THE PURSUIT OF BRITISH BLOOD
British export markets were not the only way the wider world helped shape the region, in the process turning the United States from a nation of pork eaters into a land of beef eaters in the early twentieth century. Imported genetic material mattered profoundly as well. Many of the animals unloaded at the Liverpool docks—whether dead and dressed or staggering wildly after horrific North Atlantic crossings—were making a homecoming of sorts, as the herds traced increasing percentages of their ancestry to the “blooded” bulls bred in Britain in the nineteenth century.23
The cattle driven east to market by men such as Harris were largely descended from the herds brought to North America from England, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden during the colonial era. In the 1820s, however, eastern breeders began to import pure breeds to improve their common stock.24 They turned primarily to Britain, the world’s premier supplier of pedigreed cattle. Nineteenth-century British breeders narrowed the genetic diversity that had previously characterized livestock production by creating select lines (often by crossing prize bulls with their female offspring), which they then sold to buyers in the United States, Argentina, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Russia, and other nations with beef industries geared toward export markets.25
Among the purchasers who sought better animals were the Illinois farmers looking to compete against Texan scrub cattle. Their first direct links to British breeders (rather than those mediated by importers in other states) came in 1857 with the formation of the Illinois Stock Importing Association. The investors pooled their resources to send three agents to the United Kingdom. Visiting well-known herds and livestock shows, the agents purchased thirty head of Shorthorn cattle and some sheep, pigs, and horses.26 Upon their return to the United States, they auctioned the animals they had acquired, which, along with ones obtained from U.S. farmers who bred imported stock, helped found a pedigreed livestock industry in the state. By 1861, nearly all the common cattle in Illinois had some Shorthorn ancestry.27
Harris’s prizewinning animals were not the only well-bred cattle in Champaign. An 1878 history of the county dated the introduction of “short-horn” cattle to 1836. Claiming that the county’s herds had since won some note, this history also observed that “the farmer who now feeds cattle, and who does not breed short-horns, is behind the times; in fact few such exist.”28 According to another boosterish local history, a farmer named William Owens had some of the “finest specimens” of Shorthorn cattle to be found in the county. Another prominent resident, Albert Carle, was “well known to the stockmen of the entire state and in fact of the west.”29 A 1917 directory of the farmers and breeders of Champaign listed 105 Shorthorn breeders and smaller numbers specializing in other types of cattle (including 20 Aberdeen Angus breeders, 21 Polled Durham breeders, and 1 Hereford breeder).30 Although Champaign never won extraordinary fame as a cattle-breeding area, its livestock breeders did compete at the highest levels. In 1900, a prize bull owned by the Champaign breeder O. H. Swigart won the “second premium” award at the Paris World’s Fair. Swigart boasted of seventeen cows from imported bulls “and as many more from imported dams.”31
To improve their herds, leading Illinois breeders continued to purchase stock in Britain through the nineteenth century. The trip was expensive, however, as was the transatlantic shipment of the animals. European disease outbreaks and quarantine regimes added to the difficulties. Hence top breeders also sought to acquire stock from their associates in states such as Kentucky, Ohio, and New York, and from across the border, in Ontario.
THE CANADIAN CONNECTION
There was a long history of livestock mobility from what is now the United States to what is now Canada, and vice versa. The pioneers who drove their own cattle to Illinois in the early nineteenth century found that the state already contained abundant herds, of Normandy ancestry, that had been brought via Canada by French colonists.32 By the early nineteenth century, Illinois stock raisers had begun exporting some of their animals to Canada for consumption. In the 1830s, U.S. competition from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had put a damper on Canadian stock raising. Despite duties as high as 20 percent, American drovers brought large herds into Ontario during winter and summer.33
This trade pattern shifted over time as the Ontario livestock industry grew. The 1854 Reciprocity Treaty that permitted duty-free movement of farm products between the United States and Canada aided the animal trade. Until the treaty’s expiration in 1866, Canadians exported large numbers of cattle, especially during the Civil War, when there were reports of “Yankee speculators . . . scouring the country for cattle and horses, and buying up all they can get.”34 After the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty in 1866, Canadian beef exports declined. Nevertheless, Canadian statisticians reported that Ontario farmers exported approximately a hundred thousand head of cattle to the United States in 1870.35 Just as important as the numbers was the nature of the trade: in the post–Civil War period, an increasing number of these animals were pedigreed cattle, sold for breeding purposes, not meat.
