Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History
Page 18
Only their bones remained and, fittingly, even these were turned into cash. Dispossessed Indians (and others) collected the skeletal remains of the once vast bison herds, piling them 10 feet high along railroad tracks where bone dealers arranged to ship them east. There they were crushed up and made into phosphate fertilizer, destined to be spread on the soils of the Cotton South and Corn Belt, providing a nutrient subsidy to distant ecosystems.
In those bones lay a lesson in where economic specialization might lead. When the Plains Indians engaged in the single-minded pursuit of bison, they foreclosed on other avenues for making a living from the land. In a region prone to climatic extremes, this was a risky move that might even have landed them in trouble had the market hunters, soldiers, and railroads never come along.
THE GREAT CATTLE BUST
The death of the bison was the prelude to one of the most stunning transformations ever of a North American biome: the makeover of the Great Plains grasslands into pastures and farms. Cattle drovers and wheat farmers delivered a one-two punch to the grasslands in the post–Civil War years, stripping the region of its original vegetative cover, loosening the soil, and making it far more prone to wind erosion. It was not Malthusian pressures—as in New England or the Chesapeake during the late eighteenth century—that drove the cowboys, cattle companies, and wheat farmers to exploit the plains. No shortage of food compelled them to graze more cattle or plant more wheat. It was, instead, the exchange value of the grass—that is, its ability to turn a profit—that sent them to work rearranging the landscape. By the time they were through, they had set the stage for some of the worst ecological calamities to ever befall the region.
To the rancher, cattle were less a source of food than a means of accumulating wealth. Indeed, the word cattle has the same etymological roots as capital, the so-called stock of life. As one of the world’s earliest mobile assets, cattle was money, but only if the animal could be fed. When it comes to cattle, grass is the currency of accumulation. If the grass is free, as it was on the plains during the postbellum years, then all the better. “Cotton was once crowned king,” proclaimed one eastern livestock journal in the 1870s, “but grass is now…. If grass is King, the Rocky Mountain region is its throne and fortunate indeed are those who possess it.”31
Ranching, as it evolved in the American West, originated in the early nineteenth century in southern Texas. It was there that the mixing of Anglo-American cattle from the South and Spanish stock from Mexico produced the breed known as the Texas Longhorn. Hardy and able to thrive on grass, the species, famous for its long horns, reproduced with abandon during the Civil War. The animals roamed the range unsupervised as the men who once raised them went off to fight; others simply gave up tending the creatures as hostilities cut off the market for their meat in southern cities like New Orleans. By 1870, as ranching spread northward in Texas, one county had some 57,000 cattle; another had 159 head for every inhabitant. Closed off from southern markets, ranchers shifted their attentions to the North, where cattle commanded higher prices. After the war, railroads began to work their way across the plains, and towns such as Abilene, Kansas, emerged to unite the southern cattle drover with buyers in the North. Setting off along the Chisholm Trail and other routes, drovers brought their livestock to rail depots, where they were transferred to trains headed east to meet the demand for beef in cities such as St. Louis and Chicago. By 1871, Abilene processed nearly 750,000 longhorns every year, dispatching them to slaughterhouses in cities further east.32
Slowly, the Texas ranchers gravitated northward, attracted by the vast stretches of shortgrass they found on the Great Plains. It is estimated that something on the order of five million head of cattle were driven north and west onto the plains between 1866 and 1884. From New Mexico to Montana, the Texas cattle system spread, spurred on by a period of wet weather in the 25 years following 1860. Texas cattle culture evolved in the South’s subtropical climate; had not the wet conditions prevailed, the move onto the arid plains would almost certainly have been forestalled.33
The Texas longhorn—product of the warm and wet South—was ill adapted to the arid conditions and bitter winters found on the plains. In Kansas, for example, the number of calves surviving to adulthood amounted to only four-fifths what ranchers expected in Texas. The survival rate declined still more the further north one moved. Unlike buffalo, cattle are not well equipped physically to deal with snowy conditions. Bison have gigantic flat heads that they swing from side to side, clearing the ground and allowing them access to the grass below. Not so the longhorn, which stood around and starved when confronted by snow cover. The winter of 1871–1872 was so severe in Kansas and Nebraska that mortality rates for cattle in some areas exceeded 50 percent.34
