on land expropriation through both deliberate government policy and independent rancher effort. This expropriation was part of a wrenching process of transforming the Great Plains ecosystem from a grass-bison-nomad system to a grass-cattle-rancher one. The violence of Indian War-- Romanticized and re-imagined as the against-all-odds struggles of early ranchers-- created the cattle-beef complex's foundational myths.[3]
The violently imposed reservation system was integral to the Cattle-Beef Complex and benefited cattle ranchers: "(1) by providing a favorable market for cattle, and (2) by creating circumstances that allowed for the low-cost leasing and later purchase of Indian lands for grazing."[4]
Cattle and Bison-Bio-mimicry
White settlers initially viewed the Great Plains as a destitute wasteland with no agricultural potential. It would take the massive greed of cattle ranchers to begin the occupation and colonization of the Plains (aided by the united states military) with cattle by their side to "tame" the Plains. Before this transformation could take place Bison would have to be exterminated en masse to clear land for cattle. White settlers had
"a theory ... that the native grasses of the plains and valleys which had formerly supported vast herds of buffaloes would support vast herds of cattle ... and that as the wild animals had managed to exist through the severe winters in the dry herbage, the domestic steer would learn the same method of self-preservation."[5]
Settlers, through observation, realized they were able to replace the Bison with Cattle, but they did not view the two animals as equals rather:
... beliefs about the differences between the two animals justified the buffalo's extermination. While early ranchers romanticized cattle, bison were monstrous. Surveying the Texas countryside one settler described the "big ugly buffalo that fairly blacken the valleys and hill sides. ... Whereas cattle represented the first signs of civilization, bison were wild beasts. It was a short step from here to the view that the people living off their hunt were not putting the land to its highest use. Creating the Cattle Kingdom would require dealing with the people and the bison that were said to "infest" the Plains.[6]
What settlers viewed as opportunity to accumulate land and capitol, Indigenous Nations who depended upon the Bison knew that the decimation of the Bison would lead to the worsening conditions and forced dependence upon the US government.
"Through a combination of formal military support and the individual decisions of thousands of ranchers and bison hunters, white Americans had violently remade the ecological foundations of Plains power from a nomad and bison system to a rancher and cattle one."[7]
Chapter one: War
Indigenous Nations who lived in the great plains had lived in symbiotic relationships with horses and buffalo for hundreds of years. By 1876 this way of life was being increasingly threatened by genocidal American soldiers. Genocide and displacement of these Nations was perpetuated by what was then called the Cattle Kingdom, which resulted in
the destruction of the Plains bison herds, and the fracturing of the societies that lived off their hunt. Cattle ranchers and bison hunters, supported by the US military, fundamentally reshaped the Great Plains, expelling American Indians from western lands and appropriating that land for use by white settlers and ranchers.[8]
1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
"The 1848 Treaty... ceded nearly a third of Mexico to the United States. But it was more complicated than that, as revealed by the treaty's article 11, which obligated the United States to control and pacify the "savage tribes" that inhabited the region. In practice this meant that the treaty was little more than a promise that the land could belong to the United States, should the Indians be pacified. In the 1830s and 1840s, the Comanche were firmly in control of large swaths of the region, but the treaty had created a belief in Americans that they had a legitimate claim to the land."[9]
The Indian Wars
"...cattle ranchers' part in the Indian Wars of the 1870s helped justify the emerging ranching system by binding the Cattle Kingdom to the myth of the frontier. This myth, which casts frontier areas as places of individualism and justifiable, if at times regrettable, violence in the interests of civilization, has been a potent force throughout American history..."[10]
Paternalism
"Americans had once deemed much of the trans-Mississippi West the Great American Desert, a place devoid of agricultural possibility. But early cattle-raising experiments inspired Americans who hoped to occupy the plains. Ranchers could put the Great American Desert to use. Their distinction between this productive use and the allegedly backward practices of the societies that previously occupied the Plains would provide a kind of justification for the violence on which the cattle-beef complex rested. The stories of ranchers and hunters told themselves and others were as much a tool of conquest as their rifles."[11]