The Canadian breeding industry took off in the 1860s when well-to-do Canadians started investing in high-end livestock.36 Ontario cattle breeders formed notable herds of Shorthorns (sometimes conflated with Durhams), Herefords, Aberdeen-Angus, Galloways, Devons, Sussexes, and West Highland breeds. Not coincidentally, each of these lines originated in the United Kingdom.37 This is not to say that Canadian breeders purchased all their blooded animals directly from Britain—some of their quality stock came from the United States.38 But just as U.S. breeders turned to Britain for top-notch stock, so, too, did Canadians.
The rise of the Canadian breeding industry coincided with Canada’s emergence as a federated nation. In 1867, Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec, respectively) entered a union with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The union soon expanded with the additions of Manitoba and the North-West Territories (1870), British Columbia (1871), and Prince Edward Island (1873).39 Yet even after uniting as a dominion, Canada retained close ties to Britain through investments, labor migrations, and official imperial affiliation. Many Anglophone Canadians felt a special affinity to Britain because of language, ethnicity, and family bonds. Since Britain’s cattle breeders were industry leaders, these relations proved to be an enormously valuable asset to the Canadian farmers. Some of the earliest Canadian breeders were wealthy hobbyists who relied on British-born immigrants to manage their farms. Other breeders relied on family connections, friendships, and comfort navigating the British livestock markets to establish transatlantic businesses.40
From their origins as second-tier sellers, Canadian Shorthorn breeders soon became globally competitive. As early as the 1870s, agricultural papers reported on Canadian breeders who reversed earlier relationships by exporting stock to Scotland.41 By the 1880s, the U.S. consul in Port Sarnia reported that “the transition from Scotland to Canada” had been successful, for “the animals bred in Canada from imported Polled Angus stock are superior in size and general appearance to the cattle from which they were bred.”42 Robert Miller, a leading Ontario livestock dealer who crossed the Atlantic twenty-five times to build his business, had dealings with cattlemen in places as distant as Mexico and South America by the 1890s. Regardless of such successes, the most important export market for Canadian breeders remained the United States. Ambitions for midwestern markets helped drive the Canadian livestock-breeding industry from its inception.43
Putting a precise number on the U.S-Canadian cattle trade in this period is a tricky business. The U.S. Revenue Cutter Service lacked the resources to adequately patrol the Great Lakes. Land borders were still more permeable.44 But even the traffic that passed through customs stations is hard to tabulate. Given that livestock could be imported duty-free under the terms of the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty and duty-free for breeding purposes after its expiration in 1866, customs agents lacked a major motivation for keeping close count. Through 1883 U.S. commerce reports u
se the category “animals, living” to keep track of livestock that entered the United States from Canada, failing to distinguish between cattle, horses, sheep, and swine. Rather than providing head counts, some reports list only the general monetary values of living animals. Canadian officials did track cattle exports to the United States prior to 1883, but when the data is comparable there are frequently discrepancies between U.S. and Canadian statistics.45 Finally, when the western Canadian ranching industry took off in the late nineteenth century, stocked in large part by U.S. animals, border crossings became harder to scrutinize. As Bradstreet’s reported in an 1890 piece on trade with Canada: “Congress blindly neglects to make provision for correct returns of the overland movement.”46
