Barbed Wire - Reviel Netz

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was different—in fact, could not survive otherwise on the open plains. The ancestors of these cows had gone wild after being brought to America by Spanish colonizers. The same happened to many domesticated species brought to the New World. Animals, let loose on a new continent, outgrew their European past, indeed, their European masters. The local ecology had little to resist the new species, and a few escapees would be enough to establish a huge population, gradually shedding its domesticated habits.8 Beyond the limited domain of European settlement and domestication, a penumbra of feralized animals could be seen on the American continent. Here were wild horses—as many as two million of them—famously contributing to the last stage of Indian life.9 So, to a lesser extent, were wild cows. In the 1870s, they were just being brought back to the fold, and the Texan breed was still remarkable in its ferocity. Nearly self-sufficient, they were thus not totally unlike the bison that they had replaced.

      As for the Indians—for the last century subsisting almost exclusively by hunting the bison—they too were replaced by a breed not quite unlike them. Euro-American men, mounted on horses, gathered and herded the cows, roaming the same plains as the Indians did, following the same constants of grass and water, living in similarly small bands with little attachment to settled community. Life on the plains, then, did not change much.

      The essential ecological structure was in a sense preserved as well. The sun’s energy was stored up by grass. The grass was consumed by vast numbers of large bovines. These in turn were herded and killed by small bands of humans. At first, perhaps, not quite as many as the bison; the bison population is now estimated to have peaked at about 30 million near the beginning of the nineteenth century, while cattle numbered perhaps over 11 million by 1880. But then again, the rise of the cow came after a long period of degradation, as overroaming, human impact, and ecological catastrophes gradually reduced the capacity of the plains to carry bovines. Taking a longer view, we can say that the bovine population (i.e., either bison or cows) started from around 30 million at the beginning of the nineteenth century, collapsed to perhaps 15 million in the 1860s before the final onslaught on the bison herd, then bottomed out in 1880 at 11 million before climbing back to nearly 24 million by 1900. The death of the bison was in a sense merely a crisis of transition from one bovine ecology to another.10

      Bovines, far more numerous than any other mammals, continued to dominate life on the plains. They were dominant also in the sense that they governed space, at least locally. Just as the bison did, cows roamed freely most of the time—and just as the bison did, cows did it all under the surveillance of small bands of humans. Finally (and here is the essence of the continuity) the cows, like the bison before them, accounted for the presence of the humans. Everything about human life on the plains was built around the protection of bovines for the sake of their future killing, just as it had been since the start of the Indian hunting experience on the plains. In a sense, the American West had to start from somewhere, so it started from where the Indians left off. There was nothing better to be done with the land.

      Below the ecological continuities, however, ran deep differences, most obvious in the nature of the killing. The basic structure of the history of the Great Plains was the evolution of methods for killing bovines. In fact, killing a bovine is not an easy thing to do. A bison, in particular, is a swift, agile animal. Of course, the bison did not evolve to be protected from humans, but it had enough experience with wolves and other mammal predators to teach it caution. Prehistoric Indians could hardly face a bison and try to kill it; it would, quite sensibly, run away. This was the bison’s mistake: it should, of course, have turned around and tried to ram the Indian, but the bison never realized how much weaker humans are than wolves. Thus the Indians could elaborate their method of killing. It worked like this. First, the hunt was at the level of bands—a band of Indians gathered together against a band of bison (single bison or small groups would not be affected by the method I describe). The bison would be frightened, literally, out of their wits. The humans egging the bison on would gradually herd them along a predetermined route. There they reached a precipice (the plains, in fact, do have their hills). The bison, being closely packed, could not change direction at the last moment. Most if not all would fall over the brink, which, even if not very high, would suffice to shock them so that they could be done away by the band. Notice that all tribe members participated in the exercise, which was almost pastoral, rather than hunting, in nature.11 Then, in early historical times, dramatic changes took place, and the Indian hunting method changed completely. With the horse—rapidly made available on the plains during the eighteenth century—equestrian hunters could now outrun the bison and kill it from horseback. Note the advantage: killing was possible all year long, not only during the rutting season (when bison would form their great bands). Note also that, now being more capital intensive, so to speak, killing a bison became more specialized and involved a division of labor. The Indian women, with a lesser contribution to food procurement, developed the specialty of making robes from bison hides into something of a manufacture business. Soon Euro-American merchants, reaching up the river on the Mississippi, would prompt the Indians to kill bison specifically for the purpose of robe making.12 Finally there came better guns, and in particular the much more precise rifles, invented in the 1850s and used, as we have seen, to great effect in killing humans, too. Armed with these, Euro-Americans overwhelmed the bison—already decimated by Indian overkill. Now the killing of the bison was more capital intensive (you needed to own a rifle), but almost labor free. There was no problem whatsoever in getting the bison into rifle range, so that the plains practically became bison-killing factories, with rifles for machines. The hunt peaked in 1872, and the plains were practically clean of bison by 1883; according to one estimate, more than 5.5 million bison were killed in the peak years of the early 1870s alone.13 At this point, division of labor as well as capital investment went one step further. The Euro-Americans were killing bison not to eat their meat but to transport the unprocessed hides east. The bison, killed by the products of American machinery, were further processed by this machinery—and then became part of it. The bison hide was processed by the American tanning industry to produce, in particular, the strong belts required for running factory machines.14

      The cow brought this process to its logical end. We have seen how the bison, in the final stage of its existence, stopped being consumed or processed on the plains; the cow was not even killed on the plains. The plains merely transported the cows now and gave them whatever meager nourishment would sustain them through the process. A cow would typically begin its life in Texas; herded north, it would roam under the guidance of humans somewhere in the plains, then be herded again eastward (sometimes by rail), often to be better fed and cared for there, briefly, nearer a major center of slaughter (Chicago itself, or some urban center further east). This last stage of care was necessary because of the immense hardship the cows had just been through. Walking the entire American Midwest, often under inclement weather and in inhospitable terrain, was an experience reflected by the animals’ physical state—and so in their commercial value. To make them more profitable, therefore, they were allotted a brief period of comfort before death, as if to compensate for the months and years of deprivation. Finally, however, the animal would be brought into a city to be killed there, its carcass processed and then finally consumed. During this process, many humans would be involved: usually more than one group of cowmen and farmers, freight train personnel and retailers, farmers again, and then a butcher, leading finally to the consumer.

      Horse, steamboat, gun, railroad—as each tool of control over space reached the plains, a further step was made toward capitalism. Now, finally, capitalism was reached. The prehistoric bison hunt represented a precapitalist economy, with the killing limited by humans’ precarious hold over their environment. The historic bison hunt by Indians represented the unstable interface of capitalist and precapitalist economies. With relatively little division of labor and thus a huge profit margin for the merchants, greed overcame reality. Extremely vulnerable in this exchange, becoming ever more dependent on American merchants, the Indians were driven to overkill and to ruin the basis for their way of life. At this point, with hardly a life left in the bison herd, Euro-American hunters, representatives of a more sophisticated capitalist system, came in to exploit what was for them merely a valuable, if dwindling, natural resource. The handling of cows, finally, represented a fully capitalist economy, with sharp division of labor. Killing was now made fully calculated and economical. There was more revenue

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