Despite these warning signs the ranchers pushed on, joined in the 1870s and 1880s by investors from overseas, especially from Britain. In nineteenth-century Europe, fatty cuts of beef symbolized power and privilege, but with the pastures of Scotland and Ireland overgrazed, the British turned their attention to the American plains. As early as 1868, cattle were transported live across the Atlantic. The introduction of refrigerated transportation technologies in the following decade helped to solidify the link between the plains grasslands and the British consumer. In 1875, a New York inventor named John Bates employed a large fan and ice to ship 10 cattle carcasses across the Atlantic, with good results. By 1877, one shipping outfit sent some three million pounds of American beef to Britain every month. The beef bonanza was on, as English and Scottish entrepreneurs launched cattle ventures that gobbled up huge swathes of land in the American West. By the early 1880s, foreign investment on the grasslands elicited so much opposition that both the Democratic and Republican parties supported a reduction in alien holdings. “America for Americans,” presidential candidate James Blaine trumpeted in 1884, tapping into the anti-British sentiment rife across the West.35
Driving the land grab was the ease with which one could arrive on the plains and set up a cattle business. In the early years of ranching, the range was free and open to everyone. If a drover arrived in a valley and discovered cattle, he simply moved elsewhere. The range remained the common property of all those who wanted to use it. But as American and foreign investors descended on the grasslands, overcrowding soon became a problem. In response, some ranchers purchased barbed wire (invented in 1873), closing off parts of the public domain from intruders. American factories produced 40,000 tons of wire by 1880; much of it was strung across the plains. Between 1881 and 1885, ranchers in the Texas Panhandle laid out 200 miles of fence for preventing cattle from drifting during a storm.36
COWBOYS
Until fencing, disastrous weather, and other changes put an end to the open range, cowboys of Anglo, Indian, Hispanic, and African American descent tended large herds on the grasslands of the West. (Library of Congress)
As was true in the South, fencing had some untoward ecological consequences. First, it concentrated cattle in specific locations, a development that led to overgrazing. In the 1880s, one ranch manager from Texas lamented the increase in both cattle and fences. “With this the character of the grass completely changed; where formerly there was long luxuriant grass that would fatten an animal without his having to do too much walking; there is now only short grass at the best of seasons.” Second, fences made the already severe winters all the harder for the animals. When the range remained open, cattle caught in a snowstorm would drift across the plains, perhaps escaping the worst conditions. If the animal reached a barrier, however, it remained trapped. As one critic of the fencing mania put it in 1883, “Under the old regime, there was a loose adaptability to the margins of the ranges where now there is a clear-cut line which admits of no argument, and an overstocked range must bleed when the blizzards sit in judgment.”37
And bleed it did. Huge numbers of cattle died in Utah during the winter of 1879–1880. The same happened in Colorado and Nebraska the following winter. In 1884–1885, cattle die-offs reached
as high as 90 percent, as extreme cold plunged south all the way to Texas. Ranchers on the southern plains suffered through another harsh winter the following year. As one observer put it in the spring of 1886, the cattle “died of hunger; they have perished of thirst, when the icy breath of winter closed the streams; they have died of starvation by the tens of thousands during the season when cold storms sweep out of the North and course over the plains, burying the grass under snow.”38
By the mid-1880s, the western range had been abused for over a decade. The results of that exploitative relationship with the grass were becoming increasingly apparent. Noting the deteriorated state of the pasturelands in 1885, a U.S. government official remarked, “Cattlemen say that the grasses are not what they used to be; that the valuable perennial species are disappearing, and that their place is being taken by less nutritious annuals.”39 Free grass combined with a speculative fever had led ranchers to stock the range with far more cattle than it could reasonably support.
