Established ranchers attempting to increase their herds continued to look to Mexico, though not for bulls. As the U.S. consul in Chihuahua put it, “There are no cattle in this State that would be worthy of importation to the United States for male breeding.” Mexican cows were more attractive, however: the consul described them as “much superior to the bulls” and noted that the first crossbreed with a Shorthorn or Hereford bull resulted in “marked improvement.”121
The comparatively positive appraisals of Mexican cows resulted not only from their utility in maximizing the genetic material carried by one high-value bull, but also from cultural assumptions about interbreeding. Nineteenth-century farmers believed that sires had more influence over their offspring than their female partners. Moreover, the farmers of Champaign (over 99 percent of whom were identified as white in the 1870 census) approached the issue of animal crossings from a cultural system that saw white men’s excursions across the sexual color line as potentially blanching but saw other men’s forays as inevitably corrupting. Cultural considerations influenced livestock breeding to such an extent that illustrious ancestry sometimes trumped meat-producing potential. Some prize bulls were too fat or sluggish to serve; others were too inbred to produce sound offspring. Yet midwestern farmers were far more critical of hardy Mexican bulls than of their own sometimes faulty stock.122
Besides acquiring cows from Mexico, some U.S. ranchers invested in Mexican land for grazing purposes. These ranchers joined Mexican hacendados in dispossessing peasants and outcompeting small-scale rancheros. Like northern Mexico cattle barons, late-nineteenth-century U.S. ranchers exported cattle from their Mexican holdings to the United States for consumption.123 One rancher crossed about two thousand head of cattle into the United States near Eagle Pass on a single drive in 1895. Although ranchers at that time were supposed to cross their cattle at designated spots for health inspections, they preferred to wade their cattle across the border at the most proximate place.124 Displaced Mexicans also headed north, in many cases to work on U.S. ranches alongside Texas-born Mexicans who were likewise losing ground to Anglo landowners.125
The number of Mexican cattle exported to the United States defies precise calculation. If U.S.-Canadian trade statistics are sketchy for the years leading up to World War I, U.S.-Mexican statistics are worse because the Rio Grande afforded easier crossing than the Great Lakes. In the 1880s, the U.S. customs service attempted to monitor imports into Texas through five customs districts (Brazos de Santiago, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Saluria, and Paseo del Norte—all but the last located on the Gulf of Mexico) with a total of about 110 employees (including storekeepers, messengers, and porters).126 Such a minor inland presence meant that customs inspections were easily avoided, as Treasury reports on the prevalence of smuggling acknowledged.127 The Mexican monitoring system—consisting of seven aduanas (customs houses) and four substations along the entire Texan border—was no more effective.128
The establishment of free trading zones in northern Mexico—starting with the state of Tamaulipas in 1858 and extending to the entire frontier in 1885—did not reduce the prevalence of smuggling in the surrounding borderlands. Prior to the establishment of these zones, Mexicans had crossed the border to do much of their trading. By smuggling their purchases across the Rio Grande, they had avoided steep Mexican duties. Rather than putting a stop to smuggling, the establishment of duty-free zones pushed lawbreaking activity six to twelve miles into the Mexican interior. The new trade zones also drew Texans into Mexico to shop. Texas merchants began to complain that the earlier dynamics of the border had flip-flopped—that their onetime Texan customers were now smuggling goods into the United States.129
Although the border was too permeable to permit a close count, significant numbers of cattle crossed from Mexico into Texas. A minimum estimate of the traffic can be gleaned from U.S. trade reports, which put the number at about 180,963 a year from 1884 to 1898.130 U.S. consular reports hint at higher numbers. In 1888, the U.S. consul general in Matamoros estimated that about a third of the roughly 1.5 million cattle produced in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Chihuahua went to the United States. The consul in Monterrey concurred with these findings.131 An 1895 article in The National Provisioner put the import figure at 63,716 for the last six months; an 1898 article in the same publication counted 10,830 for the previous month.132 A 1902 Bureau of Animal Industry report claiming that “Mexico raises great numbers of cattle for the United States” provides an additional glimpse into the trade. This report estimated that prior to an 1897 increase in tariffs, as many as four hundred thousand Mexican cattle crossed the border annually. The report estimated that increased tariffs had caused the number of imported cattle to fall to approximately a hundred thousand per year.133