Despite these obstacles to an exact count, it is possible to get a general sense of U.S. cattle importations from Canada. Unlike goods such as whiskey, cattle did not lend themselves to Great Lakes smuggling. By 1884, U.S. customs officials did regularly distinguish between livestock species. And there are patterns to U.S.-Canadian trade discrepancies: as one Canadian report put it, they could be attributed “to carelessness in valuation of exports on both sides of the line.”47 Hence we can assume that import statistics are more accurate than undercounted export statistics. Canada’s report of 249,361 cattle exports to the United States from 1872 to 1883 (which averages out to 20,780 head per year) probably undercounts the trade. The U.S. Treasury report that noted 469,771 Canadian cattle imports from 1884 to 1898 (which averages out to about 31,318 a year) is probably closer to the mark for the covered years. Of these, 13,746 (about 916 a year) entered duty-free, meaning for breeding purposes, mainly through Great Lakes customs houses. This may not seem like a particularly large number, but prize bulls had celebrity status in livestock circles and the potential, through their progeny, to make a prodigious mark on herds.48
Farm publications can help contextualize these government statistics, in the process making it clear that Canadian breeders had a notable presence in the pedigreed livestock circuits of the Midwest, sometimes to buy and, more often, to sell.49 Some of the most important sites of contact were agricultural fairs. The records of the Illinois State Fair reveal that Canadian breeders competed regularly in the livestock competitions and often took home a handful of prizes.50 Beyond the state fair circuit, Canadian breeders entered their herds in exhibitions with grander titles, such as the United States Fair in Chicago.51 The participation of Canadians in such events was so common that it did not attract special notice. Their absence did, however. In 1914, foot-and-mouth disease struck the Chicago Union Stock Yards, and the agricultural press reported that the outbreak was keeping Canadian exhibitors away from the International Live Stock Exposition.52 The more that Illinois breeders set forth on Canadian herd tours, bid at Canadian auctions, and welcomed Canadian breeders at their own livestock events, the more that reports on their prize herds trumpeted Canadian ancestry.53
The Illinois Farmer joined other agricultural publications in trumpeting the aristocratic English ancestry and Canadian connections of prize bulls and cows, such as Adelaide.
“Short Horn Durham Cow Adelaide,” The Illinois Farmer, June 1860, 88.
A TRANSBORDER AGRICULTURAL REGION
As the agricultural papers reveal, Illinois and Ontario cattle producers participated in a transborder agricultural system. Despite trade barriers that waxed and waned, a variety of farm products crossed the eastern Great Lakes, heading in multiple directions. Yet it was not just commodity exchanges that gave Illinois farmers grounds to consider Canada as an important part of their agricultural region: human mobility also tied the U.S. Midwest closely to Canada. Descendants of Loyalists who had fled to Canada at the time of the American Revolution joined the flow of Canadians who resettled the upper Midwest (especially in Michigan, but also in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) in the nineteenth century. Would-be emigrants from Britain read accounts presenting Ontario and Illinois as fairly comparable destinations.54 This low-key competition for settlers received a jolt in 1859, when James Caird, a member of Parliament and an investor in the Illinois Central Railroad, published an emigrant’s guide that strongly favored the lands along the Illinois Central’s tracks. A Canadian reviewer responded to this piece of self-serving propaganda by harshly critiquing conditions in Illinois. After professing “no feelings but those of amity towards our American brethren,” the booklet went on to characterize Illinois as a land of “disappointment and ruin.”55
To counter these charges and restore cordiality, the railroad invited prominent Canadians to tour the state. The Prairie Farmer applauded this effort to foster friendship: “We are so nearly cosmopolitan in our commercial relations, that it is important we should become so socially.”56 The group (numbering about sixty) rode the rails from Chicago to the small town of Loda, about fourteen miles north of Champaign County, where everyone disembarked for dinner. The men who rose to speak emphasized goodwill, trade reciprocity, and the annexation of Canada to the United States. From Loda, the excursionists proceeded on to Champaign, to meet Sullivant and learn about his steam plow. (Readers of the Canadian Agriculturalist would have been familiar with Sullivant’s farm, from a piece in an 1857 issue.) Then they departed for points farther south. The Illinois hosts relished the visitors’ praise, including one man’s confession that he had been wary of making the trip, “because I was afraid I should want to come here for a home!”57 In keeping with the boosterish spirit of the day, the editor of the Illinois Farmer predicted that the tour would have the beneficial effect of an “influx of well-to-do Canadian farmers, just such men as we shall be most happy to welcome to the great corn zone of the west.”58