The final blow came in 1886. After a dry summer the year before, fire broke out on the southern plains, reducing the available forage and weakening the animals as winter approached. And what a winter it was. Gale force winds and blinding snow reduced visibility in some areas on the southern plains to 16 feet. The cold extended as far south as Austin, Texas, where below-zero temperatures (Fahrenheit) were reported in January 1886. From Montana all the way to Texas, they died, vast numbers of cattle, too numerous to count, their carcasses piling up in precisely the places one would expect. The cattle drifted south as the blizzards rolled in and they stopped when they came to a fence, pressing in on each other, and scrounging the ground for every last blade of grass they could find. According to a firsthand account of the blizzard by O. P. Beyers, following the right-of-way fence erected by the Union Pacific Railroad, one could walk 400 miles from Ellsworth, Kansas, to Denver, stepping only on carcasses.40
Further north in the Badlands of North Dakota, an even worse disaster unfolded. On New Year’s Day 1887, the temperature plunged in the southwestern part of the state to minus 41 degrees. Gale force winds and blinding snow arrived on January 28. “For seventy-two hours,” one observer wrote, “it seemed as if all the world’s ice from Time’s beginnings had come on a wind which howled and screamed with the fury of demons.”41
Spring 1887 arrived with a vengeance. As the land began to thaw, rivers filled with water, a trickle at first that eventually became a torrent. Floods overtook the land, precipitating one of the longest funeral processions in history: tens of thousands of animal carcasses all flowing downstream. On the Little Missouri River, one observer, shocked by what he saw, wrote as follows: “Countless carcasses of cattle [were] going down with the ice, rolling over and over as they went, so that at times all four of the stiffened legs of a carcass would point skyward, as it turned under the impulsion of the swiftly moving current and the grinding ice-cakes.”42
BLIZZARD, 1886
With the range overstocked, a blast of cold weather delivered a punishing blow to western ranching. (Harper’s Weekly, February 27, 1886; Library of Congress)
It must have been a stomach-turning scene for many a rancher, watching as their investments disappeared downriver in a roar of bankruptcy. In the end, the ranchers fell victim not simply to nature, but to their inability to control their greedy impulses, to the persistent funneling of more stock onto the range. That lack of self-discipline joined with the trail of fences that now gripped the land to deny the Texas cattle—poorly adapted to the cold and dry weather conditions present on the plains in any case—its mobility, its best defense against the weather.
The die-offs of the late nineteenth century offered a textbook lesson on the perils of overstocking the range. No one, however, should see in the disaster an argument for ridding the plains of cattle. Ecologically speaking, the grasslands need cattle or some other herbivore so that the plants and grasses that live there can experience the level of disturbance they need to survive. From the days of the mastodons through the bison, plant life in the grasslands evolved in tandem with creatures that browsed. Too much grazing is a problem, but so also is too much rest for the land.43
Sustainable ranching can be conducted on the plains, as the Hidatsas of North Dakota proved in the waning years of the nineteenth century. This Native American group operated small-scale communal ranches, cutting and storing hay to get the animals through the winter. They were not out for big money, but reveled in the freedom and thrill they experienced rounding up cattle, of cowboy life out on the plains. The Hidatsas offer proof that sustainable use of the land does not have to mean forsaking all the pleasures that come with economic development, as long as people can content themselves with small monetary rewards and resist the urge to overstock.44
DARK DAYS
As calamities go, the great cattle bust was just one of a number of disasters, big and small, that put an end to the dreams of those who imagined the plains as one vast field of opportunity. The calamities may have appeared natural but were, in fact, the result of a complex interaction between an economic culture unmindful of limits and a volatile physical environment prone to drought, winds, and storms.
Most students of American history are aware of the Dust Bowl, but few learn of the 1890s drought. And yet, in terms of its social consequences, the event may have caused even more suffering and hardship than the well-known 1930s disaster. The groundwork for the calamity was laid between 1878 and 1887, when the same wet weather that gave rise to the beef bonanza also sent farmers from the eastern part of the country out to plains to plant wheat, causing the population in some areas to explode. The population of the western third of Kansas alone rose from 38,000 people in 1885 to 139,000 people in 1887. Optimism ruled the day as railroads and other western boosters, with prevailing scientific theory on their side, promoted the catch phrase “rain follows the plow.”