Official efforts to calculate the cross-border trade do not track Mexican animals to their final destinations, but commercial accounts reveal that many were shipped north for fattening and then slaughter. In 1875, a Railroad Gazette article noted that Mexican cattle were among the animals that suffered on northbound U.S. freight cars.134 In 1898, the Illinois Farmers’ Institute found that Mexico was sending “thousands of cattle to the great Chicago and other markets.”135 Following the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, a reporter for the Chicago Live Stock World registered his hope that the “rumpus” might benefit U.S. cattle feeders by leading to the U.S. acquisition of the northern Mexican “stocker” supply states.136 If the cattle-raising borderlands finally ended on the packinghouse floor, their ambit encompassed the feedlots of Champaign. For hundreds of thousands of Mexican-born cattle, the heartland meant the final supper and bloody terminus to their far-reaching life journeys.
MAGNIFYING DISTANCE
Trying to track imports of Mexican cattle to Illinois begs a question: What counted as Mexican and what as Texan, given that cattle production was a border-straddling endeavor? In addition to operating ranches in Mexico, Texan ranchers did not think twice about crossing into Mexico to recover wandering stock—at least before a quarantine regime was put in place in 1890. (Subsequently, they complained that in contrast to Mexican ranchers, who could cross the Rio Grande to bring their errant cattle home, they could not legally do so.)137 Texan ranchers also crossed the border in search of animals that had been rustled. The Prairie Farmer depicted the Texas-Mexico boundary as a lawless area, in which hundreds of thousands of animals were stolen from Texas ranches and armed vigilante groups were justified in their efforts to demand restitution from “cowardly, murderous greasers.”138 When a U.S. commission investigated cattle stealing across the Rio Grande in 1872, the Prairie Farmer reported on its findings: Texan ranchers had lost $100 million in stock to cross-border Mexican and Indian raids between El Paso and Brownsville.139
At times, the U.S. Army backed up ranchers’ efforts to curtail rustlers from Mexico. It did so in spite of objections that nations at peace should not permit their armies to “invade” each other’s territory to “capture and carry away property upon the claim that it has been stolen,” that such action would have been unthinkable “had the stolen stock been transported to Canada.”140 Among the suspected cattle thieves pursued by the U.S. military were the Kickapoo Indians of Coahuila, formerly of the Champaign area. An 1873 U.S. cavalry raid on the Kickapoo village near Nacimiento, Mexico, gained press attention as far as London, but it did not stop cross-border cattle thievery or the cross-border pursuit of “cattle stealers.” Although the U.S. press emphasized Mexican depredations, the raiding went both ways. Indeed, Mexican investigators found that their nation was the greater victim of cross-border plundering. Besides fostering bad feelings on both sides, the raids added to the difficulty in distinguishing between Mexican and Texan cattle.141
Canadians, some of them native peoples, raided across the border, too, but depredations in Montana did not figure as largely in the midwestern agricultural press as did those in Texas. The strenuous efforts of the Mounties to track down offenders bo
lstered assertions that cattle stealing on the northern ranges had become “almost entirely a thing of the past” by the 1880s. Even so, the tendency to stress the civilizing role that cowboys of northern European ancestry were playing in the region also explains the popular conception that people of the northwestern rangelands were relatively law-abiding.142 The Prairie Farmer presented thievery along the Mexican border as part of a pattern that extended to rampant smuggling and a complete absence of “responsible government.”143 In circular fashion, the comparatively greater attention paid to Mexican raids contributed to negative views of Mexicans, described in the Prairie Farmer as “plunderers,” “marauders,” and “the savage Indian and the scarcely less savage border Mexican.”144 By paying more attention to Mexican than Canadian or U.S. lawlessness, the midwestern agricultural press advanced stereotypes of Mexicans as predatory bandits a world apart from the law-abiding Ontario breeders who could precisely document not only the aristocratic genealogies of their prize animals but also their legal ownership of these animals.