As a result, solutions to the "Indian question" often took the shape of forcibly managing land on behalf of Indian polities, or the American government ignoring treaty terms because the agreements were not in what officials deemed the Indians' best interests. It was no coincidence that these measures often favored cattle ranchers. Bureaucrat Joseph Nimmo advocated shrinking reservations to not only "put [residents] in the way of becoming civilized," but also because "nearly all the area which will thus be thrown open to white settlements consists of good grazing land..."[12]
1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty
A set of agreements agreed upon by The Kiowa, Comanche, Plains Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Nations. The treaty said these Indigenous Nations would have to move to reservations in "exchange for the guarantee that the land would be "set apart for [their] absolute and undisturbed use and occupation." The federal government also promised to build various utility buildings on the reservation and provide a yearly ration of clothing, agricultural implements, and other goods. In exchange, the polities gave up claims to the land outside of the reservation areas... and pledged that "they will not, in future, object to the construction of railroads, wagon-roads, mail-stations, or other works of utility or necessity which may be ordered or permitted by the laws of the United States."[13]
William Tecumseh Sherman, a central member of the treaty commission, noted that the railroad "will help to bring the Indian problem to a final solution."[14]
Article 11
According to article 11, the Kiowa and Comanche would withdraw to reservations, but "reserve the right to hunt on any lands south of the Arkansas [River] so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase." Though the Kiowa and Comanche viewed this land as a protected hunting ground, US negotiators believed the land would be a temporary hunting region until the inevitable decline of the bison made hunting unsustainable and the land went to the United States. Whether the result of malice or foolishness, article 11 was almost sure to lead to violence.[15]
Indians as well as American soldiers and hunters all knew that the bison was the foundation of Plains Indian political and military power... the entry of hunters into the area was a clearly display of aggression. White hunters of bison were heavily armed and willing to exact retribution on those who resisted their efforts. When the Kiowa and Comanche saw the US military failing to stop the hunters, they concluded that article 11 of the Medicine Lodge Treaty was disingenuous. Under the leadership of Comanche Chief Quanah Parker and the teachings of Isa-tai - a medicine man who spoke of divine intervention to unite the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and others in a righteous battle against the buffalo hunters and the treaty-breaking Americans - an alliance of roughly five thousand Indians formed to drive the hunters from the southern Plains.[16]
Red River War
The alliance of Indigenous Nations would lead their first assault against the white terrorists at Adobe Walls: a settlement mostly populated by merchants who would sell supplies to hunters in addition to buying Bison Hides. Bison hunters would use these settlements as a home base during extended hunts.
The morning of June 27, 1874 the alliance of Nations attacked the white trading settlement. The hunters retreated to three hastily made hideouts/ forts and an hours long gun battle ensued. The White settlers who were better armed would eventually win the battle. White settler, Billy Dixon, shot their leader, Quanah Parker, seriously injuring him. This defeat and the injuring of Parker disheartened the Indigenous Warriors, but they would continue to resist the destruction of bison by the White Settlers.
After the battle a local hunter wrote about the battle explaining how "the Indians got a more severe punishment than they received any time during the war of 67, 68, + 69 from the soldiers. ... Everyone here is in hopes that this will bring on a general Indian War."[17]
And a war is exactly what ensued. The attack against Adobe Walls was what the pretext the US military needed to launch a full scale assault against the alliance of Indigenous Nations. The US military converged on the Texas Panhandle surrounding the Nations and would crushed the alliance.
This victory would pave the way for the longer-term strategy: destroying Indian subsistence through the extermination of the Bison. Military leaders Sherman and Sheridan had learned during the civil war that the key to victory was the elimination of supply lines and enemy subsistence. ... In a letter to Sherman, Sheridan wrote that "the best way for the government is to now make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands alloted to them." And so a policy of turning a blind eye would become one of deliberate support: troops would protect hunters.[18]
The US army would go on to fight against the alliance in a few skirmishes with the decisive battle happening on September 28th, 1874 where US soldiers would steal the Native's horses, which were paramount to their ability to hunt Bison. In June 1875 the remaining alliance bands would surrender and agreed to withdraw to reservations in present day Oklahoma.