Despite the speechifying and polite compliments, Champaign was not swamped by a sudden flood of Canadians. Nevertheless, there was a noteworthy Canadian presence in Illinois, estimated at seven thousand to the south of Chicago in 1870.59 Nineteenth-century naturalization records from Champaign list only the foreign potentate repudiated by the new citizens (thus making it impossible to distinguish between settlers from Canada, Ireland, and Britain, all of whom renounced Queen Victoria), but the records kept for those who came to the United States as minors and were naturalized between 1866 and 1896 do list place of birth. These reveal that 24 out of 320 naturalization cases involved Canadian-born men.60 Census data also reveals a Canadian presence: in 1850, 9 of 2,649 enumerated Champaign residents were reported as being born in “Canada,” “Nova Scotia,” or “New Brunswick.” By 1860, the number was 126 of 14,629; and by 1870, it had risen to 281 of 32,743.61 Entries for families such as that of Henry and Ann Tucker, born in England and Ireland, but with four Canadian-born children, suggest the likelihood that these numbers should be higher still because some of the many residents born in the British Isles came to Champaign after a stint in the British dominion.62
Although census records identify many Canadian-born men as farm laborers, others owned considerable property and occupied high-status positions in the community. Canadian transplants who made it into the ranks of the Champaign County elite included David Gay, a minister from Prince Edward Island; Willard Samson and Margaret Crandel Samson, farmers from Ontario; John Rogerson, a lumber, grain, and merchandise dealer from Perth, Ontario; Patrick Richards, a banker from Quebec; Joseph O’Brien, an Irishman by birth who had studied engineering in Hamilton, Ontario; Daniel P. McIntyre, a farmer and banker from Ontario; William H. Lock, an importer and breeder of sheep from London County, Ontario; Harman Stevens, a Canadian-born doctor; and Lucretia Crawford Larkin, a mother of five.63 The University of Illinois, begun as the Illinois Industrial University in 1867, brought additional Canadians to Champaign to participate in Farmers’ Institute programs. Tellingly, for the history of cross-border cattle connections, animal husbandry instructor W. J. Kennedy had been born and reared on a Canadian stock farm.64
Border crossing went the other way as well. Censuses do not track temporary sojourns outside the United States,
but they do reveal that some U.S.-born residents had children born in Canada.65 Further evidence of temporary Canadian residence can be found in community histories. One of the first pioneers who settled in the county was Henry Sadorus, a Pennsylvania native who had spent some time in Canada before putting down roots in Illinois.66 Another pioneer, the New York native Mark Carley, had lived in New Brunswick before heading west.67 Residents had grown children in places such as Vancouver and Toronto, and at least one Champaign household served as a way station on the Underground Railroad.68
If, from the 1850s through the 1870s, Canada lost population to the U.S. Midwest, by the 1890s, the flow had reversed course. Thanks in part to the active recruiting efforts of Canadian immigration agencies, as many as a million U.S. residents settled in Canada between 1898 and 1914. Railroad companies also propagandized for Canada. In the 1890s, the Champaign Daily Gazette ran advertisements for “Homeseekers’ Excursions” to various destinations, including British Columbia and Manitoba.69 An American settler reportedly found it “just as easy to visit Saskatchewan as to go from his own State to the next. He runs up here in the fall to select a Government free grant, or to buy a farm from a railway or land company, and build a ‘shack.’ He returns in the spring with his outfit, and starts breaking the soil for his first crop the next morning. If he has bad luck or poor health overtakes him, he can always sell his land to advantage, and go back to his old home without much trouble.”70
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