The disparaging assessments of Mexican criminality contributed to a larger pattern of disassociation. Even though British-style agricultural exhibitions and breeding practices took off in Mexico in the 1890s, Mexicans do not appear in nineteenth-century reports of midwestern agricultural fairs, livestock sales, university institutes, farmers’ alliance meetings, or breeding associations. Champaign histories did mention Mexico in passing, alluding to former residents in the mining business in “Old Mexico” and “in old Mexico when last heard from,” and to a current resident who had been “delayed some time at Acapulco” on his return from California. Nevertheless, most of the firsthand knowledge of Mexico that circulated in central Illinois was imparted by the veterans of the 1846–1848 Mexican-American War—that is, by people who knew Mexicans as vanquished adversaries.145
Significantly, most Champaign residents did not know people of Mexican origin as neighbors. The Champaign County naturalization records are dotted with Canadian cases but contain no references to Mexican birth, nor do census records reveal any Champaign residents of Mexican birth prior to 1910.146 If any residents had obviously Hispanic surnames, the sometimes semiliterate census takers altered them beyond recognition. The one nineteenth-century resident of the county who seems likely to have been Mexican—a woman named Donena Sweet—is not identified as such. The only census in which she appears—for 1860—identifies her as having been born in Spain around 1800. It is possible that she was, indeed, born in the Iberian Peninsula, but geographic proximity makes onetime Spanish holdings west of the Mississippi seem her more likely place of origin. Sweet lived on a modest farm owned by a son; neither she nor her family members made it into published histories of the county’s illustrious residents.147
Due to their comparative docility, farm-raised Shorthorn cattle could be tended very differently from the ornery Longhorns rounded up on the range. In this detail from a depiction of a Champaign County stock farm, the farmer walks his well-behaved cattle down the road.
Detail of “Residence and Stock Farm of J. C. Kirkpatrick,” History of Champaign County, Illinois (Philadelphia, 1878), plate after 116. The University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
It is possible, of course, that census takers missed Mexican-origin workers, especially if they were transient. Because railroad companies assumed no responsibility for cattle deaths caused by heat, cold, trampling, or smothering, shippers had good reason to take them up on their offers to allow the owner of a carload of stock to ride free as a caretaker. Yet railroads also paid the return fare for those who accompanied two or more cars of cattle to Illinois, thereby reducing the likelihood of a long-term stay.148 Men who passed too quickly through boardinghouses to attract a census taker’s notice would have had limited opportunities to make favorable impressions on Champaign farmers, who had no compelling economic reasons to seek their company. By the 1870s, midwestern farmers, like farmers in Ontario, had fenced their fields and were carefully tending their comparatively docile stock.149
In such a system, the specialized riding and roping skills that Mexican vaqueros relied on to manage ornery range cattle had no particular value. Whereas Champaign farmers were likely to know Canadian people, their main encounters with anything Mexican involved low-value animals destined soon for the shambles. Countless Mexican cowhands (both native-born and immigrant) worked on Texas ranches, but, in keeping with Anglos’ disparagement of Mexican cowboys (on class, ethnic, and racial grounds), the midwestern farm press took little note of their labor or its significance for their own economic well-being.150
This sense of distance from the people of Mexico carried over to assessments of Mexico’s economic position. Canadian farmers had valued connections to British breeders, but Mexico’s former colonial ruler, Spain, did not have a noteworthy beef industry. When Argentinian ranchers became major players in the global beef market, they purchased their high-end bulls from Britain, not from their former colonial ruler.151 Canadian breeders had higher profit margins than Mexican ranchers, who were shut out of the more lucrative fattening and packing sectors of the export business.152 Whereas Canadian railroad lines competed for U.S. traffic, Mexican lines did not lead to harbors teeming with ships bound for the U.S. Northeast or Liverpool. Canada served as an outlet to lucrative beef markets, but Mexico was, in comparison, a dead end.153
The Prairie Farmer did provide some notice of Mexican efforts to entice immigrants and of public land offerings in Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango. But in contrast to its coverage of Canadian opportunities, it did little to drum up enthusiasm for Mexican grants, noting that, “even at those rates, the sale will probably be dull. It is not the price that attracts buyers so much as the productiveness, the security, the opportunity for selling again, the accessibility and the society. If Northwestern Mexico were annexed and Americanized, provided with railroads and schools, the land would soon rise a hundred-fold in value.” Illinois farmers called for Canadian annexation as well, but for reasons of affinity rather than colonial uplift (or, in other calls for Mexican annexation, to put an end to plundering).154 Mexico, it appeared, was a country apart, and its cattle marked difference as much as anything else.