"In their remarks, the chiefs explained "we consider ourselves passing away, as our buffalo are passing away." ... the chiefs went on to explain the spiritual significance of the buffalo, to which they considered themselves "kindred."[19]
Aftermath and the Bison
... Nothing stopped the commercial bison hunt. With the Kiowa and Comanche crushed, the way was paved for mass buffalo hunting on the southern Plains. ... John R. Cook had only fleeting sympathy for Quanah Parker and his people. In his memoir of his time as a commerical hunter, Cook explained that "It is simply a case of the survival of the fittest. Too late to stop and moralize now. And sentiment must have no part in our thoughts from this time on. ..."[20]
... Within a few short years, the southern Plains herds were nearly gone. Large ranches opened in the wake of this violence.[21]
Charles Goodnight
Was the "father of the Texas Panhandle" and founded the JA ranch in the Palo Duro Canyon. "Goodnight was moving cattle into a largely unoccupied area and he makes no admission of cattle ranchers' complicity in the violence of the Indian Wars. Yet Goodnight likely left out the details of the battle of Palo Duro Canyon and his role in land expropriation not because they were unflattering, but because they were unremarkable. A rancher was putting land to its highest use, and those who would threaten his roaming cattle were simply failing to recognize his rights as a property owner."[22]
Philip Sheridan
Was one of the chief architects of Indigenous genocide in the West and celebrated buffalo hunters as integral to the success of the so called 'Indian Wars,' stating:
[Hunters] have done [more] in the last two years and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians' commissary, and it is a well-known fact that an army loosing its base of supplies is placed at a greater disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your praries can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization.[23]
Horses
After many Indigenous Nations were violently forced onto reservations the US government would debate if these Nations should be encouraged to farm or ranch. Discussions were undertaken by white men in government without any consultation or input by the Nations in question. The debates had material consequences for the Nations. One example is when a Comanche man, Otterbelt, had 19 horses stolen from him by white settlers. In a document written by Agency Superintendent William Nicholoson,
... he decided that the case could be used as "a means of teaching the Indians" Though Otterbelt could be compensated in money, or perhaps replacement horses, the superintendent recommended providing restitution in the form of cattle, because ranching "should be encouraged to the utmost extent. It is the readiest way to their self support and cattle are far less liable to be stolen than ponies." Otterbelt's desires are not even noted. ... the resolution of Otterbelt's claim is a small example of the effect of the pervasive mind-set that Indian affairs should be manged in the "interests" of Indians.[24]
Bison
"A foot taller than most cattle and significantly heavier -- bulls weighing as much as sixteen hundred pounds -- angry or fightened bison could easily trample hunters on foot."[25]
Sioux Wars
The "Indian Problem"
"Cattle raising was a central part of remaking the West and a foundation of US power there. Treasury Department official Joseph Nimmo observed in 1885 that the "range-cattle business has also been perhaps the most efficient instrumentality in solving the Indian problem. ... By this means a vast area, which, but a few years ago, was apparently a barren waste, has been converted into a scene of enterprise and of thrift." From Texas to Montana, the cattle-beef complex and the American state were co-evolving."[26]
Origin of Commodities
The story of ranching and the Indian War did not end the initial wave of conquest and land expropriation; the US government's solution to what it considered the ongoing problem of Indian peoples-- namely, the reservation system-- would prove an enormous boon for ranchers. The US government's method of Indian pacification, through a conscious targeting of the means of subsistence--the Bison-- as well as by confining American Indians to reservations, created a population dependent on government-supplied rations. Ranchers found contracts to provide these rations extremely lucrative, and at times used them as an outlet for otherwise unsalable meat.[27]
"For bureaucrats and the public, the sight of impoverished American Indians accepting the government-issued cattle and then slaughtering the animals -- a "brutal and brutalizing spectacle" according to one contemporary newspaper -- confirmed their view that Indian social and political collapse was a consequence of degenerate culture. Cultural explanations for what was then known as the "Indian question" relied on characterizations of American Indians as either criminals or children. Descriptions of beef handouts, with their emphasis on both savagery and abjection, supported both views."[28]
... After the end of the Indian Wars of the 1870s, the spectacle of the beef ration became a major way that readers and western tourists made sense of interaction between whites and American Indians. ... This contributed to a narrative of Indian cultural failure underpinning their social and economic collapse -- rather than violence and land dispossession.[29]
Government Contracts
