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 been 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]
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."[4]
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.[5]
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.[6]
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."[7]
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..."[8]
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."[9]
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..."[10]
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."[11]
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."[12]
Red River War
Horses
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."[13]
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."[14]
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.[15]
"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."[16]
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.[17]
"... 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."[18]
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.[19]
"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.[20]
"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.[21]
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."[22]
Sources
- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc77mqs
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- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc77mqs ; Page, 33-34
- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc77mqs ; Page, 34
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- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc77mqs ; Page, 35
- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc77mqs ; Page, 35