From the perspective of Illinois cattle producers, Mexico was a land crying out for improved blood. And who better to supply it than cattlemen such as themselves? A 1902 report titled Mexico as a Market for Purebred Cattle from the United States made precisely that point. Drawing heavily on the testimony of U.S. consular officers, it found a significant Mexican demand for the services of U.S. bulls.155 Claims that U.S. bulls could improve the size and quality of stunted Mexican scrub cattle resonated with claims that the “half-breed” Mexican nation would benefit from an infusion of better blood. As one pioneer history put it, without the industry and vigor of Champaign’s leading men (all assumed to be white and many identified in terms of European lineages and revolutionary stock), the community “would soon sink into the lethargic condition that characterizes the Mexican and Spaniard, and ultimately destroys their manhood, their nation.”156 A Champaign stock raiser put the matter more bluntly: “a well bred man is better than a ‘scrub.’”157 Farmers familiar with the principles of breeding would have gotten the point: Mexico desperately needed U.S. studs.
THE INDIAN TERRITORY TRADE
The tendency to characterize the southwestern cattle sent to Illinois for fattening as “Texan” hid not only Mexican ancestry and more recent origins but also links to Indian Territory. Although some Native Americans relied on government beef, especially as supplies of buffalo dwindled, other groups raised cattle for their own consumption and for market.158 Before the Civil War, cattle production was the leading enterprise of Oklahoma’s “Five Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole). Despite raids by the Kickapoos and other Native American groups, the Cherokee Nation had about 20,000 head of cattle in 1839. Prospering on
the extensive grasslands held communally by the tribe, the Cherokee herds grew to about 240,000 in 1859. They declined during the Civil War, when Union and Confederate troops joined civilian thieves and roving Native American bands in plundering Indian Territory herds. This widespread lawlessness continued through the war, resulting in the loss of about 300,000 animals before federal troops finally reduced the rustling. Thereafter, herd sizes increased, to an estimated 700,000 cattle in Indian Territory in 1884. The Cherokees had the largest holdings—about 250,000—followed by the Choctaws and Creeks.159 Other groups—including for a while the Kickapoos who had been relocated to Kansas—allowed non-Indian cattlemen to graze their herds on their lands in exchange for fees.160
Like Mexican cattle, Indian Territory cattle crossed boundaries and mingled with other herds. It was not uncommon for Anglo drovers to drive across Native Americans’ land, adding and sometimes losing animals on the way. Although an 1834 Indian Act penalized drovers a dollar per head for cattle driven across land belonging to an Indian or Indian tribe, enforcement was another matter. The great long drives from Texas north to Kansas often crisscrossed Indian lands in Oklahoma, sometimes at a purposefully slowed pace so that the animals could fatten en route, arriving at their destination after the cold had set in.161
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