American cattle ranchers secured lucrative government contracts to supply reservations with beef. These contracts provided good rates for the entire supply period (often six months or a year), safeguarding ranchers against short-term fluctuations in cattle prices. Further, these contracts were often more profitable than direct sale in Chicago markets. ... ranchers used these contracts as outlets for their lowest quality cattle ... These contracts were at times an outlet for diseased or rejected cattle.[30]
Cattle Ranchers and the US Military
Following the end of the American Civil War the united states government and military would have to reestablish control of the southern states, because during the war white American authority, both union and confederate, waned. The reestablishing of this white authority required the military and ranchers working with one another: Ranchers would provide supplies for the military, and the military would act as an enforcement arm for ranchers whose cattle were stolen by Indigenous Nations.[31]
"... cattle themselves proved a crucial supply for military outfits on the Plains. Cattle on the hoof function as a ration and supply train in one, since the cattle could walk along with the regiment. Military orders often indicated that fresh beef would be driven with the command."[32]
Key to building support for rancher efforts was military acceptance of ranchers' understanding of property and theft. In ranchers' eyes, a simple mark ... burned on an animal's side made it property, no matter how far the animal wandered from the ranch house. This conceptual understanding of branded cattle as mobile property, coupled with the standard practice of grazing cattle on unfenced land, ensured conflict. Ranchers cared little whether their cattle wandered onto land occupied or used by southern Plains Indians, but they cared a great deal if these cattle were stolen or killed.[33]
"Accounts of the late nineteenth-century Us West have rightfully emphasized the role of formal military conquest in pacifying and dispossessing the Plains Indians. Yet, small-scale conflicts over cattle movement and bison hunting were equally important. Threats to ranchers or cattle often provided the pretext for military intervention... the first Sioux War had its origin in a botched military attempt to arrest a Lakota man for killing a wayward ox. Ranchers and hunters, often the very same people, materially supported the military, providing supplies or local knowledge about Indian supply routes. Organized and well armed, in some places ranchers even acted as paramilitaries. It was not merely that the military swept the Great Plains clear during the decades after the Civil War, and that ranching arose in place of the bison hunt. Rather, cattle ranchers and bison hunters precipitated conflict with American Indians and agitated for government intervention. They also worked with the military to achieve their collective aim: the expropriation of native land.[34]
"When the US Army's initial pecemeal attempts to resolve minor conflicts over land and cattle failed, its leadership concluded that peaceful coexistence with American Indians was impossible. Instead, the army embraced total military conquest as necessary for the reservation system's success.[35]
"Through a combination of formal military support and the individual decisions of thousands of ranchers and bison hunters, white Americans had violently remade the ecological foundations of Plains power from a nomad and bison system to a rancher and cattle one."[36]
Cows as Mobile Colonizers
"Armed with the military's sympathy, a relatively small number of cattle owners could control large swaths of land. For if their cattle remained property as far as they wandered, the cattle could act as mobile colonizers, turning disputed land into valuable beef and threats to their grazing-real and alleged- into an acceptable pretext for military intervention."[37]
Illegal Cattle Grazing
Illegal grazing was common across the West. According to most treaty terms, it fell to the US government to protect property rights on the reservation, and any attempt on the part of tribal government to forcibly enforce these rights risked military intervention. But government officials showed little interest in enforcing such property rights. ... At the Rosebud Reservation on the northern Plains, there were so many trespassing cattle -- as many as 2,500 -- that residents used grass fires to try to prevent illegal grazing.[38]
Leasing of Indigenous Land for Grazing
Leasing agreements, like lucrative government contracts, were the principal way in which ranchers benefited from the reservation system. In the case of leases, the Cherokee and other nations may have received payment, but it was almost certainly less than if a fairer property regime had existed. Similarly, these agreements made for vast tracts of land in which large ranching corporations crowded out small-scale Indian ranchers, further limiting their subsistence options.
... Lurking behind government approval for leases was the belief that reservations were too large. This view came from ranchers, bureaucrats, and the general public. Joseph Nimmo captured this view most clearly when he observed that since "the buffalo has been drive off, a nomadic mode of life within that region is no longer possible; therefore reservations far beyond the needs of the Indians are to them a curse rather a blessing. This assumption had enabled the kind of paternalist policies that led to favorable leasing agreements and lucrative contracts...[39]
Leasing of Indigenous land for cattle grazing still occurs in the status quo. One example being the Santee Sioux Reservation, which has multiple cattle ranches surrounding the reservation. One of the ranches has contaminated the reservations water due to the runoff of animal waste into water sources.
Sources
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