By 1887, the past tense no longer applied with respect to drought. Wheat yields tumbled in response to the dry weather, which extended into the following decade. Widespread reports of drought-induced starvation and malnutrition—relatively minor problems in the 1930s Dust Bowl—began to file in, with some talking of “Anderson fare,” a reference to the South’s brutal Civil War prison, Andersonville. In Miner County, South Dakota, 2,500 people faced death from starvation, with corn averaging just a meager two to three bushels per acre. Unable to survive, many simply walked off the land. Some areas experienced population losses of half to three-quarters. Suddenly pessimism replaced optimism, with one song-writer telling of “starvin’ to death on my government claim.” The government, under the provisions of the Homestead Act (1862), sought to open the Great Plains by allowing anyone who settled 160 acres and remained for five years to become its rightful owner. In the late nineteenth century, however, they were more likely to starve first.45
To deal with the arid conditions, many farmers tried dryland farming. Centered on the use of drought-resistant grain crops, deep plowing, quick cultivation after a period of rain, and other moisture-conserving measures, the technique succeeded, with the help of high wheat prices, in making the years between 1909 and 1914 a boom period for Great Plains farmers. The good times continued as gasoline-powered machines—tractors, combines, and trucks—dramatically reduced the labor involved in planting wheat. The one-way disk plow, invented in 1926, doubled the amount of sod a farmer could break in a day. While the old moldboard plows (a “moldboard” being a curved plate that forced the soil off to one side) sliced through the sod and turned it over in one unbroken mass, the new disk plows, with their multiple plates, pulverized the soil, increasing water absorption. The huge strides in mechanization eventually gave rise to “suitcase farmers,” bankers, teachers, and others who purchased equipment, drove it out to plant wheat, and then returned home before venturing back in the spring to reap their rewards. If their harvests coincided with an uptick in the price of grain, those rewards could be substantial indeed.46
SANDSTORM, 1894
When World War I began, the plains farmer was in the perfect position to aid the Allied cause and to plow up millions of acres of grass in the process. Eleven million acres of grass in Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas was destroyed between 1914 and 1919. Wartime demand for wheat drove farmers to plow up more grass, but it also worked to draw the plains farmer ever more closely into the international market economy. Life on the plains became tied to economic imperatives in distant lands, as the soil wealth of the plains was creamed off to feed people across the globe.
But just as important, natural wealth from outside the country was brought to bear on plains agriculture, as U.S. scientists scoured the earth for a species of wheat that would flourish in the arid West. Turning to those parts of Asia that closely resembled the American grasslands, Frank Meyer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture returned with 2,500 new varieties of plants between 1905 and 1918. A Canadian scientist, Charles Saunders, then used some of the Russian wheat species to develop Marquis, one of the two varieties of wheat that account for the bulk of the crop planted on the plains today. It was not just wheat, but Marquis wheat that helped America win the war—a development that, it must be said, also cost the plains its grass.47
Gone by 1935 was the native grass that once covered 33 million acres in the heart of what became the Dust Bowl region. When drought conditions—a regular and predictable aspect of life on the plains—emerged once again in the 1930s, the dried-out soil became even more prone to wind erosion. Nineteen thirty-five was the worst year for dust storms; the darkest day in that dark year was April 14, 1935, Black Sunday. From Colorado to Washington, DC, the skies turned black and the sand blew in, blasting the paint from houses, insinuating itself through cracks and keyholes, piling up in front yards. The air came loaded with both dust and rationalization. In Dalhart, Texas, John McCarty, a newspaper editor incensed by the eastern media’s efforts to pin the Dust Bowl label on the region, blamed the tragedy on drought and “conditions beyond their [the farmers’] control.” Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal administration intervened to buttress farming in the disaster-prone plains—offering federal money for relief as well as loans to finance rebuilding—also blamed natural forces beyond anyone’s control. Drought was necessary but hardly sufficient to bring on the calamity. It also took an economic culture that viewed the land as capital, a society in which the search for profits guided relations with the earth.48